Tag: Region: France

  • Bruno Dumont’s Bodies

    Bruno Dumont’s Bodies

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “For the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures”
    — Flannery O’Connor

    In the “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman boldly proclaims the scope of his project: the forging of a distinctly American poetic tradition. For Whitman, the genius of America can be found in the “common people. Their manners speech dress friendships [sic] — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy . . . these too are unrhymed poetry” (712). His proclamation marked a radical departure from earlier forms and secured his position as the poet laureate of American romanticism. By elevating emotion over intellect and the wild and natural over the tamed, Whitman assaulted his readers, forcing them to abandon pretense and acknowledge their shared humanity and the moral responsibility that accompanies it.

    Echoes of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” can now be heard in the work of French filmmaker, Bruno Dumont, who turned from academia to the cinema out of a need to reconnect with people. Speaking of his first feature, La vie de Jésus (1997), Dumont contrasts his own approach to filmmaking with the ‘cerebral’ navel-gazing that he feels characterizes much of contemporary French cinema:

    What interests me is life, people, the small things. Cinema is for the body, for the emotions. It needs to be restored among the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of joy, emotion, suffering, sympathy in death. They don’t speak, speaking is not important. What’s important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. . . . The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost. (Walsh)

    Like the poet before him, Dumont has turned to the arts in a democratic spirit, celebrating the “common people” in all of their rich complexity. In La Vie de Jésus and its follow-up, L’Humanité (1999), Dumont has restored . . . well . . . humanity to the screen, and in doing so, has transcended the verite and dogme traditions. Instead of simply turning a hand-held camera on ‘real people’ living ‘real lives,’ a manipulative fiction now broadcast nightly on network television, he has, like Whitman, rediscovered the transcendent and the beautiful in the common, by giving us stunning and often shocking images of the body—here, a conflation of the body of flesh with the body politic—and by forcing us to respond truthfully and viscerally to them.

    The cumulative effect of these images on the viewer is, at times, unnerving. Dumont’s films slowly erode the ironic detachment and cynicism that we’ve built as defenses, forcing us to actually feel something. For Dumont, wrestling with the intellectual and political consequences of that emotional response remains an essential but always secondary step. It should come as little surprise that L’Humanité was met by a chorus of jeers at Cannes in 1999, while Sam Mendes’s American Beauty—a film that, in many ways, adopts a strangely similar humanist stance—won a Best Picture Oscar the following year. It appears the majority of audiences have surrendered the ability to recognize sincerity (or, perhaps it has atrophied), objecting loudly when asked to do so. Instead, audiences either opt for or are steered toward easy satire and emotional distance, not to mention Kevin Spacey-sized performances to truthful ones. Ricky Fitts claims in Mendes’s film that “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world that I feel like I can’t take it . . . and my heart is going to cave in,” but the scene ultimately has less impact than a plastic bag. It’s a disposable image, like so many of contemporary society’s manufactured emotions. Dumont refuses to let us off so easily.

    Central to Dumont’s project is his faith in the power of cinema to return us “to the body, to the heart, to truth.” That faith secures his position in the lineage of filmmakers whom he most admires: Rossellini, Bresson, Pasolini. I might also add to the list Tarkovsky, who, like Dumont, saw the cinematic image as a potential vehicle for the revelation of truth through the simultaneous experience of complex and contradictory emotions. (“I am large, I contain multitudes,” Whitman would laugh.) By privileging the audience’s instinctual, visceral responses, and by doing so within the assumed customs of contemporary European ‘art’ cinema (a questionable categorization, I realize), Dumont deliberately places his viewers in an exasperating position and dares them to find a way out: trained to ‘read’ the complex images of the art house with the intellectual rigor of something akin to New Criticism, they fall immediately into the trap of struggling to decode messages, unravel symbols, and impose order, often where little exists. Dumont, however, frustrates the viewer at every turn by lending those messages an impenetrable ambiguity. So instead, we are forced to confront the stunning complexity of emotions that his films wrestle from each of us: empathy/revulsion, desire/pain, longing/fear, awe/confusion, transcendence/alienation. For his films to touch our hearts and reveal truth, as he desires, they must first shake us free from our expectations by confronting our senses.

