Les Misérables (1934)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Raymond Bernard

By Marilyn Ferdinand

“No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” — Roger Ebert

If there ever was a film that perfectly exemplified Roger Ebert’s opinion for me, it is the 1934 French adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. In the days after I finished watching this underexposed masterpiece by an inexplicably obscure director, and I kept flashing to random scenes and faces at odd moments. It is not that any particular scene grabbed me, though there are some fine set-pieces in the film, it is the entire experience that captured me. I didn’t want to rewatch it, I wanted it to continue. I literally longed for it to be part of my life.

The pull of this sweeping, period melodrama has proven irresistible to filmmakers and audiences alike, set as it is during the turbulent 19th century in France when the republic forged by revolution in 1789 was ruled off and on by “citizen” kings who, along with the aristocratic elite, had an eye toward the permanent restoration of the absolute power of the monarchy. There have been at least 25 filmed versions of Hugo’s 530,982-word tome, spanning from a Lumière short in 1897 to 2012’s operatic extravaganza under the direction of Oscar winner Tom Hooper.

Les Misérables can be slanted almost any way a filmmaker or studio wants. Hollywood productions seem to favor a romantic line, with Jean Valjean more of a matinee idol, such as in the 1952 version with Michael Rennie as Valjean. In France, Victor Hugo is a monumental historical figure, cultural influence, and chronicler of decisive moments in French history. Thus, French adaptations of his works lean toward noble ideals and the public stage. Raymond Bernard, a highly regarded director in France who is nearly unknown outside his native land, made this 281-minute film in three discrete parts that I viewed in two sittings; even at this length, the film sticks largely with the core story of convict Jean Valjean from his final days in prison to the end of his life. Bernard, a Jew and son and brother of two French playwrights, Tristan Bernard and Jean-Jacques Bernard, cut his teeth in silent films and went into hiding during World War II. His father was sent to a deportation camp during the war; though released due to public outcry, the rigors of his imprisonment shortened his life. The experiences of Père Bernard and Jean Valjean in this regard are ironically similar.

The film strikes an almost miraculous balance of the politics and rebellious fervor, social malaise and sacrifice, rags-to-riches drama and romance Hugo offered by helping us identify personally with each of the characters through a considered dramatization of their stories. Key to Bernard’s film is his Jean Valjean, the craggy and robust character actor Harry Baur, naturally built to exhibit the physical strength we see in the first scene that enables Police Inspector Javert (played here by the great Charles Vanel) to find him every time Valjean changes locations and identities. Veracity in this detail is crucial to accepting the cat-and-mouse pursuit that forms the through line on which the secondary stories are hung, and in my opinion, Baur is the definitive Valjean in this regard.

However, Baur brings much more to the role than physical stature. He grasps Valjean’s native wit and survival instinct, and understands Hugo’s critique of the temptation to lose touch with society’s underclass as one rises in the world. When Valjean, now the mayor of a small town, learns that his suspicious police inspector (Javert, of course) is off to a trial where the defendant has been identified as his bail-jumping quarry, Valjean rides to the defendant’s rescue, but not before considering an actual fork in the road that could lead him off the path of truth and justice. Valjean keeps a 40-sous coin he stole from a young man to remind him of the base human being he became during his imprisonment, but he is not immune to being blinded by the light. When he fails to recognize Thénardier (Charles Dullin), little Cosette’s (Gaby Triquet) cruel guardian when she was a child, who has fallen as low as Valjean has risen, he sets himself up to become a crime victim and barely escapes murder, as well as rearrest by Javert. The undercurrent throughout Baur’s touching, understated performance is the desire to be free, of particular importance to the French, but also a universal imperative that has seen this tale resonate through the ages in many lands.

Valjean’s encounter with Monseigneur Myriel (Henry Krauss) is particularly satisfying in this version because Bernard offers it with simplicity, brevity, and without necessarily endorsing religious conversion as the key to reform and salvation. The scene serves to highlight the inhuman conditions convicts endured by emphasizing the wonder Valjean experiences at being shown common courtesies and having a real bed to sleep in; the man who had the decency to steal a loaf of bread for his starving nieces and nephews starts to emerge and comes to full bloom in short order. Baur is particularly affecting when he goes to Thénardier’s inn to settle Fantine’s (Florelle) debts for Cosette’s care and agrees to whatever the greedy Thénardiers ask without question or hesitation; when it appears from their increasing demands that they will never let Cosette go, he decides on a fair price, pays it, and simply takes her hand and leads her away. The scene plays particularly well today as a reminder that those for whom no amount of money is enough—I am reminded of a comment Bill Gates made about encyclopedia companies that didn’t aggressively capture the electronic market: “Oh, they have finite greed.”—can never behave in a truly human manner and that one simply must part company with them.

Fantine is treated in a more fully realized fashion here, with her story expanded in ways that while not escaping melodramatic excess completely, relieve her of the burden of being nothing more than a pathetic victim. We see her while still employed in Valjean’s bead factory, daydreaming, working slowly, and incurring the envy of her boss (Yvonne Mea) because of her beauty. Thus, we see Fantine as a vain, careless woman whose character only comes to the forefront when it comes to her daughter Cosette. The horror of watching Fantine have her teeth pulled in the 2012 version becomes something almost comic in this film, as a scene in which her future of selling her hair and teeth is foretold moves to a full-face view of Fantine with a gap where her front teeth used to be. The image has an odd quality of ridicule about it, like locking a petty criminal into stocks in a public square, thus commenting on the costs of foolish vanity. Nonetheless, Fantine’s story contains an appropriate amount of sadness as she falls fatally ill and dies without seeing her daughter again.

The final scenes in Paris that see all of the major players converge in street warfare builds with tension. The ill fortune and ill will of the Thénardiers collide with Valjean’s charitable instincts and a grown-up Cosette’s (Josseline Gaël) love affair with Marius Pontmercy (Jean Servais), an aristocrat turned revolutionary, animates the final reckoning between Valjean and Javert. Cosette is little more than a sketch as a young woman, a far cry from the overburdened little girl whose delight in a street carnival, a lively scene of French village life that particularly distinguishes this version, reveals a spirit that she has wisely hidden from her taskmasters. Nonetheless, the grown-up Cosette’s ardor for Marius and affection for Valjean are palpable, with Valjean realizing from his own, sad experiences that the spirit he saved so many years ago could be broken if Marius is killed. Among the most vivid characters in this part of the tale are Marius’ royalist uncle Gillenormand (Max Dearly), who provides comic delight in denouncing and worrying about his nephew in the same breath, and the Thénardiers’ youngest child Gavroche, played by Émile Genevois. Genevois returns this character to the cunning, adventurous boy whose defiance of the king’s soldiers in the final battle has nothing to do with becoming a martyr, as in the 2012 version, and everything to do with keeping hope of victory alive. He scurries in the dark collecting ammunition from fallen soldiers as he sings, in beautiful voice, in mockery; it is only a matter of time before an annoyed fusilier’s aim finally finds its target, but not before Gavroche has recovered 400 rounds for the cause.

