Long Pauses

Tag: Director: De Palma

  • 2007 TIFF Day 7

    2007 TIFF Day 7

    By the midpoint of Une vieille maitresse I already knew that Catherine Breillat would be my next project. I’ve always been a bit intimidated by her reputation, I think, which is why I chose this film to be my introduction to her work. A period piece reputed to be relatively tame by Breillat’s standards, Une vieille maitresse proved to be one of my great surprises at the festival. The film is built around a classic love triangle. The rakish Ryno de Marigny is soon to wed Hermangarde, a precious young aristocrat, and, so, has agreed to abandon his ten-year affair with Vellini, a stereotypically hot-blooded, dark-haired Spaniard. In this battle between a Man, his Madonna, and his Whore (and the archetypes were surely part of the appeal for Breillat), there’s a kind of dialectic created between the public sphere of mannered, polite society and the private places where desire and emotion are freed. Much of the film’s action occurs in a flashback, as Marigny recounts his relationship with Vellini to Hermangarde’s grandmother, a disarmingly frank “18th century woman” (as she describes herself) who acts as his confessor. The posh parlor where Marigny tells his tale exists somewhere between the two spheres of conflict, and Breillat seems as interested in the seductions that occur there as she does with anything that happens in Marigny’s bedroom.

    Which isn’t to say that the goings-on between the rake and his women are anything less than fascinating. Une vieille maitresse features a show-stopper of a sex scene, a verbal and physical battle between Marigny and Vellini that leaves them both exhausted and satisfied — temporarily, at least. Mid-coitus, Vellini begins to tease Marigny about his most recent lover, a woman he admits is bumbling and cold in the bedroom. The power struggle between them is brilliant to watch, as each tests and transgresses the other’s limits. It probably goes without saying that Asia Argento steals every scene, but Breillat’s staging of their bodies, more than anything else, is what has provoked my curiosity about her work.

    Redacted. In March 2006, a small band of American soldiers raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl then murdered the child and her family in order to cover up their crime. If you’re imagination is so withered that, after reading that sentence, you’re unable to extrapolate from it the many and various tragedies it contains, maybe you should go see Redacted. Brian De Palma seems to think it will help. (If irony and righteous anger are good enough for De Palma, they’re good enough for me.)

    Dans la ville de Sylvie* opens with a long, static medium shot of the film’s nameless protagonist sitting alone on his bed, staring intently into the distance. By the end of the seventh day of TIFF, I’d become accustomed to shots like this. The long, static take has come to define an aesthetic that’s en vogue at international festivals these days. (I wonder if it isn’t becoming a new “Tradition of Quality,” in fact.) But there was something slightly different about this particular image, because the character was clearly thinking intently as well. Rather than being a purely formal experience, another moment of cinematic contemplation, this was also narrative. And, sure enough, after several minutes of staring silently, the protagonist (director Jose Luis Guerin calls him “the dreamer”) completes his thought, takes up his pencil, and scribbles into his notebook. He’s a poet and artist, we learn, and he’s recently arrived in Strasbourg, the French town where, six years earlier, he’d met a young student named Sylvie.

    I knew I’d found my favorite film of the festival when, two or three minutes into an early sequence at a streetside cafe, it became apparent that we wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. Guerin was having too much fun with that old cinematic war horse, the Kuleshov Effect, forcing his audience into the perspective of “the dreamer” and, in the process, making one of those films sure to pique the curiosity (and possibly the outrage) of the Mulveyites: a film about men looking at women. It sounds so simple (and simple-minded, even) now that I’ve described Sylvie, but the film is so perfectly executed that, even on a second viewing, I found myself completely seduced by it. And I use the word “seduced” quite deliberately. There’s no denying the male, heteronormative gaze adopted by Guerin’s camera, and I worry that I’m too quick to defend a film that has given me only what the cinema always gives me: free license to oggle women. But something curious happens over the course of Sylvie. By the final sequence, which echoes the earlier cafe scene, we’ve been retrained in a new way of looking. Perhaps I should only speak for myself here, but I felt my gaze become desexualized. The women who walk into and out of “the dreamer’s” frame are no longer just obscure objects of desire. Instead, each takes on that same strange character we find in Tarkovsky’s heroines. I usually name the shot of Margarita Terekhova sitting on the fence in Mirror as my all-time favorite movie image, and the last ten minutes of Sylvie plays like an avant-garde remix of it.