    That Dumont has succeeded in this, his first goal, is evidenced by the critical response to his work, which reads like a cinematic Rorschach test. The polarized voices that were heard most loudly at Cannes made their way into the pages of Sight and Sound by way of “L’Humanite: Rapture or Ridicule?” a point/counter-point article in which Mark Cousins calls the film “one of the best . . . of the last ten years,” and Jonathon Romney responds by denouncing it as “an unsubtle film and a coercive one.” In separate reviews, Richard Falcon finds the end of La vie de Jésus “almost unbearably and inexplicably moving”; Stuart Klowans calls L’Humanité “off-putting and yet so immediate.”

    Dumont elicits these varied responses through a film style that combines the naturalistic, nonprofessional performances of social-realism with austere, Kubrick-like camerawork. As Tony Rayns remarks in his review of L’Humanité, and as most viewers have likely noticed, Dumont’s second feature is a “virtual remake” of its predecessor. Both are set in Bailleul, the small town in northern France where Dumont was raised and where he continues to reside. Both are concerned with the lives of the working class. And both display Dumont’s trademark cinematographic blend of lush widescreen landscapes, glossy-eyed close-ups, and clinically objective (and graphic) stagings of sex. [Brief plot synopses follow.]

    La vie de Jésus concerns the tragic fate of Freddy (David Douche), an unemployed twenty-something who spends his days collecting welfare checks and aimlessly riding his motorbike alone or with a gang of friends through town and the surrounding countryside. He lives there with his mother (Geneviève Cottreel), who is as disillusioned and as distant as he. Their first interaction, minutes into the film, is typical of their relationship: with Freddy standing before her, she stares past him at television coverage of an epidemic in Africa. “What a shame,” she sighs, responding to the visual messages on TV while ignoring those on her son’s face. Freddy’s only relief from the oppressive boredom comes from his participation in a marching band, his meticulous care for a pet finch, and his carnal relationship with Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), a young girl who works as a grocery cashier and who lives on Freddy’s otherwise vacant street. When Marie welcomes the attention of Kader, an Arab boy, Freddy retaliates violently, kicking him to death on the street.

    Like Freddy, the protagonist of L’Humanité lives alone with his mother in a working class section of Bailleul. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is a police superintendent, called to investigate the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. We learn little about Pharaon’s past, other than that he has “lost” his woman and child and that he seems to suffer from a heightened sensitivity to others’ emotional pain. He apparently has only one friend, a neighbor named Domino (Séverine Caneele), who tolerates Pharaon’s idiosyncrasies, but who prefers the company of her bus driver boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier). Pharaon accompanies them to dinner and on a trip to the sea. He rides his bicycle, tends his garden, and improvises on his electric keyboard. Occasionally, he also devotes some energy to his investigation, and, by the end of the film, the case appears to be solved.

    When reduced to simple plotlines, both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité sound like standard fare: one a social drama concerning disillusioned youth, the other a classic police procedural. They diverge most radically from the norm, though, in their treatment of their ‘heroes’, a label I feel comfortable applying to Freddy and Pharaon only because Dumont clearly sees them as such. They are heroes born of the same stock as Hemingway’s, Eliot’s, and Antonioni’s: characters desperate to discover communion, beauty, and purpose in an alienating and amoral world. Dumont reminds us constantly of their brutal plight by lingering on shots of their bodies, which appear broken and almost grotesquely malformed. Freddy’s body is scarred by frequent falls from his motorbike and is ravaged by epileptic seizures. He is like a younger version of Pharaon, whose sunken chest, stooped shoulders, and hollow eyes lend him the appearance of a man twice his age.

