It would be an act of critical generosity to describe this film as flawed. More accurately, “I’ve Loved You So Long” is a work in which the writer/director, Philippe Claudel, has avoided the tasks he set himself, choosing instead to engage the viewer at the lowest level of sentimentality, counting on the audience’s love affair with Kristin Scott Thomas to breathe oxygen into an airless piece. A slow and intentionally misleading storyline asks the viewer first to try to understand Scott Thomas’ character, Juliette, and then slaps the audience with a volte face that nonetheless could have been compelling if Claudel had used it as something more than a tear-jerker ending.
From the film’s opening image of Juliette—just out of prison after 15 years—waiting at the airport to be picked up by her sister, Lea, it is evident that a secret will ultimately be revealed. If this woman served a long jail sentence, it was obviously her choice. Why and for what would she have been wrongly condemned? Near the story’s end, a circumstantial occurrence reveals that Juliette’s murder of her terminally ill young son was a mercy killing done by her as a doctor to spare the boy the anguished final days of dying. Conveniently, the trial brought none of this to light—no autopsy, no mitigating circumstances, so that Juliette’s right to her martyrdom remained absolute and unchallenged, allowing her to return to society carrying the ultimate stigma of filicide.
This might have been a movie about a woman having found through the darkest secret her only way to cope with her child’s death. The work would then have had its life in the tension between an unrevealed truth and an unbearable agony. Her interactions with the world she has rejoined would offer her the redemptive opportunity to let go of the specialness of secrecy and face openly that even the greatest loss does not equal the end of life.
The time in prison which she engineered, however improbable as credible plot, would then have been a confinement for her unwarranted hubris in allowing a false narrative to dictate a conclusion. When and how would she see her untold tale as a running away from the challenges of life? That sequence might have been compelling.
Unfortunately, the film ignores the impossibility that no one else noticed the child’s disease and disfiguration. As a doctor Juliette processed her son’s blood tests herself and did not feel the need to verify the results or seek other opinions about treatment, nor did she feel the need or obligation to confide in her ex-husband, the boy’s father. No one was to have a hand in this but she.
A very different character could have emerged of a selfish woman struggling with her own inability to allow her child a separate existence, unwilling to grant him his place in the complexity of a mysterious larger world. In her act of mercy, Juliette retains the starring role. There are many ways besides the literal act of murder in which narcissistic and unfulfilled parents can burden, thwart and cripple their children as if they were merely props in a claustrophobic play and not beings with lives of their own.
The parole officer to whom Juliette must report weekly wants only to tell her about his own life and his yearning to go to the Orinoco river, a kind of image for him of journeying to the source, into expansiveness, away from the prosaic routine and disappointment about things not having worked out on a personal level—his divorce and separation from his young daughter. The ’trip to the Orinoco’ ends in his suicide by gunshot; he can find no actual way to enlarge his existence, to incorporate the painful facts of his life into the continuing journey. His is the active version of the symbolic passive suicide which has been Juliette’s fate in failing to confront her unfinished life.
For Juliette, the director conflates discovery with self-discovery; the vignettes of the film seem calculated only for their emotional effect on the audience, not as testament to the complexity of evolving from or evoking depth experience in response to the difficult and tragic realities of life. Since complexity has been absent from her return to society, Juliette’s voyage has had no thrust and the viewer feels tricked and patronized. If it is really only that she needed to tell someone else—or have someone else “know”, what is the point of all she has done and been through? How, after all this, can that make any difference to her? We are left knowing Juliette as little at the end as at the beginning, but with good reason not to trust her or the director.
Showing newest posts with label French language film. Show older posts
Showing newest posts with label French language film. Show older posts
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie)
Jacques Nolot’s “Before I Forget” begins with an arresting and compelling visual prologue: upon a brilliant, stark white screen a small black dot suddenly appears and slowly begins to enlarge.
Is the black dot an oculus into an infinite star-less future on the other side of all this whiteness- the round opening increasing in size as we approach and the view beyond the portal broadens? Or is it, rather, a small hard-edged dark planet aimed and headed straight toward us, gaining girth as it hurtles smoothly, effortlessly through an utterly empty atmosphere?
The absolute lack of articulation within each extreme- white and black- becomes entirely unnerving as the speed and size suddenly increase out of proportion, until the entire screen is filled with blackness.
The prologue imitates and is a 2-dimensional diagram of the experience of life. The initial uniformly smooth and slow pacing of the increase in size of the black dot is easily comprehended and magically- though logically- creates an assumption that this rate and ratio will naturally continue until darkness prevails and the light is entirely gone- nothing shocking, almost a pre-nostalgic response to the inevitable. The sudden change in tempo alters the point of view, destroying the complacency of presumed understanding, creating an anxiety that reverses the previous perception of outcome: what was inevitable in its time now comes frighteningly too soon. What is also entirely absent from both prologue and film is the notion of transformation- alternate possibility.
The prologue also describes the trajectory of the story “Before I Forget” which follows Pierre, a 60ish HIV+ gay man, his small circle of contemporaries and the young hustlers they ardently seek out and support with repetitive rounds of sexual episodes more reminiscent of Sisyphus’ labors than spontaneous journeys of desire.
The story that unfolds is a captivating amalgam of unrelenting banality and touching humanity, describing a world in which nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo. Both the young and old characters are stuck in patterns so predictable their lives come to look more like the orbits of celestial clusters of inorganic matter, each distinctly different, yet carelessly and powerlessly caught in a magnetic pull, circling the Big Cock.
Really, this world is a binary solar system revolving around two opposite stars that each appear in the form of a literary statement. The Dark Star is a long cerebral quote about stupidity and man’s propensity for making wrong choices because of choosing form over content, marvelously conveyed over Pierre’s car-radio as he is about to set off for an afternoon’s saunter through the local porn theater. The Bright Star is a glorious re-found love-letter from the youthful Pierre’s old sugar daddy, Toutounne, crammed with the scrappy and radiant overflow of exacting particulars that leave no doubt about the real-life love and desire still pouring off the page fifteen years after the fact.
Pierre’s circle includes a claustrophobic and vain colleague whose only interest in Pierre is comparing the price of hustlers- his fantasies of vibrancy revolve around forbidden blow-jobs with armed policemen; George, the married lawyer whose slim, occasional chances for sexual tidbits on the side seem always to be thwarted by chance; and Paul, a former convict with a much darker past and more practical tastes. Paul was the heir of his sugar daddy Gaston and Paul, unlike Pierre, achieved the means to live as he wanted. Paul exemplifies in purist form life lived moment to moment solely with the aim of advantage. He stands for the aspect of rampant capitalism under which there is nothing not for sale and someone is always going to benefit. The challenge for economic man is never to lose sight of how the game is played; a winner will always hit the jackpot. Being the winner is not just all that counts, it is all there is.
Money and time are inextricably linked and honored above all else. At one extreme, the aim is automatic prolongation of life, lived or unlived; at the other extreme lies the unrelenting and unforgiving finitude of the pay-per-view “professional hour”- whether with the hustler or the psychologist- always commanding: ”Now/NotNow” and equally unable to conform to life as experience rather than schedule.
When Pierre climbs- with surprising alacrity- over an ivy-covered wall in the deep dark of a moonless night, we imagine that he is out for another round of half-hearted sexual encounters. It is rather a memory of the Bright Star now absent from his world that draws Pierre like a pilgrim into the shadows of the cemetery for a brief visit at Toutounne’s grave.
Perhaps this gives an idea for the film’s title; the cluster of preening and self-regarding, aging narcissists is more like a gaggle of old house pets, exotic spoiled cats, running after each delectably cute mouse, dangling the captured creature but no longer in the game for blood or potency. They have forgotten what it was they were after, what deep inner needs jumpstarted the pattern of desire while being unable to see it through. Pattern and aging have taken the place of encounter. They cannot move on. What unites them all is a narrowness of vision. Will they ever meet life with an openness to widening the spectrum of observation? The opportunity afforded Pierre by Toutounne’s letter may have been his last chance to remember- or be led into an appreciation- that a moment of real meeting has the unique capacity to alter the ultimate trajectory of the Sisyphean boulder’s path. Once the ability to be affected by felt experience disappears, repetition alone remains, along with the entrapment of pointless searches and yearned for degradations.
Pierre is infantile and obvious, with a matter-of-fact and contradictory presence that belies someone who has been loved for nothing more than being himself; he is quick to point out that he will not be so generous with the next generation.
Pierre can always be relied upon to do exactly what he says he won’t, so the film ends with a scene as slow as the prologue of the black dot. Dressed in drag, like an old suburban mall beer hall waitress out for a fancy dinner in the city, complete with a long and merciless raven-black wig and simple shift with lace trim, Pierre goes off to the sex club/porn theater with one of his regular hustlers. At last he turns and enters the theater, slowly swallowed into the pitch black that describes the future, both literally and figuratively, near and far.
Is the black dot an oculus into an infinite star-less future on the other side of all this whiteness- the round opening increasing in size as we approach and the view beyond the portal broadens? Or is it, rather, a small hard-edged dark planet aimed and headed straight toward us, gaining girth as it hurtles smoothly, effortlessly through an utterly empty atmosphere?
The absolute lack of articulation within each extreme- white and black- becomes entirely unnerving as the speed and size suddenly increase out of proportion, until the entire screen is filled with blackness.
The prologue imitates and is a 2-dimensional diagram of the experience of life. The initial uniformly smooth and slow pacing of the increase in size of the black dot is easily comprehended and magically- though logically- creates an assumption that this rate and ratio will naturally continue until darkness prevails and the light is entirely gone- nothing shocking, almost a pre-nostalgic response to the inevitable. The sudden change in tempo alters the point of view, destroying the complacency of presumed understanding, creating an anxiety that reverses the previous perception of outcome: what was inevitable in its time now comes frighteningly too soon. What is also entirely absent from both prologue and film is the notion of transformation- alternate possibility.
The prologue also describes the trajectory of the story “Before I Forget” which follows Pierre, a 60ish HIV+ gay man, his small circle of contemporaries and the young hustlers they ardently seek out and support with repetitive rounds of sexual episodes more reminiscent of Sisyphus’ labors than spontaneous journeys of desire.
The story that unfolds is a captivating amalgam of unrelenting banality and touching humanity, describing a world in which nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo. Both the young and old characters are stuck in patterns so predictable their lives come to look more like the orbits of celestial clusters of inorganic matter, each distinctly different, yet carelessly and powerlessly caught in a magnetic pull, circling the Big Cock.
