Tag: Region: France

  • High Life and the Idea of “A Claire Denis Film”

    High Life and the Idea of “A Claire Denis Film”

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    The Beau Travail Effect

    When Film Comment surveyed nearly 120 filmmakers, critics, and programmers for its “Best of the Nineties” feature in the January/February 2000 issue, only four people mentioned Claire Denis. (Manohla Dargis, Atom Egoyan, Jonathan Romney, and Amy Taubin, if you’re curious). A year later Beau travail topped the magazine’s poll of the best films of 2000. The only evidence I’ve been able to find of a complete Denis retrospective in the English-speaking world during the 1990s was one organized by Linda Blackaby at the 1997 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. Whereas between 2000 and 2003—following Beau Travail’s festival tour of Venice, Toronto, New York, Sundance, Berlin, and on and on—Denis was the spotlight of retros at the Cinematheque Ontario (courtesy of James Quandt), the National Film Theatre London, the Dublin International Film Festival, and the Northwest Film Forum. There were certainly others.

    This is not to suggest that Denis was unknown before Beau travail. Her first four narrative features—Chocolat (1988), No Fear, No Die (1990), I Can’t Sleep (1994), and Nenette and Boni (1996)—all screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and variously at Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam, and elsewhere, and all four found American distribution. Other projects of note, including her contribution to Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge, the small masterpiece US Go Home (1994), and her documentary portrait of Jacques Rivette, Le veilleur (1994), aired on French television. And that summary only accounts for her career as a feature director, which didn’t begin until she was in her 40s. In an excellent 2009 essay for Reverse Shot, Leo Goldsmith traces Denis’s path from the prestigious film school, Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (now La Fémis), to the European film community of the 1970s, and speculates about how her career and style were shaped by fifteen years as an assistant director to the likes of Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch.

    Denis, then, is an interesting example of a filmmaker whose status as a leading auteur was confirmed quite suddenly, but only after nearly three decades of highly accomplished work: she was 53 when Beau travail bowed in Venice. Pedro Costa, whose debut feature, O Sangue (1989), premiered a year after Chocolat, had a similar experience in 2006, when Colossal Youth was presented in competition in Cannes. Retrospectives soon followed at the Cinematheque Ontario (again organized by Quandt), the Harvard Film Archive, and the Tate Modern, and his critical reputation in the States was finally secure enough in 2014 to land his first slot, at age 55, in the New York Film Festival. Angela Schanelec is having her well-deserved moment right now, at 57, after screening I Was Home, but… in competition at Berlin and securing American distribution for it, both firsts for her after more than two decades as a feature director.

    Costa is a useful point of comparison as well because, along with festival exposure and critical accolades, his place in the contemporary canon was cemented by the release by The Criterion Collection of the DVD boxset Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa in 2010. Denis now has two films released by Criterion, too, but I mention the significance of home video because her post-Beau travail renaissance coincided with the boom in mail-order DVD services such as Netflix and GreenCine, the corresponding re-release of catalog titles by distributors of all sizes, and the growth of new online publishing and discussion platforms. As a cinephile in East Tennessee, with no access to eclectic repertory programming and little in-person film community, I was suddenly able to have copies of Chocolat, I Can’t Sleep, and Beau travail delivered to my door. The opportunity, finally, to see contemporary world cinema beyond the sparse selection at large chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, combined with the rise of newsgroups, listservs, forums, and online film journals, gave me, and many others like me, new points of entry into the critical conversation. A decade-and-a-half before Claire Denis fans found their way to “Film Twitter,” she was a staple of the blogosphere.

    By one more significant measure, Denis’s critical reputation was secured in June 2004 with the publication of the first book-length study of her work, Martine Beugnet’s monograph for Manchester University Press’s French Film Directors series; Judith Mayne’s for the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Film Directors series followed a year later. They remain the only single-author studies of Denis in English. Mayne’s book ends with a July 2003 interview with Denis that includes a brief, vague description of The Intruder (2004)—“it’s inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s book . . . It’s based on the idea of intrusion”—otherwise, both monographs discuss her career up to and including her first two films of the 2000s, Trouble Every Day (2001) and Friday Night (2002). Our collective sense of Denis, then, coalesced during the roughly three-year period that followed the premiere of Beau travail and was formed around the seven narrative features that a majority of viewers were seeing then for the first time.

    “A Claire Denis Film”

    From the vantage of 2019, Friday Night is now the midpoint of Denis’s career as a feature director. However, what we talk about when we talk about “a Claire Denis film”—the language we use to describe her image-making, her staging of actors (or “bodies”; it’s always “bodies” with Denis), and her artistic preoccupations—hasn’t kept pace in the interim. I’d argue that, while that language remains useful and necessary, it is increasingly insufficient for a filmography that was never as uniform as the popular critical conversation suggested and has become even less so in recent years. What does it mean, for example, when long-time champions of Denis’s work suggest, as I’ve heard more than once, that had her name not been on Let the Sunshine In (2018), they would not have known it was a Claire Denis film? Implicit in that reaction is a certain bias, a predetermined sense of what each new film should be.

    This situation owes somewhat to the oft-mentioned constancy of Denis’s creative collaborations. Jean-Pol Fargeau co-wrote ten of the thirteen features, Agnès Godard photographed or operated the camera on every film except White Material (2009) and High Life (2019), and Stuart Staples and Dickon Hinchliffe of Tindersticks scored nine of them. Denis’s loyalty extends to other departments as well. Judy Shrewsbury has costumed every feature since Beau travail; Jean-Louis Ughetto and Jean-Christophe Winding recorded and edited sound for six films each. Nelly Quetier edited five of the six features between 1994 and 2004; Guy Lecorne edited four of the five since then. Denis is likewise famous for her fascination with certain actors, especially Alex Descas, Grégoire Colin, Michel Subor, and Nicolas Duvauchelle. To revisit her first seven narrative features, then, is to watch Denis gradually assembling that team and developing her signature way of working.

    Indeed, the established idea of “a Claire Denis film” might be partly understood as a constellation of formal choices resulting from a particular mode of production. For another project, I broke down Denis’s and Fargeau’s scripts for I Can’t Sleep, Nenette and Boni, and 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and discovered nearly identical structures. I’m curious, also, about the influence of Arnaud de Moleron’s production design and art direction on our notions of her style. A long-time collaborator with François Ozon, Moleron designed all but one of Denis’s films between 1994 and 2008, and my sense is that a broad polling of viewers would result in a top 5 Denis canon made up entirely of Moleron-designed films: Beau travail, The Intruder, Trouble Every Day, US Go Home, and 35 Shots of Rum. (My personal canon would include I Can’t Sleep and Nenette and Boni, also Moleron films.) When critics describe the sensuality of Godard’s images and the subjectivity of Denis’s perspective, they are more often than not also referring to a hallmark formal expressionism that is especially heightened—occasionally to the point of camp—in their work with Moleron.

    The colors of I Can’t Sleep

    The relationship between film style and the practical realities of production is a thick and complicated subject. More to the point, there’s a book to be written about how the careers and styles of acclaimed auteurs who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s were reshaped by the combined forces of the 2007 economic recession, the broad adoption of new digital technologies, and the resulting shifts in global film markets. In hindsight, those years were a historical turning point on par with the end of the studio system and the rise of blockbusters. The most extreme example is David Lynch, who only recently returned to television after a decade without a major directing credit. Tsai Ming-liang, who made ten narrative features between 1991 and 2009, has released only one since. The Assassin is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s sole post-recession feature.

    By those standards, Denis has had a remarkably productive twelve years, completing five features and a number of short films. However, she’s done so within a new economic reality. As one objective measure of the shift, Denis’s first eight features averaged five production/financing partnerships, while her five post-recession films have averaged twelve. Following the acclaim of Beau Travail, Denis has received consistent support from Centre National de la Cinématographie, Canal+, and ARTE France Cinema, which is a useful reminder of the benefits enjoyed by established filmmakers in France and other countries that offer robust state financing. The relatively small budgets of her post-recession films have otherwise been assembled from more than 40 different sources. The most glaring example of this industry trend is Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2018), which credits 31 producers and 21 production companies. Not coincidentally, Zama is the only narrative feature Martel has released since 2008—this after making three highly praised films over the previous seven years.

    This is all relevant to discussions of the second half of Denis’s career because the packaging of financing has determined not only what films she could make and when she could make them, but has also influenced certain creative decisions. When Louis Trebor visits Pusan, South Korea in The Intruder, we can assume he does so in part to appease the Pusan Film Commission, who helped to finance the film. Likewise, Lionel and Joséphine’s brief trip to Hamburg in 35 Shots of Rum and the Poland-shot flashback sequences in High Life exist, in part, to meet contractual obligations. In a recent interview with Paul Dallas for Filmmaker, Denis explains that she’d originally wanted to shoot those flashbacks in New Orleans and that one reason Godard left the project was because she would not have been allowed to use her own team: “Yorick [Le Saux] agreed to work with a German crew, and that was important for the coproduction.” If one notion of “a Claire Denis film” is that it should be concerned with borders and intrusion, then several of her films demonstrate that idea in their very form!

    Late Denis

    For her part, Denis claims to not care in the least about how we receive and theorize her films. While promoting Let the Sunshine In, she told Jonathan Romney:

    If there are theories about me, I’d rather not know. Astrophysics—now that’s fascinating. String theory, worm holes, the expanding universe, the Big Bang versus the Big Bounce—those are the kind of theories that make you feel like living and understanding the mystery of the world. Film theory is just a pain in the ass.

    When I interviewed her in 2015, she laughed when I asked a variation on the “bodies” question. It was only after following up with a specific example that she would even entertain the idea.

    DENIS: This is a mystery to me, I have to say, because I never thought that I was filming bodies. I’m filming characters, you know? And I always think, if I am not, like in No Fear, No Die, walking with them, if it’s a static shot, then I must have space to see the movement. I don’t see why I do more bodies than other directors.

    HUGHES: There are definitely recurring shots. You’ve certainly filmed more shoulder blades than any other director I can think of.

    DENIS: In Bastards, it was almost a caricature of a woman looking at a man. Certainly, Vincent [Lindon] also when he was in Friday Night naked, I was amazed by his shoulder. Nakedness I’m not interested in but the body is always very emotional.

    And yet, despite her protests, Denis is actively engaged in conversations about her work—visiting festivals, giving masterclasses and public forums, sitting with critics, mentoring younger filmmakers. Her efforts go beyond the requisite work of promotion and advocacy; she is compelled, in her own words, by a “need.” My 2015 interview took place in Toronto, where she was participating in TIFF’s Talent Lab and screening her short film, Voilà l’enchaînement, but had no major projects to publicize. When I asked her why she agreed to my interview request when it would have been so easy to say no, she told me she feared “overlooking” her work:

    I prefer to dig, to dig, to dig blindly, you know? It’s not pretentious what I want to say. I never could organize myself as a professional with a career. One film was finished and there was this sometimes painful feeling [afterwards], so the source of the next one was in this pain. There is a hope always of doing a better film, for sure, even the hope of being acclaimed as the best director in the whole world, but this hope is not as strong as it should be. Need is there, and need is driving me. At the Talent Lab, I told everyone that I feel like them, like a young filmmaker. My experience is not the experience of someone who has tamed filmmaking. No. Not at all. For me, it’s still a mustang or a wild horse. It’s true. Each time, I try. That’s all I can say.

    Still a mustang. If I’m too quick to take Denis at her word, it’s because, after watching and re-watching her films for nearly twenty years, I’m still thrilled by the feat. In one brief span, she premiered Beau travail, Trouble Every Day, Friday Night, and The Intruder—as wildly diverse, inventive, and psychologically complex a five-year run of films as any in decades. What we can say, at the very least, is that Denis is a fiercely independent artist, and one who has proven herself capable of realizing a vision within whatever restraints are posed by a particular production. (In thinking through this piece, I corresponded with a number of critics and programmers who have wrestled with Denis’s work for years, and this sense of her as a strong-willed creative force was a recurring theme.) To wit: twenty years after I Can’t Sleep, and working for the first and only time with Michel Barthélémy (production design), Ambroise Cheneau (art direction), and Claire Vaysse (set decoration), Denis and Godard still convinced us that a late-night visit to a hospital in Bastards (2013) should be bathed in rose-colored light—which I’ll admit isn’t nearly as memorable as the red naugahyde fuck-ottoman.

    The colors of Bastards

    I think we can begin to complicate our sense of “a Claire Denis film,” then, by acknowledging the shifts that took place in her career and the industry around the time of The Intruder and by foregrounding the effects those changes have had on her “late” films. We can treat her expanding roster of associates as creative collaborators—just as we do Godard, Fargeau, Descas, and Tindersticks—and try to identify and describe their contributions in an effort to better understand Denis as an auteur. And we can intentionally put aside some of the critical vocabulary that has become diminished from overuse.

    In 2008, when Denis was promoting 35 Shots of Rum and in post-production on White Material, I asked her if working with Isabelle Huppert presented any new challenges as a director.

    HUGHES: She’s one of the few actors or actresses who I think of as an auteur herself. She can command a film.

    DENIS: She’s not commanding. She’s a very intelligent actress. She is guessing and she’s inventing a relation with each director that creates an addiction to her. She’s not commanding because that would be too easy. She creates a need for her, when she’s an addiction. Somehow the film becomes … her.

    White Material marks a significant transition point for Denis in that it’s the first film made without Fargeau and Godard (cinematographer Yves Cape and editor Lecorne are both long-time associates of Bruno Dumont) and her first time directing an actor with international standing, who brings with her to the screen decades of memorable performances and strong associations for audiences. When Denis has spoken over the years of needing to hold and possess her actors, of jealously wanting them to work only with her, she is hinting at a new dynamic in her work with Huppert, Juliette Binoche, Robert Pattinson, and Mia Goth. Generally speaking, too little attention has been paid to the performances in Denis’s films (otherwise, Valérie Lemercier’s in Friday Night would be on every best of the 2000s list). That sense of White Material “becoming” Huppert—of celebrity personas and more traditionally psychological acting styles infecting Denis’s images and pacing—is an especially rich subject for study.

    Denis’s late films also expand her career-long and precise analysis of capital, from the colonial economies of White Material, to the working-class alienation of 35 Shots of Rum (René’s post-retirement death deserves an article of its own), to the blistering rage of Bastards, which I can now barely stomach in this age of Trumpian cruelty and kleptocracy. I’m eager for more people to see Voilà l’enchaînement when it’s included on Criterion’s release of Let the Sunshine In, both because Denis’s relationship with screenwriter Christine Angot has introduced a very different voice to her films and because the two-hander form of the short has much to teach us about Denis’s directing of actors. High Life also challenges simpler notions of “a Claire Denis film,” and I’m convinced it’s among her finest work. The remainder of this piece is my first attempt to better understand why.

    A Signature Moment in High Life

    Near the end of High Life, after a key character jettisons herself into space, Monte (Pattinson), a man who has spent most of his life in prisons of one kind or another, chooses to continue living. Given the context, it is an absurd and heroic act. It’s also one of the purest philosophical expressions to be found in Denis’s work. Five years into a deep-space mission and with no hopes of returning, Monte decides, like Sisyphus, to once again push his rock up the mountain, or, in his case, to log a computer report that will keep the ship’s life support systems operating for another 24 hours. “Time to feed the dog,” he sighs when the daily alarm sounds, an act of will straight out of Camus:

    By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull resonance that vibrates throughout these days. Yet I have but a word to say: that it is necessary.

    Over its long gestation period, High Life attracted the attention of several name actors, including Daniel Craig and Patricia Arquette, and Denis has mentioned several times that she imagined Philip Seymour Hoffman playing a middle-aged, more despairing version of Monte. “Then this great actor died,” she told Dallas. “He was a star, but he was someone I really thought I could work with, had he accepted the role. But the suicidal thing really frightened me.” She has also spoken often over the years, and always with great affection, about film producer Humbert Balsan, who committed suicide months after their collaboration on The Intruder. (Balsan is the inspiration for the main character in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Father of My Children.) Which is to say that the question of suicide—what Camus famously called “the one truly serious philosophical problem”—is far from an academic exercise in High Life.

    In a film already renowned for its sudden explosions of brutality, its flirtations with transgression and taboo, and its images of a nude Binoche writhing on a stainless steel dildo, Monte’s salvation is High Life’s true reason for being. I use that word, “salvation,” with only a hint of irony. While the film draws on any number of sci-fi and prison film conventions, High Life is classic speculative fiction in that all of the narrative mechanisms—cosmology, astrophysics, violence, reproduction, the ethics of crime and punishment—are interlocking pieces of an ontological/theological puzzle box.

    “We invented rituals,” Monte says in voiceover while scraping shavings from his beard into a pile. When he and his shipmates prepare a crew member for cryogenic storage, one of them tosses a handful of dirt onto the dead woman’s chest. “It’s what she wanted!” her grieving friend cries. Tcherny (André Benjamin) sits with Monte in the Edenic garden where their food is grown, his bare toes touching the soil, and espouses a kind of vague, secular mindfulness: “This little garden is teaching me to enjoy the present. That’s all that matters.” Another character mimics the motions of Christian prayer that she glimpses in random transmissions from Earth because she wants “to know what they feel.” Monte is compared with a monk; Dr. Dibs (Binoche) is a witch and a shaman. The drive to understand the universe and humanity’s place in it, and the compulsion to ritualize that understanding and build tribal identities around it, is inescapable it seems, even beyond the edge of our solar system.

    Monte’s salvation is precipitated by a child. The idea for High Life has been with Denis since the early-2000s, when she first envisioned Vincent Gallo traveling through space with only his infant daughter. This configuration of the family unit—a protective father figure and a dead or distant mother—is as foundational to Denis’s imagination as it is to fairy tales. The archetype runs from Chocolat through Bastards, but my favorite example is the “Tiny Tears” sequence in Nenette and Boni, when Boni’s onanistic fantasy about the boulangère morphs into an image of domestic bliss: a husband and wife happily holding their newborn child. He doesn’t want to fuck her so much as he needs a hug. High Life, in fact, opens with the word “daddy” and a seven-minute sequence that recalls the prologue of Denis’s “father and daughter” masterpiece, 35 Shots of Rum. In both, Denis crosscuts between the two characters before bringing them together in their shared domestic space, establishing a particular tenderness in their relationship, and then putting a button on the sequence with a killer music cue, Harry Belafonte’s “Merci, Bon Dieu” in 35 Shots of Rum, the first appearance of Tindersticks’ “Willow” in High Life.

    Father figures

    Monte’s moment of crisis isn’t quite like anything Denis has filmed before. She claims to have spoken very little to Pattinson about his character’s psychological makeup. Instead, she gives him room and trusts his decisions. There’s a highwire energy in his performance, especially when he’s sparring with Goth, another uncharacteristically spontaneous Denis collaborator. With a few notable exceptions—Denis Lavant in Beau travail, or perhaps Gallo and Béatrice Dalle in Trouble Every Day—performers in Denis’s early films, as a general rule, are composed and self-contained. Alex Descas, in particular, is a constant, immovable moral force, absorbing slaps from Dalle in I Can’t Sleep and quietly internalizing every indignity in No Fear, No Die. Monte adopts a similarly stoic pose during most of High Life, but Pattinson is a different kind of actor, and at the turning point for his character, standing alone near the airlock, he punches himself repeatedly and violently in the face. Denis watches it all from a distance before cutting to a close-up, where we see a bulging vein in Pattinson’s forehead and splotches on his skin. The existential battle has become written on his body (forgive my one use of the word).

    And so Monte makes his report, choosing to live for at least one more day, and then finds his way to Dibs’s lab, where his infant daughter is waiting. Denis composes them in a tight frame, with Pattinson leaning toward the incubator and her small hand gripping his finger. She holds the shot for nearly a minute and then cuts to Monte, who has made his decision. “I’ve got tears in my eyes,” Denis told an audience, as she described that moment. “Suddenly his life is changing forever.”

  • Valérie Massadian on Milla, Working with Nan Goldin and Uses For Anger

    Valérie Massadian on Milla, Working with Nan Goldin and Uses For Anger

    This interview was originally published at Filmmaker.

    * * *

    Valérie Massadian makes her first on-screen appearance in Milla near the film’s midpoint. The writer/director/editor plays a small but crucial role as a housekeeper at a remote seaside hotel. We first see her in a wide shot, pushing a cleaning cart down an empty hallway. When the title character, a pregnant teenager with little education and few prospects, takes a job at the hotel, Massadian’s unnamed housekeeper takes the girl under her wing. They make a fascinating study in contrasts. Massadian’s movements are practiced and efficient, honed through decades of labor. Séverine Jonckeere, who plays Milla, is disinterested and inept, a novice. 

    That I’m referring to the actresses rather than the characters they play is a consequence both of Massadian’s style, which grows out from her inquisitive attention to physical presence, and of the scenario, which draws parallels between the two hotel employees that mirror exactly the parallels between the filmmaker and her ingénue. Milla is a crafted piece of fiction, rounded out by a tragic subplot and elevated by occasional bursts of expressionism, but Massadian’s collaboration with Jonckeere, like her handling of the child actress Kelyna Lecomte in her previous feature, Nana (2011), results in a kind of hybrid viewing experience. Massadian is Jonckeere’s mentor, both in front of the camera and behind it, and that relationship is somehow the essence of the film.

    Massadian laughs easily and often in conversation. She’s frank, self-deprecating, and sincere, a disarming combination. I spoke with her on February 2, 2018 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where we discussed her path to filmmaking, the problems of observational cinema, and her next project, a dystopian fantasy about a pack of wild children that is “much worse” than Lord of the Flies.

    FILMMAKER: English-language press always describes you as having come to filmmaking by way of photography, noting your long association with Nan Goldin, but I don’t know much else about your background. If you’ll forgive such a basic opening question, where did you grow up?

    MASSADIAN: Not really anywhere, because I moved all of the time with my parents, from one house to another. The longest we stayed in any one place was about a year-and-a-half, in a destroyed house that we rebuilt and then sold to somebody rich. It was always like this, in the countryside of France, two or three hours from Paris.

    When I was 13, I got very tired of this. My parents were often not there. My brother called me “Mama.” It was weird. So I left. I ran away. I went to Paris on my moped. When I got there I started crying like an idiot, because I had no clue what I was doing. I got arrested after four days because my parents were looking for me, and this African woman gave me shelter because she saw me crying. Then we all moved to Paris.

    FILMMAKER: The whole family?

    MASSADIAN: They were always in Paris and we were left in the middle of nowhere, literally. We lived not in small towns but in the fields and forests. Voilà. From there I did so many jobs. I started working very early on. I did every kind of job that anyone who has no education can do. There’s a saying, “Curiosity is a bad thing.” But I’m part Armenian, and in Armenian it’s the opposite. I really have that. So because I’m curious I started reading and going to the cinematheque.

    FILMMAKER: At what age?

    MASSADIAN: Very young. Like 14. I was always sneaking in the back door. Always. Because I needed . . . I was hungry. Then I was in Japan, modeling. It was a complete mistake but also it was great. I did it for two months and was loaded with money, which allowed me to live in New York for two years. Then I came back. I worked with Nan Goldin.

    FILMMAKER: How did you meet Goldin?

    MASSADIAN: I was designing clothes with Jean Colonna, and one day she came. I received an email asking if she could come to the atelier. She was doing a piece for The New York Times Magazine, following James King, and I was doing the casting. So she came. That was the beginning of a long friendship.

    FILMMAKER: Was modeling your entree into the fashion job?

    MASSADIAN: Not at all. It was only in Japan, and then I went to the States. I repaired bikes, I wrote copy, I did other things. No, no, I got into fashion because I was pregnant up to my teeth and a friend of mine was doing paperwork for this guy who was working for Colonna. One day I went to pick her up and she wasn’t there but he was. I was stupid, this punk kid, but I guess it was a good kind of dumb.

    FILMMAKER: What do you mean by that? You keep describing the younger version of yourself as stupid.

    MASSADIAN: I refused to compromise but I did it in a stupid way. I could be very aggressive. I was vehement because I was a kid.

    I didn’t know what to say to him, and we were sitting like this, and I said, “I heard you want to do a fashion line.” He said he did. So I said, “Well, don’t you have to do fashion shows and things like that?” He said, “Yes, but for that you need money.” I said, “Well, money you can always find.” He said, “If you’re so smart, you do it!”

    At the time I had a job at Pyramide, the film distributor, which Fabienne [Vonier] was just starting. She took me because I was super honest and I was pregnant. She also had a child when she was nineteen — I learned this a long time after — but she couldn’t take care of the child, so she gave it to her parents. She was very touched and impressed that I was going to take care of my child. I also knew quite a lot about films and loved cinema. I was working there and, at nights, had a dossier to go look for money for Jean. And we found it. We got, like, 60,000 francs from the Ministère de la Culture and another 30,000 from a cigarette sponsor and Absolut Vodka gave us I forget what.

