Long Pauses

Tag: Genre: New Wave

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 4

    TIFF 2012 – Day 4

    Like Someone in Love

    Dir. by Abbas Kiarostami
    To begin: my favorite cut at TIFF. Soon after arriving at the home of a new client, a melancholic call girl makes small talk before strolling into his bedroom, undressing, crawling into bed, and falling asleep. Akiko (Rin Takanashi) appears finally to be at peace here, alone with Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an elderly sociology professor who lives quietly with his old books, old photos, and old music. Takashi covers the young girl and lowers the lights, leaving her to her sleep. In a blinding cut, the softness of Akiko’s profile and the warm light of Takashi’s bedroom is wiped away by a trademark Kiarostami image: white clouds and blue skies in abstract motion, reflections against a car windshield. A subtle drone can be heard on the soundtrack. (Is this Kiarostami’s first-ever use of non-diegetic music?) It’s now the morning after, and Takashi is giving Akiko a ride to campus. Like magic, a whore and her John have been transformed in a blink into an anxious schoolgirl and her doting elder.

    Like Someone in Love shares with Kiarostami’s previous film, Certified Copy, a fascination with the fluidity of identity and the pleasures and dangers of role-playing, particularly within relationships. Akiko adapts as best she can to the pressures of her life, shifting moment to moment from prostitute to student to girlfriend to granddaughter (both real and imagined) as each new environment demands. Takashi, likewise, steps bravely (if foolishly) into the role of grandfather and protector when called upon to do so, and the film’s most dramatic turn comes when a real-life threat shatters, quite literally, the fantasy he’d written for himself. I’m hardly the first person to point out the fun irony of the film’s title: each character performs like someone in love, miming behaviors learned from sappy songs and movie melodramas, including God-knows-how-many Japanese “fallen woman” and geisha films.

    I’m beginning to think of Like Someone in Love as Kiarostami’s horror film. Blake Williams has compared it to Chantal Akerman’s Les rendez-vous d’Anna, and I think he’s right. There’s a sense in both films that deep  trauma — both historical and personal — has been papered over by convention and cultural artifice, but  threatens always to leak through. Akerman is more explicit about it: think of Anna’s late-night ride on a crowded train that is populated suddenly by ghosts of the Holocaust. Kiarostami works, instead, with suggestion, with vague allusions to “what happened” in the past. The final moments of the film are a shock but hardly a surprise.

    Far from Vietnam (1967)

    A collaborative effort between Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Agnès Varda, and Claude Lelouch, Far from Vietnam lays out its position in the opening minutes: America’s military involvement in Vietnam is another “war of the rich waged against revolutionary struggles intended to establish governments that do not benefit the rich.” The bulk of the film then supports that argument via montage, juxtaposing footage of American jets taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier with images of Vietnamese women building make-shift air raid shelters out of concrete. Crowds of World War II vets chant “Bomb Hanoi!” while a young man holds his child and chants “Naaaaa-palm! Naa! Naa! Naaaaa-palm!” before adding with a sigh, “Kids like this are being burned alive. Kids like this.” A television broadcast of General Westmoreland discussing the “accidents and mechanical failures” that have resulted in a few unfortunate civilian casualties is cut against footage of a mangled Vietnamese child receiving CPR.

    Far from Vietnam is agit-prop. It was made as agit-prop and still reads as agit-prop (still-relevant agit-prop, unfortunately). It’s also a masterpiece. If tens of thousands of YouTube activists have co-opted the techniques of films like this, none have matched Marker’s violent cutting. The final sequence is as frenzied, exhausting, and incisive as anything I’ve ever seen. The film is also smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge and address the most obvious counter-arguments. “It gets complicated,” Claude Ridder says during the long, scripted monologue that is Resnais’s contribution to the film. The Ridder character plays the role of the conflicted intellectual, echoing (and complicating) a later, more biting charge from the film — that American society enjoys “the luxury of having students who protest” while slaves and farmers fight. Godard plays the role of Godard, critiquing the problems of representation and the very form of Far from Vietnam. His segment opens with a closeup of a camera lens, which in the context of the film becomes one more violent machine in a mechanized war. It’s echoed nicely by Klein’s section, a moving profile of the widow of Norman Morrison, the American Quaker whose self-immolation outside the Pentagon became a media sensation.