Really, this world is a binary solar system revolving around two opposite stars that each appear in the form of a literary statement. The Dark Star is a long cerebral quote about stupidity and man’s propensity for making wrong choices because of choosing form over content, marvelously conveyed over Pierre’s car-radio as he is about to set off for an afternoon’s saunter through the local porn theater. The Bright Star is a glorious re-found love-letter from the youthful Pierre’s old sugar daddy, Toutounne, crammed with the scrappy and radiant overflow of exacting particulars that leave no doubt about the real-life love and desire still pouring off the page fifteen years after the fact.
Pierre’s circle includes a claustrophobic and vain colleague whose only interest in Pierre is comparing the price of hustlers- his fantasies of vibrancy revolve around forbidden blow-jobs with armed policemen; George, the married lawyer whose slim, occasional chances for sexual tidbits on the side seem always to be thwarted by chance; and Paul, a former convict with a much darker past and more practical tastes. Paul was the heir of his sugar daddy Gaston and Paul, unlike Pierre, achieved the means to live as he wanted. Paul exemplifies in purist form life lived moment to moment solely with the aim of advantage. He stands for the aspect of rampant capitalism under which there is nothing not for sale and someone is always going to benefit. The challenge for economic man is never to lose sight of how the game is played; a winner will always hit the jackpot. Being the winner is not just all that counts, it is all there is.
Money and time are inextricably linked and honored above all else. At one extreme, the aim is automatic prolongation of life, lived or unlived; at the other extreme lies the unrelenting and unforgiving finitude of the pay-per-view “professional hour”- whether with the hustler or the psychologist- always commanding: ”Now/NotNow” and equally unable to conform to life as experience rather than schedule.
When Pierre climbs- with surprising alacrity- over an ivy-covered wall in the deep dark of a moonless night, we imagine that he is out for another round of half-hearted sexual encounters. It is rather a memory of the Bright Star now absent from his world that draws Pierre like a pilgrim into the shadows of the cemetery for a brief visit at Toutounne’s grave.
Perhaps this gives an idea for the film’s title; the cluster of preening and self-regarding, aging narcissists is more like a gaggle of old house pets, exotic spoiled cats, running after each delectably cute mouse, dangling the captured creature but no longer in the game for blood or potency. They have forgotten what it was they were after, what deep inner needs jumpstarted the pattern of desire while being unable to see it through. Pattern and aging have taken the place of encounter. They cannot move on. What unites them all is a narrowness of vision. Will they ever meet life with an openness to widening the spectrum of observation? The opportunity afforded Pierre by Toutounne’s letter may have been his last chance to remember- or be led into an appreciation- that a moment of real meeting has the unique capacity to alter the ultimate trajectory of the Sisyphean boulder’s path. Once the ability to be affected by felt experience disappears, repetition alone remains, along with the entrapment of pointless searches and yearned for degradations.
Pierre is infantile and obvious, with a matter-of-fact and contradictory presence that belies someone who has been loved for nothing more than being himself; he is quick to point out that he will not be so generous with the next generation.
Pierre can always be relied upon to do exactly what he says he won’t, so the film ends with a scene as slow as the prologue of the black dot. Dressed in drag, like an old suburban mall beer hall waitress out for a fancy dinner in the city, complete with a long and merciless raven-black wig and simple shift with lace trim, Pierre goes off to the sex club/porn theater with one of his regular hustlers. At last he turns and enters the theater, slowly swallowed into the pitch black that describes the future, both literally and figuratively, near and far.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Flight of the Red Balloon
With “Flight of the Red Balloon” Hou Hsiao-Hsien has created a jewel of lighter-than-air deception and quiet revelation that is both homage to and update of Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 French classic, “The Red Balloon.” The childhood loneliness at the core of the earlier film here permeates all the characters’ lives. Despite love, desire and caring good will the characters do not connect but merely overlap. Machines and technology mediate their interactions with themselves and with each other.
In the sparkling light of a summer afternoon, a young boy, Simon, scrambles up the railing of the Place de la Bastille Metro stop. Pleading with the eponymous red balloon- off screen, above the trees- to come to him, offering a king’s ransom of 100 candies, upping the ante to 2,000 caramels, but the balloon does not respond. Accepting his loss, Simon descends into the subway.
The camera drifts upwards and a glimpse of transparent red gives the impression that the balloon is nestled or trapped in the elaborate art nouveau sculpture of the Metro entrance. But this is a false start: only the crimson-tinted globe of a period lamplight. The camera proceeds upwards and we see the too-perfect opaque orb of the red balloon that caught Simon’s eye and attention.
The balloon lingers over the requisite attractive Parisian rooftops until it comes to rest on a Metro platform, patiently awaiting Simon’s train. The train arrives, the doors open; the adults come and go, pushing the unwanted obstacle of the balloon out of their way. Simon sees the balloon hovering just inches from his grasp, but this time it is he that does not respond. The train doors close and Simon goes on his appointed way. The recurrence of the balloon is not seen as magical or surprising or meaningful. Though Simon sees the balloon, its appearance does not connect to anything inside him or to the moment just a few minutes before when the balloon was the object of desire and promised sacrifice. The balloon appears many times throughout the film, though it will never again elicit a response.
In another telling of this tale one imagines that Simon would step off the train, grab hold of the balloon and be led into a journey of the unknown, or, at least, that he might try to bring the balloon into the train, activating the metaphor of merging the “other” life into the quotidian life, with all its tandem trials and lessons. But neither happens.
Song is a Chinese film student studying in Paris. She floats down a sidewalk with the same vaguely random directionality as the balloon, momentarily fluttering in a swirl at the streets' intersection, finally coming to the address she seeks. Entering a small dark theater, she encounters the rehearsal of a Chinese-inspired puppet performance that tells of a young couple, separated by the fierce Dragon king who holds the beloved prisoner at the bottom of the sea. The lover vows to boil away the ocean into a mist of oblivion to regain his true love.
Suzanne is the magnificently nuanced and varied voices of the puppets. She is a blonde rapture of vibrant talent and too much décolletage, an incarnation of frazzled beauty and distraction. Suzanne has hired Song as sitter/nanny for her son, Simon. Together they go to pick up the boy from school and Suzanne sends them home as she returns to the theater. We come to understand the sprawling nature of Suzanne’s life; a whirl of objects and emotions without order or scale, her precision is focused only in her work. On their walk home Song tells Simon of the Red Balloon film and at that moment points out a red balloon drawn onto the side of an adjacent shop. Simon does not know of the old movie and isn't interested in the image across the street; he wants to play a game of pinball.
Lovely and imperturbable, Song floats just above engagement with Simon and Suzanne, acting often as a buffer and never at a distance too great for observation. Simon is gentle, bright and related, never withholding or fearful. Song and Simon video their daily walks and errands. Song engages the boy, fleshing out his story, neither avoiding nor pursuing any of the difficult discoveries such as Simon’s parents divorce, his father’s absence or the absence of his “sort of” sister, Louise, who lives with their grandfather in Brussels.
Later, Simon and Song enter the apartment and find the usual clutter overwhelmed by a cascade of files and papers, boxes and bags. Tearful and angry, Suzanne is on the phone, saying that she cannot find the Lease Agreement, that since her husband left she cannot find where he put it or remember if she might have moved it. Suddenly the impermanence expressed in Song’s foreignness and Simon’s absent family is transferred to Suzanne herself; domestic security, apparently, is another thing of the past.
The puppet rehearsal continues and we see the undaunted young lover ladling cup after cup of seawater into a boiling pot. 2,500- 4,652 ladles of water, he counts as he goes, his ardor undiminished. A magical Genie appears, all hair and arms. To reward the young man’s effort and dedication the genie offers a magical golden coin that will help drain the ocean, forcing the Dragon king to release the beloved. In this second view there is an ominous discordance. Of course we want the young man to regain his true love, but we live in a world where technology has made actual and possible that which before was merely metaphor. Is the young man now a sociopath intent on achieving his goal at the cost to the world of the very ocean of life?
We learn that Song is making a film of a red balloon for her school project and Simon, dressed all in green, is helping by carrying the balloon. Song explains that green is a very easy color to erase digitally, so that she can make it appear that the balloon is traveling of its own volition. Suddenly the magic of the red balloon is entirely gone.
The problem of the Lease Agreement concerns the downstairs neighbor who doesn’t pay his rent; Suzanne owns that apartment as well. It had been her mother’s, and she will need it when Louise returns to Paris for school, deftly indicating that Suzanne herself is the product of a broken home. She finds the Lease Agreement and must now begin the process to force the errant downstairs neighbor to release her apartment; true love is replaced with property. It turns out that Louise does not want to come back to Paris for school, and one can see why. Her mother’s world is messy, complex and costly in many ways to herself and everyone around her. Though Suzanne is generous in emotion and substance, hers is an outmoded style, not technologically clean, not so easy to erase.
Set into the filigree of this family story is a scene of a Chinese puppet master giving a demonstration, organized by Suzanne, for a small group of students. The master's movements are so few and so slight it appears that the cloth and carved-wood doll really is a living being for whom the puppeteer has merely been so kind as to cup his hands, creating a tiny stage for the little performer to enact his scene. The puppet master appears to be doing nothing more than assisting the puppet to do what it wants, a humble gesture of loving helpfulness.
On a school trip to the Musee d’Orsay Simon’s class looks at a painting of a scene from the turn of the last century- a child chases a red ball in a dark and verdant park. In the distance, across a silent pond, a young adult couple can be seen. Who might these people be- the watching parents? More importantly, where is the artist standing, from where is the scene depicted, high above? Is the painting happy or sad? A little of both, one student replies, as Simon gazes up through the gallery’s skylight at the red balloon that flutters just above the glass. It has followed him throughout the film and, as before, he has no response to seeing it again, nor to the co-incidence- synchronicity- of seeing it represented in the painting even as it hovers above, embodying the artist's point of view.
The endless variety and sophistication of technology has robbed the world of its voice for magic and the extraordinary. In one scene Simon is “drawing” Louise through a projector device that allows him to trace her outline on an affixed sheet of paper; he looks into the machine, not at her. Suzanne peers through the viewfinder of her camera to record this fleeting moment of quiet childhood togetherness; like the scattered family it will not last.