With chaos all around and the rebellion doomed, Javert’s private hunt for Valjean, who is carrying a wounded Marius through the Paris sewers, forms a particularly tense scene that foreshadows Valjean’s capture and Javert’s victory. Watching the aged and injured Valjean, still strong but having more difficulty carrying the unconscious Marius, makes us fear that French law will win out over natural law. When Javert is waiting for the pair at one of only two gateways out of the sewers, all hope is lost. Javert agrees to have Marius taken by coach to Gillenormand’s mansion, after which he will take Valjean into custody. But it is Javert who realizes that he has been in a prison, locked away from human intercourse by the rigidity of the law. He frees himself in a way that will keep him out of the grasp of the pitiless authorities, but his suicide, like everything else in this film, is dealt with economically with a shot of circular ripples radiating from a central point in the Seine River. Valjean has the last word as he lies dying, wishing not to be remembered by anyone but Cosette, finally becoming the symbol for the French spirit Hugo always intended.

Location shooting in Paris during the final third of the film prefigures Neorealism and deepens the sense of history with which the French live and identify. In addition, German Expressionism must have been an influence on Bernard. The skewed camera angles, cubist-inspired sets, and deep shadows that give expressionist films their menacing power work well in this story of crime and punishment set against the backdrop of violent history.

To help examine Raymond Bernard’s place in cinematic history, The Criterion Collection has issued a set in its Eclipse series that contains this film and Wooden Crosses (1932). The Criterion word on the set:

One of the greatest and least-known directors of all time, Raymond Bernard helped shape French cinema, at the dawn of the sound era, into a truly formidable industry. Typical of films from this period, Bernard’s dazzling dramas painted intimate melodrama on epic-scale canvases. These two masterpieces—the wrenching World War I tragedy WOODEN CROSSES and a mammoth, nearly five-hour LES MISÉRABLES, widely considered the greatest film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel—exemplify the formal and narrative brilliance of an unjustly overshadowed cinematic trailblazer.

CIFF 2012: Holy Motors (2012)

Director/Screenwriter: Leos Carax

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

There’s one thing that people rarely talk about and yet is vital in our lives: dreaming. I don’t mean night dreams, but daydreams. They are man’s best companion, wonders of existence.

French director Leos Carax said the above in an interview about his 1999 film Pola X, the film he made eight years after completing his self-described “variation on the least original theme possible: boy meets girl”—The Lovers on the Bridge. In truth, it’s hard to imagine a more original version of that formula, with its gritty, hallucinatory visions and hard-luck, abusively passionate lovers living on Paris’ famous Pont Neuf. Now here we are again, wondering where Leos Carax has been for the 13 years since Pola X premiered. Frankly, I don’t care. In fact, I wish more directors would go away and come back only when they have something they feel compelled to express, particularly if the results are as explosive and stunning as Carax’s new film Holy Motors.

The opening quote is very pertinent to the “plot” of Holy Motors. The film plays like a series of short stories tied together by one character, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who is driven by his chauffeur Céline (Edith Scob) to various parts of Paris in a white limousine to act out a wide variety of roles. These roles are the active daydreams of their orchestrator, Carax, crafting found objects from his experiences into both ordinary and extraordinary moments. Indeed, the most extreme of his daydreams, one involving the abduction of a high-fashion model (Eva Mendes) from a photo shoot in the Père Lachaise Cemetery by Lavant as a demented leprechaun strongly reminded me of the daydreams Sally Potter had as she tried to write a murder mystery involving a dwarf and some Paris fashion models in her film The Tango Lesson (1997). If Carax did, in fact, crib the idea—and I have no way of knowing whether he did—it is only fair and proper for any dreamer to recycle material for his own purposes.

Despite the plethora of hit films with convoluted plots that sometimes go nowhere—for example, the inane summer blockbuster Inception (2010)—I imagine a lot of moviegoers will feel frustrated by Holy Motors. You see, it doesn’t exist to be a brain teaser you can use to smartly assert your own powers of reason and deduction. From the very beginning, Carax signals he is presenting his own dream material—he has a man go into an airport hotel room, pull the drapes, and then enter a grand movie theater through a chink in the wall where an audience is watching a film projected on a screen. Now that’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? But who is the man? Why is he in the airport hotel? Where is he going when he checks out? Who gives a damn! His “real” life couldn’t possibly be more interesting or exciting than the dream life Carax has given him and us.

Of course, Carax immediately plays with our initial plot expectations by showing us Monsieur Oscar exiting an enormous, gated mansion with the farewell shouts of his children seeing him down the winding driveway. His bodyguards follow him in a black sedan as he walks to the white stretch limo and greets Céline, who tells him the information for his nine appointments that day are in place for him to peruse. He makes all kinds of captain of industry noises into his cellphone as he looks at the first folder. Then we see him shift to the side of the limo we haven’t been allowed to see. A theatrical make-up mirror and racks of costumes and props stand at the ready as Monsieur Oscar begins his transformation into an old beggar woman. The limo stops below a bridge, and the disguised Oscar stands on the bridge, his bodyguards near at hand, and begs for money. When he returns to the limo, his bodyguards largely disappear from the scene as he makes his rounds, with stops that include working in a motion-capture studio, assassinating a prominent businessman, scolding “his” teenage daughter, and saying good-bye to “his” beloved niece while lying on his deathbed.

Oscar even has an interlude where he meets Jean (Kylie Minogue), someone he seems to have a past with who also travels Paris in a white limo acting out roles. So is there a real Monsieur Oscar? A real Jean? When they finish their appointments, all of the play actors end up not necessarily where they started the day, and the drivers return to the Holy Motors garage. Céline dons a mask that suggests the role the actress who plays her had in Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face, and leaves. When all the lights are out, the two dozen or so white limos parked in the garage blink their lights and carry on a conversation about their eventual obsolescence as the size of machines keeps shrinking.

So what can we glean from the various parts of this rollercoaster adventure? Carax reveals some of his own thoughts about his world. He speaks with someone who might be his employer (Michel Piccoli) who wonders about Oscar’s waning interest in the job because he fears there is no longer a “beholder” to view his creations, Oscar says he keeps on “for the beauty of the act.” This is the essence of the pure artist—art for art’s sake. He deplores the shift from the large cameras of filmmaking days gone by, wondering how anyone can even see the tiny digital cameras used today, a sentiment about the miniature, yet all-powerful machines we have all come to rely upon. Not a Luddite, rather a connoisseur of the industrial design of the past, he also finds extraordinary beauty in motion-capture technology, as Lavant in a black body suit and the incredibly flexible Reda Oumouzoune in a red body suit simulate the elegant contortions of oral sex and coitus as their movements are transformed into writhing, animated dragons on a screen above them.

By contrast, the sexiness of the fashion model kidnapped by Lavant in his Monsieur Merde persona (from Carax’s contribution to the 2008 trilogy film Tokyo!) is subverted by the feral midget. After he has escaped to his underground lair through the Paris sewers, he rips cloth from her diaphanous gown and turns it into a burqua, stripping naked himself to curl up in her lap. Perhaps the wild man who seems a huge danger—hilariously, he bites off the fingers of the photographer’s assistant who seems to think she can make him part of the shoot—really only wants a mother’s nonthreatening love. Have we been all wrong about male aggressiveness and female objectification?