    Dumont’s characters are, in fact, ‘embodied’ by their physiognomies. The director spent ten months casting L’Humanité, then recreated his original ‘prototype’ characters based on the performers’ specific appearance and mannerisms. “I directed them based on what came from within them,” he has said. “I observed their body language and composed my shots around it” (Erickson). One recurring motif in both films is a medium close-up that positions the actor horizontally within the Scope frame, usually in a side view from the chest up. The shots typically last ten to fifteen seconds with little movement and only diegetic sound. For instance, near the end of La vie de Jésus, when he is notified by a police inspector that Kader has died during the night, Freddy sits hunched over in a chair, glancing up slowly to acknowledge the news. As in much of the second half of the film, Freddy is shirtless. The pronounced scratches on his shoulders and arms and the positioning of his body lend him the appearance of one being flogged. A similar image occurs in L’Humanité, when Pharaon leans over to work the soil in his garden.

    Dumont’s broken heroes personify his idealized vision of “the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of . . . emotion.” Both Freddy and Pharaon are, on several occasions, overwhelmed by swells of inarticulate rage. Twice, Freddy lashes out by silently kicking a brick wall. In both instances, Dumont frames him in a long shot, suggesting that these outbursts are as much a part of his routine existence as are his moped rides and band practices. Likewise, the most powerful moment in L’Humanité comes when, while investigating the crime scene, Pharaon lets loose a long, wild scream that is eventually drowned out by the noise of a passing train. A “barbaric yawp,” indeed.

    As most critics have pointed out, L’Humanité is, on the surface, a police procedural that isn’t terribly concerned with the resolution of its mystery. By traditional standards, Pharaon is an incompetent detective, but it is, in fact, those very standards that Dumont is interrogating. The movie detective is an archetypal Western hero: stoic, logical, and doggedly determined. Pharaon, instead, is a man who, perhaps for the first time in his life, is overwhelmed by an empathy for others of which, Dumont suggests, very few of us are still capable. He longs desperately to connect with humanity—to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it, kiss it—but is frustrated at every turn. Even Domino, who wants, at least on some level, to comfort him, is able to offer only her body. Dumont reinforces Pharaon’s longing for connection by again lingering on shots of the body, but now from Pharaon’s subjective point of view: his boss’s sweat-soaked neck, his mother’s hand as she peels potatoes, Domino’s and Joseph’s bodies in the throes of sex, his own hand as he pets a nursing sow.

    This desperate pursuit of human connection is universal in Dumont’s world. Even Joseph and Domino, whose relationship is obviously driven by sex, are drawn together by some instinctive, biological need. Dumont does not censure this primal urge, though. In fact, again like Whitman, his controversial treatment of sex—including a penetration shot in La vie de Jésus —tears down the socio-religious barriers that often prevent us from acknowledging the base desires (words suddenly stripped of their negative connotations) that fuel so much of our behavior. Dumont does suggest, however, that a higher order of connection is attainable, but not without difficulty and sacrifice. In an outdoor cafe scene, we watch as Domino attempts to reach Joseph. She sits silently for several seconds before finally whispering, “I love you.” He’s able to respond only by stroking her hand, then Dumont cuts quickly to a shot of them having sex. A similar moment occurs in La vie de Jésus, when Freddy and Marie float over the countryside on a sightseeing chairlift. “Do you love me, Fred?” she asks. “Sure, I love you. Forever.” They kiss, but both appear more at ease in their embrace than in conversation. When they talk, they sit as far removed from one another as their chair will allow.