    It started like this. And then we did the first show and he said, “Well now what are you going to do?” And I said, “I have to find a real job because I can live in a small space but my child is not going to.” He said, “What if I manage to give you 5,000 francs in cash.” I thought, “5,000 cash, 3,000 welfare, that’s 8,000. Yeah, I’ll stay.” And we worked together for ten years. He’s the first person who trusted me for who I was — this pain-in-the-ass animal, violent, big-mouthed whatever that I was. That’s huge in someone’s life.

    I didn’t care about fashion. I mean I loved making clothes, but for me they’re clothes and you don’t change clothes every season. I think fashion is kind of disgusting. But I like making clothes for my friends.

    FILMMAKER: You left Colonna to work with Golding?

    MASSADIAN: I needed to learn. From when I was very small, it’s never left me, this . . . anger?

    FILMMAKER: Hunger?

    MASSADIAN: Yes, hunger. Anger, too, but that’s another thing! When I get to a point where I’m not challenged, I’m not learning, it makes me very nervous. I hate it. I have to find something to improve myself. I was doing a lot of other things at Colonna — we shot short films, we worked with artists, we did tons of things — and it was an incredible space of freedom. But then, because it’s also a very capitalistic business, if you don’t make a lot of money you have to sell out. I said, “I’m out,” because I didn’t feel clean.

    I always wanted to make films but that also requires money. Taking pictures became my relation to the world and my way to connect with it. But that you can do alone. You put a camera in your bag. Film is a different story.

    FILMMAKER: Your filmography includes a couple years when you did a variety of jobs on a variety of films.

    MASSADIAN: I designed a collection for some people and asked them to pay me cash. They were very happy, and that money was my film school, basically. I made a short film downstairs from my house in a bar with some crazy men. I never finished it, but every mistake you can make, every drama that can happen, it all happened. That was perfect.

    I did two films with François Rotger (The Passenger, 2005, and Story of Jen, 2008) and then Michelange Quay (Eat, for This is My Body, 2007). With them I did everything, from location scouting to working with actors to set design. They were small budgets but much bigger than my budget.

    And then, I got tired because I thought they were lazy. And I said, “If I can give this [effort] to them, then I can give it to myself, and I should.” Also my son was older, so it was my turn.

    FILMMAKER: How old is he now?

    MASSADIAN: Mel’s the DP of my film. He’s 26. Only nineteen years separate us. He really has an eye, and he has his own thing. I respect it a lot. We once filmed my mother for a project and she suddenly burst out laughing. She said, “You have no idea. It’s like a Buster Keaton film. You do not talk. You look at each other and nod. He changes the lens. It’s like a silent film.” So when I wanted to make Milla, I said, “You have to think. Maybe it’s more difficult for you to detach from the fact I’m your mother. I want you to do it because I love the way you work. The way you frame is the same way I frame. You have the same relation to space.”

    FILMMAKER: Does he have any traditional training in film production?

    MASSADIAN: No, Mel started being on the computer and making me nervous when he was 11. I’d say, “enough,” and he’d say, “But Mom you don’t know what I’m doing. Let me show you.” And then I’d see this 3-D animated character. He had cracked software and it was super complicated. He’d learned from blogs. That online community is completely different from cinema. It’s very together. At 11, he was talking to professionals in America, learning how to work with light and where to place the camera.

    A friend helped me find him an internship and I said, “Okay, we’ll make a deal because you’re really young. You have to finish school and not be as stupid as I am. It’s just paper. It’s completely ridiculous. But in ten years if you want to be a veterinarian, you won’t be able to go if you don’t have this stupid paper. Get that paper.” Then he wanted to learn real lighting, so he did an internship with a photographer. He’s really good. He has a do-it-yourself attitude.

    FILMMAKER: I can see where he gets it.

    MASSADIAN: Yes!

    FILMMAKER: Along with Nana and Milla, you’ve also made a couple short films. What is your professional life like right now? Are you constantly making work?

    MASSADIAN: Yeah, because I have to live. I made a trailer for a friend because the film is very particular and everybody proposed ideas that were completely horrible. So, I do that or I make posters or I work with friends. Now, it’s nicer. I used to feel really guilty when I wasn’t doing anything. Guilt I don’t have so much in my life but when I wasn’t doing anything I felt it. Now I’m starting to learn that I can also lay back and read a book.

    FILMMAKER: Thanks for indulging me. I wanted to begin the conversation like this because when you first appeared on-screen in Milla, I knew immediately that you were at home in the world of hard work. That wasn’t the first time you’d ironed clothes.

    MASSADIAN: No, no, no. And I would also look in suitcases! It’s so strange to keep walking into intimate spaces. You walk in and there’s pants and socks and knickers on the floor. It’s a very strange position.

    FILMMAKER: I thought about that this morning when I woke up in my hotel! I very neatly laid out my clothes before leaving.

    MASSADIAN: Of course.

    FILMMAKER: Last night during the Q&A, you said that when you were developing Milla you wrote a script for the financiers but then threw it away. What did the script look like?

    MASSADIAN: There was no boy. It was only her. She was running away from the projects and she landed at this hotel by the ocean, run by an older woman. It was one of those hotels lost in the middle of nowhere, where truck drivers stop for one night, or salesmen, mostly men. Both characters were very closed and tough — there are parallels here — and this woman decides to take her and make her do her studies. It was two solitudes, that were different because of age and time in life, but they resonate. And basically they both opened up. The script was very tender. But then I met Luc [Chessel]. And voilà it went somewhere else.

    FILMMAKER: Did you always intend to play the older character?

    MASSADIAN: I had a woman but she wouldn’t commit because I’m slow. We take a lot of time. And also Séverine was really rough because she was scared. Suddenly someone came into her life and said, “I care. You’re beautiful. And I’m going to show you that you are worth something.” For Séverine it was dangerous, because it meant she could get attached, and from her background to feel attached is to feel pain and betrayal. So her reaction was to be very violent. 

    The first thing we did was the scene when I’m ironing and there are cookies. What I say to her — “You’re short and pregnant but you’re not crippled” — that’s the way I talk. And she knows. So she said, “Oh, you just want me to be with you?” I said, “Yeah, be with me. Or be with Luc. Or be with your son. That’s all. I don’t want you to do anything. That’s my job.” It shifted everything. Suddenly she could find pleasure in being there and opening a little bit, little bit, little bit.

    FILMMAKER: I was happy to see Luc. I only know him from Low Life (Nicolas Klotz, 2011).

    MASSADIAN: Yes. Luc is very interesting. I knew his face from Low Life and from Atomic Age (Héléna Klotz, 2012). He always had small parts, but his face burns the camera. Just incredible. Luc also writes on cinema for Libération, but I didn’t know it was the same person. I remember the first thing I read by him. It was obvious he didn’t like the film politically and cinematographically, but he was talking to the filmmaker. I read the thing and I remember saying, “Man, if this was my film, I’d want to meet this guy.” The way he writes, and how respectful it is of the work and the person, is so rare. Then I met Luc at a party. We started talking. To me, he was this young kid [the actor], and then we started arguing about a film and I said, “It’s like this guy, I can’t remember his name, but he wrote this big text on a João Pedro Rodrigues film, and na na na.” I’m really pissed off because we’re arguing for real, and I say, “What are you laughing about?” And he says, “I’m the one who wrote this.” Suddenly the two became one. I thought to put [Luc and Séverine] together would help. And it did.

    FILMMAKER: Adding Luc’s character must have transformed the style of the film too, right? It moves the story into a more poetic and tragic realm.

    MASSADIAN: In France we had month-long demonstrations with the young, with kids, against the government labor laws. Those kids were between 16 and 24. They were, of course, represented by the media as idiots out to destroy. I went to a lot of the demonstrations. You have 17-year-old kids who do not come from a bourgeois, educated social class, and it had that romantic feeling I hadn’t felt for a really long time. They were fascinating. These kids really don’t want this world and are very articulate about it. So to have this couple of misfits, that’s where the love story came. And then because I wanted her to be the main character …

    FILMMAKER: You had to kill him off.

    MASSADIAN: Yes! And I didn’t want him to leave. Some girls say, “He’s a little rough with her and abusive,” and I say, “He’s not.” First, he’s the only one who says, “I’m afraid.” I don’t know a lot of men who say “I’m afraid.” They’re both teasing each other. It’s almost a seduction, a sexual game, when you’re that age.

    FILMMAKER: His character also gave you an opportunity to film another kind of hard work.

    MASSADIAN: Yes, I met the fishermen. At first they said, “Please, this girl.” But I kept returning every night at 6:00 when they were leaving, and finally they said, “Fine, you can come with us.” So I went and I filmed all night. I worked. And they were working. In the morning, when we came back, they were, like, “Okay, you’re not a wanker. You worked. So you can come back.” I said, “Can I come back with an actor?” 

    It’s constant writing until the end of the editing. The script? It was for the people who gave us money. Or loaned us money. On Nana, they said, “It’s not the script but it’s the film.” On this one they said, “It’s still not the script. It’s actually better than the script.”

    FILMMAKER: Milla is in a slow, observational style that has become common at festivals like this over the past decade. I’ve seen a lot of them, as I’m sure you have, and many of them feel inert, like there’s no one behind the camera. You said last night during the Q&A that you have to watch an image 150 times before you can be sure it has life in it. I wonder what the difference is?

    MASSADIAN: To me, it’s all in this word “observational.” I’m not observing, because that’s a position. The only judgment I will have on a film is political: the position of the person filming. What is your position? And this “observational blah blah” is very arrogant. For me it’s worse than that because …

    FILMMAKER: It’s exploitative.

    MASSADIAN: Yeah. It’s like anthropologie. It already has a superiority, like, “I’m going to watch.” I love Jean Rouch for that. He’s not observing. Then you take Robert Gardner and he’s very observing. For me, it’s beautiful work, it’s incredible that they went to these places. I cannot stand the films. To me, it’s violent because it’s objectifying people. It is the majority [of films being made], and it’s a matter of position. 

    Sometimes people say, “It’s a little corny when you talk about how you love and care [for your collaborators].” Well, fuck you. I’m corny. Seriously. Ten years from now, I can look at myself in the mirror and I’m fine, you know? I cared and I was protecting people. Even when you pay an actor, still it’s a person. This “observing” makes me really mad. People don’t realize how politically disgusting it is. In documentary it’s even worse.

    FILMMAKER: I’d like to talk about the scene in Milla when she visits your character’s bedroom. We mostly watch her eyes as she looks around and explores your space. The camera stays very close to her. I think it’s on a tripod?

    MASSADIAN: Yes, yes. The camera doesn’t move much, but it does here.

    FILMMAKER: I’m curious about your shot-making process. How did this scene come to be?

    MASSADIAN: This I had written in the script. I wanted, through this sequence, to go through my character’s life. You don’t know anything. She’s just there [at the hotel]. You understand very fast that there is a parallel between the two; she’s the same but older. 

    I wanted Milla, through objects, to draw the life of this woman. There’s a bridal item from the 19th century, there’s the music box, and there’s the picture, and you suddenly realize she also had a child when she was very young. The camera had to be very close to her because … now that I have to think about why … [long pause] … if you’re not as close it becomes intrusive, like she’s intruding on this woman’s life. But when you’re with her, it’s sensual. She’s not sneaking. She’s very gently and shyly traveling and discovering, like Alice in Wonderland.

    FILMMAKER: Did Séverine have freedom to move or did you block it?

    MASSADIAN: We dance. I tell her the objects, so she goes from here to here. This we didn’t even rehearse. We did five takes, which is a lot for me.

    FILMMAKER: I have a friend whose response to Milla was, “This woman knows how to direct goddamn curtains.”

    MASSADIAN: Thank her! [long laugh] Tell her I love her.

    FILMMAKER: The film has a number of images that are staged and decorated, in the sense that they’re like portraits. I’m thinking of Milla posed in front of the hanging sheet outside or when she’s petting the cat by the curtain. It’s like you’re telling the audience, “We’re going to take a few seconds to just sit with Milla in this beautiful image.” What function does that play in developing the character or shaping your viewer’s experience?

    MASSADIAN: I only give them actions and objects, so I also have to give them space. I don’t care if they go out of it, but they know the space. It might sound strange, but in a way I’m putting people, objects, and spaces at the same level. Of course, the care I feel for a person is very different than a plastic cup. This is why I say I drain the shit out of watching the shots. If there’s something in the shot, if it stays alive, it’s everything — from the curtain that goes like this [Massadian waves her hand] to suddenly, just before the end, the cat walks out. Everything.

    I’ve always been fascinated by how, in a lot of cinema before the 1960s, you would not really see the extras. But if your eye or your subconscious saw them, their bodies, the way they moved, the way they were dressed was all perfect. Now, I burst out laughing when I watch extras.

    I believe in the still shot and I believe in the person watching it. For example, the cat sequence: whether you focus on the cat or you focus on Séverine or you focus on the red curtain that moves, it all has to work. And [where you focus your attention] won’t change what you’re seeing or what you’re supposed to feel. Everything in a shot counts. Maybe one person in five or ten will notice there are girl toys and boy toys. When they eat together, there is a pink glass and a blue glass. This kid is only two-and-a-half, and already he doesn’t want the pink glass. A lot of people don’t see that, and it’s fine. For me, everything that is in this shot has to carry something.

    FILMMAKER: People don’t have to literally see it for it to matter.

    MASSADIAN: It doesn’t matter. That’s why I was talking about the extras. You might not see it, but you do. It’s there. Even if you didn’t notice. That’s what an image is. It should be full, even if it’s very empty.

    FILMMAKER: Another practical question. You mentioned that the scene with Luc and Séverine counting coins was assembled from a 28-minute take. When you took a first look at that take, did you find, say, a three-minute section that had potential and then throw it into another folder? And then maybe, when you returned later, those three minutes became 70 seconds in the film?

    MASSADIAN: Yes. It’s strange. This guy said, “Oh, when you edit you just put an ‘in’ and an ‘out.’” Just? Because the sequence has been edited, you feel it begins here and ends there, and there’s this movement through three layers of emotion.

    In the sequence with the books, I gave Luc a book on slang of the fishermen — it’s like a dictionary — and he’s reading the words that are sexually ambiguous and really funny.  And then there’s Duras, and then they talk about sex, and then lying, and he doesn’t care about lying and she has a problem with it — I mean, this is a gift of the gods.

    FILMMAKER: There’s some real hostility in her delivery of those lines.

    MASSADIAN: Yes, and she didn’t even realize it, because it went completely somewhere else. But I knew, so I walk in and change the scene. The camera doesn’t even cut. We will create four or five different possibilities but the result is always similar.

    FILMMAKER: How did making the film affect Séverine?

    MASSADIAN: She says it better than I do. When I was editing, I was fighting with her all the time because she was ashamed to be on welfare. She took a shitty job in a restaurant. And I said, “You’re working like an idiot. You do not see your child because you work. The money you make, you spend to pay the babysitter. Can you please explain? You want to go to school? I’ll pay for the fucking school. But I’m not going to help if you fuck up like this because it’s ridiculous. You’re not thinking straight. I could understand if you were on welfare and you were sitting like a fat cow on your couch watching television and eating chips or getting drunk. That’s not the point. See it as the government paying for your education. Get your exam.” She wants to be an educator. Because Harvard gave me a fellowship, I was so rich I could send her money.

    That went on for a year-and-a-half. And then she came to Locarno, she saw the film, and she basically said, “This really changed my life because now I see that I’m not so worthless. I think it’s even going to change the relation with my son because Valérie made me so patient in the film.” Three days later she went back and sent me a picture of her resignation letter. She started working on her exam and would send me photos of her scores. 

    She got her driver’s license. She’d been in a toxic relationship with an idiot. She realized all of this. And also she learned to trust a little bit. She trusts me. I’m like an aunt or something.

    FILMMAKER: You’ve said that you want to make a trilogy of films, beginning with Nana and ending with Milla. Do you still plan to make the one in the middle?

    MASSADIAN: Yes, but it’s going to take a while because I want to work with 11- to 13-year-olds. This world [of the film] has gone all the way with absurdity and violence, and the only ones resisting were the adolescents, so they’ve all been hunted and put in camps. They’re the enemy. All of this you won’t see. You’ll understand from their stories. Eventually, they will end up in this abandoned castle in the middle of the forest, where there is a huge library and some art — that’s all there is. And they’re going to write a new constitution.

    FILMMAKER: The kids are?

    MASSADIAN: The kids. But it’s not Lord of the Flies.

    FILMMAKER: Good.

    MASSADIAN: It’s much worse! Basically, the idea is to take four or five kids. Each will have their own particular interest. One girl is going to learn about plants and medicine, so she’s going to be the doctor. This one, she builds things; it’s all crooked but at least it’s built. This one is a poet. 

    I said, “Sometimes you’ll go scavenging, like in the zombie movies, and one day you find this woman. She’s 30, super nice, super beautiful, but she’s very sick. What do you do?” They say, “We help her. We cure her.” I said, “Yeah, but then she’s fine and she’s an adult. So there are three possibilities. Either you forbid her to leave; you jail her. Or you let her go but you take the risk that she’s going to bring back others and you’re in danger; you might even die. Or what?” And they’re like, “Oh, we kill her.” [long laugh]

  • Philippe Garrel in Conversation

    Philippe Garrel in Conversation

    There’s no exact equivalent in film history for Philippe Garrel’s “family cinema,” as he calls it here. To immerse oneself in his work is to watch Garrel and those he loves (parents, partners, children) be transformed by age and experience, while their passions and preoccupations—that particular Garrelian amour fou—persist.

    After several decades during which Garrel’s films saw limited distribution and exhibition in North America, he’s now experiencing something of a revival. Over the span of three days at the Toronto International Film Festival I enjoyed an impromptu Garrel family retrospective. In the Cinematheque program, TIFF debuted its recently-commissioned 35mm print of Jacques Rozier’s first film, Adieu Philippine (1962), which features a middle-aged Maurice Garrel in a supporting role. Actua 1 (1968), Philippe Garrel’s long-lost short documentary of the May ’68 protests, screened in the Wavelengths section, also in a new print. And Philippe’s latest feature, In the Shadow of Women, with an appearance by Louis Garrel as disembodied voiceover, had its North American premiere. In the Shadow of Women begins its U.S. theatrical run this week, courtesy of Distrib Films.

    It was also at TIFF that I heard rumors Garrel would be making his first trip to the States in more than a decade for the New York Film Festival. Rather than conduct a series of brief interviews, Garrel instead requested a three-hour, wide-ranging discussion. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to join Eric Hynes, Vadim Rizov, and Nicholas Elliot at that table. Garrel spoke at length and with great humor and enthusiasm, noting with a laugh when comments were off the record. It would be impossible to overestimate Nicholas’s skills as a translator.

    We agreed as a group to publish the entire interview with only a light edit so as to maintain the flow of the conversation. See also: Part 1 at Filmmaker Magazine and Part 3 at Reverse Shot. The interview was conducted on the morning of October 7, 2015, the day after the NYFF premiere of In the Shadow of Women and soon after news broke of Chantal Akerman’s death.

    * * *

    Part 1

    Edited by Vadim Rizov at Filmmaker Magazine

    The interview begins in response to a query from Garrel to Hynes as to whether he’d passed along a message to a filmmaker; then he explained who he was talking about.

    Garrel: He was at Cannes, I was showing La cicatrice intérieure. At a crossroads at Cannes, he caught me — I was with Nico — and said “I know who you are.” And I said, “Who are you?” “I’m Jim Jarmusch.”I said, “I don’t want to speak.” And he said, “It’s a pity!” I always remember that scene, that I refused to talk with a young filmmaker from my generation, because I was afraid he’d take my wife!

    Hynes: He was a good looking guy in those days.

    Garrel: Yeah, exactly. He’s not presentable nowadays?

    Hynes: He’s very presentable.

    Garrel: His last movie was fantastic. I thought it was a low-budget movie. It’s not.

    Hynes: It’s not super low-budget.

    Rizov: And he got tax breaks by shooting in Detroit.

    Garrel: Like $4 or $5 million. Not a one-million budget.

    Hynes: But I think that he often goes to Europe for financing.

    Garrel: Ah, that’s why. Because ten years ago, a lot of people said, “[There is] no more money” — during the subprime crisis — “in New York. Everybody has gone to Detroit,” like you said. Nobody wants to — can, not want — put private money into a movie like before, so I thought it must be a low-budget movie. Why the movie is great is because it’s one of the good films in digital. If you look, in general, the photographic artistic level has dropped except for Jarmusch and Blue is the Warmest Color, which is a fantastic film.

    Hynes: Is there anything about seeing those films that makes you curious about trying it yourself?

    Garrel: I’m like this group of Hollywood directors who went to see Kodak in Manchester and said, “We’re still going to shoot film. Even if our films are distributed on digital, we’re going to shoot on 35mm.” And I was one of the first in Paris to say, “I’m going to stop shooting if there’s no more 35mm.” It’s like what Henri Langlois said — Henri Langlois, who is one of the five major friends of my life. We were friends in the ’70s. He said — at one point people were saying black and white was going to disappear — “It’s impossible. Black and white cannot disappear, because cinema was invented in black and white.”

    And it’s true: for ten years it was very difficult to make films in black and white, but then it came back. So now, I think it’s a similar thing. People have said that 35mm is finished, it’s over. I don’t think it’s true because it’s the same thing. Cinema was invented in 35mm. So I think this is just a passage we’re going through, even though distribution has been generalized to be in digital, because it’s easier. But I’m sure I’m right, and I’m like these Hollywood directors who will keep shooting in 35mm. And in France, they’re even now shooting advertisements on 35mm, so it will continue.

    Hughes: How do you decide between black and white and color?

    Garrel: Many directors are frustrated actors or writers, and some are frustrated painters. Me, when I was a child, I was a painter. I went to a public state school at one point that was at the Louvre. It was called the “Arts Decos’” [the Decorative Arts School], and I was in a specific workshop that was for people under 15. That’s what really brought me to art, this workshop for people under 15. I was very good at pencil drawing, and I was good at gouache, but when I first tried oil painting, I found my painting very bad and I broke it, I destroyed it. That’s when I decided I would make films.

    For me, black and white is like a pencil drawing, color is like a gouache, and it’s because of that moment, with that first oil painting — when I was maybe 13 or 14 — I realized it’s very, very, very hard to do oil painting. It’s not like gouache. Mixing colors with oil is much more complicated. If you put a blue and red together, it won’t be a violet like it would be in gouache. It would be a brown. So, I’m scared of color, and I make three black and white films for one color film. Overall, I’ve made four more black and white films than color films.

    Hughes: When I think of your films, I think of a close-up of a face against a white background, or a white-washed window. When I saw A Burning Hot Summer a couple of years ago, it was shocking to see Louis’ face against those blue and red walls in the apartment.

    Garrel: Yes. There’s also an economic aspect to this. For me, to make a film in color is twice the cost of black and white. That’s not really because of the cost of buying the film or the lab work, that’s about the same today. The reason is that for me to shoot color, I need not only a DP, I also need a costume designer and a set designer. This is something that I learned from Raoul Coutard. Raoul Coutard told me this about Godard and he also told me this regarding Antonioni — where you find emotion in the red, for instance, regarding Antonioni. The thing with color photography is that it’s not only about lights, so you don’t only need a DP, it’s also about the color tones that you use. That’s why you need more money. When you’re shooting color, you need to change the sets, you need to change the walls, you need to change the costumes.

    What Coutard explained to me — Coutard, who is alive but he’s no longer shooting, and he’s the greatest French DP — he explained to me that in Godard, and also in Jacques Demy, the range of colors that would be used was decided beforehand. Godard uses the three primary colors: red, yellow, blue, and also green. Antonioni is the same thing: you don’t have pink, violet, etc. I think that’s where you get the special chromatic effect that I find emotional.
    Demy is the opposite: you have violet, pink, etc. But if you want to avoid having colors clashing, the way they do in life, you need to make sure you have a harmony of colors, and for that, you have to transform every set, every costume. You need to put paper up on the walls that you’ve made in special workshops.

    The reason I’m talking about economics is that if you look at Jealousy and In the Shadow of Women, for example, these are real low-budget films. They’re about a million, a million and a half each, so really low budget. I pay the bottom union rates. It’s very quick, they’re made in 21 days. Another thing about black and white is when I shoot black and white, I don’t use make-up. The women don’t wear make-up, not even their own personal make-up. They’re not allowed. But if I shoot color, immediately I have to have make-up, because otherwise that means the skin will be red. That means more lights, you have to have a make-up person, so you’ve got a heavier, bigger crew.