One imagines, if one doesn’t know the effect first-hand, that to Simon, brought up with technology and totally conversant with its varied modalities, seeing the red balloon now here, now there, can carry no meaning because he cannot differentiate these occurrences from the sequential and random representations on a screen while web or channel surfing or gaming. His range of expression is limited to pressing buttons and moving “mice”; all of which breaks down barriers of conventional vision while subtly directing and coercing as it robs vision of its capacity to see anew, differently, or to persist on a path of one's own making. Since anything can always appear anywhere at any time, no particular appearance is significant.
In the sparkling light of a summer afternoon, a young boy, Simon, scrambles up the railing of the Place de la Bastille Metro stop. Pleading with the eponymous red balloon- off screen, above the trees- to come to him, offering a king’s ransom of 100 candies, upping the ante to 2,000 caramels, but the balloon does not respond. Accepting his loss, Simon descends into the subway.
The camera drifts upwards and a glimpse of transparent red gives the impression that the balloon is nestled or trapped in the elaborate art nouveau sculpture of the Metro entrance. But this is a false start: only the crimson-tinted globe of a period lamplight. The camera proceeds upwards and we see the too-perfect opaque orb of the red balloon that caught Simon’s eye and attention.
The balloon lingers over the requisite attractive Parisian rooftops until it comes to rest on a Metro platform, patiently awaiting Simon’s train. The train arrives, the doors open; the adults come and go, pushing the unwanted obstacle of the balloon out of their way. Simon sees the balloon hovering just inches from his grasp, but this time it is he that does not respond. The train doors close and Simon goes on his appointed way. The recurrence of the balloon is not seen as magical or surprising or meaningful. Though Simon sees the balloon, its appearance does not connect to anything inside him or to the moment just a few minutes before when the balloon was the object of desire and promised sacrifice. The balloon appears many times throughout the film, though it will never again elicit a response.
In another telling of this tale one imagines that Simon would step off the train, grab hold of the balloon and be led into a journey of the unknown, or, at least, that he might try to bring the balloon into the train, activating the metaphor of merging the “other” life into the quotidian life, with all its tandem trials and lessons. But neither happens.
Song is a Chinese film student studying in Paris. She floats down a sidewalk with the same vaguely random directionality as the balloon, momentarily fluttering in a swirl at the streets' intersection, finally coming to the address she seeks. Entering a small dark theater, she encounters the rehearsal of a Chinese-inspired puppet performance that tells of a young couple, separated by the fierce Dragon king who holds the beloved prisoner at the bottom of the sea. The lover vows to boil away the ocean into a mist of oblivion to regain his true love.
Suzanne is the magnificently nuanced and varied voices of the puppets. She is a blonde rapture of vibrant talent and too much décolletage, an incarnation of frazzled beauty and distraction. Suzanne has hired Song as sitter/nanny for her son, Simon. Together they go to pick up the boy from school and Suzanne sends them home as she returns to the theater. We come to understand the sprawling nature of Suzanne’s life; a whirl of objects and emotions without order or scale, her precision is focused only in her work. On their walk home Song tells Simon of the Red Balloon film and at that moment points out a red balloon drawn onto the side of an adjacent shop. Simon does not know of the old movie and isn't interested in the image across the street; he wants to play a game of pinball.
Lovely and imperturbable, Song floats just above engagement with Simon and Suzanne, acting often as a buffer and never at a distance too great for observation. Simon is gentle, bright and related, never withholding or fearful. Song and Simon video their daily walks and errands. Song engages the boy, fleshing out his story, neither avoiding nor pursuing any of the difficult discoveries such as Simon’s parents divorce, his father’s absence or the absence of his “sort of” sister, Louise, who lives with their grandfather in Brussels.
Later, Simon and Song enter the apartment and find the usual clutter overwhelmed by a cascade of files and papers, boxes and bags. Tearful and angry, Suzanne is on the phone, saying that she cannot find the Lease Agreement, that since her husband left she cannot find where he put it or remember if she might have moved it. Suddenly the impermanence expressed in Song’s foreignness and Simon’s absent family is transferred to Suzanne herself; domestic security, apparently, is another thing of the past.
The puppet rehearsal continues and we see the undaunted young lover ladling cup after cup of seawater into a boiling pot. 2,500- 4,652 ladles of water, he counts as he goes, his ardor undiminished. A magical Genie appears, all hair and arms. To reward the young man’s effort and dedication the genie offers a magical golden coin that will help drain the ocean, forcing the Dragon king to release the beloved. In this second view there is an ominous discordance. Of course we want the young man to regain his true love, but we live in a world where technology has made actual and possible that which before was merely metaphor. Is the young man now a sociopath intent on achieving his goal at the cost to the world of the very ocean of life?
We learn that Song is making a film of a red balloon for her school project and Simon, dressed all in green, is helping by carrying the balloon. Song explains that green is a very easy color to erase digitally, so that she can make it appear that the balloon is traveling of its own volition. Suddenly the magic of the red balloon is entirely gone.
The problem of the Lease Agreement concerns the downstairs neighbor who doesn’t pay his rent; Suzanne owns that apartment as well. It had been her mother’s, and she will need it when Louise returns to Paris for school, deftly indicating that Suzanne herself is the product of a broken home. She finds the Lease Agreement and must now begin the process to force the errant downstairs neighbor to release her apartment; true love is replaced with property. It turns out that Louise does not want to come back to Paris for school, and one can see why. Her mother’s world is messy, complex and costly in many ways to herself and everyone around her. Though Suzanne is generous in emotion and substance, hers is an outmoded style, not technologically clean, not so easy to erase.
Set into the filigree of this family story is a scene of a Chinese puppet master giving a demonstration, organized by Suzanne, for a small group of students. The master's movements are so few and so slight it appears that the cloth and carved-wood doll really is a living being for whom the puppeteer has merely been so kind as to cup his hands, creating a tiny stage for the little performer to enact his scene. The puppet master appears to be doing nothing more than assisting the puppet to do what it wants, a humble gesture of loving helpfulness.
On a school trip to the Musee d’Orsay Simon’s class looks at a painting of a scene from the turn of the last century- a child chases a red ball in a dark and verdant park. In the distance, across a silent pond, a young adult couple can be seen. Who might these people be- the watching parents? More importantly, where is the artist standing, from where is the scene depicted, high above? Is the painting happy or sad? A little of both, one student replies, as Simon gazes up through the gallery’s skylight at the red balloon that flutters just above the glass. It has followed him throughout the film and, as before, he has no response to seeing it again, nor to the co-incidence- synchronicity- of seeing it represented in the painting even as it hovers above, embodying the artist's point of view.
The endless variety and sophistication of technology has robbed the world of its voice for magic and the extraordinary. In one scene Simon is “drawing” Louise through a projector device that allows him to trace her outline on an affixed sheet of paper; he looks into the machine, not at her. Suzanne peers through the viewfinder of her camera to record this fleeting moment of quiet childhood togetherness; like the scattered family it will not last.
One imagines, if one doesn’t know the effect first-hand, that to Simon, brought up with technology and totally conversant with its varied modalities, seeing the red balloon now here, now there, can carry no meaning because he cannot differentiate these occurrences from the sequential and random representations on a screen while web or channel surfing or gaming. His range of expression is limited to pressing buttons and moving “mice”; all of which breaks down barriers of conventional vision while subtly directing and coercing as it robs vision of its capacity to see anew, differently, or to persist on a path of one's own making. Since anything can always appear anywhere at any time, no particular appearance is significant.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Contempt (Le Mepris)
Forty-five years later Godard’s masterpiece, “Contempt”, remains a startling visual stylization, majestically interweaving cool piercing intellect with surprising emotional breadth and depth.
Ostensibly a film within a film, the opening scene credits Godard’s film about the making of Fritz Lang’s film of “The Odyssey”. Lang, playing himself, is glorious as actor, director, Greek chorus and Tiresias all rolled into one man of heart and vision.
Piccoli and Bardot, the young married couple Paul and Camille, are to some extent merely stand-ins for the characters they play. They are not required to render real performances any more than the actors in Lang’s “Odyssey” are required to do more than place their bodies within the frame of the camera’s gaze. These actors represent pawns in a game played by the gods. So, too, forces beyond their control and understanding buffet about the actors, directors and the young couple in the “real life” of Godard’s epic journey. To be discordant is in keeping with the modern fractured world.
Bardot is never more sublimely empty than in the scene showing her smoldering nude body stretched out across a bed glowing in voluptuous semi-darkness. It is the first of many different versions of contempt. In the mumbled tones of intimate after-love, Camille inventories her own formidable physical assets, asking Paul if he loves each body part she enumerates. With her laundry list of skin and bones, she is plainly telling him that this transient envelope of existence is all of her that there is to be known.
She suspects him, even now, of not being entirely fulfilled in the thrall of the perfect specimen of the machine of her body. Her contempt is also for becoming a real woman beyond the perversely conventional dichotomy of wife/femme fatale. All she can do is try on a black wig; in her world, a different look is the closest she can get to a different dimension.
Paul asserts that he loves each part of her equally, from which she concludes in dead earnest that he therefore loves her completely. He agrees, adding, “tragically.” Matching her black wig, he has adopted the look of a black hat in the hopes of inheriting some of Dean Martin’s charisma and success. It is his effort to acquire a desired aspect rather than discover his own character.
Paul pretends that he is a serious writer rather than a hack journeyman for hire. Though he knows how to secure a reasonably hefty paycheck and to play hard to get, what he has to offer is a list of decaying literary attributes as lifeless as Camille’s body parts. If he at an earlier time aspired to even a modicum of artistic achievement, he turned out to be no more than an avenue for someone else’s prosaic imagination to travel on. The longevity of his market value will not exceed Camille’s. Neither has the substance without which personal destiny has no core.
Camille and Paul’s story mimics in pathetic dis-similarity the story of Ulysses and Penelope. Paul has been asked by a famous American producer, Jerry Prokosch- played with over-sized vulgarity and ceaseless narcissistic zeal by Jack Palance- to rewrite the script for Lang’s film to make it sexier and “new.” Prokosch invites the couple to his villa for a drink, taking the beautiful young wife in his little red sports car while vaguely suggesting that Paul come along in a cab. Camille is hesitant; Paul insists she go, that he will follow. She exudes the uncertainty and anger of being even temporarily unclaimed by the designated other. The spell of her and Paul’s magical interlude is broken; she cannot forgive.