Many moments in this film are hilarious. Besides the shockingly funny finger-biting moment, the deathbed scene ends with uncle lifting “his” niece’s (Elise Lhomeau) head as he gets out of bed to go to his next appointment. Their polite, perfunctory pleasantries and farewells make the artifice of an already melodramatic scene irresistibly funny. I found the interlude between a loving working-class father and his teenage daughter to be quite touching, particularly since the girl is played by Carax’s own daughter, Nastya Golubeva Carax. When Lavant discovers the girl has lied about her experience of a party and the whereabouts of her friend, he orders her out of the car. It’s not as frightful as all that, as they are in front of their own apartment building. The anticipated punishment is not what she expects—he merely tells her that she will have to live with herself the rest of her life. While this sounds like a lily-livered parent getting out of being a disciplinarian, the effect is a lasting indictment of her character, of all of us who lie and misrepresent ourselves.

We can take these little postcard messages from the film, but the main pleasure is simply in the watching. Holy Motors is mirthful, rueful, beautiful, ugly, miraculously original while still feeling quite familiar, particularly to cinephiles, and already has the earmarks of a modern film classic. It and its star, Denis Lavant, were the richly deserving winners of the top prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival. Bravo, Monsieur Carax, bravo!

Previous coverage

Night Across the Street: Raul Rúiz’s last completed film is a surreal and frequently comic float through the memories of a man who is ending his work life with the feeling that death is stalking him. (Chile)

The Scapegoat: New adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel in which a schoolteacher impersonates an arrogant aristocrat and has a warming effect on his dysfunctional family. (UK)

Tey: Telling the story of one day—the last day—in the life of a young man, a fact known, celebrated, and mourned throughout his community, this film confronts our peculiarly human tragedy of knowing we will die, and gives us a few answers about coping with that frightening inevitability. (Senegal)

Mr. Sophistication: A familiar story of a comedian trying to make a comeback is made compelling by great performances, an intelligent script, and deft direction and camerawork. (USA)

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni: The life of Egyptian movie star Soad Hosni, a cultural icon and touchpoint for unity in the Middle East, is interpreted in a biopic using nothing but footage from her 82 films. (Lebanon)

Shun Li and the Poet: A tone poem of a film depicting the longings of a Chinese emigrant to Italy and the loving friendship she forms with an elderly Yugoslavian man in a small fishing village near Venice. (Italy)

The Last Sentence: A gorgeously photographed biopic of Swedish newspaper editor Torgny Segerstedt that focuses attention on his romantic intrigues as he wages a relentless campaign against Hitler and Swedish neutrality. (Sweden)

The Exam: In a taut thriller set in 1957 Hungary, a member of the secret police unknowingly undergoes a harrowing loyalty test under the watchful eye of his own mentor. (Hungary)

Judex (1963)

The Days of High Adventure: A Journey through Adventure Film

Director: Georges Franju

By Roderick Heath

Amongst early pioneers in film, Louis Feuillade, who made his famous serials between the lead-up to World War I and his early death in 1925, produced ür-texts of almost incalculable impact on subsequent architectonics of film and popular culture. For many French and German directors, in particular, his style is almost endlessly resonant: his example gave immediate birth to Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Feuillade’s style moved beyond the theatrical wonderment of Georges Méliès to embrace a perfervid blend of realism and make-believe, utilising the realities of the then-contemporary Parisian landscape and filling it with bizarre emanations of the fantastic, populated by figures accumulated from tropes of gothic fiction and stage melodrama, and the evolving science fiction and detective genres. He did so with a deadpan grace that made him an immediate ancestor for the surrealist movement, which would bloom in the following few years, and captured, in several senses, the birth of modernity. More than that, the tensions within Feuillade’s work seem to capture an innate dissonance in the nature of film, poised to be both a tool for capturing the world as it is, and yet ripe for subverting reality and delighting the eye with wonders and perversities that take on totemic power. The images and driving ideas of his serials have been sustained and transmitted through innumerable tributes and imitations, both drawing from and contributing to the common lore of pulp heroism and comic-book super-heroism. As such, it’s arguable something of Feuillade’s spirit trickles down to us even in such contemporary product as V for Vendetta (2005) or The Dark Knight Rises (2012), where the source material owes its definite debts, however distant, to Feuillade’s fantasias of masked avengers and cat-suited femme fatales dancing over rooftops and reigning over a cityscape transformed into a psychic playground.

Georges Franju, for his part, had been making short documentaries since the 1930s, most famously, his 1945 exploration of an urban charnel house, Les Sang Des Bêtes, but he retained links to the cinema avant garde, and his own surrealist sensibility remained in evidence even in explicating strange and terrible textures, constantly locating the charge of the unearthly in the seemingly harshly realistic. His fascination with cinema history became apparent when he made a short documentary about Méliès not long before he made a successful entrance into feature cinema. After his seminal horror film, Eyes Without a Face (1959), named after a Feuillade work and remixing themes from fairy tales and 1930s horror films, he decided to remake the silent master’s 1916 serial Judex. Some New Wavers made fun of him for crawling back into historical daydreams, and yet Franju has been proven smartly anticipatory of where popular fantasies were heading. Within a few years, a surge of pop-art-hued superhero mockeries would hit screens big and small, long before comic-book progeny would begin to invade multiplexes. In turn Franju would provide some inspiration to other filmmakers, especially horror directors like Don Sharp, whose The Kiss of the Vampire (1964) was immediately indebted, and French underground gothic auteur Jean Rollin. Franju’s touch is far more delicate, however, than most of his followers, and certainly more so than the blockbuster fare he anticipated. His film’s closing title reads, “Dedicated to Louis Feuillade – In Memory of an Unhappy Time: 1916,” a reminder that many of the most disturbing fantasias well out of the most troubled of eras. Franju’s take on Feuillade’s material both looked back to the hazy dawn of modernism and anticipated an oncoming age of moral destabilisation, rebellious countercultures, and anarchic subcultures.

For Franju the mocking, pseudo-surrealist possibilities of this material became paramount. Compressing the five-hour serial into a 90-minute feature, Franju dashes through narrative with a troubadour’s rollicking wit, refashioning the tale as a display of subversive surfaces and magic-realist artifice. His protagonist Judex (Channing Pollock) struts through the proceedings in black cape and hat, playing the vigilante avenger. Yet, he often seems less a force of traditional heroic potency, usually expressed through rock-solid fists and guns, than a bringer of graces, karmic balance, and atonement: he offers bleak but symmetrical punishments without violence. The film’s thematic stresses also take up where Eyes Without a Face left off in extending Franju’s insidious disassembly of the old French patriarchy through motifs torn from fairy tales and genre yarns and pasted back together in his own pattern. Like his successor as a Feuillade fan and natural cinematic rebel, Jacques Rivette, Franju was fascinated by the cinema as an assembly of carefully textured surfaces whose surface order and frippery always contain the seed of the mysterious and the chaotic.

The film offers up tycoon Favraux (Michel Vitold) as a corrupt and oppressive overlord, and as per Balzac’s great maxim, he’s a former bank clerk who’s built a fortune and become a capitalist titan through criminal acts. The first few minutes witness him contemptuously dismissing an old vagabond, Pierre Kerjean (René Génin), who took the rap for him years before for a criminal act and now has lost contact with the wife and child Favraux was supposed to protect. Favraux patronises his daughter Jacqueline (Edith Scob), introduced looking shocked into immobility by haute-bourgeois conformity as inescapable as the sunlight she lounges in, with her father; having forced her into one marriage, he now plans to force her into a second with a wastrel aristocrat. But justice is already looming over Favraux: he’s received a threat of death in the form a letter from the mysterious Judex, and he calls in oddball private detective Alfred Cocantin (Jacques Jouanneau). Whilst driving into town along a country lane, Favraux sees Kerjean walking and takes the opportunity to rid himself of this potential pest by running him down.