    Another reason I shoot black and white is so that I can make low-budget films, and that’s the condition of my freedom. That’s how I stay free. If I make for one or 1.5 million, I demand, in exchange, total freedom. I get final cut, no one has any right to have any influence on the cut of my film or anything — the distributors, the financiers, they can’t say anything. But I couldn’t request, or be able to get, that kind of freedom, if I wasn’t less expensive than the other directors.

    That’s something that I understood from Godard. I understood that Godard was the most avant-garde director of the French New Wave because he was a little less expensive than Truffaut, Chabrol, and the others, and it’s similar to how I am now vis-a-vis Desplechin or Carax. My films cost about half the price of their films. I understood that about Godard, that he was more avant-garde through being less expensive. And it wasn’t by exploiting his crews, it was about being faster. He shot in less time, he edited in less time — that’s the condition of my freedom, that’s how I can keep my freedom, and it’s something that’s very rare in the US today.

    Hynes: This is related to something you and I talked about last year, about working with single takes for the most part, and there being a practical reason for that. But then there’s an actual effect of that too. Hearing you talk about all the reasons you work in black and white — financially, logistically, and in terms of your own control — there’s also an effect from that. So you make a practical choice about make-up, and yet seeing your actors on screen in that manner has an effect on us as an audience in terms of how we approach them as people. How do you see the value in that as an effect?

    Garrel: When I made my first films — Marie pour mémoire, Les hautes solitudes, L’enfant secret… I’m talking about the films that I produced myself, which here were probably only seen by cinephiles. I made these films with no money at all. That’s how I’m different from the New Wave, because I made films like a painter painting. I took some money that I got from patrons to buy paint and canvas, what painters would do. Now, the New Wave, they made inexpensive films, but industrially they weren’t working like painters. So that’s a difference that I have from the New Wave. I was my own producer for 15 years, and I don’t mean a painter with an office.

    What I would do is, I found this idea of asking for the leftover, unexposed film on a roll that was taken out. At that time, when stars acted, as soon as the star had been shot, they would change the roll of film, because they were afraid that the roll would run out if the star was doing something else. So I invented this idea of making features by going around and asking people to give me their leftover, unexposed film. There was so little film, therefore, to shoot, that I couldn’t shoot two takes, it was impossible. So all my films were made in this way. Then in 1983, when I started working with producers, I kept this one-take method. And, in a sense, it’s a lucky accident, a lucky coincidence, because now, if I hadn’t done that, the producers could have forced me to shoot digital.

    My first films were shot in 35mm using this method, and when people switched to digital, the argument was that digital is so much less expensive to shoot. So if I didn’t have the one-take method, I could have lost that argument. Now, I make a film with maybe five hours of exposed film. It’s very different from Abdetallif Kechiche, who for Blue is the Warmest Color shot 600 hours. Jealousy, I had five hours of rushes. In the Shadow of Women, four hours of rushes. That’s a huge difference from digital, and, in my case, it’s a method that I’ve had from the beginning.

    Hynes: But there’s substance in what the artwork is too.

    Garrel: There’s no doubt — unquestionably, this one-shot method leads to a specific genre of film. As I’m the son of an actor who died four years ago now, I’m very, very sensitive to the question of good acting. I work like the theater does. I rehearse long before the shoot, let’s say about 25 days. I rehearse with the actors, and that’s where I do all the directing, in rehearsal. Once we’re on set, I do only one take, and that one take works because of everything that I’ve done before. If I used the traditional method of cinema-making — coming in in the morning and starting to direct the actors at that point — it would be extremely, extremely difficult. It’s thanks to the fact that I added the theater rehearsal before the shoot that we can do this.

    And to be specific about it, it’s actually more than theater, because what we do is we work for 25 Saturdays. That’s nearly a year, let’s say about eight months, if you don’t work on holiday, and that allows the role to mature in the actors’ minds [and] the actors to act together. A lot of times now there’s this absurd risk that actors meet on the set for the first time and have never acted before. If only for the chemistry, as they say here, it’s so important for them to be together. So, what I have the opportunity of doing, starting with the casting in these rehearsals, is to match the actors together, to see different people together and see how it works. That’s how my method has evolved.

    Many, many French films — not as many American films, but still some — are simply bad because there’s no chemistry between the actors. Directors see an actor, they see an actress separately, they say they’re great, and it’s like they’re putting two photos together. But it doesn’t mean that they can act together, it doesn’t mean that they’ll have chemistry. Hollywood knows that, I think. In France, you can’t test stars together. If you want a star, you deal with the star separately. You can’t test them together. I’m told that in Hollywood, they have readings with stars and actors together so you can see how they go together. You see films where actors may be very good, but organically, they’re not meant to play together; they don’t play together.

    My second career is as an acting career. I spent eight years teaching at the Conservatoire in Paris, the national school, also two years at the National Theater School in Strasbourg. When my films don’t make enough money for me to make a living, I sign up to teach acting. It’s there that I saw this business about chemistry — that though actors may have the talent, they don’t fit together. That’s something that you have you to look at in casting. Apart from the Actors’ Studio, in cinema we’re very, very primitive about this question of the association of actors.

    Rizov: One of the things I associate with your films is a shot of a face or a whole body in the moment before the actual dialogue and argument of the scene starts. These can go on for a long time. I was watching Liberté, la nuit last night and saw that some of the reaction shots of Emmanuelle Riva are much longer than you let them go on now. This also relates to your work in the ’70s, such Le berceau de cristal, which is a lot of portraiture, which relates to your interest in the screen test. Could you talk a little bit about how long you allow them to get to this point, whether it’s up to them to decide when to enter the dialogue, and how you’ve changed your compression of these moments?

    Garrel: Like the New Wave, what I liked best when I went to the Cinematheque was the silent films. For instance, I think that Sunrise by Murnau is one of the greatest films ever made. My three top films are Godard’s My Life to Live, Bergman’s Monika, Munrau’s Sunrise. Why? Because of the faces, the silent shots of faces. Now, when I wrote scripts by myself in the period you’re referring to, the dialogue was very, very short. That’s because I’m a paranoid type. Paranoid types don’t talk very much. It’s like Warhol. I think it’s very useful in art to be paranoid or schizoid. The most paranoid person I ever met, the most paranoid artist, was Warhol. I met him through Nico. He never talked. You would see him standing there all pale in the Factory, never talking, and he made these long, hours-long silent films with no talking. To me, that’s the work of a paranoid man, and I’m paranoid too.

    So at the time of Liberté, la nuit, the entire dialogue of my film was three or four pages long. Once I started with co-scriptwriters — this started with Marc Cholodenko, who is also a novelist. This started with Emergency Kisses. He’s more of a schizoid, so my cinema started to talk. There were pages and pages of dialogue. My original thing, though, comes from who I am, and the silent films that Henri Langlois showed me. At the time, the silent directors that people really liked were Murnau, Fritz Lang and — now he’s a little bit out of fashion, young people don’t know him so well — but I loved Erich von Stroheim. These films of von Stroheim’s, you would see them in a kind of half-waking state. It was like a dream, these films were like opium to me. And I think that left a trace on me, aside from my personality, which is to not talk very much, at least not in art, not to declare. This combination of the paranoid and the silent films is what had an impact. Now, today, things have really changed because I work with co-screenwriters.

    Hughes: My favorite moment in In the Shadow of Women is when Pierre and Elizabeth are sitting on the bed together. I think he’s fixing a coffee maker, and he hurts her feelings, and she leans forward. She’s so delightful before he makes the hurtful comment, she’s just staring at him and admiring him, and then when he hurts her she leans forward, toward the camera, and makes this gesture with her hand. It’s really lovely, and I’m wondering — you talked about 25 Saturdays of rehearsals, and I’m wondering what the scene looked like at the beginning of those 25 days versus the one when the camera’s finally rolling and you get that one take. Where does that gesture come from? How are those choices made?

    Garrel: All the young people in my films since Savage Innocence, which is 2001, have come from the Conservatoire, the national conservatory of acting Paris where I teach, like for example Lena Paugam, who you’re talking about. In my work as a professor with an acting class, it’s not at all a magisterial lesson. It’s a workshop class. I have a camera man, I have a sound person, I have a small camera, and I get the actors to do scenes in front of the camera. My work is to deblock the actor, to free the actor, to give him the freedom that’s been taken away from him by being filmed. Because being filmed paralyzes him, my job is to remove that paralysis.

    So that for example, for that gesture, my responsibility is simply to free the actress. She invents it, she makes the gesture in that moment that you’re referring to where he’s hurt her feelings and she’s repulsed and slightly traumatized. My only responsibility for the gesture is to free her, to be free on the set. Now, some good directors will push the actor. They’re like, “Let me show you what to do,” and then the actor imitates the director. I stay behind the camera. I don’t ever get in front of the camera, I don’t show them what to do, I don’t say what to do, I free them. Now, that takes a very long time, which is why it’s useful to have these many rehearsal days that I use. All my recent films — Savage Innocence, Regular Lovers, Jealousy, etc. — have actors from the Conservatoire, either people from my own classroom or, because I’m a titular professor there, people who I see at the graduation exercises in the new classes.

    So the level of acting is reached by the level of freedom; the actor has to be himself and to act only like he would. And that’s what’s touching about it. In Regular Lovers, for instance, the May ’68 riot scenes, all of those people — 45 actors — come from the Conservatoire. So what you have behind that is six years of work in my class. School nourishes the set for me. And my son has been my student too in class, so he knows very well what the other students have done. It’s not like he is only my son, because he’s just a student like the others.

    Part 2

    Edited by Darren Hughes at Mubi’s The Notebook

    HYNES: I’d love to know for you the relationship between teaching and directing. Is there a real overlap in those two jobs? And more specifically for this film, did your directing start well before the shoot? Do you think of it in those terms? Or are there points when you feel you’re primarily teaching? How do those two jobs evolve over the course of a project?

    GARREL: It’s the same thing. It’s like playing tennis. The tennis match is the shoot, the training is the classroom. The only difference, I would say, is that when I’m on the set, I only talk to the actors separately, secretly. I don’t let the others hear. Whereas, when we’re in the classroom, I do let everyone hear so that they can learn from it. That’s the only practical difference.

    When I chose what my profession would be, what my craft would be, which was after this business of the failed oil painting, I remember I was waiting at the bus stop and I saw a poster of a Marcel Carné film that was playing at the time starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan [Port of Shadows (Le quai des brumes, 1938)], and I thought to myself, “I’m not able to act, but I would be able to tell actors how to act well, because I’m the son of an actor.” So, that at first is what I realized I could do. Nine-tenths of directing is directing actors. In school, they put way too much emphasis on camera placement and so on, whereas really that’s just one-tenth of directing a film.

    When I had kids, and I wasn’t as well known then, I was able to make a living by becoming an acting teacher. By thinking that you know something, you’re able to convince other people that you know it, and you become respected for it. It’s kind of like working with a psychoanalyst—by believing that the psychoanalyst is a wise man, you in fact heal yourself. It’s the same with an actor. I can say for myself that I’m a conductor, except that I’m a conductor who doesn’t know how to play any of the instruments.

    HYNES: You talk about your father being an actor, and you felt emboldened in terms of offering that to others, but if I’m not mistaken you father was ambivalent about being an actor. You seem less ambivalent about being an actor and a director than he was. There’s a legacy of acting that you’ve inherited, but you’ve inherited it without the reluctance.

    GARREL: It’s true that my father was like a hidden actor. He was mostly a theater actor, not a film actor, and the reason for this was that during the war he landed—he invaded in Provence and in Italy and he had killed people. This was a huge problem for him because my father was a humanist [yet] during the war he had been forced to do this. He had signed up with the North African Free French troops and he landed, like Samuel Fuller and others. He used to say to me, “There are no murders in war, Philippe,” but still, because he killed, it was very hard for him. At the end of his life, he explained to me that he had hidden himself away in a small profession, the small profession of being a theater actor.

    He also was a puppetmaker and puppeteer first. When I was born, that’s what he was doing—acting with Jean Dasté and Gaston Baty. Gaston Baty belonged to the so-called “Cartel,” which was Baty, [Jacques] Copeau, [Charles] Dullin, and [Louis] Jouvet. My father was a student of Dullin, and my method comes from Dullin. Dullin is someone you might have seen in a few films around the second world war, but he was primarily a theater actor. That’s where most of his leading roles were. So when I was around six or eight I would go and sit alone with adults at night in the theater and watch my father on stage.

    But it’s true he was ambivalent about it. He considered it a small profession. In a way, that’s something that I inherited from him.

    RIZOV: I want to follow up on that a little bit. You talk about the work of unblocking the actor. When you were working with your father—especially regarding his experience in Algeria, which is addressed in Liberté, la nuit—did you have to unblock him in relation to his own experience to then relive it on screen?

    GARREL: Just once. Other than that, I never directed him. He did it all alone. And on the contrary it was me who learned from him.

    But for the last film he made with me, Un été brûlant, which was actually the last film he ever shot, I gave him a supporting role—he was too old to play a leading role—and he was acting with his grandson, Louis Garrel, and he was telling an incident from the war. For the first time I had seen with him, it was reality for him. It wasn’t improvising, it was reality. He started acting not just for Louis, he was acting for the crew as well, as if it were a confession. The crew included great, experienced members like Willy Kurant, the D.P., and he was talking to all of them. So it was the only time in my career that I decided to do a second take with him. I told him, “No, you have to talk just to Louis.” It was the only time I directed him, and it was for his last role. I think it was because he was so old that for him there was no difference between acting and being.

    HUGHES: I’m deeply moved by that scene with your father, partly because as a cinephile I have a unique relationship with your family. A few weeks ago in Toronto, for example, I saw the new restored print of Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962), in which we see your father in his late-30s. You’ve been working with your family for several decades now. Does that still satisfy your curiosity and bring you pleasure as a filmmaker?

    GARREL: At the moment I’m rehearsing a film with my daughter, Louis’s sister [Esther Garrel], because my family is kind of like the circus. Everyone is in the theater or in film. So right now I’m rehearsing a film with my daughter who’s 23, an actress from the Conservatoire who I found in the recent graduating class and who’s 20, and one of my father’s best friends who’s an actor. It’s very, very important for me that art is grafted onto real, intimate life because a film is a piece of your life. Sometimes it takes a year, sometimes three years. I think it would be hard for me to maintain professional—even emotional—ties with people in cinema if I didn’t have these people from my family around me.

    Sternberg had done it before, but what really interested me in the New Wave was that it was a couples’ cinema, it was a lovers’ cinema. Antonioni did it, too. What I think I invented, with my situation, was a family cinema. It’s very important for me that film remain meaningful, that it does not remain outside of the subconscious. Once the subconscious is expressed on the set—and I think this is very important—the film becomes more expressive.

    At the end of his two books on acting, Stanislavsky comes to the conclusion that one should leave room for the expression of the subconscious. If you can let the subconscious be expressed in the making of the film, then when the viewer sees the film he will have something of his own subconscious emerge. Not through identification. He’ll think of people he loves, for instance. He’ll think of something that is emotionally moving to him. If my subconscious surfaces in the film and comes through, he will be touched because his subconscious will emerge. In this way, cinema heals.

    I look for emotion in truth. I don’t go searching for emotion like some filmmakers do. I think it’s more successful to go looking for emotion through truth because that way the viewer can come to his truth.

    RIZOV: In terms of your work with your son, his relative lack of expression is something that’s been discussed a lot. As an example, I’d like to ask about one of my favorite of your scenes that everybody likes, the “This Time Tomorrow” scene in Regular Lovers. Everyone is dancing around him and you cut to him in the middle of it. He’s very unmoved, in opposition to the spirit of the room. How do you develop that characteristic as you direct?

    GARREL: In that particular scene, it was a choreographer who teaches at the Conservatoire. At the Conservatoire, they also have dance professors. It’s not just theater and films. Anyways, Caroline Marcadé choreographed the Kinks number.

    My set is quite free, and Louis Garrel, in general, is quite inhibited about dancing, so he didn’t want to dance. Since my cinema is free, I said, “Okay, don’t dance. Be a character who doesn’t like to dance.” Then, as we were shooting, I saw that Louis was watching his classmates, because all the others in the scene were people he was at the Conservatoire with for three years. He was watching them, so I told the D.P. to film Louis without telling him. Those are documentary shots that are inserted in the choreography that Caroline Marcadé did.

    By the way, I’m working with her again this year, so it’s not just actors that I get from the Conservatoire. I also take professors and use them behind the scenes. For instance, the person who teaches fight choreography at the Conservatoire, I’ve had him act in the films.

    My father acted like I never could have imagined. And now Louis Garrel is a much better actor than I am. I try to help him, but most often when he’s stoic like that, these are decisions that he has made among his classmates, people he was in school with for a long time, based on what he can and can’t do.

    I try to navigate this family relationship on the set. It can be awkward for people, and I try to avoid that. You have to avoid playing favorites. He and I are obviously very close, but one has to be democratic and not treat him differently. Of course, if we come back to the subconscious, of course I do treat him differently because, for instance, I dream of him more often than I dream of his classmates.

    HYNES: You talked earlier about introversion and about how you’re an introvert and there’s an expression of that in terms of lengths of shots and the quietness, to some degree. It’s interesting to me that that’s how you describe yourself. When I spoke to Louis he also talked about your family as being a circus and he likened himself to being the clown in the circus. So, in that sense he seems very different from you. And yet, in your films there is an introversion that comes through at times, and I’m wondering about your relationship with him in terms of him basically being an expression of you in a deep sense. And also, how do you relate to other actors in that sense? Because actors tend to be introverts. As a teacher and a director, how do you work with that dynamic, bringing actors down to a quieter place? Or at other times encouraging their outgoing aspects?

    GARREL: When I film Louis Garrel or my actors, even if I’ve written a story based on my own life, it’s really them that I’m filming. When I filmed my son or, back in the day when I filmed my father in films like Liberté, la nuit, I wasn’t asking them to play me. I was really filming them, and it’s been like that since the beginning, even when my films are drawn from my own personal life.

    The problem is, for instance, if you’re telling a story that involves sex you can’t talk to your father about sex the way you would with your best friend. What we’re getting to is the problem of incest. In asking my father or my son to be actors, I can’t film my father kissing a woman. I can’t film my son holding a naked woman the way I could with other actors because that would be like looking through the keyhole at my parents or into the children’s room.

    It’s Freud who said that the number one taboo for humanity is incest. It’s the most repulsive point. Everything about our evolution as a society is designed to avoid incest. So if I write, for instance, my love story with a woman, and I ask my father or Louis to act in it I don’t ask them to play me. I ask them to play themselves. And not only that, I have to film a purely spiritual love, because otherwise it’s like going and peeking at your parents or going into the kids’ room. You can’t do that.

    There’s an inconvenience to that, which is that it makes for a certain kind of story; but there’s an advantage, which is that every time the story has to be of amour fou. It’s not just a little love affair. It can’t be that. It spiritualizes the love while taking away the problem of incest or voyeurism of other family members. So there’s both a limit and a kind of luck in this, which allows a transcendence. Perhaps I haven’t completely answered the question.

    HUGHES: You mentioned earlier that you wanted to trigger the subconscious rather than create an identification. When I watched Emergency Kisses for the first time ten years ago, I felt very removed from it. I’m now the same age as you were when you made it. I’m married and have children the same age as Louis in that film. So when I revisited it last week, I identified much more closely with your character, but I was also deeply moved by it because I now understand deep in my bones that the loss of my family would be the great tragedy in my life. I now experience—subconsciously, I suppose—the threat of despair.

    GARREL: Well, I think that’s proof of how art is useful. As we see with great filmmakers like Bergman, his films show that he was an artist, but they also show that films can be as useful for healing as a book by Freud.

    It’s very important. I deeply believe that art can replace religion, like psychoanalysis can help—not replace but help—medicine. Art can supplant religion as far as belief in life. And that’s what’s sad about Chantal Akerman’s suicide. She was an atheist. My father used to say to me, to deal with suicides, “All young people are suicidal and I was, too.” And he used to say to me, “Suicide is two lines in the newspaper.” And we saw as much.

    So, with Chantal it’s a real failure of art, as far as our business is concerned. We can’t get into her private life or the failure of love or any of that. But what we can see politically in her life is the concentration camps, because her mother was in the concentration camps, and we can see that art wasn’t enough for the collective unconscious, as Freud saw the collective unconscious. Not this idea that we have now of a cloud floating above men. Freud saw it as something that’s anchored in our memory and that comes from those who lived before, who came before us, and that makes us act despite ourselves.

    As far as friendship and love and so on in art, that’s what art is good for, as the five of us here who agree that art must be defended in this way, because it helps us to live. But even psychoanalysis fails us. We see that with Primo Levi, who had been in the concentration camps and who, like Chantal, killed himself. It’s very, very complicated to heal the psyche through art, through this search for emotion, for reliving things, for bringing things forth from memory and unconscious when we see art. It’s not like we’ve reached the end point with this. On the contrary, we’re at the eve of the importance in our civilization of understanding that art is essential.

    RIZOV: It would be hard for me to imagine a film of yours that eliminated political aspects entirely. There is an analytical component in returning to, revisiting, and re-experiencing charged political moments, whether through Maurice’s monologue in Liberté, la nuit about the scars left by the Algerian war, a very short eruption like in Frontier of Dawn when the man at the bar suddenly says, “I’m an anti-Semite,” or in A Burning Hot Summer, when a sidewalk conversation is interrupted by immigrants running from the police. The characters are preoccupied by their lives, while briefly noticing what’s still going on around them.

    GARREL: Instinctively, what you’re touching on with all of these scenes is something that I didn’t invent. I didn’t invent this process. Artists have been doing this since the dawn of time. What you’re touching on are dreams that I wrote down upon waking up. Notated dreams. For instance, the murder of the mother in Liberté, la nuit, the arrest of the immigrants in A Burning Hot Summer, these are all dreams.

    Now, many artists have done this. They mix imaginary scenes and dreams. But these scenes are not shown as dreams because I’ve also had scenes in my films where you see actual dreams, you see the hero fall asleep and dream. I like to mix those with reality. What I’m interested in is the search for a method, and that’s how you get an avant-garde style—by searching for something new.

    In Regular Lovers, for instance, toward the end of the shoot, I had a dream, but instead of writing it down I did something like what Godard would do when he was . . . let’s call it “improvising the mise-en-scene” on the set, where he would make something up and shoot it with without writing it down. So, I had this dream. I called my assistant early in the morning and said, “Go to the store, buy some barbed wire, and come to the set. I’ll tell you why.” We were shooting in the forest, and what I was able to do is I noted the dream directly through the camera. I didn’t write it down. It would be hard for you to remember, but it was the scene where the character takes opium and then he dreams. That was a dream noted on camera. You see a young woman wearing old clothes in a small camp with barbed wire. She’s woken by Louis Garrel, who’s dressed as a young prince. There’s a small flame. He takes her out of the camp.

    And that’s how you get to be avant-garde. You try to be the first to make a certain gesture. So, in this case, two or three hours after I’d woken up, I was shooting the dream, noting the dream directly through the camera, while I was still inhabited by it. What I try to do is I take these scenes from dreams, which you’ve instinctually noticed, and I mix them with realist scenes. They’re oneiric scenes by definition, since they’re taken from dreams.

    You’ve instinctively put your finger on all of these scenes that were from dreams that were shown as reality!

    Part 3

    Edited by Eric Hynes at Reverse Shot

    HYNES: I don’t usually think of your films in terms of genre. I think of you as coming out of the avant-garde but continually working towards your own vocabulary. But with In the Shadow of Women, you do seem to be in dialogue with comedy. How deliberate were you in bringing in those elements, and how willing were you to go into that area?

    GARREL: It’s true what you say, but it was not on purpose. In France, when I saw the audience laughing at the movie, they were laughing at it as if it were a comedy, as if I had told it with humor. It was absolutely not on purpose. I did it without humor. What’s possible, however, is that it’s due to the fact that it’s the first time I’ve worked with Jean-Claude Carrière. When I said to Jean-Claude, “Everyone is laughing in the audience,” Carrière said, “Yeah, Philippe. That’s me!” When Godard decided to make industrial cinema again in 1979, I observed that he worked with his wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, and he worked with Carrière, who as you know had written for Luis Buñuel and worked with Godard on two films, Every Man for Himself and Passion.