    The scene on the chairlift is notable because it exemplifies Dumont’s cinematographic style. Seeing his films for the first time, one is left a bit shaken by the graphic sexuality, by the brutality of the violence, and by the absurdity of his heroes. This, again, is the first goal of his project: to elicit a truthful emotional response from the viewer, even if that response is revulsion. But there’s also a formal beauty in Dumont’s films, a beauty that becomes more pronounced with subsequent viewings. During Freddy and Marie’s chairlift ride, Dumont cuts frequently to their subjective points of view. We see, from their perspective high above the ground, another of Dumont’s trademark images: an extreme long shot of the landscape, the widescreen frame divided by land and sky. The motif recurs with considerable frequency in both films, perhaps most notably in the opening of L’Humanité, a static shot that lasts nearly a minute as we watch Pharaon, dwarfed by the immense landscape, run from one side of the frame to the other.

    Dumont’s attention to landscapes, specifically, and to the natural world, in general, again harkens to Tarkovsky, who saw humanity’s increasing alienation from nature as symptomatic of its tragic loss of divine faith. Dumont has denied any personal belief in the existence of God, but has admitted to a fascination with the human history of Christ, evidenced most clearly in the title of his first film. In both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, Dumont’s camera acts as a mystical agent, offering the audience a glimpse of the transcendent that remains just beyond the reach of his characters. My favorite moment in these films comes just after one of Freddy’s epileptic seizures. He is with his friends, standing beside a road outside of town, when his body seizes, jerking him to the ground. The camera begins near eye level in a medium shot, but then cranes up slowly, rocking slightly from side to side as it climbs, floating over the boys until finally settling on another landscape. It’s a moment of breath-taking beauty that unites Dumont’s preoccupations with the body, the heart, and truth.

    A similar mystical effect is created by Dumont’s frequent subjective shots of the sky, which seem to embody, visually and emotionally, his characters’ search for meaning, a search that is then transferred to the viewer. The first of such shots occurs early in L’Humanité: upon hearing of the rape and murder of the young girl, Domino turns her gaze to the sky, as if searching for some explanation for the abominable act. Thirty minutes later, Dumont echoes that scene, when Joseph and Pharaon stand together, staring out at the sea. Hearing a voice, they both look back and to the sky, where they see Domino looking down at them from atop an old fort. By placing Domino in the position that we might assume to be filled by God (or fate or any number of mystical guiding principles), Dumont lends the image an ambiguity that refuses simplistic resolution.

    The same could be said of a scene near the end of La vie de Jésus, when Marie and Kader seek privacy in a section of a park that “smells like piss.” Finally alone, Marie embraces Kader and asks for his forgiveness. He looks upward, then, after a cut on an eye-line match, we see the sky as if through his eyes. It’s a beautifully complex sequence, one obviously rife with New Testament allusion. Much of the scene’s power is generated by a lovely close-up of Marie’s face pressed against Kader’s shoulder, a shot to which Dumont returns throughout L’Humanité in Pharaon’s many strange embraces. That beauty, and the potential connection that it seems to suggest, is tempered, though, by the aura of inevitable violence that surrounds the couple. The embrace is a desperate gesture for Marie, and one that, even after repeated viewings, I can only explain by acknowledging the powerful desperation I experience sympathetically each time I watch it.

    In “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” Flannery O’Connor defends her preoccupation with grotesque characters and absurd situations by claiming, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures” (806). A devout Catholic, O’Connor wanted to awaken her readers from the apathy and intellectual arrogance that blinded them to God’s presence in their lives, to force them to experience what Herman Melville called the “shock of recognition.” In both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, Bruno Dumont confronts his viewers from a similar tack. The final skyward glance in La vie de Jésus is Freddy’s. After escaping from the police station and once again wrecking his motorbike, he lies rigid on his back, hidden by tall grass. Dumont’s camera stares down at him as the scene begins to darken, leading us to expect another fade to black. Instead, he cuts to Freddy’s view of clouds drifting across the sun. What follows are two images that return us once again to the body: first, a close-up of an ant walking across his skin (a similar shot occurs in L’Humanité); then, a shot of his hands, dirty and broken beyond their years. As with the notorious final sequence of L’Humanité —Pharaon sits alone, inexplicably handcuffed, after Joseph has been accused of the murder—Dumont leaves Freddy’s fate unresolved. And we are left to wrestle with the consequences. I can’t rationally explain Pharaon’s behavior, nor Freddy’s. Dumont’s world, like O’Connor’s, is recognizable but distorted, heightened, surreal, which might also describe the way I feel when the credits roll: overwhelmed by the experience, but strangely alive to the possibility of something more.