The crimes of high society will soon encounter both the reaction of repressed and degraded classes, represented by the devilish Diana Monti (Francine Bergé) and the vigilante actions of Judex, a shape-shifting, self-appointed knight. A key joke is that both of these characters are posing as people close to Favraux. Diana pretends to be Marie Verdier, a governess for Jacqueline’s daughter: Favraux asks her to marry him after she refuses to be his mistress, spurning him because of his great fortune, the perfect hook. Judex poses as his trusted elderly aide Vallieres, a benevolent guardian hovering over the otherwise blighted Favraux household. With a typical sleight of hand, Judex is, then, secretly present in the narrative even before he makes his official entrance in one of the most amusingly bizarre and iconic introductions in film history: Franju’s camera slowly tilting up from his feet, revealing a well-formed masculine body in an elegant suit, before revealing a head encased in a bird mask, gazing with an implacable raptor’s intensity at the camera. In the same year as Hitchcock’s The Birds, Franju peppers his film with constant avian images utilising them, like Hitchcock, as emblems of emotion and the inexplicable, except here they’re the tools and symbols of benevolent forces rather than the underlying chaos in nature. This imagery is also based partly in justifying one major tool at Franju’s disposal, Pollock’s gifts as a magician: the American-born performer was world-famous for his conjuring of doves.

Judex’s most famous scene follows this first sight of the hero as he proceeds through a masked ball held by Favraux to announce his daughter’s engagement with an apparently dead dove in his hand, held out before him like a pagan offering and symbol of the damage Favraux has done to others. As he reaches the stage with the eyes of the guests on him, the bird suddenly flutters to life, and the masked magician begins to release more birds that flit above the society guests. He closes in on Jacqueline, herself wearing a dove mask, and charms her with his pets, before her father, clad aptly in a vulture mask, takes the stage to announce the engagement at midnight—the time when Judex has promised he will die. Just after the clock finishes striking the hour, Favraux immediately falls to the floor and is pronounced dead by a doctor (André Méliès) who is amongst the guests.

Franju reconstructs Judex into a kind of artist-hero, an Orpheus figure standing at the gates and wielding powers of life, death, and resurrection through his artful execution, a figure with an otherworldly quality that stands in stark contrast to the equally multitudinous, yet deeply, deliciously corporeal Diana. This is partly a side effect of the fact that Franju had originally wanted to remake Fantômas (1914), and was more interested in the villains Musidora had played for Feuillade, with her potent eroticism and air of ungoverned radicalism, than in traditional hero figures, and this tension contributes to the peculiar texture of Judex. Franju clearly doesn’t care about the usual rules that are supposed to preoccupy filmmakers engaging with such material, like trying to make the flimflam logically or psychologically convincing, opting for uncovering an animating spirit of transformative delight.

Caught between the two masked protagonists is Scob’s Jacqueline, an ironic touch considering she played the disfigured, perpetually masked and imprisoned heroine in Eyes Without a Face. Scob is here just as angelic and victimised, but this time she’s just about the only major character who is not adopting some kind of disguise. She is rather the character who is the most integral being, needing nothing more than what she possesses, and for whom all decency is a private epiphany. Jacqueline is initially dominated and pinioned by her father’s prerogative; his “death” comes as both an aggrieving shock and an opportunity to declare autonomy, rejecting the poisoned chalice that is his estate in favour of raising her daughter Alice on her income as a piano teacher, and seeing off her loser fiancé with passing delight. Scob, rather resembling a blonde Audrey Hepburn with her swanlike neck and large, expressive eyes, inhabits the role of nominal damsel in distress with an ethereal grace, relentlessly hunted, snatched, drugged, and nearly murdered by Diana and her coterie of dimwit thugs. Yet, she also is the moral light of the film: after she spurns the estate, Judex changes his original plan to execute her father, who was merely paralysed with a drug, for his crimes, and instead keep him prisoner.

Judex and his band of warriors unearth Favraux from his tomb and transport him to their abode, a super-futuristic hideout underneath an ancient, perhaps Roman ruin (felicitous, given the Roman roots of his adopted name and creed), an abode reminiscent of Cocteau’s Hades in Orpheé (1949) translated into proto-science fiction, as seemingly solid brick walls slide apart, ceilings become panels upon which written words appear delivering messages of almost deistic judgement, and Judex keeps an eye on his captive with the sorcery of technology—television. Judex, like some other films of the late ’50s and early ’60s, including a small rash of period-dress Jules Verne adaptations, offers a prototypical version of the spirit that drives the more recent Steampunk movement: a delight in modern and futuristic technology viewed through the sensibility and conceptualism of the past, coupled with an effervescent, yet quietly meaningful reflection on the subtler transformations of society. Franju coats the film with a veneer of the comedic and the ethereal that don’t entirely hide its awareness of the fluidic moment it depicts, with characters, particularly the female ones, shaking off the dead weight of Victorianism to claw their way into a new era. Judex already seems to live in that new era, like a time traveller, or perhaps a Merlin, who was said to age in reverse: fittingly, then, one key image of perverse sensuality arrives when Jacqueline is shocked to discover Judex in the act of transforming himself into the elderly Vallieres, mantle of snowy white hair over his young face, her aged protector revealed as dramatically handsome potential lover/persecutor/saviour.

Judex is filled with such deft shifts of emphasis and perception, as it moves from incident to incident borrowed from Feuillade with diversions into moments of private wit and invention. Franju constantly gleans strange humour from tropes of melodrama: Jacqueline, dumped in a river by the notorious criminals, floats blithely into the arms of fishermen whilst her tormentors look on in frustration; Morales with a hand caught in a trap on Favraux’s desk, trying to hide long enough for Diana to sneak up on the interloping Jacqueline, who screams on seeing the apparently disembodied limb; Diana, pretending to be a nurse with a voluminous wimple perched on her head, checks herself out in her compact to make sure her makeup hasn’t been despoiled by lying on the ground to spring a trap on an another unsuspecting victim. The sight of Judex’s men scaling a sheer wall like so many four-limbed spiders is both physically impressive and yet, somehow, hilarious, as is the heroes’ appearance in costume dashing about in full daylight, which ought to get them arrested on general principal. The two roving bands of mysterious heroes and villains chase each other around the landscape in a roundelay of costumes and roles, both infiltrating and slipping outside the confines of society, before finally reverting to their purified roles as emblems of good and evil.

Franju rigorously contrasts environs, shifting slowly from the old-world mystique of the country mansion to the rundown Parisian suburb where the finale takes place, with the building Diana’s gang holes up in turned into a lonely castle in a gloomy waste ground at the very frontiers of a bleak and bottomless modernism, with stygian factories burning away in the background as Diana dangles above a void. Judex’s presumption in labouring according to a desire for essential human justice to be upheld is based in a sense that society is, on the level of villainy that Favraux has worked, corrupt beyond the possibility of real justice. Favraux himself is so scared of the powerful men he has done business with or has dirt on that he doubts he could ever return safely to his former life even after Diana and her cohort rescue him from Judex’s prison. This news only makes Diana happier: even better to feed off the dark secrets of high society than to steal its trinkets. The spirit of fin-de-siècle anarchist movements and proto-revolutionary zeal lie underneath both sides, whilst the lone figure of even vaguely official justice, Cocantin, is a comical figure given to excitedly flipping the pages of the original Fantômas novel.