    Far and away the best feature film I saw at TIFF. I just wish it were easier to see again. Kudos to the festival for programming this beautifully restored 35mm print.

    Tower

    Dir. by Kazik Radwanski
    Radwanski establishes the formal rules of Tower in the opening minutes of the film and then, to his credit, follows them to the letter until the closing shot. The first image is of Derek (Derek Bogart) digging a hole in the woods. The camera is inches away from his face, where it will remain throughout the film, only occasionally panning or cutting away to the people around him. Tower takes the trademark cinematographic style of the Dardennes’ The Son to its logical extreme, performing a disarmingly intimate study of a 34-year-old man who lives in the basement of his parents’ Toronto home.

    The key word there is “intimate.” Derek is an awkward, unmotivated, and self-defeating guy, but he’s socially competent. He dates someone throughout most of the film. He’s invited to parties. He has friendly, if superficial, relationships with his co-workers. The camera, in effect, gets closer to Derek than any of the people in his life do, and as a result the film emphasizes real physical proximity. Think for a minute about the number of people you touch meaningfully on any given day. A spouse or partner? A child? Films often make physical isolation a metaphor for emotional detachment; Tower is about the thing itself. Intimacy is felt profoundly in the film because it is so profoundly lacking.

    Tower is in many respects a classic “first film.” It has the whiff of autobiography — Derek toils away in his bedroom on a short animated film that he’s reluctant to share with the world — and I quickly realized the film would stop rather than end (although a friend’s reading of the final sequence gives it a neater ending than I’d first assumed). Also, because it’s a kind of gimmick film (the form of it, I mean), I’m not sure what to think of Radwanski or how to predict his next move. But I’m eager to see what he does next.

    Wavelengths 3

    Just a quick word on Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, which was my favorite film at TIFF. The word I keep using to describe it is “breathe.” It breathes, and in ways that seem to mark a significant evolution in Dorsky’s recent work. The camera is moving more, and it’s moving into open spaces, even capturing portraits and ending on a long shot of a ship out at sea. For the second year in a row Dorsky’s film literally blew a fuse in the Jackman Hall projection booth, and I couldn’t have been more happy about it because it gave me a second chance to look at what might be the most beautiful filmed image I’ve ever seen. It’s a shot of a flag billowing against a dark sky, which Dorsky filmed as a reflection in a window across the street. That image alone is staggering, but it becomes downright transcendent when, miraculously, a mannequin appears from shadows behind the window. And that’s when you notice the clouds passing in front of the sun. Shadows and light. Shadows and light. It’s like all of cinema reduced to a single instant.

  • Seeking Film Suggestions

    Seeking Film Suggestions

    For a couple years now, I’ve been meeting with some friends once or twice a month to eat lunch and discuss a movie. We’ve always taken turns picking films, sometimes grouping the choices around a particular theme or genre, but it’s been a fairly random affair. Since leaving academia, this group has been a lifesaver — my one regular opportunity to have a rigorous intellectual discussion without apology or embarrassment. The other members have become good friends, and, importantly, I’ve come to really trust them. Even when they don’t particularly like a film, I can always count on them to engage with it honestly and on its own terms. I’m guessing other cinephiles will be able to sympathize with me on this somewhat odd point: Sharing a loved film with others involves some emotional risk-taking. I don’t trust Beau Travail and The Son to just anyone. (To their credit, my friends all loved those films, which were two of my first, strategically-chosen picks.)

    We’ve hit a point where we want to rethink our group a bit, so after a fun discussion yesterday it was decided that, instead of choosing individual films, we’d take turns programming and moderating short series. I’m going first and have settled on the New Wave as a topic. Before I joined, the group watched Breathless, and a few months ago we did My Night at Maud’s. We’re going to begin the series with The 400 Blows, which none of the others have seen, and then I’m probably going to pick a late-60s Godard, maybe Week End or Two or Things I Know About Her. But what I’m most excited about is picking contemporary films that allude in various ways to the New Wave. So, for example, I’m starting with the Truffaut so that we can later watch Tsai’s What Time Is It There? I’m playing with other ideas but would be curious to hear suggestions:

    What films would you show to illustrate the spirit and lasting influence of the New Wave? And what are some of your favorite reads on the subject?