    The importance is not that I’m avant-garde or a modernist; what’s important is that we say, “It’s cinema,” the way that we can say, “It’s a painting” when we look at a painting. Now, in the modernists that I like—Picasso and Matisse and Max Ernst—you have a figure, sometimes it’s Cubist, it’s de-structured, interpreted, but underneath it you see the classic drawing, you see the construction of the human body. That’s the modernism I like in painting, because the two forms of art I like are cinema and painting. What I’m looking for is how to be modernist in a profound way. But you also have to be classic in a narrative sense. You can’t, with cinema, put the book down and do something else or look at another painting. Only cinema and theater have this thing of imposed time where the viewer must accept to be a prisoner. So, what I wanted to do was be like a painter, to have a classic design underneath (which Picasso could do very well because he was a master draftsman) and on top to deconstruct. I thought Carrière was the ideal person for this because what he had done for Every Man for Himself. What I wanted, in a sense, was a classic script and to do a modern mise-en-scène.

    What you see with Godard—and he’s the only one who does this, and this is why he’s so much better than me—is that ten years later, after the movie, you see that he was telling the story. But because of his modern mise-en-scène, the story wasn’t exposed. It appears over time. And in that way he’s like Picasso, or Einstein. Because he’s searching, he’s searching and he finds. For instance, take Nouvelle vague. I had to see it four times to understand the story. People walk out of Godard movies because they say there’s no story, there’s no logic. But there is a story. It’s just exposed differently. For instance, in a classic film you’ll have an actor who says, “I’m the President of the United States.” In a Godard film, you’ll have an actor saying nothing, and you’ll have a voice coming in from somewhere saying, “Mr. President, do you want a glass of water?” That’s his method of exposition. It’s hard to understand. And you need to understand that logic to be moved by the movie. But with time and maybe one sentence in the program, these movies can touch people. Slowly we’re catching up.

    If we take the example of Nouvelle vague—which was shown in competition in Cannes because Alain Delon was in it—there were many, many walkouts. Which is what happened to Chantal Akerman’s film, No Home Movie, in Locarno. Godard was used to this kind of treatment. When I took Godard as a master when I was 13 or 14, there were maybe six of us in the screening room to see Alphaville, and at the end there were four. But Chantal wasn’t used to that kind of thing. She filled theaters. So maybe No Home Movie is too modern. Maybe it’s hard to understand. It was the same for Nouvelle vague as it is for No Home Movie. But the difference is that Straub and Godard—they’ve always seen this kind of behavior. They’re used to it. Now when I read the Cannes reviews of Nouvelle vague back at that time, the story they described was wrong. They said it was the story of two brothers and a rich heiress. The critics told a different story than was the movie’s actual story.

    When I saw the film a fourth time, I realized that the story was actually of a Machiavellian character who makes people believe that he was killed by this heiress. And then he reappears with another personality pretending to be the first man’s brother. And out of guilt the heiress gives him everything she says to avoid him telling the police about her. At the end, when she nearly drowns in an accident, she realizes who he is. And he saves her. So she says, “But it was you all the time.” And he says yes. And so she says, “But there’s one thing I didn’t understand—why did you save me?” And he says, “Because in the meantime I’ve fallen in love.” Which is very, very moving. But if we don’t understand it, it’s like a math problem.

    So back at that time I wrote to Godard, because I write him quite frequently or I go to visit him—and I was right, that was the story. But no one at the time understood it. Except maybe the top student [smiles]. Now everyone understands it. It’s a great story, but instead of exposing it in the Scorsese style, Godard told it in his modern way. It’s a moving story for the 21st century. It’s told in the avant-garde way of Godard. The exposition is too hidden, instead of being really comprehensible. But that’s why Godard is in my eyes the greatest modernist. Why he’s above all the rest. Like Picasso—Picasso who in relation to the Louvre or classic painting in general, he came along and he broke everything. So that he could come after, and that’s what Godard did. After only 80 years of cinema, he came along and he broke the Lumière and Edison things that we were doing, and he invented modernism.

    HUGHES: When you talked about seeing Nouvelle vague for the fourth time, you said you came to understand the logic of it, which is an interesting choice of words. All critics and viewers have to wrestle with Godard’s logic, but I’m not sure it’s a word that comes to my mind when watching and writing about your films, which are more about unearthing, in that subconscious sense, the emotions generated by your images. You’ve talked about growing up as the son of an actor, being exposed to art and painting as a young child, but I’m wondering about other sources for your images, beyond dreams. Do you still take direct inspiration from paintings? I’m thinking about the images of feet being held and wrapped and washed, which is a trope in sacred art. Some of your earlier work is almost mythological.

    GARREL: The other exercise that I devote myself to, aside from seeing and re-seeing the films of Godard… actually there are two other exercises. One of them is going to the museum. When I was fourteen I lived next to the Louvre, and the Louvre was free once a week. In fact I saw here that on Sundays it’s pay as you wish at the Frick, which I think is a great thing, a democratic thing, to allow poor people to see classic painting. I went to the Louvre every single Sunday. At 25 I counted, and I’d been to the Louvre 147 times. When I shoot, I don’t watch movies—I go to the Louvre. And I look at how they paint things. I don’t look at the dates—I don’t know the history about paintings. I look at the names and I look at the paintings.

    The other practice that I’ve undertaken, which I started when I was 25, is that I read Freud. Whenever I had a problem, I read one book by Freud. For instance, if I had an addiction, I read a book by Freud to get over it. And I would say, in the Freudian sense, this is the this of the illness, and I would work through it by reading the book. And then I would not be dependent. Or if a woman had left me and I felt terrible, I would read one Freud book. And no lie, I think I’ve read more than half of Freud. And I did this without undergoing psychoanalysis while making films.

    Now, not long ago, I started to experience really visceral jealousy over a woman—a very serious problem. And so for the first time I decided to go to psychoanalysis. And I found an old psychoanalyst who is a disciple of Lacan. And I had a very short psychoanalysis with him—six months to get rid of the jealousy. I didn’t get rid of my other problems, but I did get rid of the jealousy. And so I wrote to this 92-year-old psychoanalyst, “I think I can get by alone.” And because he’s a very wise man, he wrote me, “If you think you can get by alone, you should leap on the opportunity.” So I stopped the psychoanalysis, and I also stopped reading Freud. So here, for instance, in New York, I’ve seen zero films, but I’ve been to the Whitney, I’ve been to the Frick. I’m really, truly interested in that.

    So I have classic and modern painting, I have Freud, I have Godard, there’s seeing old films as well. Like recently I discovered some Bergman films that people don’t know very well, from the mid-forties. Like Prison and Music in Darkness. These are all films that I go to see in the Latin Quarter, small movie theaters—kind of the remains of Henri Langlois’s Cinematheque. This is how I make my cinema. It’s something I get from my father. I’m an artist to make a living—I just do it well. I’m not alienated by it, but I’m not a specialist. And that’s why I have a small audience. I like being recognized as a filmmaker, but I don’t need to have a huge audience. It’s much more important to me to fully live my life, and be thoroughly involved with my intimates and loved ones, and my family. Life is more important. I surround myself with art to escape the ambient idiocy. But I’m less of a specialist than, for instance, Leos Carax. Because I prefer life. And I think that’s something that comes from May ’68.

    RIZOV: I would like to go back to your new film for a little bit. What the couple is united by initially is their work in the editing room. At the end, when she’s the first to discover and understand that the film is based on a falsehood, she sees the footage better than he does. This seems to relate a bit to your practice of having female collaborators come in to help you write the female parts. At the same time they’re working with physical film, and he meets the other woman when he’s helping her carry cans of film. It’s a triangle united by celluloid.

    GARREL: Well, even thirty years ago, if you met a woman and you were a director, she would say to you, “Make me a star.” Now, a woman will say, “Make me equal.” So the work has naturally evolved. You see, men court women naturally. Or if they like men, they court men. And by courting I mean in the medieval sense of courtship. So naturally there’s courtship in art, and I want to seduce. In the past, women wanted to be glorified in film. Now it’s different. And that changes the work of artists. Smart women today want to be equals—they won’t be upset if they’re not stars. But if they’re artists, they just want to be having their work looked at as equals, as intelligent beings. So I use that to court women. I want to meet the deepest desires of women today.

    Now, the other thing is that in cinema today—cinema is young, it’s only 120 years old—most women have spoken men’s words. It’s never been an objective vision of women. So even men who are not misogynists, who love women, who see them as equals—it’s still a problem in cinema that all the words that women were speaking were coming from men. So by associating men and women in writing the films, I get to have a more dialectic type of film. More dialect in regarding the human species. It’s like an inner documentary on men and women. Cinema is not only macho, it’s industrially made by men.

    So I’ve just tried to move it forward. Godard did the same thing with his second period. Which you could refer to as the Blue Period, if you’re continuing the Picasso parallel. He wrote a lot of those films with Anne-Marie Miéville. There’s one called France/tour/detour/deux/enfants, which he made for television and which I love, which he wrote with Miéville. And I think to write a film with your wife makes it intelligently gendered. The other advantage is that it’s less dangerous to write a film with your wife than to have her be the star—because you’re less likely to have someone steal her away from you. Which brings us back to the beginning of the conversation, when I was talking about Jarmusch.

    [Laughter]

    HYNES: And then you made an entire film about that—about whether or not a director will cast his partner as the lead in a film written about her.

    GARREL: Emergency Kisses.

    HUGHES: Can I ask a very practical question? In the last few films, there’s a consistent rhythm to the sequences, in that there will be a fairly static shot, like of two people sitting on a bed talking, followed by a shot of people walking down the street—there’s visual movement. I’d like to hear you talk about the design of that visual rhythm. What happens in a walking scene that can’t happen in a quiet, static scene?

    GARREL: I don’t know. It’s like drawing. Those kinds of operations aren’t analyzed by the artist. I have no theory on my own film. You know, cinema is gestural; this is what it has in common with dance or with painting. You take your camera, and people, and you write something with that, that resembles life. That’s why I shoot in order. I shoot the first shot the first day, and the last shot the last day, and I edit during the shoot. I have an editor who edits as we go. So that in the evening, I see the last shot, and the next morning I continue from there. I continue from the previous image—not from what’s in the script. Once all the rehearsals are done, in a sense I could throw the story out, the actors would keep the dialogue, and we would start over.

    So if you would ask me, why do you track backwards when this guy is walking down the street feeling desperate because his wife cheated on him?—it’s like painting. If I have a blue line, I look at it and I put a green line underneath it. I don’t tell myself I’m going to make a blue and green painting. I don’t theorize about that. It’s a blue line, then the green. There’s no intention before the gesture. I do it. I observe. Then I do the next thing. I observe. I do the next thing. I observe the continuity. But there’s no outside definition of what I want to get. There’s no film in my head. There’s no imaginary film I want to make. I organize reality, in the present, on the set. What I’m trying to explain to you is that it’s really gestural. I’m not reconstructing something that was constructed in my mind. I’m constructing something for the first time in reality.

    HUGHES: That’s another advantage of your technique of having extensive rehearsals and then shooting a scene only once. I can’t imagine any other filmmaker that looks at the previous shot the night before, who can feel the rhythm of the movie and then make the decision the next morning based on that.

    HYNES: Right, if you were considering from among fifteen takes, it would be harder to determine, tonally, what should be next.

    GARREL: [in English] Ah, yes, yes. Because it’s no more clear if you make a lot of takes. That’s true. Everything is a method that you’ve invented. Every artist invents his own method. And his own method is his style. That’s why it’s so difficult to teach directing. Except for the fact of directing actors. But teaching the mise-en-scene? It’s very difficult. Because every artist is particular, every director is particular.

    HYNES: But you were encouraged by Godard, your mentor, to come up with your own method. Which is quite different from other directors coming up.

    GARREL: It’s also a question of misunderstanding. I thought that Godard wrote nothing at all, and that his films were entirely improvised. So through all my first films, basically from Marie for Memory to Les hautes solitudes, which is where I started to do something like preparatory work, I thought that Godard came to the set with hands in his pockets, nothing written down. In fact, I later learned that he had a notebook in which there was a story, in a few lines. He didn’t have a script but he did have a notebook, and he would give the dialogue to the actors. But since I didn’t know that, and since one doesn’t know in general how other artists work, I started doing things in my own way. So for my six first films I did absolutely no writing, I just went straight to the camera. And then at the end of the shooting I would write just a few lines of dialogue and I would give it to the actors and say, “This is for tomorrow.” This thing of misunderstanding is specific to art. It wouldn’t work with science. Art can tolerate approximation and misunderstanding. You can still have a work of art that’s based on a misunderstanding. That’s expressive.

  • Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

    Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

    Dir. by Abdellatif Kechiche

    I’m interested, primarily, in one aspect of this film. I saw Blue is the Warmest Color projected onto a large screen in a wide ratio (2.35:1). If IMDb is to be trusted, it was shot on a Canon C300, and the resulting image is uncannily detailed in that too-real-to-feel-real style of hi-def video. Because Kechiche frames nearly every shot in a tight closeup (an unusual move, generally, but especially so in this aspect ratio), and because of the film’s 179-minute run time, watching Blue is the Warmest Color in a theater means spending more than two hours looking at faces through a telescope. When my attention drifted from the content of the film, as it did fairly often, I’d distract myself by looking at Léa Seydoux’s teeth and gums or at the warts on the back of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s hand. (This is a cinephile’s prerogative. We are habitual voyeurs, and there are few opportunities in real life for this kind of intimate examination.)

    After the screening, I mentioned on Twitter that Blue is the Warmest Color felt like a film that was designed to be viewed on an iPad, and someone countered that it’s not too different in that respect from The Passion of Joan of Arc or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, two other films that rely heavily on closeups. I agree with him to a certain extent, but I think Blue is the Warmest Color is an interesting test case for a directing technique that is categorically different from the work of Dreyer and Leone. I say “technique” rather than “style” or “voice” because I suspect Kechiche’s choices could be reproduced by most competent technicians to similar effects (and likely will in coming years). It could be reduced to something along the lines of: extensive use of hi-def closeups + interesting faces (casting) + duration + realistic performances = the manufacture of feeling. I can’t think of a perfect precedent for this combination.

    Obviously, Blue can be distinguished from a film like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly in many, many ways but I’m most interested in its “realistic performances,” by which I mean the genuine tears, the dripping snot, the flushed skin. Watching 18-year-old Exarchopoulos exhaust herself in scene after scene, I thought of Catherine Breillat’s comment about Isabelle Huppert: “Her gift is to be involved with her character just in the time she is playing it, and without protection. Actors are well paid but it is very dangerous work.” Throughout Blue is the Warmest Color I was too conscious of the likelihood that after Kechiche said “cut,” Exarchopoulos would need an hour to regain her composure.

    I was moved by Blue is the Warmest Color, as I’m often moved by coming-of-age stories, but I don’t trust my response because the film’s form is so calculated. (I don’t trust the film because of some narrative cheats, too, but they’re tangential to this discussion.) In a nutshell, I suppose I’m wondering here if it’s possible to project 60-foot, detailed images of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s emotive face for two hours and not move an audience? More to the point, I’m wondering if that technique, in and of itself, can be called directing? Yes, Kechiche made important decisions—the elliptical editing is occasionally interesting, as are some of his storytelling choices—and he was able to elicit those large emotions from Exarchopoulos, which is one of the jobs of a director. But in all of the commotion about Kechiche’s alleged exploitation of his actresses in the filming of the sex scenes, I hear a more vague and general distrust of the film’s voice—a distrust I share because I feel manipulated by a technique devoid of a guiding wit or wisdom.

  • Catherine Breillat: Material Desires

    Catherine Breillat: Material Desires

    This interview was originally posted at Mubi.

    * * *

    In late-2004, Catherine Breillat suffered a debilitating stroke that paralyzed the left side of her body and precipitated a five-month hospital stay. After learning to walk again, she soon returned to work, finalizing pre-production on The Last Mistress (2007). Her next project was to have been an adaption of her novel, Bad Love, starring Naomi Campbell and Christophe Rocancourt, a notorious criminal who, by the time Breillat met him, had already served five years in an American prison for defrauding his victims out of millions of dollars.

    In a 2008 interview, Breillat said of Rocancourt: “He is so intelligent, so sincere, so arrogant. You have to be arrogant to achieve anything in this life. When I first saw him, I knew he would be perfect for my film.” Breillat was, in fact, under the spell of Rocancourt at the time of that interview. Borrowing small sums at first, he would eventually swindle her out of nearly 700,000 euros, a harrowing ordeal that Breillat first described at length in her book, Abus de faiblesse, and now explores again in a film of the same name.

    I spoke with Breillat at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Abuse of Weakness had its world premiere. The film opens with a remarkable, high-angle shot of rumpled bedsheets before panning up to Maud Schoenberg (Isabelle Huppert), who wakes suddenly and grabs her arm.

    * * *

    HUGHES: It’s been nearly a decade since your stroke, and you’ve already written a book about your troubles with Rocancourt. In other words, you’ve had a great deal of time to think about how to depict these experiences on screen. Did you always know you would open the film with the stroke? And did you consider other ways to visualize it?

    BREILLAT: When I first wrote the script I imagined something more complicated with curtains—muslin curtains in the wind, with the titles over them. Later, suddenly, I thought of the sheet. I bought a very, very good quality sheet because you cannot find that kind of texture in simple cotton. It was strange. When we shot the scene I became worried and said to Isabelle, “Oh, no! The sheets are not laying right!” They had to have some relief, like a sort of mountain, covered in snow. And, in fact, viewers often don’t know what they are looking at.

    HUGHES: It’s disorienting, for sure, and then when we see the stroke, terrifying. By opening the film with the stroke, we never know the Maud “before,” which makes her motivations and relationships a bit of a mystery. So much of the film is about trying to understand why she is susceptible to Vilko’s con. [Vilko Piran, the film’s Rocancourt, is played by French rapper Kool Shen.]

    BREILLAT: Because he is her actor! In Sex is Comedy (2002) you see this relationship—how actors become the material of the film. Also, in my case, I was closed up in my house. Isolated. I could not go outside. And he was the person who came, who was always there, who took me by the arm and helped me go outside.

    When I was preparing the movie and found the location [Maud’s home], I fell apart. Wept. Because, in fact, I was very happy in the hospital. I accepted it. I’m very stoic! I was in bed, paralyzed. I made no distinction between me before and me like that. It’s me. I didn’t want to live some other life in my mind, so I accepted it.

    In the hospital, I had things to learn. Rehabilitation is mental rather than physical. It requires great mental concentration because you’re working those neurons that are not dead. It all felt familiar to me from directing films, which also requires great concentration.

    But, at the same time, I also developed a kind of relationship I’d never experienced before: the therapist who helped me to walk was like a god to me. And with Vilko, in fact, it was the same. It began here, the story, because the therapist not only helped me take a first step, physically. It was like a psychological transfer. And the same with Vilko.

    HUGHES: I love the scene when Vilko first enters Maud’s home. She’s seated on a couch, watching him like she’s his private audience. There’s a slight smile on her face and she looks delighted by it all. Kool Shen is such an irresistible screen presence. He walks in, surveys the room, leaps effortlessly onto a bookshelf…

    BREILLAT: [smiles] Yes, yes.

    HUGHES: It’s an incredibly seductive performance, which I assume is why you were drawn to him?

    BREILLAT: That’s also why I chose a rapper for this character. He’s not just seductive. It’s a violent seduction. Tres physique! In my own story, Rocancourt had the same sort of movement and manner. Not beauty but something else. It’s like he’s already taking the power.

    She’s a filmmaker, and she’s looking at him as the material for a future movie, so she is in the dominant position. She’s sitting there, looking at him, not asking him if he wants something to drink. He’s not a person, just a character in her movie. But he takes the power. He has an animal presence.

    HUGHES: A friend who hasn’t seen Abuse of Weakness yet asked me what I thought of it, and I told him that the narrative is relatively simple. There’s an inevitability to Maud’s crisis, especially for viewers who already know about your personal experience. But I also told him that getting to watch Kool Shen and Isabelle Huppert in the same room together—that is what makes it a Breillat film!

    BREILLAT: [smiles] Yes.

    HUGHES: I interviewed Claire Denis a few years ago, soon after she’d finished working with Huppert for the first time.

    BREILLAT: White Material?

    HUGHES: Exactly. I think of Huppert as being an auteur herself, so I asked Denis what it’s like to work with a lead actress who can command a film. She quickly dismissed the notion that Huppert is commanding. “That would be too easy. She creates a need for her, when she’s an addiction…. It’s much more seducing the way she does it.”

    BREILLAT: [laughs] For me it was the contrary. I’m like Vilko. I take the power! With Isabelle, the first four days were a fight, a war. I didn’t want her to be in control, and Isabelle is always in control. She wanted to see replays of her performance, so she walked over to the camera and the assistant obeyed her—showed her the monitor. I saw that happen and shouted, “That is mine! [Breillat pounds her fist on the table.] That is my image, not hers!” She’s the actress. She has a job to do. But me, I am the film. It was a big fight. [smiles]

    “This belongs to me,” I said. “It will be different from your other movies.” After three or four days, she began to see the layers in the film. It’s not just sadness. Not just anguish. There are light sides and comedic scenes. Even Isabelle didn’t understand that would happen in the movie. After that we became very close, we laughed together, we are now like twins.

    HUGHES: You said Huppert was surprised to discover the comedy. Is that part of what interested you in telling this story?

    BREILLAT: Always. In all of my films there is comedy. The journalists and critics who don’t like me think I have no sense of humor. [Laughs] But I always balance my films with light scenes, funny scenes. Always.

    Also, I have to say, for Isabelle’s sake, the character is called Maud. It’s not me. It’s Maud, so Isabelle can play the part, the personage. Yes, she is my twin in some way, but on the set she is Isabelle Huppert, acting and finding a character. It’s not a biopic. It’s a fiction. Fiction is what appeals to me.

    HUGHES: You’ve always been interested in “obscene” subjects, especially female sexuality. Abuse of Weakness is made in a more traditional style but, thematically, it sits comfortably alongside the rest of your work. It occurred to me while watching the film that infirmity is another issue that we often censor from the public view. I’m thinking of that closeup of Maud’s right hand trying to wrestle open the other, palsied hand. It reminded me, oddly enough, of Fu’ad Aït Aattou’s and Asia Argento’s naked, entangled bodies in The Last Mistress.

    BREILLAT: I think that is a beautiful image. It’s strange. I’m an invalid, and I know it is not beautiful to be an invalid. Before, I always talked with my hands [she raises her left arm from below the table]. Yes, the image is indulgent, but it’s beautiful. It’s ugly and it’s beautiful.

    HUGHES: I know that you tend to not shoot many takes and that you like to walk into a setup and demonstrate for your actors how you want them to stand and move. Have you modified your methods in recent years? Are you still able to participate like that?

    BREILLAT: Yes! Always. I thought, when I was preparing to shoot The Last Mistress, that I would never be able to do that again. But an actor doesn’t know how, as the character, to enter the scene. Your body is not the same when you feel desire or power or shame or shyness. You don’t walk in the same manner. Only I can find it, with my body, and I still do.

    HUGHES: I assume non-professional actors like Kool Shen are more willing to allow you to control their performances like that. Was that one of the sources of conflict with Huppert at the beginning of the shoot?

    BREILLAT: Those first four days really were like a war zone. Who has the power? Once she saw that I had the power she began to obey. And she never obeys. [laughs]

    No, really! The fights were awful, terrible. Isabelle said after that nobody in her life has treated her like that. And I said, “Even Pialat?” And she said, “Yes!” [laughs] “Very, very, very, very worse than Pialat!” It was terrible, the furor.

    I think I was wrong. I think I went too far. I didn’t need to be so tough. I was insecure, and some of it could have been avoided. She left the set at times, and we wondered if she would come back. But she always came back to play the scene. And, of course, she was marvelous, so I knew I had to trust her.

    HUGHES: There’s a scene where Maud comes home carrying groceries on her back. She stands at the bottom of the stairs and tries to throw the bag over her head. Instead, she loses her balance and falls hard to the floor. It’s a difficult scene to watch. I was worried for her—for Huppert, I mean, not Maud. It made me wonder about your pre-production negotiations with actors.

    BREILLAT: No, no. I cut a scene where Isabelle had to climb [raises right hand, implying a great height]. She and I both have incredible vertigo, but if it’s written in the script, she does it. And this I can’t show her how to do!

    When we planned her fall at the bottom of the steps, a man prepared a false floor and some protections for her, because she had to hit her wrist on the metal bar. In fact, she fell on her neck. I was stunned because I thought surely she had hurt herself badly. A normal actress would stop the scene and think, “I’m crazy. It’s too dangerous.” Isabelle paid no attention. She’s like that.

    Her gift is to be involved with her character just in the time she is playing it, and without protection. Actors are well paid but it is very dangerous work. Because after the shoot they are not themselves. It’s a stain—this other person, which is the part. They are like fantômes when they return to real life.

    Isabelle is the character just when the scene begins, even if it is the most poignant scene. Acting is not playful. From here [hand on table representing beginning of scene] to here [hand on table representing end of scene], you are the person you interpret. And Isabelle, she can stop! She throws herself into the role, but when the scene stops, she becomes Isabelle Huppert.