Paul’s cab ride, like Ulysses' journey, doesn’t go as planned. The taxi gets into an accident. To find another cab he has to walk for 20 minutes from the Castello Sant’Angelo to the Piazza Venezia. He is half an hour late. With the heartless brevity redolent of contemporary attention deficit disorder, Ulysses’ decade of meaningful wandering and development has been reduced to thirty pointless minutes. These few minutes of unexpected waiting have stretched Camille beyond her resources. Paul makes matters worse by flirting with the producer’s attractive assistant/interpreter. Each knows that this day has revealed something neither of them wanted to discover.
Paul quotes Dante’s lines about Ulysses' last voyage: “We rejoiced, but soon our joy turned to grief…and the sea closed in on us.” Perhaps the most concise poetic description of the journey of life and a virtual blueprint description of Paul and Camille's fate, this oracle is followed by the spectacularly oppositional imagery of the harsh and dry opaque verticality of the rocky cliffs of the island of Capri partly encircling and overshadowing a tiny cove of brilliant, glistening deep turquoise water.
For Lang, Ulysses’ character cannot be changed without changing the entire nature and substance of the story- it would no longer be the Odyssey. That Ulysses could not restrain his desire to gain experience of the world despite his love for his family and known world was the instantiation of his desire to know himself; he and his world are inseparable. Lang’s interpretation and understanding of the Odyssey and of Ulysses is of no interest to the American producer. Prokosch wants to re-envision the context of the Odyssey with Ulysses restyled as a modern man, an everyday neurotic. Secretly unhappy with Penelope and suspecting her fidelity, in this version Ulysses goes off to war, not bothering to hurry home after the victory and only killing all his wife’s suitors in order to save face. Prokosch’s Ulysses is a clever, defensive ambler, irrelevant in an uncaring world, responding as best he can to gain advantage or evade the unwanted.
Paul resonates with this convenient view of Ulysses’ fate for it will explain why Camille no longer loves him. Paul’s boredom, thoughtless over-confidence, carelessness, and meaningless flirting have produced her disdain. That this idea makes no sense doesn’t matter. It fits the modern concept of mechanistic cause and effect, lacks entirely any sense of responsible volition and obviates any deeper understanding of or inquiries about the nature of love and desire. Camille responds by flirting with Prokosch partly to punish Paul, but more because she has no other persona to enact or call upon.
Camille recalls idyllic images of their earlier happiness: a simple, uncomplicated and unconscious love of unboundaried bliss and pleasant delirium. Paul envisions a time when Camille would no longer love him, but the corresponding image is of her perfect unchanged nude body, suppliant as always. She dreams of the past; he begins to imagine a different future.
The young couple argues. Paul asks Camille why she no longer loves him and her reply is that she would rather die than tell. However, barely a few minutes pass before she does tell: she hates him because he is incapable of moving her. Camille’s contempt is akin to hating god for not being more god-like. As if denouncing a false god for his impotence, she does not see that the error and responsibility are her own. She no longer loves Paul because he is just a man. Previously she placed him in the position of a god, or, at least, co-conspirator in their undifferentiated and repetitive unconscious instinctual vitality. Now she finds he cannot make her love him any more than a god can make someone believe or worship sincerely. She feels abandoned and is incapable of moving in any direction on her own. She needs the other to move her, even as she resists. Prokosch’s large gestures may be empty and false, but they are unambiguous and predictable. It is no surprise when she goes off with the American; their fates are sealed in their separate yet equal inabilities to find another dimension or view of themselves. Endless repetition requires no next scene and the handsome runaway couple meet a sudden and unglamorous end in a highway accident: the little red sports car crushed like crumpled paper in the gigantic rig of a tractor-trailer, the two bodies slumped like discarded dolls.
Lang’s deeply human and humane character reminds us that man can only be human. Dante echoes again; man is not made to live like a brute, but to follow virtue and knowledge: to aspire to them, to keep them ever in our sight.
In the final scene of Godard’s film Paul has found the letter from Camille and he, too, prepares to depart. On the rooftop terrace of the Capri villa, Lang is shooting the end of his film; he describes it to Paul as that moment when Ulysses first sees his homeland. The actor playing Ulysses, barely more than a prop himself, moves sideways across the edge of the terrace. The camera sweeps along with him and then finally past him, out to a pure uninterrupted view of the horizon of sky and sea. Nothing and everything is there. The film has come full circle back to its own beginning as Ulysses eventually comes back to Ithaca. It is no mere return, the place and man are no longer the same, each is new and more. To find his way home Ulysses must first see his home in his mind’s eye, exactly as the artist must first see the vision of his work.
Ostensibly a film within a film, the opening scene credits Godard’s film about the making of Fritz Lang’s film of “The Odyssey”. Lang, playing himself, is glorious as actor, director, Greek chorus and Tiresias all rolled into one man of heart and vision.
Piccoli and Bardot, the young married couple Paul and Camille, are to some extent merely stand-ins for the characters they play. They are not required to render real performances any more than the actors in Lang’s “Odyssey” are required to do more than place their bodies within the frame of the camera’s gaze. These actors represent pawns in a game played by the gods. So, too, forces beyond their control and understanding buffet about the actors, directors and the young couple in the “real life” of Godard’s epic journey. To be discordant is in keeping with the modern fractured world.
Bardot is never more sublimely empty than in the scene showing her smoldering nude body stretched out across a bed glowing in voluptuous semi-darkness. It is the first of many different versions of contempt. In the mumbled tones of intimate after-love, Camille inventories her own formidable physical assets, asking Paul if he loves each body part she enumerates. With her laundry list of skin and bones, she is plainly telling him that this transient envelope of existence is all of her that there is to be known.
She suspects him, even now, of not being entirely fulfilled in the thrall of the perfect specimen of the machine of her body. Her contempt is also for becoming a real woman beyond the perversely conventional dichotomy of wife/femme fatale. All she can do is try on a black wig; in her world, a different look is the closest she can get to a different dimension.
Paul asserts that he loves each part of her equally, from which she concludes in dead earnest that he therefore loves her completely. He agrees, adding, “tragically.” Matching her black wig, he has adopted the look of a black hat in the hopes of inheriting some of Dean Martin’s charisma and success. It is his effort to acquire a desired aspect rather than discover his own character.
Paul pretends that he is a serious writer rather than a hack journeyman for hire. Though he knows how to secure a reasonably hefty paycheck and to play hard to get, what he has to offer is a list of decaying literary attributes as lifeless as Camille’s body parts. If he at an earlier time aspired to even a modicum of artistic achievement, he turned out to be no more than an avenue for someone else’s prosaic imagination to travel on. The longevity of his market value will not exceed Camille’s. Neither has the substance without which personal destiny has no core.
Camille and Paul’s story mimics in pathetic dis-similarity the story of Ulysses and Penelope. Paul has been asked by a famous American producer, Jerry Prokosch- played with over-sized vulgarity and ceaseless narcissistic zeal by Jack Palance- to rewrite the script for Lang’s film to make it sexier and “new.” Prokosch invites the couple to his villa for a drink, taking the beautiful young wife in his little red sports car while vaguely suggesting that Paul come along in a cab. Camille is hesitant; Paul insists she go, that he will follow. She exudes the uncertainty and anger of being even temporarily unclaimed by the designated other. The spell of her and Paul’s magical interlude is broken; she cannot forgive.
Paul’s cab ride, like Ulysses' journey, doesn’t go as planned. The taxi gets into an accident. To find another cab he has to walk for 20 minutes from the Castello Sant’Angelo to the Piazza Venezia. He is half an hour late. With the heartless brevity redolent of contemporary attention deficit disorder, Ulysses’ decade of meaningful wandering and development has been reduced to thirty pointless minutes. These few minutes of unexpected waiting have stretched Camille beyond her resources. Paul makes matters worse by flirting with the producer’s attractive assistant/interpreter. Each knows that this day has revealed something neither of them wanted to discover.
Paul quotes Dante’s lines about Ulysses' last voyage: “We rejoiced, but soon our joy turned to grief…and the sea closed in on us.” Perhaps the most concise poetic description of the journey of life and a virtual blueprint description of Paul and Camille's fate, this oracle is followed by the spectacularly oppositional imagery of the harsh and dry opaque verticality of the rocky cliffs of the island of Capri partly encircling and overshadowing a tiny cove of brilliant, glistening deep turquoise water.
For Lang, Ulysses’ character cannot be changed without changing the entire nature and substance of the story- it would no longer be the Odyssey. That Ulysses could not restrain his desire to gain experience of the world despite his love for his family and known world was the instantiation of his desire to know himself; he and his world are inseparable. Lang’s interpretation and understanding of the Odyssey and of Ulysses is of no interest to the American producer. Prokosch wants to re-envision the context of the Odyssey with Ulysses restyled as a modern man, an everyday neurotic. Secretly unhappy with Penelope and suspecting her fidelity, in this version Ulysses goes off to war, not bothering to hurry home after the victory and only killing all his wife’s suitors in order to save face. Prokosch’s Ulysses is a clever, defensive ambler, irrelevant in an uncaring world, responding as best he can to gain advantage or evade the unwanted.
Paul resonates with this convenient view of Ulysses’ fate for it will explain why Camille no longer loves him. Paul’s boredom, thoughtless over-confidence, carelessness, and meaningless flirting have produced her disdain. That this idea makes no sense doesn’t matter. It fits the modern concept of mechanistic cause and effect, lacks entirely any sense of responsible volition and obviates any deeper understanding of or inquiries about the nature of love and desire. Camille responds by flirting with Prokosch partly to punish Paul, but more because she has no other persona to enact or call upon.
Camille recalls idyllic images of their earlier happiness: a simple, uncomplicated and unconscious love of unboundaried bliss and pleasant delirium. Paul envisions a time when Camille would no longer love him, but the corresponding image is of her perfect unchanged nude body, suppliant as always. She dreams of the past; he begins to imagine a different future.
The young couple argues. Paul asks Camille why she no longer loves him and her reply is that she would rather die than tell. However, barely a few minutes pass before she does tell: she hates him because he is incapable of moving her. Camille’s contempt is akin to hating god for not being more god-like. As if denouncing a false god for his impotence, she does not see that the error and responsibility are her own. She no longer loves Paul because he is just a man. Previously she placed him in the position of a god, or, at least, co-conspirator in their undifferentiated and repetitive unconscious instinctual vitality. Now she finds he cannot make her love him any more than a god can make someone believe or worship sincerely. She feels abandoned and is incapable of moving in any direction on her own. She needs the other to move her, even as she resists. Prokosch’s large gestures may be empty and false, but they are unambiguous and predictable. It is no surprise when she goes off with the American; their fates are sealed in their separate yet equal inabilities to find another dimension or view of themselves. Endless repetition requires no next scene and the handsome runaway couple meet a sudden and unglamorous end in a highway accident: the little red sports car crushed like crumpled paper in the gigantic rig of a tractor-trailer, the two bodies slumped like discarded dolls.