    Works Cited

    Cousins, Mark, and Jonathon Romney. “L’Humanite: Rapture or Ridicule?” Sight and Sound 10.9 (2000): 22-25.

    Erickson, Steve. “Oh, the Humanité!” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. Time Out New York June 2000. (7 Mar. 2002).

    Falcon, Richard. “La Vie de Jesus/The Life of Jesus.” Rev. of La Vie de Jesus, by Bruno Dumont. Sight and Sound 8.9 (1998): 55.

    Klawans, Stuart. “Columbo This Isn’t.” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. The Nation. 10 July 2000. (7 Mar. 2002).

    O’Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” Flannery O’Connor: Selected Works. Ed. by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998. 801-06.

    Rayns, Tony. “L’Humanite.” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. Sight and Sound 10.10 (2000): 46-47.

    Walsh, David. “Interview with Bruno Dumont, Director of The Life of Jesus.” 20 Oct. 1997. (7 Mar. 2002).

    Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Norton, 1973.

  • Breathless (1960)

    Breathless (1960)

    Dir. by Jean-Luc Godard

    Images: Typical Godard, though toned down a bit in comparison to his later films: frequent jump cuts and moments of deliberate self-awareness, as in those scenes in which first Michel, then Patricia, address the camera directly. Film moderates between break-neck pacing (the shooting of the police officer, for instance) and slow introspection (Michel and Patricia talking in her apartment). Key point: Godard reminds us constantly that we are watching a movie, as in the carefully choreographed kisses and Michel’s obsession with Bogart.

    • • •

    If asked to define postmodernism, I would probably cheat and just show an early Godard film. Breathless likely wouldn’t be my first choice — I’d take Alphaville or A Woman is a Woman — but it certainly fits the bill. Godard caused a sensation forty years ago with this, his first film, by not only tearing down cinematic and narrative conventions, but by doing so with a sly, mocking wink to his audience. Like the best postmodern art, Breathless blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, elevating B-movie sensation onto the plane of high French art and, thankfully, humbling and demystifying the latter in the process. Its greatest asset, I think, is that it does so with a fun, irreverent self-awareness that prevents us from ever forgetting that the story we’re watching unfold before us — like life itself, some postmodernists would argue — is nothing more than that: a fiction.

    The story is simple: Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a charismatic young thug wanted by police for shooting an officer. Penniless, alone, and, well, horny, he attaches himself to Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a beautiful American student and aspiring journalist. The majority of the film chronicles Michel’s frustrated efforts to: 1) track down money owed to him so that he can escape to Italy, and 2) get Patricia back into bed. Technically, he succeeds in both endeavors, but, as has been the case with all storied young lovers on the run, before and since, his successes are always fleeting. “I want us to be like Romeo and Juliet,” Patricia naively tells Michel. Shakespeare this ain’t, but Michel’s fate is as inevitable as that poor sap’s from Verona.

    Along with inspiring countless imitators, from Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands to Natural Born Killers (not to mention that embarrassing Richard Gere remake), Breathless is most often remembered for — and remains fascinating today because of — Godard’s deliberate disregard for convention, both as a filmmaker and as a story-teller. His technical innovations, particularly the frequent jump cuts and hand held cinematography, have, in the four decades since, become the stuff of prime-time network TV (NYPD Blue comes to mind). Likewise, Godard’s rebellious irony and self-conscious play with film iconography (as seen most famously in Michel’s long gaze at a Humphrey Bogart lobby card) have become key terms in the contemporary film vocabulary — think The Simpsons, Pulp Fiction, Scream, and the like.