    I’ve never seen another actor or actress like that. They usually stay under the influence of the emotion they just played, and that destroys them a little bit. Nothing destroys her, and she knows that, so she can go very, very far. She has such control of her emotions, so she can give way, way more of herself than others do.

    HUGHES: I want to change subjects slightly. I saw The Last Mistress, Bluebeard (2009), and Sleeping Beauty (2010) here in Toronto. All three are period pieces, and in the audience Q&As you seemed to take great deal of pride in the materials and fabrics used to make the dresses and bed linens.

    BREILLAT: Ha! Of course!

    HUGHES: I laughed during the scene in Abuse of Weakness when Maud gives detailed directions for the design of her walking boot because I could imagine you doing just that! So, did you sew all of those pillows on Maud’s bed?

    BREILLAT: [Laughs] Isabelle asked what costume designer I’d hired for the movie. I said to her, “Me!” “It’s not possible, Catherine,” she said. “It’s too tiring. You cannot. You cannot.” And she wanted to give me her costumer, her hairdresser, all that. And, of course, I was her costumer. I make almost all of my costumes. I don’t know why. Sometimes I sign my designs with the name of my mother, Maillon, and this time I decided to sign them myself.

    Isabelle never saw the costumes. Week after week she never saw the costumes. Finally, her agent asked me why Isabelle hadn’t looked at the costumes. In some ways Isabelle is like a child. She was so happy at the end of the shoot. She had sworn she would never weak black, but after the film she wanted to be in black. And she said, “Catherine, you should be a designer in an elite coutourier!”

    For me, all of the set, the color of the set, is also costuming. For example, it was very difficult to find a location for the final scene. I needed a very big table to host the entire family [for when they meet with Maud and her attorney to address her debts]. When I found the location, there were many beautiful objects. But I looked at something like this [points to a window treatment hanging over my head], made of a brocade of silk, and suddenly I knew Maud had to be against that backdrop.

    I called my costuming assistant, because we had to dye a silk shirt to match that color exactly. We had to buy raw silk. I wanted to sew an overcoat, so we went into my wardrobe and picked one out and then he sewed one like it in Isabelle’s size. When it was time to shoot the scene, she tried on all of the clothes that were prepared for her. They were beautiful, but only this one suited her.

    In that final scene, she’s wearing a thin coral necklace, which I think of as being like a crown of thorns. Several of my films include an image of a throat being cut. I call it the “coral necklace.” It’s just a thin red line, like blood.

    And you know the kimono in the film? It’s mine! I found the material with this sort of green and this sort of red and this particular form.

    HUGHES: The one Maud puts on when Vilko visits late at night? She asks him to help her tie it, but he more or less ignores her.

    BREILLAT: Yes, yes. I was very proud of that scene. It’s the first moment when she wants to be beautiful for him. After, she wears only that ugly, ugly robe. She makes no more effort for him. She neglects her appearance.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 6

    TIFF 2012 – Day 6

    Dormant Beauty

    Dir. by Marco Bellocchio
    Inspired by the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who spent seventeen years in a vegetative state and ignited a national cause célèbreDormant Beauty tackles the subject of euthanasia by weaving together four stories. In the first, a Senator (Tony Servillo) with first-hand experience of the issue prepares to cast a vote that pits his conscience against his party. Meanwhile, his daughter (Alba Rohrwacher), while participating in pro-life demonstrations, falls for a man whose emotionally-troubled brother is arrested while protesting for the right to die. In the third story, a beautiful drug addict (Maya Sansa) with suicidal tendencies is nursed back to life — perhaps in more ways than one — by a handsome doctor (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio). And, finally, a famous actress (Isabelle Huppert) abandons her career, becomes a recluse, and dedicates her life to caring for her comatose daughter and praying to God for a miracle.

    As that summary should suggest, Dormant Beauty is in many respects standard, made-for-TV fare. The script hits every predictable beat. When two characters argue, each actor waits patiently for the other to finish his or her line before responding. Huppert’s devout Catholic whispers on-the-nose lines like, “I can’t hope Rosa wakes up unless I have innocence — unless I have faith.” And yet Bellocchio makes it so much damn fun to watch, especially the story line involving the Senator, which he turns into a Juvenalian satire of politics in a media age. Nearly every shot catches a glimpse of a TV screen in the background that is tuned to coverage of the vote, including several scenes set in the bizarre underworld of the legislative baths, where naked Senators consult with a mephistophelean character known only as Lo psichiatra (The Psychiatrist), who offers political advice and anti-depressants by the handful. I especially like one shot near the end, when Senators come rushing through a door after a vote and by some trick of the camera (a really long lens that flattens depth?), the Senate chamber appears to have been replaced completely by a pixelated video monitor. Dormant Beauty is a bit of a disappointment after Bellocchio’s previous film, the excellent Vincere (2009) — it loses momentum each time Belocchio cuts away from the Senator and his daughter — but its best moments were some of the most exciting of the festival.

    Something in the Air

    Dir. by Olivier Assayas
    Set three years after May ’68 and loosely inspired by Assayas’s own political and artistic coming-of-age, Something in the Air follows seventeen-year-old Gilles (Clement Metayer) from his first direct action in the student movement to a sojourn through Italy to his eventual return to Paris, where he studies art and apprentices under his father in the commercial movie business while attending programs of experimental films at night. Something in the Air offers an interesting point of comparison with Dormant Beauty. In both cases, the writer-directors produced fairly banal scripts, but whereas Belocchio frequently generates new and exciting images from the material, Assayas’s direction is strangely anonymous and unremarkable. For a film about beautiful young people discovering sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and revolution, Something in the Air is inert and humorless. Boring, even.

    I did enjoy, however, some of the ironies built into Assayas’s backward glance. Something in the Air tackles a relatively un-sexy moment in the history of the Left and its heroes are refreshingly unheroic. More radicalism tourist than party soldier, Gilles is chastised in one scene by older revolutionaries for believing the reports of bodies washing up in Maoist China. And poor Christine (Lola Créton) abandons Gilles for a group of revolutionary filmmakers only to end up answering telephones and washing their dishes. Assayas’s version of the post-’68 Left is more than a bit sexist, and the concurrent rise of second-wave feminism is felt in the film — intentionally and ironically, I think — by its absence.

    Berberian Sound Studio

    Dir. by Peter Strickland
    Apparently I should have written about Berbarian Sound Studio while I was still in Toronto, because two weeks later I can barely remember it. My notes aren’t very helpful, either. The film opens with extreme closeups of analog sound equipment. Instead of opening titles for Berbarian Sound Studio, we see a fun, throw-back, animated credit sequence for The Equestrian Vortex, the low-budget horror film whose soundtrack Gilderoy (Toby Jones) has traveled to Italy to mix. And there is a dream sequence that was apparently impressive in some way. Thus ends my notes. (I average three pages per film at TIFF.)

    In a way, Berbarian Sound Studio is similar to Tower. Both are simple character studies that conform strictly to a set of internal rules. Here, Strickland limits his entire film to two locations, the studio and Gilderoy’s rented apartment, and likewise limits the camera’s perspective to Gilderoy’s increasingly unhinged point of view. The premise is enjoyable enough for forty minutes or so — I’m a sucker for films about filmmaking — but I was genuinely surprised when the closing titles started to run. I was still waiting for the plot to develop into . . . something. I suspect fans of Berbarian Sound Studio will enjoy debating which parts of the film actually happen and which parts exist only in Gilderoy’s mind. These types of questions are, I think, among the least interesting to ask of a film, and in this case I honestly don’t care.

    Nights with Theodore

    Dir. by Sébastien Betbeder
    Nights with Theodore is one of several oddly shaped films I saw at TIFF. The folding of the Visions program into Wavelengths allowed for more double features that paired, say, a 55-minute “feature” with a 30-minute “short.” Their schedule-unfriendly running times make films like this difficult to program, so I was encouraged to see more of them in the lineup this year. Most of my favorite films at the fest fall somewhere in this category. One pleasure of a 67-minute film like Theodore is that it necessarily breaks convention in the most fundamental way. As seasoned film watchers, we’re familiar, deep in our muscle memory, with 85- to 120-minute run times and predictable act breaks. (Peter Watkins, of course, has a thing or two to say about this.) I feel time differently, more consciously, when I watch a film like this because the shape of the narrative is rare and peculiar.

    In the case of Theodore, this unmoored-from-convention quality is essential to its success. A fragile nocturne of a film, it imagines the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris as a fairy-tale wonderland pulsing with occult power. Betbeder cuts throughout the film between the main storyline — Theodore (Pio Marmaï) and Anna (Agathe Bonitzer) are young lovers who leap the fence of the Buttes-Chaumont night after night, irresistibly — and documentary material about the park itself. The film opens with archival maps, photographs, and film clips and with a brief history of the park’s founding. We see video footage of the park during the day time when it’s teeming with joggers, tourists, and picnickers. And Betbeder also include a brief interview with an environmental psychiatrist who recounts the story (truth or fiction?) of a man whose bouts with depression corresponded directly with his proximity to the park. I’d like to see Theodore again before declaring whether all of the pieces fit together to offer anything more than an impressionistic portrait of a place transformed by history, imagination, and obsessive love. Regardless, I’m eager to see what Betbeder does next.

    The Last Time I Saw Macao

    Dir. by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata
    Equal parts city symphony, essay, film noir, and home movie, The Last Time I Saw Macao is fascinating conceptually but a bit of a mess. Compiled from hours and hours of video shot over many months and on multiple trips to Macao, the film began as a documentary; it was only during editing that Rodriguez and Guerra da Mata stumbled upon the ultimate form of the project. Inspired by Joseph von Sternberg’s Macao (1952) and other Western, exoticized representations of the Orient, the co-directors scripted a B-movie intrigue involving an on-the-run beauty named Candy, a violent crime syndicate, and a much-sought-after, Kiss Me Deadly-like bird cage and then superimposed the drama onto the documentary footage by means of a voiceover and fiction-creating soundtrack. It’s a wonderful idea. Suddenly a random stranger pacing the street and talking on his cell phone becomes a side player waiting for a clandestine meeting. With the addition of gunshot sounds, a couple shutting down their storefront for the night become the latest victims in a gang war.

    Guerra da Mata described The Last Time I Saw Macao as a “fiction contaminated by memory,” and, indeed, “fiction” and “memory” are almost interchangeable here. Guerra da Mata spent much of his childhood in Macao. We hear his voice. The unseen hero of the film has his name. We see him as a child in old family photos. And I wonder if that might account for the uneven tone and pacing of the film. It’s not by coincidence that Candy lives on Saudade Road. (Saudade might be imperfectly translated as a kind of a deep and pleasantly painful longing for something lost and never to return.)

    The ideas at play in this film are almost too numerous to count: the political and economic consequences of China’s takeover of Macao in 1999, the complex legacies of Portuguese colonialism, the queering of glamor and a critique of Western notions of Asian sexuality (I haven’t even mentioned the opening sequence, which turns the classic femme fatale song and dance number, like Jane Russell’s from the original Macao, into a beautiful, campy drag show). But The Last Time I Saw Macao fails, finally, to shape them into anything satisfyingly coherent. It was telling, I think, that Rodriguez and Guerra da Mata invited their editor on stage for the Q&A. The noir idea could sustain an hour. The documentary images of Macao could as well. But Guerra de Mata’s saudade — what should be at the heart of the film — is described but too seldom felt.

  • Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978)

    Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978)

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    – – –

    Dir. by Chantal Akerman

    The Image in Question

    This is the fourth shot in Les rendez-vous d’Anna. Aurore Clément stars in the title role as a young filmmaker who, as the movie opens, is arriving in Germany to attend a screening. In this shot she is checking into the first of the three hotel rooms in which she’ll stay during her trip back to Paris. Like Akerman at the time, Anna is in her late-twenties, a Belgian who is attempting to make a home in France. The autobiographical parallels are difficult to ignore, particularly because Les rendez-vous d’Anna is so much of-a-pair with Je, tu, il, elle, in which Akerman herself plays the lead character, Julie. Julie’s encounter with the truck driver, and the long, unbroken monologue he delivers, serve as a kind of structural template for Anna, in which Clément acts as a mostly-passive sounding board to the friends, family members, and strangers she meets along the way.

    Broken Symmetry

    Although it’s only the fourth shot, the image of Anna at the hotel comes nearly five minutes into the film (if we include the opening titles in the run time). Les rendez-vous d’Anna continues the trend in Akerman’s early work of combining long shot durations with static, precisely symmetrical compositions. The following are the first three shots and their durations:

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    The medium shot of Anna staring just beyond the camera is startling, first of all, because it breaks two “rules” Akerman establishes in the shots that precede it. While Anna appears in each of them—and at progressively nearer distances—the 90-degree cut to Anna’s face brings us closer (in every sense of the word) to the character than we might have expected, especially given the self-consciously long (duration and depth) shot that opens the film. Even more striking, though, is the sudden break of symmetry, which is the visual equivalent of a time signature change in music.

    To continue the music metaphor (and I think it’s a useful one), Akerman’s attention to symmetry is a rhythmic theme that she varies playfully and with remarkable complexity throughout Les rendez-vous d’Anna. I especially like these images, which are two of only a handful of shots that move off of the 90-degree axes. Here, we’re at about 45 degrees, and Akerman has used the physical space to neatly divide the frame.

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    Subjective Structuralism (or something like that)

    My enthusiasm for this film began with the realization that I was so emotionally involved with it because of Akerman’s formal control. I occasionally have exactly the opposite response with narrative filmmakers who so precisely stage each frame (Roy Andersson comes to mind; Kubrick can also leave me cold). A friend suggested that the difference is Akerman’s anthropologist-like curiosity—that each composition illustrates her genuine and affectionate attempt to better understand what she’s looking at. That’s certainly true, but I think the more important factor is that when Akerman cuts to that shot of Anna’s face for the first time, we enter a subjective space. It’s quite a trick. Only rarely does Akerman employ classic techniques for establishing a character’s subjective point of view: there are three or four cuts on eyeline matches when Anna looks out the window of her train car, and in her first hotel room, the sound of the radio gradually becomes drowned out by the noise of passing traffic, despite Anna having already closed the window (presumably we hear the sounds Anna is more attentive to).

    Akerman’s trick is maintaining that subjectivity throughout the course of the film, while simultaneously standing at a distance and pulling the strings. Scroll back up to the first image and note the man in the background. Note how his body is leaning into Anna and how he’s staring at her.

    I’m not prepared to argue the case for “Anna as a feminist text,” but the move to a subjective perspective clearly colors that first sequence of shots: 1. Anna walks alone through the hotel doors, 2. Anna has a typical exchange with a hotel clerk, who is as far as we know, the only other person in the lobby, 3. Anna is being watched. Given the composition of the shot, we read the stranger as forcing himself into Anna’s space (they are battling it out for the center axis), so we expect her to feel his gaze, which she soon does. She turns toward him, causing him to avert his eyes, lean forward to grab his drink, and relinquish a bit of breathing room to her. When Akerman cuts next to a medium-long tracking shot, we discover that the stranger is one of several men who are watching her.

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    This double-ness—this sense of being both inside and outside of Anna’s perspective—can be felt throughout the film. One of the more interesting examples comes soon after the first monologue. Anna has been invited home by a man she met the night before. He wants her to meet his mother and daughter; he tells her a brief history of his family home and explains how and why his wife left him. Akerman literally centers the frame on Anna and expresses the character’s uncomfortable aversion to domestic life by eliding in a single, nifty, 180-degree cut everything that happens inside the house.

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    This is a Horror Film, Right?

    The doubled perspective also lends Les rendez-vous d’Anna a quality that I can only describe as…well…creepy. The standard critical line on Akerman is that she is a poet of transience and displacement, that her rootless characters are haunted by the always-present specter of historical trauma. By those standards Anna could be Exhibit A. Made barely thirty years after the end of World War II, and taking as its central plot device a train journey between Germany and France, the film struggles to make sense of a post-Holocaust world. Order is too unstable, rationality is not to be trusted, the horror is always just right there. History dissolves completely during Anna’s late-night trip to Brussels, when, by stepping from one train car to another, she seems suddenly to have become a passenger bound for the camps. It’s a terrifying sequence.

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    The strangeness of that first shot of Anna’s face, then, can also be attributed to her entrance into a liminal space. The hotel lobbies, hallways, train stations, and platforms where we most often see her are all public, nondescript, and well-traveled places. I’m reluctant to stretch this idea too thin, but I think the case could be made that Anna is a vampiric figure. She enters only one home during the film, and it’s at the owner’s invitation. (It’s interesting that Akerman also elides Anna’s film screening, which would have been a kind of home away from home.) The majority of the movie takes place after dark, and Anna’s most intimate and revealing moments—her conversation with her mother and the song she sings to Daniel—both occur late in the night and seem to be forgotten and alien to her the next morning. When she finally returns to her apartment, it’s dark, lifeless, and unnaturally silent (this is, as I recall, the only scene without ambient noise of passing traffic).

    Like I said, the vampire analogy snaps pretty quickly, but it’s a useful model for the not-quite-fully-present state in which Anna seems to exist. “Anna, where are you?” Akerman’s voice asks in the penultimate line of the film.

  • 2009 SFIFF Diary 3

    2009 SFIFF Diary 3

    Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (Peter Greenaway)

    The last Greenaway film I saw was Prospero’s Books, so I have no idea if Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is a return to form, as programmer Rod Armstrong claimed when he introduced it at SFIFF. A companion to Greenaway’s recent Rembrandt biopic, Nightwatching (2007), Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is an art history lecture disguised as an essay film. In his meticulous dissection of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” Greenaway alludes to the painter’s biography, to the political life of 17th century Amsterdam, to the aesthetic tastes of the day, to romantic intrigues, to the history of technology, and to various schools of relevant academic criticism, but the film seems less intent on uncovering the mysteries of a great painting than on modeling for a contemporary audience the fine and fading art of looking. Really looking.

    Though drowning in a whirl of images, we are sorely lacking in visual literacy, the film implies. Or, that’s certainly what I found most interesting about it, at least. Formally, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is an odd bird. Each of Greenaway’s arguments is presented logically and in sequence (such is the burden of a linear medium), but it has something of the quality of a Flash presentation or a late-’90s CD-Rom. I can imagine it being spliced into hyperlinked elements and finding a home as an interactive museum kiosk. (I almost certainly would have preferred to explore it that way.) Greenaway’s talking head even appears throughout the film like a pop-up window, reading from the script in a resounding, pedantic tone that rivals Terrence Davies’s.

    The Other One (Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic)

    The Other One (Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic)

    My expectations for The Other One skyrocketed during the opening title sequence, which is a beautiful montage of high-angle, nighttime shots of a mostly-empty, twelve-lane highway. It reminded me of a Claire Denis film — the helicopter ride that opens I Can’t Sleep or the rooftops of Paris in Friday Night. The wide highway leads eventually to a toll station. Then, as I recall, Bernard and Tridivic cut to their heroine, Anne-Marie (Dominique Blanc), who proceeds to drive a hammer into the side of her skull. Anne-Marie, we learn, has recently ended her relationship with a much younger man, freeing him to meet someone more appropriate. When she later learns that his new partner is also d’un certain age, she comes unhinged. She fails, embarrassingly, to seduce him, she cyberstalks, she begins to hallucinate.

    With The Other One, Bernard and Tridivic are positioning themselves somewhere in that line from Sirk to Cassavetes to Almodovar, all of them male directors preoccupied by strong women of fading beauty and sexual power. Blanc’s performance is impressive, and the style of the film is often suitably claustrophobic and disorienting, but something has gone awry in the structuring of this film. That cut from the toll station to Anne-Marie’s bathroom is the first of countless ellipses, most of them chronological jumps, both forward and backward in time. It’s not confusing — I never struggled to understand what was happening, or when — but the cutting creates a flatness or stasis in the main character, a woman who is presumably becoming transformed through a moment of crisis. Particularly during the last half hour, as my patience waned, I thought often of Fien Troch’s disappointing recent film, Unspoken, which also seems to assume that fixing a camera long enough on an actress will necessarily reveal the complexity of her character (exactly the wrong lesson to be learned from the best practitioners of contemplative cinema). Sirk, Cassavetes, and Almodovar (at his best) empathize with, are curious about, and have an essential understanding of their heroines. I don’t doubt Bernard and Tridivic’s commitment to Anne-Marie but the film lacks a trustworthy guide behind the camera.

  • 2009 SFIFF Diary 2

    2009 SFIFF Diary 2

    Oblivion (Heddy Honigmann)

    Four years ago, on my first trip to the San Francisco International Film Festival, a couple friends and I had our liveliest debate after a screening of Ellen Perry’s The Fall of Fujimori, a documentary about Peru’s recent political history told mostly in the first person by Fujimori himself. On one side of the debate were those of us who felt the strength of the film was its subtle ironies, particularly its use of the contemporary context (the early days of Bush’s war on terror) to undermine the elected dictator’s self-aggrandizing justifications of his anti-democratic domestic policies. On the other side were those who argued that people in power are afforded ample opportunity to speak for themselves and that the filmmaker was morally obligated to condemn Fujimori outright. It was a fun — and heated — exchange. Heddy Honigmann’s latest film is a fascinating answer to that discussion. Oblivion is also told in the first person, though this time mostly by aging, blue-collar workers who, in several cases, literally served (whether food or drink or services) several past presidents and dictators, including Fujimori. I’ve only seen two Honigmann films, but in both I’ve been startled by the candor she elicits from her interview subjects. Here, her camera lingers awkwardly on a man who admits with some shame that after working for more than 30 years in one of Lima’s finest restaurants, he had never had an opportunity to take his wife there. A 60-year-old leather worker hides his face when he’s overcome by emotion while remembering all he lost during the days of runaway inflation. An adolescent shoeshine boy stares blankly into the camera and tells Honigmann, “No, I don’t have any dreams. No, I don’t have any happy memories.” She intercuts these stories with footage of young, self-taught jugglers and acrobats — homeless kids — who perform in busy intersections during red lights. They’re graceful and full of life, their performances have a startling and kinetic beauty. The juxtaposition is complex and loaded with ambiguities — a reflection, I suspect, of Honigmann’s personal relationship with her home country.

    Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

    Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

    To recycle a line I’ve used before, I’m often more interested in what a film does than what it’s about, and Bradshaw’s first narrative feature, Everything Strange and New, does quite a lot. The opening shot (pictured above) is a long, static take accompanied by an explosion of percussive, dissonant music — a self-conscious announcement that this is not another of those suburban stories about disaffected fathers and husbands. As it turns out, it is one of those films, but I’ll credit Bradshaw for his experiments with the genre, particularly his working-class lead character, Wayne, and for his often fascinating photography. One or two shots approach Bela Tarr territory (if Tarr shot a low-budget dv movie). Had the film ended 20 minutes sooner, I would have even applauded Bradshaw’s success at blending avant-garde techniques with more naturalistic storytelling. But a plot turn in the final act — and, more importantly, Bradshaw’s cynical handling of it — caused me to reevaluate everything that came before. Everything Strange and New is cruel to its characters in a way that comes off as smug rather than searching.

    35 Shots of Rum (Denis, 2009)

    35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)

    I’ve already written a bit about this film, but I want to quickly mention a scene that, to me, encapsulates all that distinguishes Denis’s take on the small, family drama from most other films in the genre. The morning after the “Nightshift,” Noé (Grégoire Colin) announces to Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Joséphine (Mati Diop) that he’s leaving for a job in Gabon. Rather than dealing explicitly with the fallout from his decision, Denis cuts, instead, to a closeup of Lionel (Alex Descas), who’s walking home, presumably after a one-night-stand. She then cuts on an eyeline match to Joséphine climbing precariously out of their top-story window with a bottle of cleaner and towels in her hand. We are given, cinematically, the perspective of a father watching his child in danger. Or, at least that’s how I read the image the first time. On repeat viewings, there’s something much more interesting in Lionel’s expression: his intimate and hard-won understanding of his daughter’s behavior, his realization that she’s cleaning, which means that she’s upset, which means that it’s his job to go soothe and protect her. This plays out in the next few minutes in a wonderful scene in which their history is revealed through gestures. There’s text — Joséphine shaking out the bedsheets, looking through family photos, and arguing with her father — and there’s subtext — not only the loss of their mother/wife but also their deep familiarity with each other and with moments like this. (We can immediately imagine them having a hundred other similar confrontations — her cleaning, him stoic, with arms folded.) Characters in movies expertly express their feelings; real people, in my experience, typically don’t. Yet those of us in successful, long-term relationships manage to communicate anyway. 35 Shots of Rum is rare for managing to capture that peculiar kind of intimacy on screen. Ozu would approve.