Lang’s deeply human and humane character reminds us that man can only be human. Dante echoes again; man is not made to live like a brute, but to follow virtue and knowledge: to aspire to them, to keep them ever in our sight.
In the final scene of Godard’s film Paul has found the letter from Camille and he, too, prepares to depart. On the rooftop terrace of the Capri villa, Lang is shooting the end of his film; he describes it to Paul as that moment when Ulysses first sees his homeland. The actor playing Ulysses, barely more than a prop himself, moves sideways across the edge of the terrace. The camera sweeps along with him and then finally past him, out to a pure uninterrupted view of the horizon of sky and sea. Nothing and everything is there. The film has come full circle back to its own beginning as Ulysses eventually comes back to Ithaca. It is no mere return, the place and man are no longer the same, each is new and more. To find his way home Ulysses must first see his home in his mind’s eye, exactly as the artist must first see the vision of his work.
Friday, March 21, 2008
The Witnesses
Andre Techine’s new film, “The Witnesses”, is a difficult and courageous vision wrapped in a gay romance and sophisticated contemporary folklore. Set in Paris, 1984, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic, it weaves together the fates of five characters whose lives passively bear witness to their era, location and personal histories. For each one of them there is a moment of experience in which the observer becomes the act-or, awakening momentarily to witness in a deeper, evidential way the truth of his/her singular existence and struggle and is permitted, through the convergence of freedom and necessity, to make some mark in the world.
That these moments of transformation do not eventuate in transformed characters is one of the more shocking aspects of this bristling story. The changes that occur are not meaningless, but the film questions the model we use to view the development of character and of life itself. The neat progression of stacking, cumulative perceptions is replaced by the random non-linear hyper-action of the molecular images of the replicating virus and the ceaseless up/down, in/out of the flow of waves along the shore.
The film opens with a furiously-paced score that matches the intensity of a young woman, Sarah, stabbing at the keys of a red typewriter, her gaze darting everywhere in a desperate attempt to pull an elusive oracle out of thin air. She circles and crosses out the freshly typed lines until almost nothing remains. We feel her tension, urgency and dissatisfaction.
In a hospital corridor a handsome dark man, Mehdi- a police detective and father of a new-born- bickers with Adrien, a middle-aged doctor. Sarah, the new mother and Mehdi’s wife, looks trapped and cautious in the hospital bed, leery of the baby lying nearby.
Sarah’s friend Adrien is a gay man who cruises for sex at night in the park where he meets Manu, newly arrived in Paris with little more than youth, good looks and two years of culinary schooling. Manu is fiercely independent and clear in rejecting Adrien as a sex partner but welcomes him as a friend. Manu lives with his sister Julie, an aspiring young singer, in a small room in a seedy hotel occupied mostly by amiable prostitutes.
Early in the film, a dramatic example of the sudden call from observer to actor presents itself. Sarah invites Adrien and Manu for a seaside weekend. After lunch on the beach, Mehdi swims far out into the cove. Manu follows, swimming out past his ability and would certainly drown if not for Mehdi’s determination to pull the dead weight back to shore. The two go on to become lovers; their trysts are simultaneously full of passion and lifeless. Manu cannot give himself to anyone, while Mehdi feels physical longing, nothing more. Because their liaison is not the basis for renewal, they return to being observers of their lives, even at a carnal peak.
Adrien likes beautiful boys and can afford to treat himself. He comes to think of Manu as his great love, not least because they are not sexually involved. During a narcissistic outburst of well-practiced wounded love-pride, the doctor’s initiatory moment reveals itself in the sores and lesions on Manu’s chest that he rightly intuits as the presence of a new killer disease.
The shock of recognition allows Adrien to step out of his petty habituation, giving him a larger sphere in which to focus and utilize his estimable resources and expertise. Manu’s decline is steady and ineluctable. Whereas Mehdi could just pull Manu out of the deep water, Adrien is essentially helpless. Adrien’s commitment to starting a war against this disease while shepherding Manu through his decline and death lends his own life meaning and purpose. Once Manu dies and he picks up the next handsome boy, he is back to the mechanics of living, pattern without recognition.
Sarah learns of her husband’s affair with Manu but harbors no ill-will toward either man. What Sarah rejects is motherhood; it is not a child but a book that she wants to bring into the world. She is keenly aware of the unsympathetic response this provokes. She is honest and determined, struggling with a novel that does not come together and ultimately must be thrown out. She cannot find her story.
At Adrien’s for a Christmas dinner with Manu and Julie, Sarah asks Julie about the magic of her art. Julie is quick to disabuse Sarah of so romantic a notion. It is hard, muscular work- more like athletics- finding the right place in the throat from which to produce the correct sound. Momentarily alone with the diseased and disfigured boy that was her husband’s lover, Sarah gives Manu the kiss he asks for. Like a medieval princess encountering a leprous beggar in a wondrous legend, she willingly offers her lips; in that touch with death, chance and transcendence, Sarah understands that she has found the subject for what will undoubtedly be her one completed piece of adult fiction.
Manu’s moment comes in the humble guise of a store-bought stew provencal, casually and improperly prepared. He rejects it and along with the stew everything that is fractional and wrong, including his own life, which he ends with an overdose of pills provided by Adrien.
The day that Julie and Adrien bury her beloved brother, Julie admits that all her feeling and attention have gone to safe-guarding her voice for that night’s performance. Julie’s is a minor operatic talent at which she has slaved away to the point of becoming a viable performer in a small Mozart role. She has found the place in her throat and her place in career, but it does not correspond to any particular location in the world.
Mehdi returns to his detective work and family life; Sarah returns to her husband and child. Adrien continues his work and finds the next boy, relieved of having to rename convenience and habit as love; Julie is free to accept an offer to sing with a company in Munich; there is no reason not to go.
Thus it can be said that the witness element in Techine’s film is not about the distinction between action and observation. A character may be engaged with his or her life’s routine while not birthing new life within or without. A moment of engagement is just that: an experience of lived life. Only when a calling surfaces- saving the swimmer, fighting AIDS, perfecting vocal expression, discovering a narrative- is there a shift out of witnessing and into some completion, a hiatus from routine and the perpetual cycles of life.
That these moments of transformation do not eventuate in transformed characters is one of the more shocking aspects of this bristling story. The changes that occur are not meaningless, but the film questions the model we use to view the development of character and of life itself. The neat progression of stacking, cumulative perceptions is replaced by the random non-linear hyper-action of the molecular images of the replicating virus and the ceaseless up/down, in/out of the flow of waves along the shore.
The film opens with a furiously-paced score that matches the intensity of a young woman, Sarah, stabbing at the keys of a red typewriter, her gaze darting everywhere in a desperate attempt to pull an elusive oracle out of thin air. She circles and crosses out the freshly typed lines until almost nothing remains. We feel her tension, urgency and dissatisfaction.
In a hospital corridor a handsome dark man, Mehdi- a police detective and father of a new-born- bickers with Adrien, a middle-aged doctor. Sarah, the new mother and Mehdi’s wife, looks trapped and cautious in the hospital bed, leery of the baby lying nearby.
Sarah’s friend Adrien is a gay man who cruises for sex at night in the park where he meets Manu, newly arrived in Paris with little more than youth, good looks and two years of culinary schooling. Manu is fiercely independent and clear in rejecting Adrien as a sex partner but welcomes him as a friend. Manu lives with his sister Julie, an aspiring young singer, in a small room in a seedy hotel occupied mostly by amiable prostitutes.
Early in the film, a dramatic example of the sudden call from observer to actor presents itself. Sarah invites Adrien and Manu for a seaside weekend. After lunch on the beach, Mehdi swims far out into the cove. Manu follows, swimming out past his ability and would certainly drown if not for Mehdi’s determination to pull the dead weight back to shore. The two go on to become lovers; their trysts are simultaneously full of passion and lifeless. Manu cannot give himself to anyone, while Mehdi feels physical longing, nothing more. Because their liaison is not the basis for renewal, they return to being observers of their lives, even at a carnal peak.
Adrien likes beautiful boys and can afford to treat himself. He comes to think of Manu as his great love, not least because they are not sexually involved. During a narcissistic outburst of well-practiced wounded love-pride, the doctor’s initiatory moment reveals itself in the sores and lesions on Manu’s chest that he rightly intuits as the presence of a new killer disease.
The shock of recognition allows Adrien to step out of his petty habituation, giving him a larger sphere in which to focus and utilize his estimable resources and expertise. Manu’s decline is steady and ineluctable. Whereas Mehdi could just pull Manu out of the deep water, Adrien is essentially helpless. Adrien’s commitment to starting a war against this disease while shepherding Manu through his decline and death lends his own life meaning and purpose. Once Manu dies and he picks up the next handsome boy, he is back to the mechanics of living, pattern without recognition.
Sarah learns of her husband’s affair with Manu but harbors no ill-will toward either man. What Sarah rejects is motherhood; it is not a child but a book that she wants to bring into the world. She is keenly aware of the unsympathetic response this provokes. She is honest and determined, struggling with a novel that does not come together and ultimately must be thrown out. She cannot find her story.
At Adrien’s for a Christmas dinner with Manu and Julie, Sarah asks Julie about the magic of her art. Julie is quick to disabuse Sarah of so romantic a notion. It is hard, muscular work- more like athletics- finding the right place in the throat from which to produce the correct sound. Momentarily alone with the diseased and disfigured boy that was her husband’s lover, Sarah gives Manu the kiss he asks for. Like a medieval princess encountering a leprous beggar in a wondrous legend, she willingly offers her lips; in that touch with death, chance and transcendence, Sarah understands that she has found the subject for what will undoubtedly be her one completed piece of adult fiction.
Manu’s moment comes in the humble guise of a store-bought stew provencal, casually and improperly prepared. He rejects it and along with the stew everything that is fractional and wrong, including his own life, which he ends with an overdose of pills provided by Adrien.