An sly sensuality charges Judex throughout, most obviously with Bergé dancing about in tights, culminating in a delirious moment in which she strips off her nurse’s garb down to her basic bodystocking, with that absurd wimple still on her head, before finally tossing that aside, too, and plunging through a trap door into a river to elude Judex and his men. The erotic edge is, however, equally manifest in the undertones of Judex’s and Jacqueline’s encounters, crystallising in images of symbolist power, like a doped-up Jacqueline left splayed in the driveway of the mansion by Morales and Diana when they’re faced with guard dogs, one of the hounds placing one paw protectively over the girl moments before the equally watchful, beneficent Judex strolls out of the woods and carries Jacqueline back home, her white clad form aglow in moonlight and seeming to float in the arms of the nocturnal-cloaked hero.

Aided by Bergé’s mischievous, but never winking, performance, Franju delights in Diana’s displays of sexy evil and rapid alterations of attire, playing the prim Madonna for Favraux’s benefit, the sister of mercy, the urban coquette, the mannishly garbed leader of her cell of rebels, and most indelibly, slinking through the night in her form-hugging black bodysuit with silver dagger at the hip a la Musidora’s Irma Vep and many a Catwoman after her. Diana is not merely a naughty anti-heroine, however, but a cold-blooded killer constantly poking lethally sharp objects in Jacqueline’s face, as if she’s seized hold of phallocratic power, but can only fashion an intent to violate her feminine opposite with it. Diana lives with a boyfriend and partner in crime Morales (Théo Sarapo), first glimpsed lounging on his bed and looking very like Jean-Paul Belmondo, as if Franju’s making a wry link between the older fantasies and Godard’s contemporary brand of eroticised, rough-trade criminal. Turns out that Morales is actually the missing son of Kerjean, progeny of a family unit torn asunder by Favraux’s malfeasance: his father wasn’t actually killed by Favraux’s attempt to run him over, but is, in fact, another of Judex’s operatives, and father and son recognise each other when locked in a deadly battle.

Cocantin’s return to the fray late in the film comes when a village boy, a pal of Alice’s who, having recognised Diana in her nurse costume as the fake Marie Verdier, approaches the detective to succeed where Judex has momentarily failed in tracking her down. Cocantin’s childlike spirit has already been confirmed when he was glimpsed gleefully relating blood and thunder tales and stories of her namesake to the delighted Alice; now, he and the kid form a fairly effective crime-fighting duo, allowing Franju to offer a nod in the direction of Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) and further undermining any pretences to seriousness. Yet, the film’s very last act is a brilliant whirl of reversals, as Judex is captured by his enemies, and fends off Diana’s attempt at sadomasochistic-hued seduction as she tries to kiss him while he’s tied up. Franju performs another pirouette in offering surprising sympathy for Favraux as a man who’s alive and yet might as well be dead, now wanting only peace. He still falls for Diana’s pretence to being the kindly Marie who will marry him now that he’s no longer rich, for she still hopes to use his knowledge. Favraux trusts her completely and understandably fears Judex, so much so that when the hero arrives to save him from the villains, Favraux knocks him out, and shoots himself rather than be retaken by his rescuers, lending of note of tragedy to the story, but also saving him from the disillusionment of learning Diana’s real nature.

Meanwhile, of course, a gentleman like Judex can’t be seen to hurt a lady, so to deliver Diana a comeuppance and save Judex from his apparently inescapable death, a deus ex machina arrives in the form of Cocantin’s gorgeous acrobat girlfriend Daisy (Sylva Koscina), whose circus caravan just happens to trundle past as Cocantin and the kid are watching the enemy hideout. Daisy reports to Cocantin that her own domineering uncle is now dead (“The lions ate him!”), so she’s a free agent now. A perfect equal and opposite to Diana, she wears a dashing white bodysuit for her act, initially entering wearing a spangled cape and tiara that she hands over to Cocantin for the duration. She is the one who will climb up the wall of the house and spring Judex, allowing him to turn the tables on Diana and Morales by substituting the criminal male for his bound and hooded form; Diana unknowingly plunges a knife into her lover’s heart, in a typically inspired, vicious twist. Diana’s own comeuppance comes as Daisy chases her onto the roof, where the mirror opposites battle to the death. Franju even offers a gleefully sexy and exciting shot showing only their legs, clad in leotards of contrasting black and white, entwining and tangling in the dance of combat. Diana loses, and finishes up sliding down the roof to dangle from the drain pipe as Judex’s men try to reach her, to no avail. That she was as much of a life force as a destroyer is suggested when her end comes, falling to her death and lying open-eyed amidst rubble and flowers, wept over by the young boy, with a mournful taps blown by one of the circus musicians: for Franju, even a villain’s end is something to be mourned. The very end belongs again to Judex and Jacqueline, who, leaving behind the past, are seen on a beach with the lady love now dressed in a sailor suit and the avenger reverted to magician, producing flapping totems of love from thin air. It’s a glorious end to a film that’s made an instant leap into the ranks of my personal favourites.

La belle équipe (1936)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Julien Duvivier

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I recently had a discussion with Jason Bellamy at his marvelous blog The Cooler about the relative merits of the 1942 biopic The Pride of the Yankees. I dislike that film intensely as a slapdash piece of hagiography, yet Jason argues persuasively that the film was an important morale booster for an American public suffering under the privations and fear that came with our involvement in World War II. Showing the courage with which Lou Gehrig faced his physical decline and death must have helped the millions of filmgoers who were facing death overseas or coming to terms with the loss of their loved ones.

In a similar vein, the 1930s saw a number of filmmakers around the world deal head on with the effects of the Great Depression and the threat of German aggression by making politically charged “popular front” movies, endorsed, but not sponsored by the Communist Party. Popular front movies were characterized by a vigorously democratic approach, frequently dealing with the hardships of working-class life and the need to stand together to better our collective circumstances. Frank Borzage trained his camera on the unemployed in Man’s Castle (1933), and Leo McCarey combined the plight of unemployment and old age in the heartbreaking Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), while less serious-minded approaches to social problems could be found in Mervyn LeRoy’s Gold Diggers of 1933 and Louis Milestone’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933).

In France, filmmakers with socialist sensibilities attempted to stir the populace to fight both monied interests and fascism; the pinnacle of these films was, in my opinion, Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938). Two years earlier, Renoir was mulling whether to direct La belle équipe, scripted by Charles Spaak, his collaborator on Grand Illusion (1937) and The Lower Depths (1936). In the end, Renoir’s friend Julien Duvivier took the reins. La belle équipe, which translates as the beautiful team, does indeed bring together a beautiful team of designers, cinematographer, and actors, led by the complex, charismatic performance of Jean Gabin, to tell a quintessential film of the popular front in Europe.