    Zift (Javor Gardev)

    Zift (Javor Gardev)

    A Bulgarian film noir? Yes, please. Although a bit too stylized (in the Tarantino sense) for my tastes, Zift is a hell of a lot of fun and could probably find a decent audience in the States if a distributor packaged it properly. (First-time director Gardev must surely be taking studio offers for his next film as we speak.) The movie borrows liberally from classic Hollywood noirs, most notably a reenactment of Rita Hayworth’s iconic number in Gilda, and the black-and-white cinematography honors that legacy while updating the camera movements for contemporary audiences accustomed to a more frenetic pace. The two lead actors are fun discoveries, too, particularly Tanya Ilieva, who, frankly, is one of the sexiest women I’ve ever seen on screen. Zift was on my radar last September at TIFF, so I’m glad to have finally had a chance to catch up with it.

    Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

    Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

    Wild Field belongs to a class of films I’m drawn to at festivals. I rarely expect them to be great (and they rarely are), but I see them less for their stories or formal innovations than for the opportunity they provide to watch people in a part of the world I would never have a chance to see otherwise. (Tulpan is another recent example.) Wild Field is set in a remote region of the Kazakh steppes, where a young doctor lives Thoreau-like, tends to a handful of locals, and pines for his girlfriend back in civilization. Although I can’t find confirmation for this, I suspect this is an adaptation of a novel. I can imagine the protagonist’s inner life being a playhouse of ideas for a gifted writer, and the moments of magical realism that pockmark the film could flower beautifully in prose, but Kalatozishvili fails to find a cinematographic analogue, and the pacing of the film suffers for it. Still, I was perfectly content to study the landscape and faces for 90 minutes or so.

  • 2009 SFIFF Diary 1

    2009 SFIFF Diary 1

    Adoration (Atom Egoyan)

    There’s certainly no mistaking an Atom Egoyan film — the non-linear narrative, the technology fetish, the intertwined obsessions with history, identity, and trauma, and all of those secrets and lies. Closest in spirit and form to Ararat, Adoration is another interesting jumble of ideas from Egoyan that, to my surprise, works more often than other critics had led me to expect. I especially like the scenes between Scott Speedman and Arsinee Khanjian, who are the only two actors in the film who consistently make Egoyan’s dialog sound like words an actual human being might speak. (In Egoyan’s defense, the performance of language and identity is a central concern — and plot point — of the film, so some of the awkwardly-heightened language is clearly by design. Egoyan alerts the attentive viewer to this fact by formal means, though I’m not sure if that defense justifies the unfortunate shifts in tone he creates.) Egoyan’s at his best when he manages to balance his wealth of ideas with drama, when his characters transcend the intellectual and psychological conceits they are intended to embody. That happens often enough in Adoration, particularly in the final act, to make it my favorite of his films of the last decade. (I’m still eager to see Citadel.) One final note: Mychael Danna’s original score is fantastic, but I’d prefer to hear it alone on a soundtrack album. I suspect I would have liked Adoration a good deal more if Egoyan had trimmed 75% of the music cues.

    Bluebeard (Breillat, 2009)

    Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)

    God bless you, Catherine Breillat. When Bluebeard started last night around 9:40, San Francisco time, I’d already been awake for 19 hours. Who else under those circumstances could put me at the edge of my seat, giggling and gasping at the nerve of a film? A playful and stylized period piece in the (formal) vein of Rohmer’s Astrea and Celadon, Bluebeard is a wicked dismantling of a fairy tale that, although lacking Breillat’s trademark nudity and explicit sexual content, is no less obsessed with bodies. Mary-Catherine (Lola Creton), Bluebeard’s young bride, is one more Breillat heroine, tempted by, curious about, and fearful of both sexual desire and by sex itself — by the physical, biological realness of it. I can’t think of a better image to represent Breillat’s cinema en toto than a shot of the massive, shirtless Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) being watched unnoticed by his waif, virgin wife. Brilliant film.

  • Films of the ’80s (part 1)

    Films of the ’80s (part 1)

    Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)

    Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) leaves her controlling, bourgeois husband André (Guy Marchand) for Loulou (Gérard Depardieu), a petty criminal and top-notch lay, and all hell breaks loose. In my tweet about Loulou I described it as “the missing link (for me) between early New Wave & contemporary naturalism,” which, like so much of what goes on in the twitterverse, is pithy and imprecise. Like Jules and Jim and a number of films from Godard’s first phase — and also like so many of the classic genre films they’re riffing on — the love triangle here is a site of class conflict and shifting sexual and gender dynamics. Who’s the Whore here? Who’s the John? Pialat’s style allows plenty of room for the performers (is Huppert ever not amazing?) and ratchets up the cruelty and emotional suffering. My favorite scene takes place at a family reunion of sorts for Loulou and his kin, which plays like something from a Bruno Dumont film.

    Cruising (Friedkin, 1980)

    Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)

    Given Cruising‘s checkered reputation, I was disappointed to discover that it’s little more than an uninventive serial killer movie. That a film set in New York leather bars was financed and widely distributed in 1980 is fairly interesting in its own right (note to self: learn more about Lorimar, who also produced Being There the previous year), but the only aspect of Cruising that really piqued my curiosity was Al Pacino. I’m not refering to his performance, which is refreshingly low-key and out-of-balance, I guess. I’m talking about Pacino himself. He’s bulkier and more muscular in this role, which has the incongruous effect of making him seem smaller. That and his wardrobe made me consciously aware of his body for the first time. Cruising is structured as sensationalized tourism (“And on your right you’ll see that this breed of American Homosexual signals his fetishes with a brightly-colored bandana in his back pocket”), but its real transgression is its foregrounding of the gay male body, which, regrettably, remains a charged political act even now, three decades later. I guess it deserves some credit for that.

    Atlantic City (Malle, 1980)

    Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

    My only memory of Atlantic City, which I saw one other time nearly twenty years ago, was, of course, the lemon scenes. I had no idea it was such a strange film. Populated with quirky, two-dimensional characters and structured around over-written and weirdly implausible plot turns, it’s closer in spirit to Sundance-approved American indie cinema of the last decade than the continental drama I was expecting. But, really, it’s impossible to not love Burt Lancaster here. Lou Pascal, the aging and never-too-important gangster he plays, is quietly dignified and kind, which makes him pitiful in the best sense of the word. The final shot of Lou and Grace walking off together after one last score is as sweet and joyful an image as you’re likely to find.

    American Gigolo (Schrader, 1980)

    American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

    Another loose adaptation of Crime and Punishment, this time by way of Robert Bresson and Jerry Bruckheimer (there’s a pairing!), Paul Schrader’s third film as director is never less than watchable, thanks largely to Richard Gere’s performance, which is appropriately charismatic, pathetic, and vacuous. Schrader now admits he’s unsure whether the moral transformation Gere’s gigolo experiences in the final scene is authentic or “one that was simply imposed on him by his maker.” I share his ambivalence. That American Gigolo places a distant third in a race with Bresson’s Pickpocket and the Dardennes’ L’Enfant isn’t a surprise, but given their radically different modes of production, I find it hard to fault Schrader. It’s an interesting narrative experiment from a Hollywood release of 1980.

    Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980)

    Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

    Amidst the formal fireworks on display here — the mesmerizingly elliptical cutting, the fast zooms, the unexpected music cues — what I found most shocking was Theresa Russell’s performance, which gives life to a role that, on paper, is little more than a misogynist fantasy. But, damn, she’s good. The image I captured above is from a scene on a bridge, where her reunion with Alex (Art Garfunkel) is spoiled by his pettiness, and her response is so natural and solicitous that, for a second or two, she breaks the movie. All of Roeg’s machinations are undone by the sudden intrusion of uncalculated emotion.

    Grown Ups (Leigh, 1980)

    Grown Ups (Mike Leigh, 1980)

    Made for BBC2 Playhouse, Grown Ups is about Dick (Philip Davis) and Mandy (Lesley Manville), a working-class Canterbury couple who are settling awkwardly into adulthood and their first home. Next door live one of their former teachers, Mr. Butcher (Sam Kelly), and his wife Christine (Lindsay Duncan), who, at first glance, seem the very models of middle-class civility. And that, of course, is the joke. Leigh has great fun contrasting the cold pedantry of Mr. Butcher with Dick and Mandy’s crass and loud-mouthed affection. The star of the film, though, is a nearly unrecognizable Brenda Blethyn, who plays Mandy’s older sister Gloria — a kind of spinstery, 30-something cross between Vickie Pollard and MadTV’s Lorraine. (Here’s a nice clip of Gloria in action. The entire film is available on YouTube.) Grown Ups reminds me that I need to spend more time with Mike Leigh.

    Voyage en Deuce (Deville, 1980)

    Voyage en douce (Michel Deville, 1980)

    Thanks to Dan Sallitt for making several mentions of Deville, the first great discovery of my little jaunt through the ’80s. I’m rarely caught off guard by a film these days, but Voyage en douce, a film I’d never heard of by a filmmaker I’d never heard of, offered one surprise after another. On paper, it sounds like late-night Cinemax fare: two women spend a weekend in the south of France, ostensibly in search of a vacation home, but devoting much of their time, instead, to remembrances of their sexual awakenings, casual flirtations, and, in the words of that old Monty Python sketch, “candid photography” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). From the opening sequence, though, Deville establishes his authorship and makes obvious that titillation is not his chief concern. About À cause, à cause d’une femme (1963), one of Deville’s collaborations with Nina Companéez, Dan writes: “[They] are interested, not in the mechanics of their commonplace plots, but in an affectionate and profuse evocation of the feminine principle, and in giving a deadly serious account of romantic love. . . . To give full play to their concerns while remaining faithful to their narrative task, Deville and Companéez direct us to the important stuff largely through cinematic form.” The same can be said of Voyage en deuce, particularly in its final act, when Bunuel-like moments of surreality disrupt the women’s stories by blurring the divide between fantasy and memory. A stunning film, and one certainly worthy of more than a capsule-length response.

  • Heartbeat Detector (2008)

    Heartbeat Detector (2008)

    Dir. by Nicolas Klotz

    Heartbeat Detector is a tricky one. Immediately after my first viewing a couple weeks ago, I went searching for decent writing about it but found slim pickings. Judging by the responses of most critics I’ve found online, it’s little more than a too-long and “oh so European” corporate thriller. Unflattering comparisons to Michael Clayton are the norm, and there’s a not-so-subtle (and strangely patronizing) animosity running through the reviews: that a film would seriously compare the workings of modern capital to the Holocaust is just too much, apparently.

    This kind of “critic of critics” metacommentary is boring, I know, but I mention it because, to be honest, all that really interested me after that first viewing was trying to make sense of the first hour of the film, nearly half of which is given over to a series of mesmerizing, Claire Denis-like musical sequences. Heartbeat Detector is the first of Klotz’s films I’ve seen*, but it was obvious from the opening moments that he’s a formalist, that the real work of the film is being done with the camera and mise-en-scene, and that the “Corporate Manager as Oberführer” theme is being explored in a dialectic with something more generous and ineffable. Those critics who proved themselves unwilling or unable to write about form did this film a real disservice.

    This is the first of what I hope will be several posts about Heartbeat Detector. My goal, eventually, is to make sense of those music sequences, though I suspect it will take several steps to get there. For the record, I’ve tweaked the levels of my screen captures in order to make them more “readable” at this size. The film’s original palatte — at least as it’s reproduced on DVD — is darker and less vibrant.

    Have a seat

    First, a genre convention. Simon Kessler (Mathieu Almeric) is a human resources psychologist at a German multinational corporation that he calls “S. C. Farb.” (That the film is being told by a limited and possibly unreliable first-person narrator has also gone largely unnoticed.) In the opening moments of the film, he’s called into the office of Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), the company’s second in command, who informs Simon that the board is growing concerned with the increasingly erratic behavior of Farb’s CEO, Matthias Just (Michael Lonsdale). Simon is assigned the task of investigating and evaluating Just’s mental fitness, thus turning him into a kind of generic, film noir detective.

    His conversation with Karl Rose proves to be the first of many fact-finding interviews for Simon, and the staging of these interview scenes is one clue to Klotz’s formal strategy. When he first enters Rose’s office, Simon is invited by Rose to sit in the middle of a couch, which leaves his superior in the unnatural position you see in the first image below.

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Klotz then cuts to a static, close-up of Rose and holds him there for several minutes as he tells Simon about Just. Notice that the scene has been designed in order to fake an odd variation of a shot / countershot that very consciously refuses to make an eyeline match. The voice-over narration might be Simon’s, but the camera remains as distant as possible from his subjectivity. Notice, also, the flat background behind each man’s face. This is a subtle doubling motif that draws a visual parallel between Simon and Rose/Just.

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Have a seat (part 2)

    The scene with Rose is reenacted several minutes later at the home of Matthias Just. After raising a toast with his guest — “a l’histoire” — Just also invites Simon, by way of a hand gesture, to take an awkwardly close seat beside him.

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    And again Klotz cuts to an unexpected p.o.v., this time between and behind the men. We see only Just from this perspective. Simon excuses himself and exits the room, leaving us behind, still far removed from his subjectivity.

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    “The sight of her neck game me incredible pleasure.”

    Following his late-night conversation with Just, Simon is invited back for a second conversation, this time with Just’s wife, Lucy (Edith Scob). Here, Klotz begins with a more traditional shot / countershot. (Although the mise-en-scene is odd here, too. The chairs are unnaturally positioned in the middle of the room, and the short lens further isolates the characters from their surroundings.)

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    The bigger surprise, though, is the next cut, which jumps fully into Simon’s subjective point of view. Not coincidentally, this scene follows immediately the longest musical sequence and marks the beginning of the film’s second act. I’ll probably return to this moment in a future post.

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Have a seat (part 3)

    There are several other interviews I haven’t mentioned yet, including the critical conversation with Arie Neumann (Lou Castel) that ends the film and that I’ll have to deal with later. But, finally, I’m curious about this scene that takes place in the apartment of Just’s secretary and former lover, Lynn Sanderson (Valerie Dreville). As in the earlier conversations with Rose and Just, Simon begins at a remove from the other person, but in this case it’s Lynn who invites herself to take a more intimate seat beside him.

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    After she divulges more secrets about Just, she stands, leaves the room, and returns, at which point Klotz cuts to one of the only insert shots in the film: Just’s gun, neatly wrapped.

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Along with providing some narrative information, the insert allows Klotz to move his camera to the other side of the couch, which gives us visually balanced close-ups.

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2008)

    And?

    At this point, I haven’t gotten much further than did the reviewers I criticized in my opening paragraph. My conclusion, so far, is pretty obvious: that, in typical noir fashion, Simon begins the film as a detached, clinical observer before gradually being consumed by his investigation. Klotz mirrors that transformation with his camera, moving from an objective p.o.v. to a perspective more closely aligned with Simon’s subjectivity.

    What we’re also seeing, though, is Klotz’s considered attention to actors’ bodies and to physical space. The cinema is not a story. It can’t be adequately described in narrative terms.

    * If anyone out there can help me see Klotz’s earlier work, let me know.

  • 40 Hours in 18 Images and 3 Songs

    The Duke Spirit

    Thursday Night, The Bijou Theatre, Knoxville, 9:40 – 10: 30 p.m.

    If I die having never seen PJ Harvey live, I will at least be able to tell my grandchildren that I saw Liela Moss and The Duke Spirit play their first ever show in Knoxville. Michael Smith has been keeping me up-to-date on all things Spirit-related for the last two years, and after experiencing Liela first-hand, up close and personal, I owe him one. She is such a rock star. In a town like Knoxville, where crowds for this kind of show typically number in the low hundreds, her energy and joy were a real treat. She never stopped playing to the last row of the balcony, even though when the spotlights dimmed, I’m sure she could see that the balcony was empty. From what I could tell, there were maybe only four or five other people there on Thursday night who had heard of The Duke Spirit, but by intermission there was a long line at their merch table and every conversation around me was about the band.

    The Duke Spirit at The Bijou Theatre in Knoxville

    The Duke Spirit at The Bijou Theatre in Knoxville

    The Duke Spirit at The Bijou Theatre in Knoxville

    The Duke Spirit at The Bijou Theatre in Knoxville

    Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

    Thursday Night, The Bijou Theatre, Knoxville, 10:50 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.

    The most pleasant surprise of my concert-going year in 2007 was seeing Morrissey. It had been a while since I’d last experienced a rock star extravaganza, complete with wardrobe changes and a light show. (I’m now convinced he’s the Tom Jones of Generation X.) But even Morrissey, at his posing, most calculated best, isn’t as committed to an aesthetic as are the guys in BRMC. Dressed in black and silhouetted by uplighting and a barrage of strobes, they pounded their way through about 70 minutes of music before I left. It was great fun to see a hard working power trio again — bassist Robert Levon Been and guitarist Peter Hayes are both impressive — but especially after The Duke Spirit, BRMC’s act felt too much like a pose. Live music should be fun, right?

    Black Rebel Motor Cycle Club at The Bijou Theatre in Knoxville

    Black Rebel Motor Cycle Club at The Bijou Theatre in Knoxville

    Black Rebel Motor Cycle Club at The Bijou Theatre in Knoxville

    Black Rebel Motor Cycle Club at The Bijou Theatre in Knoxville

    Sonic Youth

    Friday Night, City Hall, Nashville, 10:20 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.

    In a week or two I’m going to turn 36, and I felt it on Thursday night. The BRMC demographic, apparently, skews a bit younger. Which is one of the many reasons it was so much fun to see Sonic Youth just 24 hours later. Among the thousand or so people who packed the room at City Hall in Nashville was a healthy assortment of folks like me who bought Daydream Nation back when it was released, twenty years ago. I’d hoped we might get a surprise encore of their 2007 tour, when they played Daydream front-to-back, but, instead, we got three songs from it — “Hey Joni,” “Candle,” and “‘Cross the Breeze” — several from Rather Ripped (I still really love “Reena”), and an assortment of older material. I’m not complaining. I’m sure that if I had the opportunity to see Sonic Youth live every night for the rest of my life, I’d eventually skip a show or two, but not for some time. Being packed into a sweaty crowd, bouncing to that Sonic Youth noise, is a special kind of euphoria. Kim, Lee, and Thurston are all in their 50s now, so I figure I’ve got another decade or two in me.

    Sonic Youth at City Hall in Nashville

    Sonic Youth at City Hall in Nashville

    Sonic Youth at City Hall in Nashville

    Sonic Youth at City Hall in Nashville

    Sonic Youth at City Hall in Nashville

    Sonic Youth at City Hall in Nashville

    Last Year at Marienbad

    Saturday Afternoon, The Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, 12:00 p.m. – 1:40 p.m.

    One of my secret ambitions is to establish in Knoxville a theater like Nashville’s Belcourt. The last remaining independent theater in the city, The Belcourt is now run as a non-profit and offers a variety of film programming, live music, and drama. Notably, it is often the only theater in the southeast where audiences can see the newly-struck prints that play NYC, Toronto, Chicago, LA, and San Francisco. It’s where I saw Satantango a year-and-a-half ago and where, yesterday, I saw the same 35mm print of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad that played at the Castro in March. I’d seen Marienbad only one other time — seven or eight years ago when I was just beginning to discover European cinema. I remember thinking at the time, “Hmmmm, I wonder if it’s possible for a film’s drama to be located in the camera rather than in the performances?” It was that kind of breakthrough film for me. And I’m happy to say I’m no nearer to understanding it today.

    Last Year in Marienbad in 35mm

    Last Year in Marienbad in 35mm

    Last Year in Marienbad in 35mm

    Last Year in Marienbad in 35mm

  • 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.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 6

    2007 TIFF Day 6

    I don’t see much point in writing about Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light without mentioning the final scene, so consider this your warning: SPOILERS AHEAD. Both of Reygadas’s previous features, Japon and Battle in Heaven, use a subjective camera to achieve what I’ve developed the lazy habit of calling “Transcendence” — that is, they use formal means to represent cinematically the extra-worldly or extra-Rational or Metaphysical or whatever you want to call it. Silent Light is being praised as a significant departure for Reygadas — mostly, I suspect, because of its relative lack of transgression. But the bigger surprise to me is how staid, almost conventional, his camera has become. Silent Light is one of the most beautifully lensed films of the festival, and the opening and closing sequences are stunners, but Reygadas here dips less often into his impressive bag of aural and cinematographic tricks. Although I was actually a bit disappointed by this development (I like his tricks), that’s not a criticism. Rather, I see this as a transition work in which he is attempting to shift a heavier burden over to narrative and drama. And apparently he’s been revisiting the old masters for inspiration: Bresson, Bergman, and Tarkovsky are all over this film. And then there’s Dreyer, who Reygadas “covers” here by restaging the climax of Ordet. A remake of THE great moment of transcendence in all of film history?! The cajones of this guy. (See that? I used Spanish there.) Silent Light is a fascinating experiment, and it’s very likely a brilliant film, but I’m still processing. The climactic scene did not move me at all, and I’m genuinely curious to know why. From the opening moments of Battle in Heaven, the first of his films that I saw, I’ve trusted Reygadas completely, so I’m confident that Silent Light realizes his ambitions. I’m just not sure yet what, precisely, those ambitions are. Or, to put it even more bluntly, I don’t understand this film. I really don’t. And I can’t wait to see it again. One other throw away observation: With a few notable exceptions, the filmmakers to whom Reygadas is most indebted worked in the Academy ratio (4:3), and I can’t help but wonder what he would do with it. His ‘Scope compositions are gorgeous, of course, but they seemed to me too plastic at times here.

    Contre Toute Esperance was my first encounter with Quebecoise filmmaker Bernard Emond. (Any pointers for tracking down his earlier work would be much appreciated.) Emond told us after the screening that it is the second film of a planned trilogy about the three Christian virtues: faith, hope, and charity. “I am not a believer,” he said, “but I cherish my Catholic tradition.” Contre Toute Esperance is an angry, political film that poses the questions, “How does one remain hopeful in a world turned by amoral market forces? And what role, if any, can the Christian tradition play in generating hope?” Contre Toute Esperance centers on Rejeanne Poulin, a woman who is forced to support her young husband after he suffers a stroke, only to lose her job at the telephone company where she works as an operator. The film plays like a bit of old fashioned Naturalism, with good people suffering (and suffering) the whims of an indifferent universe. Except that Emond creates, through formal gestures, a kind of holy space for his characters to inhabit. I can only imagine how many gallons of blue paint were sacrificed in the production of this film — the walls are blue, passing trucks are blue, clothes are blue, and the seas of blue are punctuated only by occasional bursts of deep red and purple. I suspect that the key to the film’s design is a brief scene in which Rejeanne visits a church to pray. In a high-angle shot, we look down on her kneeling at a pew, a long blue carpet running up the center aisle beside her. The entire world of the film, I think, exists symbolically within that church, making it (the world) a place of potential sacrifice, ritual, and dignity.

    Another work by a young female director, Naissance des pieuvres is a fascinating coming-of-age story that revolves around a central metaphor so perfect I’m surprised it hasn’t been used before: synchronized swimming. We first meet the three central characters at a competition. Anne, overweight and brash, competes with the younger girls; Floriane, an early-developed beauty, captains the top team; and Marie, a gangly tomboy, watches intently from the bleachers, seduced by the beauty of it all. Much to her credit, first-time filmmaker Celine Sciamma takes advantage of the obvious symbolic resonances without stooping to sentiment. All team sports make ripe settings for teen films — the struggle to fit in while retaining one’s individuality and all that — but synchronized swimming amplifies the tropes. With their garish makeup and aggressive smiles, the girls are performing a kind of make-believe femininity akin to drag. And they’re doing it all in bathing suits, which expose, literally, the strange bodies that inevitably influence each girl’s sense of self. At the risk of sounding like a dirty old man, I’ll admit to a special fondness for coming-of-age films about girls, made by women directors. (I’d include Claire Denis’s Nenette et Boni, Lucretia Martel’s The Holy Girl, and Tamara Jenkins’s The Slums of Beverly Hills on my short list of favorites.) Adolescence was not a good time for me — I was “husky” (or so read the label on my corduroy pants) and had braces — but I was never so keanly aware of my body as are the girls in these films.

  • Godard’s “Paradise”

    Godard’s “Paradise”

    A throwaway observation: The many reviewers who have described act 3 of Notre Musique as “pastoral” and “lyrical” are projecting their own desires onto it. After watching 25 Godard films in the last few weeks, I can think of very few sequences that take place completely in nature. In fact, the only two stand-outs are the interview with Eve Democracy in One Plus One and the final act of Weekend. Godard’s characters often leave the city — see Les Carabiniers, Pierrot Le Fou, and For Ever Mozart — but they always maintain access to a car or some other technological connection to civilization. (Now that I think about it, even Miss Democracy is always accompanied by that interviewer and camera crew.) Weekend, then, is Godard’s paradigmatic expression of nature as revolutionary and savage; Notre Musique‘s “Paradise” is, likewise, a political and ironic space.