    * a.k.a. En la Ciudad de Sylvia or In the City of Sylvia. Why her name changes from Sylvie to Sylvia I don’t know, because it’s definitely Sylvie in the film.

  • The Black Dahlia (2006)

    The Black Dahlia (2006)

    Dir. by Brian De Palma

    De Palma’s introduction of “The Black Dahlia” (the character, not the film) is a show-stopper. As I recall, the camera begins more or less at eye level, following police officers Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) as they race toward a rowhouse in pursuit of criminals. Rather than going into the building, though, the camera instead floats up and over it, pausing for only a few seconds as it spots the Dahlia off in the far distance. There she is: the nude, disemboweled, disfigured body; the image that, if you’ve ever seen it in oft-duplicated black and white, is likely seared into your memory. (Here’s the image I first saw in a bookstore copy of Hollywood Babylon when I was way too young. Scroll down. Warning: graphic content.)

    A woman spots the Dahlia’s remains, screams, and then runs into traffic, crying for help. De Palma at first appears to be following her. “Twenty minutes into a film called The Black Dahlia we’re finally going to get to her story,” we think, relieved. But De Palma’s not interested in the frantic woman; he doesn’t appear, even, to be concerned with the victim. Instead, his camera, in a continuing, unbroken shot, chases after a bicyclist, who leads the crane back down and around the building, back, eventually, to Bucky and Lee, our main characters. Another five minutes or so pass before there is any mention of the poor woman whose mutilated body lies in the grass a few hundred feet away.

    I’m nowhere near deciding yet whether or not The Black Dahlia is good, but it’s certainly among the strangest and most fascinating Hollywood films I’ve seen in quite some time. As we were walking out of the theater last night, Joanna asked the key question, and I’m still wrestling with it: “That was supposed to be a satire, right?” I’m not sure if “satire” is the right word, exactly, but The Black Dahlia is self-aware to the point of distraction. (Poor Scarlett Johansson comes close to out-Showgirls-ing Elizabeth Berkley.) I haven’t done much reading about the film yet, but I do recall seeing one comparison to A History of Violence, which seems about right. Like Cronenberg, De Palma has made a decent-enough genre film that comments constantly on the genre itself — not in a snarky, wink-wink way but, rather, with a bit of bite.

    Noir has always been ripe for psychoanalytic readings, as have many of De Palma’s films, especially those that are more explicitly Hitchcock-inspired. What I find so interesting about The Black Dahlia is its making real and visible what has been suppressed in so many of the films that preceded it. In one sense, The Black Dahlia isn’t about “The Black Dahlia” at all. (That was Joanna’s main disappointment. She wanted an account of the murder that stayed within the wide bounds of established fact, and became frustrated when the film didn’t match her expectations.) And yet, one could also argue that every noir is about “The Black Dahlia” — namely, she is an embodiment (with all of the troubling connotations attached to that word in this context) of noir desire. She’s a hyper-sexualized femme fatale, dangerous and beautiful, the subject of our voyeuristic gaze, a helpless victim and sly manipulator, and a site of horrific violence. Now, in 2006, “The Black Dahlia” is also infected with sensationalism. She’s not just a murder victim; she’s the murder victim who was photographed and whose photographs have entered the public consciousness. She’s a media event. (Just imagine what Nancy Grace would have done with this story.)

    Traditionally, Film Noir heroes have been haunted by this repressed desire. (Hell, some would argue that this particular ghost infests all of cinema. I’m talkin’ to you, Mulvey.) Well, repression be damned. In the closing moments of The Black Dahlia, when Bucky returns for one final reunion with Johansson’s icy blonde Kay, De Palma kicks the proverbial psychic doors wide open. Bucky, who has been betrayed at every turn and who has just committed a sex-charged act of violence himself, sees the high-contrast, severed remains of “The Black Dahlia” everywhere he turns. In what I can only assume is meant to be a joke, he’s rescued from his reverie, finally, by Kay’s none-too-subtle invitation to “come inside.” I thought it was funny, at least.