    What most fascinates me about Breathless, though, and what makes it still feel revolutionary today, is Godard’s fascination with the parts of life that we (still) rarely see on the screen. Midway through the film, when most “young lovers on the run” movies would turn their attention to a violent heist or a gratuitous sex scene, we follow Michel to Patricia’s apartment, where the two simply pass the time in idle conversation, waiting (like we do) for the excitement to begin again. The scene does help to further develop the characters — Patricia’s love and understanding of art distinguishes her further from Michel, who is still interested only in getting Patricia undressed — but, as was the case for many of his New Wave contemporaries, Godard evidences little hope for genuine communication. Michel and Patricia are characters in a film who behave as if they were characters in a film, performing their superficial roles/lives for the benefit of others, oblivious to the consequences.

    As with much postmodern art, my main critique of Breathless is ethical. The blurring of boundaries between high/low, fact/fiction, performance/life, though vital and beneficial to much that has happened socially and politically in the past four decades, can also collapse dangerously into total relativism. Godard has called Michel an “Anarchist Hero,” meaning, I assume, that his rebellion against authority is a martyrdom of sorts for the cause of greater freedom for all. Noble, I guess, and I probably would have bought it ten years ago. But it feels overly romantic and naïve to me now. Actually, it feels like the unbridled energy and maturing (but still immature) philosophy of a first-time filmmaker.

  • L’Humanite (1999)

    L’Humanite (1999)

    Dir. by Bruno Dumont

    Images: Dumont’s style could perhaps be described as a more polished verite. He uses only diegetic sound and shoots non-professional actors in stunning compositions and with impressive grace. Most striking images are those that foreground the “fleshiness” of characters. For instance, we ocassionally enter Pharaon’s POV as he stares at the back of the inspector’s neck or at his mother’s hand. Later, the camera lingers on a close-up of Pharaon, forcing us to listen attentively to his breathing. The explicit and unsentimental staging of sex between Domino and Joseph serves a similar purpose.

    • • •

    What interests me is life, people, the small things. Cinema is for the body, for the emotions. It needs to be restored among the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of joy, emotion, suffering, sympathy in death. They don’t speak, speaking is not important. What’s important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. The spectator must think. He has a lot of work to do. The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost. [He] has something that I’ve lost, that I must find again, I don’t know what exactly. I find that our culture, our civilization, has failed politically, socially, morally.

    Bruno Dumont

    Walt Whitman would be proud.

    It’s remarkable to hear echoes of Whitman in the voice of a contemporary filmmaker, but there he is, still singing the “body electric” and sounding his “barbaric yawp.” Like the poet before him, Dumont has turned to the arts in a Democratic spirit, celebrating the “common man” (for lack of a better term) in all of his rich complexity. Although I’ve always found the county/city dichotomy a bit reductive, I applaud Dumont’s devotion to it here, for it’s as radical a statement in cinema today as it was when Whitman staked his claim on verse with Leaves of Grass.

    Dumont is, of course, not totally without peer — Abbas Kiarostami is the closest kin to come to mind —but, in L’Humanite, he has made a landmark film that, ultimately, restores . . . well . . . humanity to the screen. In doing so, he has transcended the verite and dogme traditions. He has not simply turned a shaky camera on “real people” living “real lives,” a manipulative fiction now broadcast nightly on network television. He respects his characters, his form, and his audience too much to cheapen them in that way. Instead, like Whitman, he gives us stunning and occasionally shocking images of the body — here, a conflation of the body of flesh with the body politic — and requires us to respond genuinely to them.