France’s revolutionary motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” finds its representatives in this film. Mario (Rafael Medina) represents the active revolutionary—a Spanish republican ejected from a number of countries who is one step ahead of the French authorities. He is in a serious relationship with Huguette (Micheline Cheirel), a piece worker in a dried flower factory whose name is redolent of religious persecution in France. Forced to abandon his hotel room to avoid the gendarmes who have been sniffing around, Mario arranges to meet Huguette at a bistro where their unemployed friends Jean (Jean Gabin), Raymond (Raymond Aimos), Charles (Charles Vanel), and Jacques (Charles Dorat) eat on the credit the proprietor (Charles Granvat) reluctantly extends. The friends sneak Mario into their one-room digs at the King of England, evading the badgering hotel manager (Jacques Baumer) for a time. Eventually, Mario is discovered, but as great luck would have it, the good news arrives that the men have won the national lottery and will split ₣100,000. The residents pour out of their rooms to celebrate and drink the cases of congratulatory wine Raymond has arranged.

Jacques talks of using his share to emigrate to Canada, Raymond wants to start a small machine shop in the country, but Jean suggests that if they pool their money, they could do more together than they could alone and still maintain their great camaraderie and friendship. He suggests they open a guinguette—an open-air café on a river to attract the boating crowd. The men row down a river a few miles outside of Paris, passing one grand home after another, as Raymond scoffs that such opulence is not fit for their proletarian spirit. Finally, they find a husk of a house, burned and for sale. Raymond imagines a castle tower, Jean sees an open-air dance floor, and before long, the men have purchased the derelict building and started working to transform it into “Chez Nous (Our Place),” a tribute to collective labor and shared rewards.

The lot of the working class and political progressive is aired, miraculously without making one feel terribly depressed. When Jacques falls for Huguette, he leaves for Canada rather than introduce disharmony into the enterprise. When the police catch up with Mario, the gendarme (Fernand Charpin) is a kind and sympathetic grandfather who gives Mario a day’s reprieve to attend the pre-opening party the men throw for all their friends from the old neighborhood, and even brings his grandchildren to enjoy the party. When Huguette decides to join Mario in exile, her sickly grandmother (Marcelle Géniat) offers her blessing and even finds the strength to waltz with Jean at the opening party. The generous esprit de corps of the working class that typifies popular front movies is well developed by the nuanced performances and warm and lively mise-en-scène Duvivier encourages.

The film is teeming with ingenious and pleasurable moments. Mario despairs of getting Huguette a gift for her birthday, but the friends have a solution. While one distracts the owner of the bistro, the others lift and tilt a skill claw crane machine to win items to give her. When she comes to the bistro, each holds out the prize they snagged—a clock, an eraser—with Mario presenting her with the present she hoped for, a make-up compact. The scene is innocent, funny, and perfectly timed to endear the audience to their attempts to please Huguette with a minor bit of larceny. Indeed, larceny is a fall-back position of the working class, but cheating a penny-arcade machine or avoiding the rent collector are seen as a way to balance the scale with the monied classes.

Another lovely scene involves the men rowing down the river and stopping at the burned property. Each of them gives himself over to Raymond’s reverie, walking through the shell and imagining what they could do with the place. It’s a leap-of-faith moment, as the building is in extremely rough condition, but each of the actors helps us see what he sees with enthusiasm and imagination. When the construction is threatened by a violent storm, and the roof starts to blow away, we are horror-stricken and then encouraging as the men climb up in the downpour and use their bodies to hold the tiles down through the night.

The most serious threat to the enterprise is femme fatale Gina (Viviane Romance), the estranged wife of Charles. Unlike the more vicious American femmes fatale, Gina is merely a greedy hedonist. She manipulates a still-smitten Charles into giving her part of his winnings—they are still married, she reminds him—and lures Jean into an affair when he goes to her Paris apartment to reclaim the money, needed to repair the damage done by the storm. Jealousy threatens to tear the comrades apart; both Charles and Jean find Gina irresistible, and she lies without compunction to get what she wants or to seek revenge. It is a bit disconcerting to hear Jean exclaim about fraternal friendship being the more noble and lasting bond, but there is something so quintessentially French about examining the folly of love that it’s hard to feel offended. It must also be acknowledged that the women in the film are not caricatures, with Huguette a real part of the team and Gina a strong, if negative, agent of her own life, refusing to let Jean shame her for posing for nude photographs.

My cousin, who has lived in Paris for many years, relayed some comments she heard about French detective films to me: “The difference between American films and French ones is that the American ones have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the end is usually happy. In the French film, things happen every which way, and we can’t really follow who’s doing what why. And someone almost always ends up dead.” While La belle équipe isn’t a detective film, someone does indeed end up dead. In fact, there is an alternate, tragic ending to the happy one of the print the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered from France to the theater; reportedly, rather than having one or the other, French audiences usually see both endings in succession when the film is screened.

Remains of “Chez Nous” can still be found on the riverbank where it was constructed. Tourists occasionally visit it out of curiosity and to remind themselves of a traditional type of communal meeting place that has declined in France. For modern film audiences in any country, La belle équipe is a wonderful reminder that a popular front that offered courage and camaraderie to people bent by fear and poverty is part of our heritage, with pleasures and lessons for a new generation.

Goodbye First Love (Un amour de jeunesse, 2011)

Director/Screenwriter: Mia Hansen-Løve 

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Anyone who has loved for the very first time—and especially, lost that first love—will be marked for life. The intensity and purity of the feeling, the all-encompassing preoccupation with the beloved, the almost miraculous unreality of being swept up in a new and irresistible feeling has no match in human experience. As Camille (Lola Créton), the protagonist in Mia Hansen-Løve’s documentary-like film Goodbye First Love, says of her new love when her first love Sullivan (Sebasian Urzendowsky) walks back into her life after walking out a decade earlier, “I love him as much as I loved you, but in a different way.” That she can recognize real love that isn’t exactly like her first love is a measure of how far she has grown.

Beginning in 1999 Paris, the film opens, as many modern movies do these days, with a sex scene. I absolutely hate this too-common film opener, yet this sex scene isn’t the act itself or even focused on the act itself. Instead, Sullivan pulls a naked Camille in front of a mirror and says “Look how pretty you are.” This is a very telling moment, suggesting that Sullivan is teaching Camille about more than love and sex. More on that later.

Unfortunately for the besotted Camille, Sullivan isn’t as content being in relationship as she is. He is a young man who wants to find himself before he settles down. He decides to drop out of college and arranges to leave on a 10-month trip traveling around South America. Camille, a high school student who can’t imagine a future, let alone one without Sullivan, helplessly flails at his decision, her recriminations nearly spoiling a quiet idyll in the country the pair takes on the eve of his departure.

After Sullivan leaves, Camille tacks up a map of South America and charts with push pins his travels as announced by the weekly letters she receives from him, cellphones not having entered the marketplace yet. After Sullivan has reached Chile, the letters stop. Eventually, Camille takes down the map and pins. She also tries to commit suicide. While in the hospital, we see a book on her nightstand about the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Camille’s brother makes a snide comment about this “light reading.” Camille says nothing, but she starts on her journey to become an architect. She will eventually fall in love with one of her teachers, Lorenz (Magne Håvard Brekke), move in with him, and start work at his firm.

Goodbye First Love must cover 10 years in under two hours, so the film has an episodic quality to it. Nonetheless, Hansen-Løve, whose own career slightly mirrors Camille’s as first an actress for Olivier Assayas and then his wife, pays attention to details that flesh out her characters. We see Sullivan at home with his parents in the suburbs, his dog and kid brother running through a scene or two just because. Sullivan’s habit of coming to see Camille by climbing through her bedroom window provides a romantic echo to Romeo and Juliet, but as the film progresses, we’ll see that the true reference is to Peter Pan and Wendy.