  • Godard ’66-’67

    Godard ’66-’67

    Seven or eight years ago, when I was just beginning to explore world cinema, I went through a Godard phase during which I watched most of his early features — Breathless, Les Carabiniers, Contempt, and five of the Anna Karina films. I ended my run with Pierrot le Fou, partly because the later films weren’t then available on DVD but also because Godard’s turn at that point in his career threw me for a loop. It wasn’t the formal complexity of Pierrot that startled me (formally, it isn’t terribly different from the films that preceded it); it was the anger, bitterness, and despair. The final sequence in that film — Belmondo painting his face, wrapping his head in dynamite, lighting the fuse, struggling for a few terrifying seconds to put it out again, and then (after a cut to a long shot) blowing himself to pieces — scared the hell out of me. I wasn’t sure I was ready to follow Godard in this new direction.

    Over the last few weeks I’ve watched for the first time the five features that followed Pierrot le Fou, all of them released in 1966 and 1967: Masculin Feminin, Made in U.S.A., 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, La Chinoise, and Weekend. They mark several key transitions in Godard’s career. As his marriage to Karina dissolved, so did their working relationship, and Made in U.S.A. would be their last collaboration. Jean-Pierre Leaud, who’d made uncredited appearances in a few of Godard’s earlier films, stars in four of the five here, the exception being 2 or 3 Things . . . , which Godard filmed concurrently with Made in U.S.A. (one was shot in the morning, the other at night). Godard’s use of Leaud seems to reflect his growing disenchantment with his own generation, who are increasingly represented as grotesque bourgeois decadents (the couple in Weekend, for example) by comparison to the young radicals who were then animating so much political unrest in France and the rest of the world. We see this also in Godard’s use of his new young wife and leading lady, Anne Wiazemsky, whose expressionless face offers a stark contrast to Karina’s glamour, and whose characters are more likely to assassinate government dignitaries or spraypaint Maoist slogans than to sing or dance.

    It’s the formal turns, though, that make these films so damn exciting. I happened to have watched Masculin Feminin just a few hours before meeting Caveh Zahedi for dinner last month, and I was surprised when he told me he’d never seen it all the way through. Always the Brechtian, Godard had been using distancing effects and winks to the camera (both literal and metaphoric) since his pre-Breathless days, but the interview segments in Masculin Feminin disregard, once and for all, the documentary/fiction distinction. (They also strike me as the most Caveh-like sequences in any Godard film I’ve seen.) I especially love the long interview with France’s “real” Miss Nineteen, which begins as an innocuous enough conversation before turning to more sensitive and awkward subjects like birth control and reactionary politics. Godard echoes the interview with similar conversations between his “fictional” characters. By La Chinoise, one year later, Godard has dropped the formal artifice completely, including in the final cut his off-camera questions to Leaud, the actor/character — questions about the film itself!

    Tearing down the distinctions between documentary and fiction is a key step in Godard’s deliberate move away from genre (the gangsters, singers, soldiers, and sci-fi detectives of his early films) and toward something closer in spirit to an essay. Juliette Jeanson of 2 or 3 Things . . . might call to mind Nana of My Life to Live, but her turn to prostitution isn’t some inevitable concession to narrative convention; it’s an economic transaction. Godard’s growing dissatisfaction with commercial cinema is palpable here. With 2 or 3 Things . . . he is exploring film, instead, as an explicit method of analysis — in this case to study and critique the suburbanization of Paris and the growing middle class. In this context, the apocalyptic violence and decay of Weekend is downright sublime. “End of film. End of cinema.”

    I’m less willing at this point to comment on the political content of these films. I still hope to track down a few of the Dziga Vertov Group projects, which, I assume, will help to unravel Godard’s thinking in this regard. That a film like La Chinoise even exists says a great deal about the tenor of the times in which it was made, and I’m eager to give it another viewing. (I watched it last night, so it’s just begun to percolate.) For now, I’m content to allow the sloganeering and the recitations stream right on by and to enjoy, instead, the revolutionary dissonances of Godard’s aesthetic choices (and surely that was his intent): His Mondrian-like use of blue, white, red, and yellow (see image above); the minutes-long tracking and crane shots; the piles of burning wreckage; the urgent absurdity of it all.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.