    The cumulative effect of these images on the viewer is, at times, unnerving. L’Humanite slowly erodes the ironic detachment and cynicism that we’ve built as defenses, forcing us to actually feel something. It should come as little surprise that Dumont’s film was met by a chorus of jeers at Cannes, while Sam Mendes’ American Beauty — a film that, in many ways, adopts a similar humanist stance — won an Academy award. We seem to have surrendered our ability to recognize sincerity, opting instead for easy satire and emotional distance (not to mention “larger than life” performances over truthful ones). Ricky Fitts claims, in American Beauty, that “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is going to cave in,” but the scene ultimately has less impact than a plastic bag. It’s a disposable image, like so many of our manufactured emotions. L’Humanite doesn’t let us off so easy.

    Dumont establishes the tone of L’Humanite in its opening scene, a static long shot of the French countryside, which lasts nearly a minute. Across the horizon, we see a small figure running from one edge of the frame to the other. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is a police superintendent in a small French town, who is called to investigate the rape and murder of an 11 year old girl. We learn little about Pharaon’s past, other than that he has “lost” his woman and his child. He seems to have only one friend, a woman named Domino (Séverine Caneele), who tolerates Pharaon’s idiosyncrasies, but who prefers the company of her bus driver boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier).

    As most critics have pointed out, L’Humanite is, on the surface, a police procedural that isn’t terribly concerned with the resolution of its mystery. By traditional standards, Pharaon is an incompetent detective, but it is, in fact, those very standards that Dumont is interrogating. Movie detectives are typical of most Western heroes: stoic, logical, and doggedly determined. Pharaon, instead, is a man who, perhaps for the first time in his life, is overwhelmed by an empathy of which very few of us are still capable. He longs desperately to connect with humanity — to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it, kiss it — but is frustrated at every turn. Even Domino, who wants, at least on some level, to comfort him, is able to offer only her body (a too frequent substitute these days).

    The most powerful moment in L’Humanite comes when, while investigating the crime scene, Pharaon lets loose a long, wild scream. It is a moment of pure, inarticulate emotion unlike anything I have ever experienced from a film. That scream alone makes L’Humanite more real, more painful, and more affecting than any other film I’ve seen from the 90s. A barbaric yawp, indeed.

  • My Night at Maud’s (1969)

    My Night at Maud’s (1969)

    Dir. by Eric Rohmer

    Images: Complete lack of shot/reverse-shot. Instead, much of the dialogue is framed in static medium shots, some lasting more than a minute. Speaker doesn’t address camera directly, but the effect is the same, involving the viewer as an active participant. “Our” voice is heard from off screen.

    • • •

    Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a young engineer, spies his ideal woman at Sunday Mass. Francoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) is young, attractive, blonde, and, most importantly, a practicing Catholic. Before they have even met, Jean-Louis determines that Francoise will be his wife. His pursuit is interrupted, though, when he happens upon Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a childhood friend who he has not seen in 14 years. The two spend an evening discussing religion and philosophy, then agree to meet again the following day at the home of Maud (Francoise Fabian), a beautiful divorcee who Vidal has been seeing. When the three meet, their conversation again turns to philosophy and religion, particularly the consequences of Pascal’s wager.

    My admittedly superficial understanding of Pascal’s wager: Given even overwhelming odds against the existence of God (say, 100 to 1), we must bet on that one chance. For if God does not exist, and we lose the bet, then our loss is inconsequential. But if God does exist, then our lives gain meaning and our reward is eternal.

    The three main characters are an interesting study in contrast. Vidal sees the wager as a logical tool for explaining everything, from religion to politics. For Jean-Louis, Pascal is too strict, a logician who has sacrificed sensual pleasure (“Pascal never said, ‘This is good,’” Jean-Louis tells his companions). His stance on Pascal is one of the many contradictions in Jean-Louis’ ideas, as he himself adheres strictly to (or at least claims to) the mores of Catholicism. Maud is a sensual being and an atheist, who tires of Jean-Louis’ pretenses and deftly dissects them. When left alone with Maud, Jean-Louis is forced to test his principles, to overcome his temptation in order to remain faithful to Francoise, a woman he has not yet met.