The day that Julie and Adrien bury her beloved brother, Julie admits that all her feeling and attention have gone to safe-guarding her voice for that night’s performance. Julie’s is a minor operatic talent at which she has slaved away to the point of becoming a viable performer in a small Mozart role. She has found the place in her throat and her place in career, but it does not correspond to any particular location in the world.
Mehdi returns to his detective work and family life; Sarah returns to her husband and child. Adrien continues his work and finds the next boy, relieved of having to rename convenience and habit as love; Julie is free to accept an offer to sing with a company in Munich; there is no reason not to go.
Thus it can be said that the witness element in Techine’s film is not about the distinction between action and observation. A character may be engaged with his or her life’s routine while not birthing new life within or without. A moment of engagement is just that: an experience of lived life. Only when a calling surfaces- saving the swimmer, fighting AIDS, perfecting vocal expression, discovering a narrative- is there a shift out of witnessing and into some completion, a hiatus from routine and the perpetual cycles of life.
Monday, March 3, 2008
The Duchess of Langeais
“The Duchess of Langeais”, Jacques Rivette’s new film, opens with images leading the viewer across an ancient church floor patterned with symbols redolent of mysterious power, patched and faded beyond legibility if not resonance. A filigreed iron grille of prison-like bars separates absolutely the luminous space of an elaborately carved high altar, glistening with gilding and color and embellished with narrative images that we cannot see, from the darkened nave where seated congregants dutifully listen to a vocal concert Mass by the convent nuns, now used to celebrate the latest regime change: post-Napoleonic royal restoration. The church and convent is the crowning and orienting complex on an isolated rock of island jutting up into the sky from the pure blue line of the sea.
The film demarcates spheres of possibility and action and requires that the viewer abandon a premise normally taken as axiomatic: that the storyline will unfold in a fashion where the narrative elements build so as to reveal an underlying depth dimension.
Whatever vertical dimension exists in this work lives outside the story proper. It is referred to in the tale told by Armand, a French general; equally it shows up in the imagery of the up and above convent to which Antoinette, the duchess, repairs after her unconsummated affair seems to render daily life in society intolerable to her. Each of the two main characters encounters a life moment which offers the potential for a transformative experience. Neither, however, is prepared to receive an unanticipated shift in understanding, so that no defining moment can occur.
Antoinette and Armand meet at one of the elegant nightly soirees that constitute the socially acceptable round of amusements for upper class Parisians. She is intrigued by the damaged and illustrious soldier; he determines to make the beautiful duchess his mistress; more deeply each intuits in the other a trustworthy reflection of a substanceless stance.
Armand in successive segments tells the duchess of his time on campaign in the desert of Africa when he had to march barefoot under a punishing sun over a brutal terrain that never seemed to get closer to its goal. The native guide had lied about the distance, for there was no way back. Armand’s bitter denunciation produces no response from the guide except an indifferently offered dagger with which he may end his suffering, if he so chooses. Marching on, pushing himself beyond his physical limits and carried for the final distance on the native’s shoulders, he ultimately reaches that place which offers him a clear vision of the equal presence of opposites: desert on one side, oasis on the other. Life, he is invited to see, challenges him to choose a direction that calls to him.
To Armand, however, the experience he describes has no impact. The journey, far from being an entry into awareness, becomes reduced to a harried remembrance of when physical survival hung in the balance. The ordeal opens no new understanding because Armand does not have the capacity to encounter himself in a new form. Rather, he continues on the same road he will follow when he begins to woo the duchess- a determination to successfully complete a quest with which he is not actually engaged.
Suitably married to a husband of the right rank, Antoinette is only required to fulfill her mundane social duties. She is more than welcome to a love affair if she so desires, provided discretion is exercised as to the where and when. It would seem from very early in the film that we are witnessing the unfolding and inevitable consummation of a passionate liaison.
Something, alas, is missing. The lover, though often ardent in his words of pursuit, is barely lukewarm in his actions. Similarly, the woman for whom he is supposedly pining away speaks as though her whole life between their meetings is just dead routine. Antoinette is a flurry of energetic anticipation in preparing for Armand’s visits, yet, as soon as they are together, she is as distant in the present as ambiguous about a future between them.
The duchess takes the poses of a woman falling in love, even as we witness her infatuation with the style, not with the man. Armand brusquely makes a demand he cannot effect and Antoinette trumps his bluff by simply asking “how?” He arranges for the duchess’ abduction, but in parallel fashion loses the spark once it could catch flame. Armand has all the trappings of a man of action, but we recognize them as circumstantial, not characterological.
Once it is unmistakable that the two will never become lovers, Rivette teases us with the cleverness of the unraveling. They who cannot but be appearances to each other must remain hot in pursuit of what neither would know how to want. How can the frustration of this failed attraction be rendered meaningful?
Miraculously, the film provides an unexpected, though forceful, answer. The surrounding characters function as mouthpieces of the idea that adherence to social form and subordination of any feeling to the necessity of weighing how it is to function in the world is precisely what gives life meaning. Forget transformative experiences, grand passions, religious conversions, liftings of the veil- no one wants them. If some misfit is seduced by a moment of inner revelation into imagining a different life, it is everyone’s task, by way of censure or complicity, to unite towards supporting that person in keeping the personal private until it can be conveniently forgotten.
Each of these characters is in harmony with his/her station in life; they are survivors. The aging and practical Princess, like the convent’s Mother Superior later, understands that form is the only unconditional reality of any given collective; the worldly and veteran Monsieur de Pamier understands that life can only be lived at the juncture of appearance and sentiment. The duchess’ maid, Lisette, can easily resist the luxurious cream-filled pastries that do not agree with her and Julien, the Majordomo, knows that his lot is to obey command and bell alike. Like the Princess and Pamier, these two know how to negotiate advantage from the small, yet immensely variable, slice of latitude that social form and the necessities of life allow.
Antoinette and Armand have found in each other the needed foil for their own reflections. Seemingly the misfits, they are, in fact, utterly conventional. Their security lies in being told that there can be no life outside the rules. Neither wants the substance of contact, for each knows of his/her incapacity to fully surrender to experience. Their gamesmanship ratchets up into high gear until the duchess ruins herself socially, eventually finding her way to the inspired depravations of the religious refuge.
Armand plans to abduct the duchess a second time. With his band of accomplices, the weary and sickly general breaks in to the convent, too late: the duchess is dead. Again, he can think of nothing better than to follow through on his original plan and steals Antoinette’s lifeless body, carrying the corpse back to his waiting ship. Armand is now as adrift as the directionless vessel that suddenly no longer has purpose. His cohort suggests tying weights to the meaningless body and dumping it into the sea, henceforth thinking of the entire experience like a childhood story, or a poem.
The film demarcates spheres of possibility and action and requires that the viewer abandon a premise normally taken as axiomatic: that the storyline will unfold in a fashion where the narrative elements build so as to reveal an underlying depth dimension.
Whatever vertical dimension exists in this work lives outside the story proper. It is referred to in the tale told by Armand, a French general; equally it shows up in the imagery of the up and above convent to which Antoinette, the duchess, repairs after her unconsummated affair seems to render daily life in society intolerable to her. Each of the two main characters encounters a life moment which offers the potential for a transformative experience. Neither, however, is prepared to receive an unanticipated shift in understanding, so that no defining moment can occur.
Antoinette and Armand meet at one of the elegant nightly soirees that constitute the socially acceptable round of amusements for upper class Parisians. She is intrigued by the damaged and illustrious soldier; he determines to make the beautiful duchess his mistress; more deeply each intuits in the other a trustworthy reflection of a substanceless stance.
Armand in successive segments tells the duchess of his time on campaign in the desert of Africa when he had to march barefoot under a punishing sun over a brutal terrain that never seemed to get closer to its goal. The native guide had lied about the distance, for there was no way back. Armand’s bitter denunciation produces no response from the guide except an indifferently offered dagger with which he may end his suffering, if he so chooses. Marching on, pushing himself beyond his physical limits and carried for the final distance on the native’s shoulders, he ultimately reaches that place which offers him a clear vision of the equal presence of opposites: desert on one side, oasis on the other. Life, he is invited to see, challenges him to choose a direction that calls to him.
To Armand, however, the experience he describes has no impact. The journey, far from being an entry into awareness, becomes reduced to a harried remembrance of when physical survival hung in the balance. The ordeal opens no new understanding because Armand does not have the capacity to encounter himself in a new form. Rather, he continues on the same road he will follow when he begins to woo the duchess- a determination to successfully complete a quest with which he is not actually engaged.
Suitably married to a husband of the right rank, Antoinette is only required to fulfill her mundane social duties. She is more than welcome to a love affair if she so desires, provided discretion is exercised as to the where and when. It would seem from very early in the film that we are witnessing the unfolding and inevitable consummation of a passionate liaison.
Something, alas, is missing. The lover, though often ardent in his words of pursuit, is barely lukewarm in his actions. Similarly, the woman for whom he is supposedly pining away speaks as though her whole life between their meetings is just dead routine. Antoinette is a flurry of energetic anticipation in preparing for Armand’s visits, yet, as soon as they are together, she is as distant in the present as ambiguous about a future between them.
The duchess takes the poses of a woman falling in love, even as we witness her infatuation with the style, not with the man. Armand brusquely makes a demand he cannot effect and Antoinette trumps his bluff by simply asking “how?” He arranges for the duchess’ abduction, but in parallel fashion loses the spark once it could catch flame. Armand has all the trappings of a man of action, but we recognize them as circumstantial, not characterological.
Once it is unmistakable that the two will never become lovers, Rivette teases us with the cleverness of the unraveling. They who cannot but be appearances to each other must remain hot in pursuit of what neither would know how to want. How can the frustration of this failed attraction be rendered meaningful?
Miraculously, the film provides an unexpected, though forceful, answer. The surrounding characters function as mouthpieces of the idea that adherence to social form and subordination of any feeling to the necessity of weighing how it is to function in the world is precisely what gives life meaning. Forget transformative experiences, grand passions, religious conversions, liftings of the veil- no one wants them. If some misfit is seduced by a moment of inner revelation into imagining a different life, it is everyone’s task, by way of censure or complicity, to unite towards supporting that person in keeping the personal private until it can be conveniently forgotten.