I have been studying Jung’s concepts of the animus and anima lately, and it seems clear to me that Sullivan is a projection of Camille’s animus, or masculine spirit. Camille, in turn, seems to be a projection of Sullivan’s anima, or feminine aspect. Jung says that we can suffer from an animus or anima possesssion, that is, we do not integrate our gender-opposite characteristics into our own psyche, but rather remain captive to the person who acts as our gender mirror. If we fail to integrate these opposite characteristics, we cannot progress properly in our psychic development.

Camille’s life with Sullivan is one wholly given over to the natural, a Garden of Eden so to speak. We see them meeting to have sex, swimming in a pond, lying in a field. When Sullivan returns to Paris later in the film, we learn that he is making a subsistence living taking pictures for a local paper in Marseilles—not the art photographer he planned to be—and doing carpentry for a two-man business he has formed with a friend. He hates the very urban Paris, preferring the rougher port city in which he has settled. He truly is a nature boy, apparently still stuck in his anima possession as he falls into an affair with Camille and runs out on her again, afraid of her influence over him, telling her before he leaves that he thinks of her constantly and sees her when he is having sex with other women. Fortunately for Camille, she assimilated some positives of her time with Sullivan, who helped her recognize her own attractiveness, something women struggle with when their inner animus voice tells them they do not measure up to an ideal projected by male-dominated societies.

Camille has faced the demise of her animus possession, nearly losing her life in the process and demonstrating how tricky and potentially dangerous a process this psychic integration can be and why many people avoid it. We watch her in her classes create structures—houses are symbols of the Self—and receive critiques on her designs. Interestingly, one critique is that she has spent too much time on the creation of an artificial pond—water is a symbol for the unconscious—and not enough on the needs of the people who will be using the buildings she designs and builds. Her class goes on field trips to the architectural centers of Berlin, Bauhaus, and Copenhagen, grounding her growing identity in the real world and putting some flesh on the film with location shooting. When she meets Lorenz, he asks her why she decided to become an architect. Her answer is that she likes to make sense of her surroundings, that is, she wants to differentiate herself from the undifferentiated morass of nature. Later, Sullivan will exclaim that he never pictured her doing anything with her life, an interesting commentary on what happens to us when we are in thrall to our animus or anima.

That she finds herself drawn to Sullivan again is no surprise, as the pull of our unconscious is very strong, and Camille is a long way from completing her life task. Yet she is not the same person she was at 15. She has embarked on an adult life, and while the lure of a return to the Garden of Eden is very real, she also is able to see Sullivan as a real person, one with whom she has little in common. In a very interesting plot point, Camille stops in front of a sidewalk vendor and contemplates some watercolors for sale. We see a scene very like the tall grass she and Sullivan laid in, as well as one of a faceless parent tending to a child. She presents Sullivan with a watercolor as a gift before one of their trysts. When he leaves, he does not take the watercolor. I assumed she bought the tall-grass painting as a memory of their first love, but instead, she bought the parent and child, inviting him to join her in the future.

Urzendowsky plays a man-child beautifully, his faux maturity in breaking with Camille at the start of the film utterly realistic, and his despair in the later stages heartfelt. I liked the way Hansen-Løve developed the relationship between Lorenz and Camille, with only a handful of meaningful smiles that signal a growing attraction, not the quicksilver clinch that seems a prerequisite these days to enduring love. Créton’s performance is perfect in the teenage years, and she chooses a very contained Camille to signal the deep grief over her lost love, a grief that spans years. In some ways, this emotionally reserved attitude took some energy out of the film, but the choice was honest and appropriate, so this is a mere quibble. Less of a quibble is the short wig Créton wore during her schooling phase; it is an appropriate symbol of sorrow-induced celibacy and turning to the psychologically masculine realm of achievement, but it wouldn’t have taken much to buy a wig that looked more natural.

Goodbye First Love worked for me on two levels, the real and the symbolic. If you choose only one view of this film, you will still find great rewards within from a skilled director with a strong handle on the meaning of images and her fine cast.

The Artist (2011)

Director/Screenwriter: Michel Hazanavicius

By Marilyn Ferdinand

They’re back again. The creative team behind the successful OSS 117 spy parodies—filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, his wife and leading lady Bérénice Bejo, and his leading man Jean Dujardin—have turned their talents not only to another subgenre, but to film history itself. The Artist is a backstage Hollywood story made as a black-and-white silent film, complete with title cards and music score. Modern silent films are more numerous than many people think, though The Artist will be a novelty to the majority of people who go to see it. Unfortunately, as a silent-film fan, I found myself quite confused by this film and feel it distorts the record on the transition from silent to sound pictures in a way that further offends John Gilbert, a silents legend who ended up unjustly on Hollywood’s ash heap.

The film begins unlike any real silent film: a spy is shown in extreme close-up being tortured with electroshock treatments by some Russians who want him to spill his secrets. He refuses to talk and is tortured to unconsciousness. Fortunately, the spy’s faithful dog comes to the rescue, the baddies are beaten, and the spy returns to the arms of his lady love. This sequence, the climax of the new George Valentin (Dujardin) film “A Russian Affair,” is intercut with an audience in a large theatre and George and his costar Constance (Missi Pyle) sitting behind the screen waiting to take their bows at this, the film’s premiere. This clever opening signals the modernist sensibilities that will be brought to bear on a film era spanning from 1927 to 1931, from the Roaring Twenties through the 1929 stock market crash and into the Great Depression and the rise of the movie musical.

Following the (silently) thunderous applause of his appreciative audience, George mugs with Dog (Uggi) on stage like the old vaudevillians they must have been, as Constance fumes about not being introduced until the very last moment. George exits the theatre, and one of his fans, while trying to retrieve the autograph book she drops, stumbles into George. He forgives the intrusion, and the young lady, Peppy Miller (Bejo), makes herself an overnight sensation by posing for the newspaper photographers and giving George a kiss that makes it to the front page of Variety. George’s disaffected wife Doris (Penelope Ann Miller) refuses to believe the innocence of the encounter, particularly when she sees George with Peppy at the studio, where the aspiring starlet has wormed her way into a nonspeaking cameo on George’s new picture. The pair signals their attraction by repeatedly flubbing their brief moment together on camera; studio boss Al Zimmer (John Goodman) wants to fire her, but George uses his clout to keep her on.

In a classic reversal of fortune, Hazanavicius produces credits for several films showing Peppy moving from the bottom of the list, through the common variant billings of the time (“Pepi”), to top-billed star as the studio switches to all-sound pictures and new faces to usher the new era in. At the same time, George, scoffing at talking pictures, heads toward ruin. He loses his fortune in the stock market crash, his wife leaves him, and the studio drops him like a hot potato. He and Dog move into a small apartment, along with his loyal chauffeur Clifton (James Cromwell), who works without pay until George fires him for his own good. After George has pawned everything of value and become a full-fledged alcoholic, Peppy rescues him after he has nearly died in a fire of his own making and resurrects his career by turning him into a musical comedy star alongside her. Their final number, a tap dance routine reminiscent of Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s “Begin the Beguine” turn in Broadway Melody of 1940, is the only nondream sequence with sound, as the stubborn silent “artist” embraces light entertainment in all-sound pictures.