  • Schuss! (2005)

    Schuss! (2005)

    Dir. by Nicolas Rey

    “Do you ski?”
    Pause. Sly grin. “I used to.”
    — First question at the Q&A with Rey, TIFF 2006

    Nicolas Rey’s Schuss! is an experimental essay film that is concerned, ultimately, with the spoils of capitalism. More specifically, it’s about the rise of the aluminum industry, the building of a French ski resort, and the economic interests that joined the two. Also, Schuss! is about the cinema, which, I realize, is one of those lazy critical phrases that gets attached to every film that pushes, in even the vaguest of ways, the boundaries of film form. But in this case it’s a fair assessment, I think. During the post-screening Q&A, Rey told us that the overarching subject of his work is the 20th century, and in this film he’s particularly interested in chemistry — specifically, the radical innovations that improved manufacturing processes and that made possible both weapons of mass destruction and, eventually, multi-national capital. Rey participates actively in his investigation by scavenging decades-old film stock, shooting it with restored cameras, and processing his footage by hand. (His previous film, Les Soviets plus l’electricite, was apparently shot on Soviet-era Super 8. Not surprisingly, he’s in no hurry to buy a DV cam, and he doesn’t want you to either.)

    Schuss! is divided into several chapters, each of which includes: early 9 1/2mm skiing footage, recent footage shot atop a ski slope, archival documents that unearth the history of an aluminum manufacturing plant and the local economy it fueled, and contemporary images of that plant and the owner’s large home that towers over it. A voice-over (I can’t recall if it’s Rey’s or an interviewee’s) comments on the images, filling in some — but not all — of the gaps. I’m ambivalent about the film’s rigid structure, but the aspect of the film that I most admire would be impossible without it: the repetition of the skiing footage. The man in the image above is one of the sixty or seventy vacationers we watch take off from the same spot. Each acts in precisely the same manner. They pause briefly, stare down the slope, push off (“schuss” is a German word that describes a fast downhill run), and turn to pose for Rey’s camera as they pass. Rey cuts the skiers together into a montage that begins to feel like a loop until interrupted, from time to time, by black, “empty” frames. (I’ve been following Zach’s recent posts on cinema violence and flicker films with interest because I suspect that much that I liked about Schuss! is wrapped up, somehow, in those ideas. I remember, after the screening, making some vague comment to a friend about how I wanted to understand “what those black frames were doing to my eyes.” Any guidance in this area would be much appreciated.) Schuss! is a long film — unnecessarily long according to the few reviews I’ve found online — but the effect of the duration, the constant repetitions, is to defamiliarize those skiers, making them . . . well . . . gross.

  • Beau Travail and Britten’s Billy Budd

    Some random thoughts inspired by another viewing of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail:

    I’m not sure how to characterize her use of Benjamin Britten’s opera, Billy Budd.  Because the film is so closely tied to Galoup’s subjectivity, my first tendency is to read the music with some irony, as if this were exactly the kind of soundtrack — one full of epic Drama and Meaning — that Galoup himself would choose to score his inner life. While not always the case, the Britten cues do appear at a few moments that are clearly subjective visions, most notably the moment after Galoup decides to destroy Sentain; the music climbs as Denis slowly tracks-in on the two men circling closer and closer to one another, a dance of sorts that serves metaphorically for their “real,” impending showdown. (Sentain’s punch is, by comparison, quite anti-climactic, I think.)

    But the emotional effect of the music — on me, at least — is anything but ironic. In true Melvillian fashion, this is an epic battle of Drama and Meaning, the most epic battle, in fact, if we recall our fuzzy memories of the Christian symbolism that permeates Billy Budd. Granted, Denis strips away most of those symbols (I wonder about the etymology of Sentain), but the central conflict of the film remains mostly unchanged. It’s still Good vs. Evil, and the sturm and drang of Britten’s opera seems appropriately scaled for the images and emotions it accompanies.

    I’ve written before about the music in Beau Travail and about Denis Lavant’s final dance, but until this most recent viewing, it had never occurred to me how closely the film as a whole resembles a ballet. What few words are spoken are necessary only to explain the most basic of plot points. Everything else — the emotions, the motivations, the conflicts — is expressed by bodies in motion. The training sequences here are categorically different from those in, say, Full Metal Jacket. (I’ve seen the comparison more than once in reviews.) I don’t seem to have the vocabulary to describe the exercise scenes in Beau Travail, but I suspect that I’d have to go to critics of modern dance to find it.

  • Le Temps qui reste (2005)

    Le Temps qui reste (2005)

    Dir. by Francois Ozon

    I hadn’t planned to write about Le Temps qui reste. As has been the case with the few other Ozon films I’ve seen, it feels slight and undernourished, like a short story pushed to novella length. Melvin Poupaud plays Romain, a thirty-ish fashion photographer who, in the opening moments of the film, is diagnosed with cancer. Rather than suffer the side-effects of aggressive treatment, he decides, instead, to accept the three-month life expectancy given him. He decides, also, to keep his condition a secret — the first of several head-scratching choices that alienate him from everyone in his life. At a family dinner, he humiliates his sister with a barrage of savage insults. At home, he matter-of-factly breaks off his relationship with his boyfriend. By the time the film reaches its inevitable conclusion, Romain is quite literally alone. (Ozon’s final image is frustrating. I still haven’t decided how I feel about it.)

    I hadn’t planned to write about Le Temps qui reste, but then, while typing up notes this morning, I tripped over this line from E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel: “My sister and I can never inflict total damage — that is the saving grace. The right to offend irreparably is a blood right.” In Doctorow’s novel, Daniel and Susan Lewin are the son and daughter of characters modeled closely on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the young Jewish couple executed in the summer of 1953 for giving the secret of the A-bomb to the Soviets. Daniel’s line, I think, has a doubled meaning. As the child of traitors, he has inherited a particular ability to offend, to enlarge and extend personal grievances into a wider sphere of influence. But he and Susan have also inherited a particularly tragic history and, with it, the right to offend. “He’s such a bastard,” acquaintances must surely think, “but give him a break. Can you imagine all he’s been through?”

    In Le Temps qui reste, Romain tells only one member of the family about his illness, his grandmother, played by Jeanne Moreau. Their brief scene together is the most interesting in the film. He’s drawn to her by their shared relation to the world — both will be leaving it soon — and she is likewise alone, alienated from family and community. During a late-night conversation, she confesses to having had a string of lovers soon after her husband’s death. She is unapologetic, though, and refuses to judge the friends, family members, and neighbors who so callously judged her at the time. “They didn’t understand,” she tells Romain, his head resting on her shoulder. “I would have died otherwise. It was survival instinct.”

    When Ozon introduced Le Temps qui reste at TIFF, he called it a “personal and secret” film, and, while I have no interest in psychoanalyzing Ozon or presuming to extrapolate conclusions about his life, I do suspect the film’s “secret” is closely related to Romain’s and his grandmother’s “survival instincts.” For Doctorow, Daniel’s “right to offend” has political connotations. The Book of Daniel is, in Doctorow’s words, “the story of the American left in general and the generally sacrificial role it has played in our history.” Daniel is a walking, breathing reminder of an iconic and tragic past. He has, in a sense, earned his right to disrupt our complacent social mores.

    Ozon’s film is a smaller, more personal (and, ultimately, less successful) work of art, but it’s no less transgressive. I also like its ambitions. When Romain first learns of his prognosis, he immediately asks, “Is it AIDS?” I’m not gay, and I worry that I’m wading into dangerous critical waters here, but Le Temps qui reste works most effectively as a study of, for lack of a better word, gay psychology. Romain dies of cancer, but he’s haunted by the same specter of mortality that floats through the work of so many queer artists of the AIDS era. It’s important that we hear the word, I think. And it’s also important that we’re reminded of the difference between heterosexual and homosexual mortality — that is, the procreative aspect of sex, the ability to share DNA with one’s lover in the formation of a new life that will carry on beyond one’s own. A side plot involving Romain’s decision to impregnate a woman whose husband is impotent, though underdeveloped in the film, does touch upon some quality of gay psychology (again, excuse the poor choice of words) that I seldom see addressed in films. It’s another of Ozon’s “secrets,” I suspect. Another survival instinct.

  • Un Couple parfait (2005)

    Un Couple parfait (2005)

    Dir. by Nobuhiro Suwa

    Look closely at the image above. It’s Un Couple parfait in miniature — a story told in body language. The husband (Bruno Todeschini) is an arm’s length from the table, his shoulders turned perpendicular to his wife. His cup sits untouched, reminding us, even moreso than the expression on his face, just how unwelcome these daily rituals of marriage have become. The wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) has a Mona Lisa smile. At first glance, she appears perfectly content — a woman deeply in love and endlessly curious, perhaps? But look at her eyes. They’re staring past her husband, lost in thought, wandering. There’s something absolutely beautiful to me about the way her right arm rests against her leg. And the way her body leans forward, gesturing toward him despite the growing distance.

    The image is also a capsule of Suwa’s cinematographic style. There are maybe thirty-five shots in the entire film, all but a few from the fixed, static perspective of a waist-high camera positioned some distance from the characters. Suwa has said that, while working as an assistant director, he came to distrust the artificiality of traditional blocking. He chooses, instead, to allow room for his actors to move freely, to breathe and embody emotions more complex than those expressed in their dialogue. Language is slippery in Un Couple parfait. Or, not slippery, but irrelevant, maybe. Suwa isn’t at all interested in offering some metacommentary on the entanglements of postmodern discourse. Rather, his style — allowing actors to improvise lines while the camera is running, for example, or admitting, even, that he often did not understand exactly what his French actors were saying — is more humanist and psychological. Like an analyst, he observes quietly and respectfully the unspoken, looking for clues in behavior and movement, ripples from the subconscious.

    Notice also the door that separates the characters from the camera. When asked why he so often underlights his actors, losing their faces in shadow, he said, “There are two ways to watch. One is to open your eyes and look closely; the other is to close your eyes and imagine.” Unlike so many filmmakers, Suwa clearly values the latter as much as the former, and his film is, on some level at least, a pedagogical instrument. At more than one point in Un Couple parfait, the husband and wife sit in adjoining hotel rooms. After one or the other shuts the door between them, Suwa lets his camera run, trapping our vision for a time. These, he claims, are his favorite moments in the film, for as we sit suspended, staring at the closed door, we’re also allowed room to move, to empathize or judge or imagine freely.

    What you can’t see in the image are all of the subtle touches that make Un Couple parfait such a satisfying film. The look of wonder on Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s face as she wanders through a museum. The brief interruption of “reality” when an actor sneezes, another says “God bless you,” and they continue on with the scene. The occasional hand-held close-ups that jar you back into close identification with the characters, preventing the film from becoming a formal, intellectual exercise. The late-night conversation between Bruno Todeschini and an old man he meets in a cafe. Or the final scene, which rediscovers a cinematic cliche by taking the “irrelevance of language” to its logical extreme. Un Couple parfait is a kind of collision between the visions of Ingmar Bergman and Hou Hsiao-hsien: brutally incisive but always fascinated and tender.

  • The Great Films, Part 1

    The Great Films, Part 1

    In a deliberate effort to beef up my cinephile cred, lately I’ve been loading my GreenCine queue with selections from the list of 1,000 Greatest Films compiled by the folks at They Shoot Pictures. With 30 or 40 films now in my queue, I’ve stopped prioritizing or shuffling the list and just watch whatever happens to show up on my door. It’s probably not the best strategy — perhaps I should instead queue up ten films of a particular genre or, say, all of the John Ford or Japanese films I’ve never seen — but I’m enjoying the variety. It’s been a fun, summer-time distraction from the brain-wearying work of dissertating. Next up are Some Like It Hot and My Darling Clementine.

    Some quick thoughts on recent viewings. (I’m afraid that none were overwhelmingly positive, so any feedback would be much appreciated.)

    The Blue Angel (1930, dir. Josef von Sternberg) — My first Marlene Dietrich film. Also, my second Emil Jannings film (after The Last Laugh). Both are fun to watch here, though I find it almost impossible to imagine how they would have been received by an audience in 1930. Jannings is the subject of our ridicule and sympathy, and von Sternberg’s balancing of the two is tricky. Dietrich is likewise a complicated character — a femme fatale, a seducer, and a betrayer, whose charm is irresistible. Two weeks later, what I most admire about the film are its images of the creative world behind the stage curtain, which bring to mind the magic of Bergman’s films.

    Jules and Jim (1962, dir. Francois Truffaut) — Jules and Jim was my first New Wave film. I remember checking it out from the Wilmington public library eight or nine years ago, when I was first dipping my toes into world cinema. What little lasting impression it left was mostly negative. I recall being annoyed with all of the main characters and confused by their behavior. A decade later, I now recognize some of its precedents — writers like Flaubert and, to a lesser degree, James, both of whom saddle their characters with particular flaws then watch (as if casual observers rather than authors) as those flaws become manifest in the inevitable and messy consequences.

    I appreciate Flaubert and James, but I don’t read them for pleasure, just as I seldom watch Truffaut for pleasure. To be fair, I’ve seen far too few of his films (five or six, maybe) to make any blanket statements, but, aside from The 400 Blows, I don’t recall ever being pestered by one of his films. By “pestered” I just mean that mixture of confusion and curiosity that follows (sometimes days later) an encounter with great art — or, if not great art, then interesting or daring or insightful art. I don’t mean to imply that Jules and Jim is lacking here on all counts; only that, the morning after, I wasn’t the least bit curious to know more about Jules, Jim, or Catherine. Perhaps I’ll give it another go in ten years.

    The Life of Oharu (1952, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi) — Much to my embarrassment, it’s time that I own up to the fact that, on a number of occasions now, I have found myself surprisingly unmoved by the great Japanese filmmakers. There’s something so thoroughly alien (other-worldly, even) about the customs, politics, music, and rituals of, in this case, 17th century Japan. But I feel excluded, also, by the film style. The long takes, which I so admire in many other filmmakers, try my patience in Mizoguchi. His actors’ movements, which are so graceful and balletic, are impossibly strange to me. I can’t seem to penetrate through to the emotional core of the characters and, so, remain uninvested in their tragedies.

    About 40 minutes into our screening of The Life of Oharu, I leaned over to a friend and joked that I felt like I was watching a Thomas Hardy novel. He chuckled, then a few seconds later added, “Hey, you’re right. You’re absolutely right.” Mizoguchi’s film is, with one notable exception, textbook Naturalism. Oharu, like Tess, Maggie, and Carrie before her, is abused by a patriarchal system, to be sure, but the depths and the ironies of her suffering suggest that a vast and indifferent universe is conspiring against her. The Life of Oharu is like an anti-picaresque novel, a compilation of vignettes in which our heroine, rather than outsmarting her abusers, is instead toyed with, degraded, and openly mocked by them. I love Mizoguchi’s camerawork in this regard. He often looks down upon her from a high angle, forcing the horizon line above the edge of the frame so that we, like Oharu, seldom catch a glimpse of the sky.

    The one exception to this Oharu-as-Naturalism theory is the final, enigmatic shot, in which Oharu, now old and alone, looks up with reverence at a tower in the distance. I say “enigmatic” because I simply lack the context and understanding to read the image. Is the tower the home of her son, now a powerful lord? Is it a temple, and, if so, what does it represent to her? In an earlier scene, she has found some consolation in religious ceremony, but it’s an earthy, human consolation — the smiling face of Buddha becomes a talisman of her one moment of perfect happiness, the love she once felt for a young man. Regardless, Hardy, Crane, Dreiser, and the other literary Naturalists tended to leave their heroines in the grave, so the finale of Oharu felt hopeful to me. I’m not sure if that hope is justified, however.

    Note: I didn’t rent this one from GreenCine. It is, however, available as a good-enough R2 DVD from Artificial Eye.

    L’Age d’Or (1930, dir. Luis Bunuel) — L’Age d’Or‘s images aren’t as striking as those in Un Chien Andalou, but I found it a much more compelling film. I guess I prefer my surrealism to be grounded a bit more firmly in narrative, no matter how loosely the term “narrative” must be employed in this context. That Bunuel uses a love affair as a framework around which he builds his political and aesthetic critique gives the images (such as the one in my new title) a deeper resonance. There are humans in this film rather than simply a collection of subjects or symbols. L’Age d’Or seems to be more distinctly a Bunuel film as well — Un Chien Andalou has too many of Dali’s fingerprints on it, in my opinion — and, indeed, a pairing of it with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie would feel perfectly natural, despite the 42 years that separate them.

  • Short Takes

    Short Takes

    I’m adjusting to a new schedule. Getting up early, driving to campus, setting up my laptop in the library, and forcing myself to sit there — to write — until late-afternoon. In other words, I’m finally turning my dissertation into a full-time job. By the end of the day, I have little energy left to write about films or anything else, really, so instead I’ve been relaxing each night with a DVD. Because GreenCine doesn’t carry the later seasons of The West Wing, I’ve re-upped with NetFlix as well, meaning that, until I cancel one of the subscriptions, I’ll have a steady stream of titles to choose from. Good times. Some recent viewings:

    Notre Musique (2004, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) — I won’t even attempt a reading of this film after only one viewing, and I’d be suspicious of any reviewer/critic who does so. Is it anti-American? Anti-Semitic? Anti-Intellectual? Maybe. I have no idea at this point. I’ve already mailed the disc back, but I think I’d like to buy copies of Notre Musique and In Praise of Love (which I loved, also after only one viewing) and give both films the time and attention they deserve.

    I can say without hesitation, though, that the opening ten minutes of Notre Musique, the “Hell” section, are absolutely compelling. A collage of violent images, some real (documentary), some imagined (fiction), “Hell” is disgusting and fascinating. Godard digitizes, distorts, and makes abstract a timeline of human sadism and suffering, and I’m beginning to suspect that the remainder of the film is an argument about the moral and political consequences of that very act.

    The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, dir. William Wyler) — The night before my grandmother’s funeral, my grandfather told me about a letter he wrote to her when he was in Europe. Actually, he dictated the letter to a nurse. And in it he told her that he would be returning “half the man” he was when he left. He’d been wounded badly by a German mortar somewhere in western Europe, and he was ashamed of the toll it took on his face. I wish now I’d had the chance to watch this film with them.

    If I hadn’t seen Best Years, I wouldn’t believe a film like it could exist. The story of three men returning from war to the same home town, it unsettles every expectation I had about Hollywood World War II films. The heroic Army Air Force captain is haunted by nightmares and unable to find his place in a booming postwar economy that places little value on the skills he learned as a bombardier. The gruff and hard-drinking ol’ Sarge’, a staple of service films, is a banker who discovers that words like “collateral” and “investment” are absurd when used back home. And Homer, who lost both hands to a fire, returns to a society better-equipped to accept a heroic death than a disfiguring wound.

    And along with that setup, you also get brilliant performances from Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael, and Teresa Wright (with whom I’ve fallen in love again); you get the patient, impeccably-human direction of William Wyler; and you get a stream of jaw-dropping images from Gregg Toland that rival his more famous work in Citizen Kane. Best Years might be my single favorite film of the classical Hollywood cinema. An absolute masterpiece.

    Sunrise (1927, dir. F. W. Murnau) — I first watched Sunrise several years ago on a 9″ viewing carrel* at the university library. Having now seen it projected at 100″ — thanks to the kind generosity of a friend — I finally get what all of the fuss is about. I’d seen Janet Gaynor a week or two earlier in Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, which was made the same year, and I’d become fascinated by her face. It’s the perfect silent film face — all round eyes and round cheeks, like Betty Boop. Her character is almost too perfect, too forgiving in Sunrise, and I wonder if the film would hold together if not for that face.

    The star of the film, though, is Murnau’s camera. Nearly every image is a knockout, but it’s the double-, triple-, quadruple-exposures that take your breath away. I’m not sure which film is the greater miracle, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, which was brash enough to toss away the old book of film grammar, or Sunrise, which displays many of the same feats of daring but in the service of a more traditional narrative.

    Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, dir. Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller) — I think I’ve watched too many great essay films over the past year. Too much Resnais, Marker, Varda, Jost. They’ve changed my expectations for non-fiction films. Unfairly, perhaps. I tuned in to Moving Train on IFC a few nights ago because I was curious about Zinn, and the film gave me all of the information I was looking for — a biographical sketch, interviews with him and those who have known him, archival footage of key moments from his career, and historical context. Moving Train is interesting because Zinn is interesting. I wish the film were more than just a Biography channel profile, though. I wish it had a voice of its own, a voice offering insight into why Zinn matters, if Zinn matters.

    * Note: Apparently, this is the first time I’ve ever typed the word “carrel.” Did you know that both “carrel” and “carrell” are acceptable spellings? English, really, is a ridiculous language.

  • Chocolat (1988)

    Chocolat (1988)

    Dir. by Claire Denis

    Claire Denis’s debut film, Chocolat, opens with a two-minute static shot of a man and child, both black, playing in shallow ocean waters. When the camera does finally move, it pans nearly 180 degrees to the right before coming to rest on a young white woman. I thought little of the shot the first time I saw the film, but watching Chocolat again last night, I was struck by the economy of that single, simple camera movement. By dividing the frame in perfect halves, the shot’s composition introduces what will become one of the film’s central metaphors, the horizon line; by recontextualizing an idyllic image of a father and son (presumably) through what amounts to a cutless eyeline match, the pan firmly establishes the film’s tricky but essential subjective perspective.

    The young woman, we eventually learn, is traveling through Cameroon, visiting the lands where she was raised as the daughter of a French colonial district officer. France (Mireille Perrier) carries with her her father’s leatherbound diary of notes and sketches, and she fingers its pages as if the diary were family album, romance novel, and roadmap, all in one. Ten minutes into Chocolat, we leave the present to enter her reverie of the past, and all but the final few minutes of the film are a recreation of her childhood landscape. Specifically, France remembers a time when her father set out on a short trip, leaving her and her mother (Giulia Boschi) behind under the care of their houseboy, Protée (Isaach De Bankolé). Like an Edith Wharton novel, Chocolat appropriates the conventions of a romance plot to comment on restrictive social structures, specifically the complexities of a colonial system that simultaneously dehumanizes and hypersexualizes the colonized, while also degrading the colonizer. It’s brilliantly executed—a story told completely in small but significant gestures.

    Reviewers who have deemed “unnecessary” the framing device involving the adult France have completely misread Chocolat, I think. While there is much to recommend in the film—Agnes Godard’s cinematography, the many fine performances, and Denis’s typically seductive pacing, to name just a few—Denis’s handling of the film’s subjective perspective is what differentiates this film from other earnest and well-intentioned examinations of racism and/or colonialism. (There is probably room here for a discussion of the differences between Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, and Anthony Minghella’s also-good but differently-focused film adaptation, but I’ll save that for another day.)

    Take, for example, the most significant of Chocolat‘s many small gestures: the moment when the mother reaches slowly from her position on the floor to touch Protée’s calf. It’s a perfectly staged sequence, more charged and transgressive than anything imagined in a typical Hollywood sex scene. And Protée’s reaction retains its mystery and shock even on a second viewing. But who is “remembering” this moment? Although Denis’s camera shoots from the vantage point of the young France, three feet or so from the floor, France is not in the room. She could not have witnessed this event, and so we are left to answer any number of questions: Who is telling this story? From what evidence is she reconstructing her narrative? How does something so subjective as memory (not to mention love, faith, and power) distort our understanding of history, both personal and political.

    Near the end of Chocolat, France is told by her father, “The closer you get to [the horizon], the farther it moves. You see the line, but it doesn’t exist.” It’s one of those movie lines that screams significance. But recognizing the metaphor as metaphor and unpacking it are very different tasks, and I’m finding the latter a pleasant and surprising challenge. The most banal reading might be something like, “the line that separates the races is culturally-determined and, therefore, surmountable.” There’s nothing in the film to suggest such a rose-colored reading, however, and, really, the film would be dishonest crap if there were. Or, the father’s line might be exploded into some universal platitude about the hopeless quest for understanding. “No matter how hard we search, Truth always remains just out of reach.” But Chocolat is too grounded in specific historical conditions to be reduced to a platitude.