Each of these characters is in harmony with his/her station in life; they are survivors. The aging and practical Princess, like the convent’s Mother Superior later, understands that form is the only unconditional reality of any given collective; the worldly and veteran Monsieur de Pamier understands that life can only be lived at the juncture of appearance and sentiment. The duchess’ maid, Lisette, can easily resist the luxurious cream-filled pastries that do not agree with her and Julien, the Majordomo, knows that his lot is to obey command and bell alike. Like the Princess and Pamier, these two know how to negotiate advantage from the small, yet immensely variable, slice of latitude that social form and the necessities of life allow.
Antoinette and Armand have found in each other the needed foil for their own reflections. Seemingly the misfits, they are, in fact, utterly conventional. Their security lies in being told that there can be no life outside the rules. Neither wants the substance of contact, for each knows of his/her incapacity to fully surrender to experience. Their gamesmanship ratchets up into high gear until the duchess ruins herself socially, eventually finding her way to the inspired depravations of the religious refuge.
Armand plans to abduct the duchess a second time. With his band of accomplices, the weary and sickly general breaks in to the convent, too late: the duchess is dead. Again, he can think of nothing better than to follow through on his original plan and steals Antoinette’s lifeless body, carrying the corpse back to his waiting ship. Armand is now as adrift as the directionless vessel that suddenly no longer has purpose. His cohort suggests tying weights to the meaningless body and dumping it into the sea, henceforth thinking of the entire experience like a childhood story, or a poem.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Last Year at Marienbad
“Last Year at Marienbad” (or was it Fredericksbad?) explores the phenomenon of memory and the idea of possibility in the context of the spa-going European rich between the wars. More precisely, its concern with memory- which on the surface is about identifying and proving what happened when, where and to whom- describes an obsession with naming literal events that had no outcome last year anymore than they can in the present.
Alain Resnais’ film moves through repetitive ritual to a depiction of the stagnation which results when forms and patterns of behavior become surrogates for action. The environment of Marienbad is an active element of the film barricading and confounding any possibility that even chance could enter the equation to counter inertia.
The film begins with long, elaborate and repetitive scenes of the setting of the luxurious spa. Its gilt encrusted ceilings and walls; the endless enfilade of dimly glittering hallways and heavily paneled doors that lead to more hallways and other doors, an ineluctable Piranesian loop.
The colorless trompe l’oeil murals of the walls and the occasional framed period etching depict formal gardens almost identical to the flat geometric park surrounding the villa. These images are less works of imagination than random game board instructions. They are relentless reminders for the characters parading from room to room, that this world operates in single-point perspective, where depth is merely alluded to by way of elaborate adjustments and calculations. It isn’t actually achievable, let alone desirable, by the rules of their game.
On stage an actress and actor- dressed, coiffed and bejeweled exactly as the audience members at the spa’s little theater- deliver their lines as if automatons. All of the characters, only three of whom emerge as actual identities, share a lifelessness which is inescapable.
The narrative voice belongs to one of them, the suitor. His pervasive role is to establish, particularly with the woman he pursues, what happened when they met the year before and fell in love. His fractured argument moves to define what has to have happened at that time for him to know all that he does about her. Almost convincing in its specifics, the case he makes nonetheless lacks any embodied reality.
That this is so continually leads the viewer back to the film’s central paradox: the very urgency of unveiling the truth about last year is trumped by the certainty of inertia. The suitor cannot differentiate between persistence and will, which he entirely lacks and fears. The unrelenting quality of his quest is entirely betrayed by his willingness to postpone action.
The object of his love, the exquisite, young Delphine Seyrig, is a parody of restless passive beauty. Neither can she give herself to anyone or anything, nor can she maintain a position or point of view (- she never stays anywhere more than a few weeks and, repeatedly, we see her break the heel of her shoe.) She represents fear in its overt form. Her modus operandi is escape; whether sitting, standing, lying or walking her internal focus is on knowing where the exit from the moment lies. For her, fear is not a negative emotion, but a comfortable milieu and an actual safeguard enabling an exploration which cannot eventuate in any conclusion. Even if unwillingly, she can endure small doses of her pursuer’s portrayal of what transpired when last they met. Her decisive place of confidence rests in her ability to counter any certainty about what happened with the parry that decision can await a future time. Such time, of course, could never actually present itself, since only the fear has life.
The third figure, her husband, is an agent of death who inspires fear. Little more capable of action than the others (who represent feelings of fear and sentiment), he represents will, though meaningless and without effect.
The symbol of his might is a game/trick that he displays early in the film to establish his dominance among the residents at Marienbad. Sixteen objects- matches, cards- are placed in four rows: 7. 5. 3. 1. The rule: each of the two players may, in a given turn, take away one or more pieces, but only from one row. Whoever must take the last piece loses. The husband calmly asserts that though he could lose, he never does.
Everyone wants to figure out a strategy or gimmick to explain the winner’s luck: who goes first; take away even numbers only; etc. But the game can only be won by paying attention as you go. The husband neither needs to confuse nor cheat; he only has to concentrate- an impossibility for the other characters who are either unconscious or dead in their faithful observance of meaningless forms. The husband lives only through the will to win, however pointless. Obviously the winnings mean nothing to him, only the power.
That power also describes his hold on his wife. Given that his very presence inspires fear, he is her perfect mate. She gets to hold onto the freedom of being afraid without respite, while he gets to experience total control with the absence of desire. Each of these characters remains impervious to any external stimulus; each also achieves constancy of occupation because their own feeling states never bore them. They are ghosts in an airless world. Like the images on the walls, the characters live a 2-dimensional existence, lacking depth in every sense of the word. Their world is like a blueprint or a map, where a journey can be conceived, plotted and traced, even confirmed, but never taken.
When finally the wife does go off with the suitor, they are each fulfilling a role like young children in a school play, or markers on a game board. The suitor does not want, nor can he, change his role to become a man, the lover. He is terrified of will and force- potency, and of the loneliness of even momentary non-consensuality. The wife cannot live in an environment free from fear and the need to escape. Having nothing but surface and form, she has nothing to give to a man who would want her as a woman. Equally powerless where real action is concerned, the husband cannot stop them, but knows they can go nowhere.
As the fatelessly mismatched couple flees into the night, the narrator puzzles over how it is possible, in this plain, flat garden- devoid of all vegetation or any obfuscating element, where everything is straight paths and right angles- that, even now, they are losing their way.
Alain Resnais’ film moves through repetitive ritual to a depiction of the stagnation which results when forms and patterns of behavior become surrogates for action. The environment of Marienbad is an active element of the film barricading and confounding any possibility that even chance could enter the equation to counter inertia.
The film begins with long, elaborate and repetitive scenes of the setting of the luxurious spa. Its gilt encrusted ceilings and walls; the endless enfilade of dimly glittering hallways and heavily paneled doors that lead to more hallways and other doors, an ineluctable Piranesian loop.
The colorless trompe l’oeil murals of the walls and the occasional framed period etching depict formal gardens almost identical to the flat geometric park surrounding the villa. These images are less works of imagination than random game board instructions. They are relentless reminders for the characters parading from room to room, that this world operates in single-point perspective, where depth is merely alluded to by way of elaborate adjustments and calculations. It isn’t actually achievable, let alone desirable, by the rules of their game.
On stage an actress and actor- dressed, coiffed and bejeweled exactly as the audience members at the spa’s little theater- deliver their lines as if automatons. All of the characters, only three of whom emerge as actual identities, share a lifelessness which is inescapable.
The narrative voice belongs to one of them, the suitor. His pervasive role is to establish, particularly with the woman he pursues, what happened when they met the year before and fell in love. His fractured argument moves to define what has to have happened at that time for him to know all that he does about her. Almost convincing in its specifics, the case he makes nonetheless lacks any embodied reality.
That this is so continually leads the viewer back to the film’s central paradox: the very urgency of unveiling the truth about last year is trumped by the certainty of inertia. The suitor cannot differentiate between persistence and will, which he entirely lacks and fears. The unrelenting quality of his quest is entirely betrayed by his willingness to postpone action.
The object of his love, the exquisite, young Delphine Seyrig, is a parody of restless passive beauty. Neither can she give herself to anyone or anything, nor can she maintain a position or point of view (- she never stays anywhere more than a few weeks and, repeatedly, we see her break the heel of her shoe.) She represents fear in its overt form. Her modus operandi is escape; whether sitting, standing, lying or walking her internal focus is on knowing where the exit from the moment lies. For her, fear is not a negative emotion, but a comfortable milieu and an actual safeguard enabling an exploration which cannot eventuate in any conclusion. Even if unwillingly, she can endure small doses of her pursuer’s portrayal of what transpired when last they met. Her decisive place of confidence rests in her ability to counter any certainty about what happened with the parry that decision can await a future time. Such time, of course, could never actually present itself, since only the fear has life.
The third figure, her husband, is an agent of death who inspires fear. Little more capable of action than the others (who represent feelings of fear and sentiment), he represents will, though meaningless and without effect.
The symbol of his might is a game/trick that he displays early in the film to establish his dominance among the residents at Marienbad. Sixteen objects- matches, cards- are placed in four rows: 7. 5. 3. 1. The rule: each of the two players may, in a given turn, take away one or more pieces, but only from one row. Whoever must take the last piece loses. The husband calmly asserts that though he could lose, he never does.
Everyone wants to figure out a strategy or gimmick to explain the winner’s luck: who goes first; take away even numbers only; etc. But the game can only be won by paying attention as you go. The husband neither needs to confuse nor cheat; he only has to concentrate- an impossibility for the other characters who are either unconscious or dead in their faithful observance of meaningless forms. The husband lives only through the will to win, however pointless. Obviously the winnings mean nothing to him, only the power.
That power also describes his hold on his wife. Given that his very presence inspires fear, he is her perfect mate. She gets to hold onto the freedom of being afraid without respite, while he gets to experience total control with the absence of desire. Each of these characters remains impervious to any external stimulus; each also achieves constancy of occupation because their own feeling states never bore them. They are ghosts in an airless world. Like the images on the walls, the characters live a 2-dimensional existence, lacking depth in every sense of the word. Their world is like a blueprint or a map, where a journey can be conceived, plotted and traced, even confirmed, but never taken.
When finally the wife does go off with the suitor, they are each fulfilling a role like young children in a school play, or markers on a game board. The suitor does not want, nor can he, change his role to become a man, the lover. He is terrified of will and force- potency, and of the loneliness of even momentary non-consensuality. The wife cannot live in an environment free from fear and the need to escape. Having nothing but surface and form, she has nothing to give to a man who would want her as a woman. Equally powerless where real action is concerned, the husband cannot stop them, but knows they can go nowhere.