    I have seen several of Rohmer’s films over the last few months, and they never fail to elicit from me the same response. Thirty minutes into them, I’m typically annoyed, either by the characters or by Rohmer’s style. His film worlds are populated by self-absorbed “navel-gazers” (a common criticism) and his use of voice over narration often seems redundant. But, without exception, I have eventually fallen into Rohmer’s rhythms and become fascinated by those same characters. Most impressive is his ability to build a logical dramatic tension into his finales. The end of My Night at Maud’s — a coda that takes place years later, in which we learn that Jean-Louis and Francoise are married and that she may have had an affair with Maud’s husband —felt more forced than most, but the result is the same: despite the film’s slow pacing (or, more likely, because of it) I became anxious for the film’s conclusion, unaware of which way the story would turn until it did.

  • Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

    Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

    Dir. by Agnès Varda

    Images: Constant movement, both of the camera and of objects and people within the frame (for instance, the rocking chair and swing in Cleo’s otherwise minimalist apartment). Jump cuts, though not used so frequently as in Godard. Long, overhead shots of Cleo as she wanders through the park (think Antoine and his classmates in 400 Blows). And, perhaps most importantly, the stares of passer-bys on Paris streets. As the camera assumes Cleo’s subjective perception, we, the audience, feel the eyes of men on us.

    • • •

    Cleo (Corrinne Marchand) is a beautiful, spoiled, self-obsessed pop singer. As the film opens, she is having her fortune told by a tarot reader, who is startled to discover death and cancer in the singer’s immediate future. Cleo is quite upset, as she is waiting to meet with a doctor to discuss the results of a medical examination. The remainder of the 90 minute film chronicles Cleo’s afternoon, from the time that she leaves the tarot reader until her appointment at the hospital two hours later. We see her return home to her fashionably minimalist apartment, where she tends her kittens, does her exercises, and meets with her songwriters. Exasperated by the jokes of her friends and by her own worries, she sets off alone through the streets, cafes, and parks of Paris, running errands with a friend and meeting a young soldier, Antoine, who is to ship off for the battlefields of Algeria on the following morning.

    Cléo de 5 à 7 is very much a film about perception — about looking and being looked at, and the warped sensibilities formed when worth is based solely on appearances. In that sense, it also seems to be very much a woman’s film (and one ripe for the Laura Mulvey treatment). This is most obvious in several scenes when Cleo is walking through crowded streets. Vardas cuts constantly to Cleo’s POV, using documentary-like footage of faces turning their eyes toward the camera. As a male viewer raised on the voyeuristic thrills of male filmmakers, it’s a disconcerting experience — feeling all of those eyes on me. The implication is that such an existence has disfigured Cleo’s self-image and stunted her emotional development. Vardas contrasts Cleo’s superficiality with the level-headed confidence of her friend Dorothee, a nude model who finds joy and satisfaction in her body, but not pride.

    The end of Cléo de 5 à 7 has some very effective moments, but suffers from a too tidy conclusion. While walking through a park, Cleo meets Antoine, a soldier who puts a human face on the war in Algiers, a conflict that is acknowledged throughout the film through radio reportsand overheard conversations. My favorite moment occurs when he accompanies Cleo to her scheduled appointment. As they ride a trolley across town, Antoine pulls a flower from a passing truck and places it in Cleo’s hair. Vardas lingers on the image, allowing 20 or 30 seconds of silence between the actors, their two faces framed tightly in close-up. There’s an awkward (but very charming) embarrassment between them. It’s a great example of what the New Wave directors have done best: capturing honest and instantly identifiable images. I think I would find the film more satisfying had it ended there. But in the final scenes, when Cleo learns that she is ill but will recover with a few months’ treatment, Vardas too neatly resolves a plot that is secondary to the film’s larger concern. My frustration is that Cleo, a woman whose worth has been formed by the opinions of the men around her, seems to have only found redemption through Antoine, another man. Perhaps a minor quibble, but one that leaves me less than satisfied.