    The horizon metaphor begins to find its shape, I think, in juxtaposition with another scene: the moment when the mother reprimands her cook, who speaks in badly broken English. “Enoch, I don’t understand any of what you’re saying,” she tells him. (I can’t comment on the original release of the film, but the DVD wisely leaves the African languages untranslated.) I have always wished that someone would film Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, but Chocolat has made any effort to do so redundant, for at their core both are about the colonizer’s desire to understand the colonized, a desire that is human and noble, on one hand, but too disfigured by power and history to be anything more than patronizing. This is how Gordimer describes the terrifying moment when her heroine, Maureen Smales, recognizes that she is caught in such a trap with her servant, July:

    How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing that was to say between them that had any meaning.
    Fifteen Years
    your boy
    you satisfy

    But—and this is important—unlike the end of July’s People, which is a story of revolution, Chocolat does offer some portent of hope. The film ends, once again, in the present day. France has hitched a ride from the black man whom she first spotted swimming in the ocean, and whom she soon discovers is actually an American immigrant. This revelation once again recontextualizes Chocolat‘s opening image, calling into question the validity of France’s perspective. (Had she imagined herself witnessing some timeless ritual of real black African life? Did this fantasy put her in closer communion with her mother? With an imagined version of her mother?) Denis, who also spent much of her childhood in colonial Africa, clearly sympathizes with France’s plight. Her desire to understand, to write narratives that discover the human in inhumane circumstances, is noble, is essential, even if fraught with ambiguities and unavoidable landmines.

    The final image in Chocolat is another long static shot, the frame divided in half once again by the horizon. Three black men smoke and laugh as an unexpected burst of rain passes through. France is gone, but somehow we have retained her (its) perspective. Denis leaves the camera running for several minutes, inviting us to understand these men, or, at least, fostering in us the desire to do so.

  • Friday Night (2002)

    Friday Night (2002)

    Dir. by Claire Denis

    Joanna tells me — and she’s told me this many times over the years — that she fell in love the first time we held hands. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. Men, in my experience at least, seldom consider hands. Or, we consider them only when they’re noticeable — scarred, chewed, ornamented by loudly painted nails. Even then, though, we offer only a passing glance and a quick, rarely-conscious judgment. To really consider a hand demands a certain intimacy, I think. We’re allowed to stare at faces, encouraged even to maintain eye contact during public conversations, but to really look at a hand (or the place where a neck meets a shoulder or the back of a knee) is taboo outside of a bedroom (metaphorically speaking).

    In After Life, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s brilliant 1998 film about a heaven in which the new-dead film the happiest moment of their lives that they might relive it eternally, one woman restages her first taste of love a perfectly innocent encounter on a public bench and when we finally see the finished film, it culminates in a slow zoom onto her lover’s hands. That sequence, like nearly every frame of Claire Denis’s Friday Night, reminded me of Joanna’s words and sent me off wondering about “the female gaze.” (The quotation marks allow me to allude casually to feminist film theory, though I’m not sure yet if that is what I’m really after here.)

    Denis seems to have discovered a cinematographic grammar entirely of her own. I say that having seen only three of her films Beau Trevail, which I love in part because I never would have imagined such an adaptation of Billy Budd possible; L’Intrus, which is the most beautifully frustrating film I’ve seen this year; and now Friday Night, a film about a woman (Valérie Lemercier) who has an affair the night before she is to move in with her boyfriend. I would like to read a formal analysis of one of Denis’s films because I simply don’t understand how they work. She and cinematographer Agnès Godard are able, somehow, to create a world that is both recognizably real and mythic; the camera remains objective (showing us things that no character could have seen), but it also becomes so intimately involved with the action that the entire film is covered by a sheen of subjective emotion. Magic is possible.

    When we were discussing L’Intrus, Girish kept reminding me that the line separating narrative- from experimental filmmaking has been arbitrarily drawn and that Denis’s films prove the point. While more neatly-plotted than her latest feature, Friday Night also slips easily across those borders. The lovemaking scenes, for example, are constructed from a collage of extreme close-ups that slip in and out of focus to the point of abstraction. Sex, which is so often reduced by most films to little more than genital stimulation, becomes alien. And familiar. A patchwork of fingers and necks and ankles. And hands. If I were asked to summarize Friday Night, I would say it is a film about hands and about the impossible fact that my wife decided to love me the moment she first held mine.

  • 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (2004)

    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (2004)

    Dir. by Raymond Depardon

    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences is 105 minutes of documentary footage shot within a French District courtroom. We watch as Madame Justice Michèle Bernard-Requin hears the cases brought against twelve defendants (culled from the 169 that Depardon originally shot). Most are there on misdemeanor offenses: drunk driving, petty theft, possession of a weapon, selling marijuana. And in nearly every case we watch the process from start to finish, from plea to verdict.

    During the screening of 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences, I was quite disappointed by the film, but even then I knew that my disappointment was with the audience rather than with the film itself. At the Sunday screening — and friends who saw it on Tuesday report a very different experience — 10e Chambre played as pure comedy. (One friend, a TIFF veteran, argues that crowds are different during the opening weekend, when more people dress up and come out to experience the festival itself rather than to see the films, and I think he might be right.)

    The idea of 10e Chambre as “comedy” is quite disturbing to me. And I’ve come to realize that that is partly Depardon’s point. He crafts the film so that our allegiances immediately fall to the side of the witty and cynical Judge, whose clever retorts to the first few defendants are, at times, well justified. But by the time we are laughing at a young man who is clearly under the influence of a narcotic while in the courtroom, the joke has gone on too long. We are now no longer well-heeled sophisticates at an international film festival; we are Middle Americans, smoking pot, watching Jerry Springer, and laughing at the poor clods who are too poorly educated, too economically burdened, too mentally incapacitated, or ( perhaps most damning of all) too dark-skinned to know any better.

    10e Chambre began to open up for me when my friend Girish described that laughter as a Rorschach Test. What do we laugh at? How do we choose where to direct our derision? And why do we often side with those in authority? Depardon shoots each of the defendants from the same static, low-angle position, giving us a perspective of the criminal that is similar (metaphorically speaking) to the Judge’s: he or she is a disembodied head, divorced from context or backstory, who is offered only a few moments to justify his or her behavior. The opportunity to judge them is impossibly seductive, as my audience proved, and Depardon invites us to do so by not revealing the verdicts of the final cases. I have no doubt how most in that theater would have ruled.

    As a side note, one of my friends who attended the Tuesday screening reports that one or two members of that audience also felt the need to laugh throughout much of the film. Not surprisingly, the social pressure of being the lone voice laughing in a hushed room led them to suppress that urge during the last half hour. The analogy to being a lone voice of dissent, whether in an important public discourse or, say, a jury room, is fascinating. This will be a wonderful film to teach.

  • The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “Since its beginnings, many hundreds of thousands of Marines have prepared for war here, practicing their war-fighting skills in the challenging terrain and climate of the Mojave Desert. In the early days it was primarily seen as a place for artillery units to unmask devastating firepower in training. Subsequently, it has been home to numerous tenant commands, earning a reputation as the premier combined-arms training facility in the Marine Corps.
    – History of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms (1)

    “The H1 and H2 were created to handle deep water, nasty side slopes, inclines and harrowing vertical ledges. So, that’s just what the AM General Test Track in South Bend, Indiana serves up. On the same course where the U.S. Army and Allied Forces have trained drivers, you’ll face twisted, muddy terrain and also learn recovery techniques. Unfortunately, after the training is over, you will in fact, [sic] have to return to civilization.”
    – The Hummer Driving Academy (2)

    Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003) begins amid the traffic of a congested Los Angeles freeway. David (David Wissak) is driving; Katia (Katia Golubeva), his girlfriend, rests in the back seat. They are leaving the city, headed east, deep into the Joshua Tree National Park, where David plans to scout locations for a film project. Once there, they settle quickly into routine: their days begin with a long trek into the desert, followed by a few hours of exploration and then the long drive back to Twentynine Palms, the small town where their motel is located. There they swim, have sex, shower, watch television, eat dinner, fight, and make up, in roughly that order. As in his previous films, La Vie de Jésus (1997) and L’Humanité (1999), here Dumont is interested in the mundane details of human experience. His camera lingers patiently on David and Katia’s bodies with a naturalist’s curiosity, capturing something of their boredom, their desire, their frustration, their jealousy, and their confused affection. (David, an American, and Katia, a Russian, converse in a mix of half-understood English and French.) Even in the final minutes of the film, when the Edenic isolation of the desert is ruptured by outside forces, Dumont refuses to quicken his pace. Audiences are forced to observe everything – the ordinary and the terrifying – unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylised photography. Dumont has once again given us “large and startling” figures and has left us to sort through the consequences (3).

    While Dumont’s “humanity under glass” approach to characters has carried through each of his films – Freddy and Marie, Pharaon and Domino, David and Katia are all similarly flayed under the director’s scalpel – his latest film marks something of a departure, as his move from the small French town, Bailleul, to the American southwest necessitates a new palette of cinematic iconography and, more significantly, a new socio-political context. Reviewers of Twentynine Palms have, almost without exception, called attention to the former, citing Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970) and Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) as a few of the film’s most obvious forebears (4). But while appropriating “American film imagery”, as Dumont admits to deliberately doing, he also comments on that imagery, deconstructing the culturally-coded messages that each image carries. “I can’t understand half of what you’re saying”, David tells Katia, but he could as easily be speaking to Hitchcock’s motel room, John Ford’s desert mountains, and the heart of Boorman’s darkness. Hollywood’s visions of violence, cowboy masculinity, and the never-ending battle between good and evil have long been mythological tropes of America’s political identity (and they have obviously gained currency in the 21st century); in Twentynine Palms, Dumont calls attention to the artificiality of those tropes and to the dehumanising effects they mask. The end result is a film equal parts high-minded allegory and kick-in-the-guts sensation. Dumont, perhaps more than any living filmmaker, deliberately challenges audiences to reconcile those tensions, or, if not reconcile, to at least experience, in all its fullness and complexity, the sudden disorientation such tensions inevitably inspire.

    When all is said and done – after the endless driving, the pain-faced orgasms, the countless miscommunications, and the brutal, brutal violence – Twentynine Palms is, I think, really a film about a red truck. Specifically, it’s about David’s red H2, a sports utility vehicle modelled after the US Army’s High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (pronounced Humvee). Loaded with high-end comforts, including a nine-speaker sound system, DVD navigation, and standard leather seating, the “Hummer” is capable of producing 325 horsepower and 365 pounds of torque. Its welded steel frame, ten inch ground clearance, and 40 degree approach angle give it the appearance of being one of the toughest, most agile off-road vehicles on the market. “In a world where SUVs have begun to look like their owners, complete with love handles and mushy seats,” Hummer’s website announces, “the H2 proves that there is still one out there that can drop and give you 20.” But the H2, despite its rugged appearance, is little more than a new face on an old idea – a significantly modified version of General Motors’ oldest line of SUVs, the Chevy Suburban (a name thick with allegoric potential). The H2′s base price is just over US$50,000.

    There is a danger, of course, in pushing this metaphor too far. A truck driven more often through upscale neighbourhoods than over rocky terrain, a truck with an American military pedigree and a soccer dad clientele, a truck whose name was inspired by a euphemism for fellatio – the Hummer is ripe for juvenile Freudian analysis and for simplistic pronouncements about the ethical problems of the postmodern simulacrum. Had Dumont been less patient with his material, had he treated it with too little grace or honesty, Twentynine Palms would likely have collapsed under the weight of such a symbol, becoming not a study of, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the banality of evil, but a banality itself. Dumont avoids that trap (for the most part) by calling little attention to the Hummer as symbol, with only a few notable exceptions. For instance, during their drives through the desert, David often stops to allow Katia to take the wheel. On one such drive, she scrapes paint from the side of the truck, then infantilises David by laughing at his anger. The brief conflict mirrors the gendered struggle that defines so much of their relationship, and it would not require too great a stretch to read David’s meticulous waxing of the Hummer as an attempt to reconstruct his masculine authority. (Welcome to Psychology 101, where “waxing a Hummer” is never just waxing a Hummer.)

    It’s the nature of that masculine authority, however, and the particularly American myths that determine it that seem of greatest import in the film. In the same California desert where novelist Frank Norris’s McTeague dies as a result of his greed and jealousy, where John Wayne eternally rides horses and fights “savages”, where the US Marines “unmask devastating firepower in training”, David adopts the appropriate pose, driving his army-like truck and fucking his beautiful girlfriend with a near-bestial desperation. “We can fuck and fuck, but we can’t merge”, Dumont says (somewhat disingenuously, I think) on the Blaq Out DVD release (R2), reducing David and Katia’s troubling relationship to a universal platitude. But David and Katia are not Adam and Eve, or Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina, or Freddy and Marie; they are characters trapped at the nexus of conflicted American types, old and new: rugged individuals and conspicuous consumers, democratic liberals and unilateral militarists, Western gunslingers and West Coast hipsters. Is it any wonder they’re both a touch schizophrenic?

    Unlike, say, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), with its satiric commingling of images of American military power, “Old West” masculinity and myths of redemptive violence, Twentynine Palms consigns many of its targets to spaces just beyond the edge of the screen. The most striking example is the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, which is alluded to only in the title of the film and in one key sequence. While eating ice cream, David notices Katia admiring a Marine in uniform. “You wouldn’t want me to shave my head like them?” he asks. She laughs, then tells him, “If you do, I’ll leave you”, but her answer offers David little comfort. Katia admits to finding Marines “really handsome”, and her laughter – to David, at least – is patronising. He sulks, then launches into a tirade about their conversations lacking a “logical progress”, before she interrupts him with the words, “I love you”. Tellingly, he responds, “I want you”. (The film’s dialogue, though cliched at times, does work a bit better on screen than when transcribed.)

    David’s thin frame, shag haircut, and fashionably-dishevelled wardrobe put him in stark contrast to the “proud, fighting men of the US Marines” who surround the periphery of Twentynine Palms. Alone with Katia, however, he (over)compensates for any apparent lack. Dumont’s cinematographic style is never more clinical and his worldview more deterministic than in his stagings of sex. Not only do David and Katia never truly “merge”, but each appears barely cognisant of the other’s presence. Bodies become entangled; orgasms are loud, primal. Sex, for Dumont, is an act of self-gratifying violence predicated on domination. “The poor thing”, Katia says after David describes an episode of The Jerry Springer Show in which a father admits to sexually abusing his daughter. David’s casual response – “Who?” – is perhaps the film’s most chilling moment, for it portends something more base and destructive than the “desensitising effects of the media” against which cultural critics on both the left and the right rage (though that is certainly one element of Dumont’s critique). David’s nihilism puts him closer in line with the morally ambiguous heroes of Hollywood’s Old West: Ethan Edwards (John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956) and Bill Munny (Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, 1992), for example – men who kill because they can. In David’s case – and, again, at the risk of slipping headlong into bad Freud – sex and murder have become indistinguishable; the symbolic Colt revolver has been replaced quite literally by the signified, and David, to borrow from Bill Munny, has always been “lucky in the order”.

    Lucky, that is, until the final minutes of the film. Twentynine Palms ends with two acts of outrageous violence that, even upon first viewing, feel both genuinely shocking and strangely inevitable. During their final drive through the desert, David and Katia are chased and brought to a stop by three men who pull them from their truck, beat them, and sodomise David. After a three-minute, agonising shot of Katia crawling naked toward David, Dumont cuts to the motel room, where they have returned, alive but badly injured. David refuses to call the police, presumably because of his shame, and sends Katia to fetch dinner. When she returns, he emerges suddenly from the bathroom, pins her to the bed, and repeatedly stabs her. The final image is a long, high-angle shot of the desert. David is naked, facedown in the sand, dead, the Hummer parked beside him. A police officer wanders near the body, and we hear his voice as he calls for an ambulance.

    Were the film to end ten minutes earlier, with David and Katia still driving, still miscommunicating, still struggling to capture a glimpse of some impossible communion, Twentynine Palms would be another in a line of cinematic meditations on modern alienation, more L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) or Vive l’amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994) than Psycho. The seemingly random brutality of the violence, however, and the symbolically-charged manner in which it is staged, shift the film much closer to the realm of socio-political allegory. In that sense, the “attack” sequence is key. As in a classic Old West ambush, the savages appear from nowhere. Aside from a few early glimpses, David and Katia are unaware of their menacing white truck until it rear-ends them and forces them to a stop. The sequence might be boiled down to three shots. The first is a low-angle image of David’s face. He’s looking back over his right shoulder, screaming, helpless to stop the attackers’ truck from pushing their own. The look on David’s face is familiar to us by now, having already seen it on several occasions during his sexual climaxes. The second is a long shot of the two trucks coming to rest. Dumont films it from behind and to one side such that the perspective becomes slightly distorted. David’s H2 – the militaryish SUV designed to “handle deep water, nasty side slopes, inclines and harrowing vertical ledges” – suddenly resembles a toy beside the attackers’ massive pickup truck. The third is the image of David being raped, his bloodied face buried in the sand. Dumont positions the two men beside the back of the Hummer, which, metaphorically speaking, has also been sodomised. Not coincidentally, the attacker is also shot from a low-angle, and his face also contorts with a scream when he ejaculates.

    At a moment when depictions of American violence, both real and imagined, tend to be commodified (as in the Hummer) or hyperstylised (as in The Matrix [Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999]) or sanitised for our protection (as in television coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), Dumont’s treatment is relatively unfiltered and uncompromising. Audiences are subjected to long takes of “real” brutality; the director only subtly imposes his editorial voice to guide the viewing. In a film that plays so self-consciously with America’s mythologies, that experience is genuinely disconcerting, for it deconstructs those myths by accosting viewers with unfiltered sensation, the best remedy, Dumont implies, for intellectual distance and moral apathy. Twentynine Palms fits comfortably into the “art film” genre, and, as such, it will likely be appreciated by those most willing to rationally dissect its network of symbols and allusions. The textbook psychosexual connotations of the attack sequence, for example, are just too overt to be ignored. And yet, watching a Bruno Dumont film is, first and foremost, a visceral experience. We are forced to sit uncomfortably and observe the beating and rape of two people, fighting all the while the learned urge to avert our eyes. Thus, when David springs from the bathroom and savagely murders Katia, we might, in a somewhat detached manner, explain it away with allusions to Lacan and the dissolution of the fictional unity of David’s masculine subjectivity (and his failed attempt to reconstruct it through violence and the shaving of his head); but the more immediate sensation is horror – horror at the spectre of violence, horror at the depravity of its nihilism, horror at the sudden realisation that so many of America’s defining tropes have made of such violence a point of pride and national unity. In that sense, Twentynine Palms is timely and urgent in a way that Dumont’s earlier (and, in my opinion, better) films are not. His appeal to transcendence is now grounded in history, at a moment when America’s myths are being written on the world.

    Endnotes

    1. See MCAGCC/MAGTFTC History and Unit Information, accessed July 2004.
    2. http://www.hummer.com
    3. See my article, “Bruno Dumont’s Bodies”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, March–April 2002.
    4. I would add the “Dawn of Man” section of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) as well. Notice how David crouches ape-like in the desert, his knees above his waist, and how Dumont films the murder, the knife rising and falling like the bone in Kubrick’s film.
  • Late August, Early September (1998)

    Late August, Early September (1998)

    I had planned to write a full response to Olivier Assayas’ Late August, Early September, but when I sat down to do so I realized that I just didn’t have much to say. It’s a smart enough film — well made, finely acted, and a pleasure to watch — but like, say, one of Rohmer’s late comedies, the charm of Late August is found almost entirely in its characters (all of whom are likeable enough and three-dimensional enough) and in the smart things they say to one another. They twist themselves in existential knots, struggling to balance their idealized visions of integrity with the muddy necessity: compromise. They try to love themselves and others, in that order. They smoke. And drink wine. It’s all captured in cool-filtered, hand-held 16mm, and there are some fun, self-referential lines about gauging artistic success based upon the size of one’s audience. All in all, I would call it a pleasant and mostly forgettable distraction.

  • Beau Travail (2000)

    Claire Denis’s Beau Travail is a remarkable film. A loose adaptation of Billy Budd, it transposes Melville’s sea voyage to a French foreign legion outpost in East Africa, where the Claggart character (Sergeant Galoup, played brilliantly by Denis Lavant) plots the inevitable destruction of Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), who stands in for Billy. Melville’s novella provides only a rough narrative framework, though. Denis seems less concerned with that epic, allegorical showdown between good and evil — although in one remarkable image, her camera looks down on the men as they circle one another, spiraling closer and closer until they are face to face in a tight close-up — and less concerned, also, with the Christian iconography that punctuates Melville’s prose.

    Instead, Beau Travail foregrounds the concerns of much contemporary Melville scholarship and would probably make a wonderful teaching tool because of it. So, whereas post-colonial critics have, in turn, criticized/praised Melville for his appropriation of racist stereotypes (or his subversion of those stereotypes, depending on which side of the debate each critic stands), Denis situates Melville’s moral dilemma in an explicitly post-colonial situation, complicating further the relationships between European and African, Christian and Muslim, and calling into question the political value and motivations underlying those relationships. In several memorable scenes, the legionnaires exhaust themselves in senseless and utterly futile chores — digging holes, moving stones, repairing unused roads — all the while Africans look on, curious and silent but unmistakably present.

    Likewise, the homoeroticism of Melville’s texts is displayed in beautiful shot after beautiful shot of the legionnaires in training. At one point, they perform a training exercise in which each man throws his body at a partner, ending in an embrace that is both menacing and welcomed. Appropriating the tropes of stereotypical “basic training” sequences (see Full Metal Jacket), Denis brings to the fore those odd narratives that write gender onto our fighting men. She makes particularly good use of Galoup, whose voice and memories narrate the film. Galoup is not an embodiment of pure evil and jealousy like Claggart. Instead, he seems to be motivated by repressed desire — desire for authority and acceptance, but also, the film suggests, homosexual desire. Lavant is just a marvel throughout Beau Travail. As I recall, we hear him speak only in a stylized voice-over (there might be a few exceptions of diegetic speech), but he communicates with perfect clarity through his body language. The film’s final sequence might be impossible to explain, but it felt to me like another of those moments of grace that I’m constantly seeking.

    Beau Travail is also just a beautiful film to look at — stunning images cut together using a poetic logic that is part Eisenstein montage, part neo-realism, part Tarkovsky mysticism. The directors who most often came to mind were Kiarostami, Dumont, and Malick, though I never would have guessed beforehand that those three would ever be found sitting around the same table. A couple useful links:

  • Time Out (2001)

    Time Out (2001)

    What separates Time Out from the recent spate of “disillusioned upper-middle-class white guy has a breakdown” movies is writer/director Laurent Cantet’s interest in the specific economic forces that lead — some would say inevitably — to such discontent. Aurélien Recoing plays Vincent, recently fired from a position he had held unhappily for more than a decade. Ashamed of his failure and unable to escape nagging anxieties, Vincent reinvents himself as an imagined UN employee, while bilking friends out of investment capital that will, he assures them, return steep profits in Africa’s “emerging markets.”

    American treatments of this theme tend to elide the messy problems of multinational capitalism — the massive systems of exploitation and profit that reify workers at every stage. Cantet refuses to let us off so easily. Employing an odd mixture of Hitchcockian logic and late-Bressonian critique, he drops us instantly into a world of systematic victimization where the conflation of financial and humanitarian interests, now indistinguishable from one another in our contemporary public discourse, is exposed as fraudulent and disastrous. Unlike, say, American Beauty, which (satire or not) encourages us to take delight in Lester’s impotent rebellion, Time Out forces us to suffer alongside our representative hero. Whereas Lester gets to experience something like grace (or so the film’s defenders would argue), Vincent’s fate is determined, once again, by market forces. As his wealthy and influential father tells him in the penultimate scene, “Money problems can always be solved.”

  • Claire’s Knee (1970)

    Claire’s Knee (1970)

    Last night I watched Claire’s Knee (1970), the fifth entry in Eric Rohmer’s series of “Six Moral Tales.” This one is built around Jerome, an unusually self-absorbed rake (even by Rohmer’s standards) who spends the weeks leading up to his marriage on holiday at Lake Annecy. While there he meets an old acquaintance, Aurora, an Italian writer in search of inspiration. Their reunion, as is often the case in Rohmer’s films, leads to long talks about love and life, some genuinely interesting, others much less so. Jerome tells Aurora that he has finally agreed to marry because, after six years with his fiancee, he is surprised to discover that he still finds her interesting. It’s difficult to imagine Jerome finding anyone interesting, though. At the end of the film, for instance, he is shocked to learn that Aurora is engaged. “You never asked,” she tells him.

    Much of Claire’s Knee concerns Jerome’s flirtations with Laura and Claire, the two young daughters of his landlady. In typical Rohmer fashion, their courtship rituals are mostly verbal. His protagonists are keenly interested in love and in ideas of love. At times, I find these discussions endlessly fascinating — the late night talk between Jean-Louis and Maud being the best example — but after seeing more than ten of Rohmer’s films, the novelty of his style has begun to wear on me. I’m fascinated by the pacing of his films and by his need to show those parts of life that are so seldom put on film (the boring parts, some would say), but their lasting affect has been lessened by repetition. For more info about Rohmer, check out my friend Gary’s site.