As the fatelessly mismatched couple flees into the night, the narrator puzzles over how it is possible, in this plain, flat garden- devoid of all vegetation or any obfuscating element, where everything is straight paths and right angles- that, even now, they are losing their way.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Man of My Life
Imagine a rainy-day summer camp project where the youthful avatars of Eric Rohmer and Andrei Tarkovsky unite to create a cinematic divertissement with the theme, perhaps drawn out of a hat: The Universe- amusingly, also the name of the coffee bar at the local town square. Like the universe, or, more terrestrially, the late summer in which the film takes place, there is too much of everything in Zabou Breitman’s new film, “The Man of my Life”, co-written by Ms Breitman with Agnes de Sacy (in French with English subtitles.)
I can’t help wondering how many horoscope saturated bloggers might be at this moment hashing out the exact trines and conjuncts in this over-bursting cosmos of an unabashedly romantic movie, a fable imbued with the sensibility and truth of children’s stories. It is also chock-a-block with the endless detailing and imaginative coloring that is a specialty of stories by children. It is engaging and fun to follow each piece of the complex mosaic as it inscribes yet another dimension or reference into an already crowded tale, but this may have come at too high a price. One is reminded of the advice to the novice traveler: put your clothes and your money on the bed, then take away half the clothes and double the money; now you’re ready to go. Half as much story and cleverness could have allowed for a greater emotional depth.
Set in a picture-perfect maison de vacance in the south of France, this little galaxy constellates in its pre-Copernican symmetry around Frederic, its beneficently rounded, loving and earthy center. Bernard Campan’s Frederic is like a luminous, small Dutch still life of a ripe peach in a blue and white china bowl- the sheer joy of its simple deliberateness even the most die-hard downtown conceptualist could not resist. Lea Drucker is his beautiful lunar wife, Frederique, who has yet to find out the extent to which she depends upon predictability. Their three children are a tender, if calculated, array: the quiet, older saturnine daughter spends her vacation peering into a microscope; the middle son is a would-be magician in a skeleton printed T shirt, his sleight-of-hand changes the king of spades into the king of hearts; the youngest, Arthur, is the irrepressible and irresistible masked and caped trickster, constantly in motion, searching and heroic. Various family and friends fill out the night sky and daytime activities that shuffle along seemingly eternally.
But the happy couple is just past the cusp of youth and opposition appears like a small disproportionately influential asteroid in the form of Charles Berling’s Hugo, the new, single, gay next-door neighbor. Hugo’s sphere is icy mentation and azure imagination, constricted and unforgiving, fearless and honest; he, too, is at an edge only slightly different from Frederic’s.
Myriad flashbacks and surreal imagery weave their way into the domestic drama, as Frederic and Hugo become not so much friends, as neighboring influences- this is not a male bonding film. It goes without saying that if you are expecting to see the cinema verite aftermath of a Larchmont barbecue you are looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. The flashbacks mostly revolve around a long after dinner conversation a deux as they congenially battle out opposing views about love and life, stretching only slightly, for now, out of their respective caricatures.
As the early morning air chills, Frederic has fetched sweaters from inside for them both. The mental Hugo happily parries and thrusts in his erotically charged polemic against relationships. Like anyone who has paid a high price, he overvalues the narrow purchase he has on Eros; Frederic, by contrast, is so awash in Eros that it barely registers with him. In his bourgeois mechanical materiality, he is transfixed by the label sticking up from the back of the sweater that Hugo has just put on and, while carrying on the conversation- including a brief rendition of the 30’s cabaret song, Parlez de Moi, backlit with the golden rays of early morning- devises and executes a complex design both proper and inconspicuous to tuck the offending label back out of sight.
.
Frederic’s unconscious flow of warmth and good nature has been diverted by the force of this newcomer, now running partner, and Frederique will suffer for it. The story turns retrograde with harsh doses of reality: limitation, infidelity, deceit, cruelty and AIDS. Hugo’s mentioned but unseen daughter arrives on the scene. A beauteous treat that did not fall far from the tree, she is full of felt and clever accusation, and one previously unknown bit of information, trying to convince her father to visit, if not forgive, his own harsh, rejecting and rejected father who now lies, in hospital, dying.
Everything is set; all that can is madly breaking away from its former form. Frederique howls into the night, the conventional container of their relationship can no longer be taken for granted, she is a powerless new moon, a sunken cave of darkness. Frederic, wounded by a simple sprained ankle, is no longer the center. Something has pulled him away and into consciousness of a greater Sun-center, his world has expanded, but he must find his place within these new dimensions. To fulfill this destiny he hobbles off into the night to find Hugo, messenger of the gift, if not its source, to give him the reciprocal token: a tender acknowledgement to a man all too accustomed to so much less. Hugo’s still rampant harshness is overwhelmed by Frederic’s simple generosity and he, too, is released from a predictable repetition. As stated earlier in the movie: magic is what happens when you’re not looking, from the place you don’t expect. It looks like chance to the viewer, but it is hard work to the creator of the illusion. And what about the stars? For millennia man has looked to the heavens trying to discern the clues to fulfill his fate and outwit chance.
There are few actually false notes in this film but the director did not do the substance of her story any service by having Hugo default into conventional sentimentality when his daughter demands to know why he loves her? His replies, she grippingly points out, are all matters of chance. Instead of agreeing with her, like it or not, he dissolves into hugs and confirmations that, yes, he loves her simply because she is his daughter. No doubt this reasoning makes good and possibly necessary box-office concessions, but isn’t the rare beauty and terror of love, like grace, its pure freedom from reason and contingency?
I can’t help wondering how many horoscope saturated bloggers might be at this moment hashing out the exact trines and conjuncts in this over-bursting cosmos of an unabashedly romantic movie, a fable imbued with the sensibility and truth of children’s stories. It is also chock-a-block with the endless detailing and imaginative coloring that is a specialty of stories by children. It is engaging and fun to follow each piece of the complex mosaic as it inscribes yet another dimension or reference into an already crowded tale, but this may have come at too high a price. One is reminded of the advice to the novice traveler: put your clothes and your money on the bed, then take away half the clothes and double the money; now you’re ready to go. Half as much story and cleverness could have allowed for a greater emotional depth.
Set in a picture-perfect maison de vacance in the south of France, this little galaxy constellates in its pre-Copernican symmetry around Frederic, its beneficently rounded, loving and earthy center. Bernard Campan’s Frederic is like a luminous, small Dutch still life of a ripe peach in a blue and white china bowl- the sheer joy of its simple deliberateness even the most die-hard downtown conceptualist could not resist. Lea Drucker is his beautiful lunar wife, Frederique, who has yet to find out the extent to which she depends upon predictability. Their three children are a tender, if calculated, array: the quiet, older saturnine daughter spends her vacation peering into a microscope; the middle son is a would-be magician in a skeleton printed T shirt, his sleight-of-hand changes the king of spades into the king of hearts; the youngest, Arthur, is the irrepressible and irresistible masked and caped trickster, constantly in motion, searching and heroic. Various family and friends fill out the night sky and daytime activities that shuffle along seemingly eternally.
But the happy couple is just past the cusp of youth and opposition appears like a small disproportionately influential asteroid in the form of Charles Berling’s Hugo, the new, single, gay next-door neighbor. Hugo’s sphere is icy mentation and azure imagination, constricted and unforgiving, fearless and honest; he, too, is at an edge only slightly different from Frederic’s.
Myriad flashbacks and surreal imagery weave their way into the domestic drama, as Frederic and Hugo become not so much friends, as neighboring influences- this is not a male bonding film. It goes without saying that if you are expecting to see the cinema verite aftermath of a Larchmont barbecue you are looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. The flashbacks mostly revolve around a long after dinner conversation a deux as they congenially battle out opposing views about love and life, stretching only slightly, for now, out of their respective caricatures.
As the early morning air chills, Frederic has fetched sweaters from inside for them both. The mental Hugo happily parries and thrusts in his erotically charged polemic against relationships. Like anyone who has paid a high price, he overvalues the narrow purchase he has on Eros; Frederic, by contrast, is so awash in Eros that it barely registers with him. In his bourgeois mechanical materiality, he is transfixed by the label sticking up from the back of the sweater that Hugo has just put on and, while carrying on the conversation- including a brief rendition of the 30’s cabaret song, Parlez de Moi, backlit with the golden rays of early morning- devises and executes a complex design both proper and inconspicuous to tuck the offending label back out of sight.
.
Frederic’s unconscious flow of warmth and good nature has been diverted by the force of this newcomer, now running partner, and Frederique will suffer for it. The story turns retrograde with harsh doses of reality: limitation, infidelity, deceit, cruelty and AIDS. Hugo’s mentioned but unseen daughter arrives on the scene. A beauteous treat that did not fall far from the tree, she is full of felt and clever accusation, and one previously unknown bit of information, trying to convince her father to visit, if not forgive, his own harsh, rejecting and rejected father who now lies, in hospital, dying.
Everything is set; all that can is madly breaking away from its former form. Frederique howls into the night, the conventional container of their relationship can no longer be taken for granted, she is a powerless new moon, a sunken cave of darkness. Frederic, wounded by a simple sprained ankle, is no longer the center. Something has pulled him away and into consciousness of a greater Sun-center, his world has expanded, but he must find his place within these new dimensions. To fulfill this destiny he hobbles off into the night to find Hugo, messenger of the gift, if not its source, to give him the reciprocal token: a tender acknowledgement to a man all too accustomed to so much less. Hugo’s still rampant harshness is overwhelmed by Frederic’s simple generosity and he, too, is released from a predictable repetition. As stated earlier in the movie: magic is what happens when you’re not looking, from the place you don’t expect. It looks like chance to the viewer, but it is hard work to the creator of the illusion. And what about the stars? For millennia man has looked to the heavens trying to discern the clues to fulfill his fate and outwit chance.
There are few actually false notes in this film but the director did not do the substance of her story any service by having Hugo default into conventional sentimentality when his daughter demands to know why he loves her? His replies, she grippingly points out, are all matters of chance. Instead of agreeing with her, like it or not, he dissolves into hugs and confirmations that, yes, he loves her simply because she is his daughter. No doubt this reasoning makes good and possibly necessary box-office concessions, but isn’t the rare beauty and terror of love, like grace, its pure freedom from reason and contingency?
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