The character of George is a compilation of classic silents stars, including Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, but he seems most modeled on Greta Garbo’s regular costar John Gilbert. Dujardin’s appearance mimicks Gilbert’s, and George’s reason for refusing to make talkies, “Nobody wants to hear me speak,” alludes to the myth that Gilbert did not make the transition to sound because he had a poor speaking voice. Gilbert also got an assist out of obscurity from Garbo, who insisted that he was the only man she’d play with in Queen Christina (1933), and Gilbert was an alcoholic. However, making George an egoist who declared his own film artistry as the reason to reject sound, not to mention a laughable voice test by Constance a la Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, undercuts the real reasons behind Gilbert’s problems and those of other silents stars—high salaries and more power than the studio bosses cared for them to have. George is reduced to an actor whose pride is his only impediment, and that includes having the hubris to declare himself an artist when Hollywood insists that it will support only happy campers who churn out light entertainment for a downtrodden nation.

Filming The Artist without sound seems a very confused choice to me. The big reveal at the end that George has a French accent would seem to confirm his fear of sound due to his voice, but what exactly does the choice do for the rest of the film? I’m afraid I don’t really see the point as anything other than some high-concept conceit that seems a particular attraction of The Weinstein Company, which picked this film up for American distribution. Is it fun to see modern acting styles done without sound or color, or to pick through the film references placed like Easter eggs throughout the film (e.g., the breakfast table scene between Charles Foster Kane and his wife in Citizen Kane or the verbatim score for Vertigo in the fire sequence)? Honestly, I felt these were cheap attempts to engage my cinephilia instead of giving me a film that was well conceived with a strong point of view.

The area where this film shines is in the incredible talent and likability of Dujardin and Uggi. The pair works very well together, particularly in the gripping scene when George is overcome by smoke in his apartment and Dog barks desperately at him to get up and leave, finally exiting the scene and racing down the street to attract a policeman (Joel Murray) to the conflagration. This scene plays remarkably true to silent film conventions and maintains its own integrity, with the exception of a comic moment when an older woman (Annie O’Donnell) waiting for a bus tells the cop he probably should see what all the fuss is about.

The extremely crisp look of the film gives a hint of what a new nitrate film might have looked like to audiences in the silent era, though even restored films from nitrate we see today don’t look quite this good. In general, the costumes were a treat, but I was a bit disconcerted to see Peppy in full flapper regalia for a 1930s film she was starring in. The Artist was also surprisingly chaste by both 1920s and pre-Code standards; George and Peppy never act on their attraction, making the relationship one of mentor-protégé despite plot developments that assert it should have been more, for example, Peppy buying all of George’s personal effects at auction and saving them in her mansion for a time when he could be reunited with them.

I enjoyed various components of this film and thought the performances were generally quite good, but perhaps I am too much of a silent-film buff to really give it my full endorsement. And if I’m not the target audience for this film, then who is? This talented team should have thought this one through a little further, as I feel there’s a first-rate film in here somewhere straining to come out.

Womb (2010)

Director/Screenwriter: Benedek Fliegauf

By Roderick Heath

Films that use the ideas of the science fiction genre to genuinely serious investigatory or poetic ends are pretty few and far between in today’s cinema. If they are taking those ideas seriously at all, it’s more likely to be on a conceptual, rather than psychological or emotional, plane. A coldly beautiful and quietly dazzling exercise in psychosexual provocation, as well as a meditation on mortality and personality with a blend of genre with high Freudian perversity, Womb easily bests the last mainstream film to tackle the moral and humanitarian ramifications of cloning, 2010’s unfocused and soapy Never Let Me Go, for narrative density and effect. Fleigauf’s film expands its ideas with genuinely unsettling and affecting permutations that retain a touch of the otherworldly and yet also proceeds with a nerveless logic.

Strangely, Womb has gained little attention, though not too surprisingly, as it’s inevitably noncommercial; I only came across it by chance, dumped onto DVD, in spite of sporting two excellent young stars: Eva Green, an actress who embodies something intelligent yet provocative and insinuatingly decadent even in the most humdrum of parts, and the rubbery-limbed Matt Smith, currently inhabiting the role of Doctor Who. Indeed, it’s been a good year for dumped Green films, also including the lesser but still interesting Cracks.

At the outset of Fleigauf’s film, Green is a solitary woman sitting on the balcony of her remote house, perched on stilts in the midst of a tidal plain, cradling a belly bulging with pregnancy, thanking, in voiceover, someone for this gift. Fliegauf then jumps back many years in the past to when Green’s character, Rebecca, was nine years old (played at that age by Ruby O. Fee), and staying for a vacation with her grandfather. She encountered a boy, Thomas (Tristan Christopher), when he took a break from being chased about by local hooligans to say hello, and they swiftly became inseparable friends, with Rebecca practically absorbed by Thomas’ parents, Ralph and Judith (Mike Leigh regulars Peter Wight and Lesley Manville), into their family. The two children spent an idyllic vacation in spite of the typically northern European, tempestuous, and glowering atmosphere of the seaside locale, with its pebbly beaches and beautifully blasted shores and sands, until Rebecca finally had to leave to join her mother who was taking a job in Tokyo. The night before she leaves, Tom announces he’s going to see her off and give her a going-away present, but he never shows up.

Rebecca returns over a decade later, having gained a degree and a profession as a designer of software for acoustic devices, to take over her since-deceased grandfather’s house and to look for Tom. When she finds him, he’s grown into the agreeable adult form of Smith. When Rebecca finds his current abode, still in the same seaside town that he loves too much to leave, she finds Rose (Natalia Tena) sitting on the floor in her undies, reading a book. But she’s just a casual pick-up, and she gets frustrated and stomps out when faced with Rebecca and Tom’s instantaneously resumed mutual fascination: “Maybe you two should start sniffing each other.” Tom gives Rebecca the present she was supposed to receive, a matchbox containing a snail, now long dead.

Tom, who is now a biology student and an activist, is planning a demonstration at a new cloning centre called Sparkling Park, and has a crate full of cockroaches ready to release to cause alarm amongst the security staff. Rebecca joins him for this jaunt, but when she gets him to pull his car over so she can go take a pee in the grass, and he starts to get out after her, she hears the unmistakeable sound of another car hitting him at speed. Fleigauf and Green pull off this scene with terrific dispassion and a proper sense of the jarring shock of sudden, complete, irretrievable loss registered in the ever so slightly widening eyes of Rebecca as she surveys Tom’s broken body. Except that it’s not irretrievable, not anymore. As Tom’s parents grieve, Rebecca retains her sphinx-like smile, and presents them with a solution: that they clone Tom, and she will act his surrogate mother. Judith rejects the notion, stating that, “We’re atheists…but that doesn’t mean we can rummage in our deceased’s grave…we are not farm animals…we accept what life gives us!” Rebecca presses ahead, however, going to Sparkling Park, where Rose, who works there, catches sight of her. Months later, Rebecca gives birth to Tom redux, and begins to raise him as her own son.

What end such an act can possibly have, and all its manifold and troubling imputations, looms with constant tension throughout Womb, as Fleigauf describes young Tommy’s growth from bulge in Rebecca’s belly to upright young man. Whether Rebecca can continue to treat Tommy as simply her own child who happens to also be giving the genetic material of her great love a second chance at life, or if she’s nursing a darker, if still possibly inchoate, plan to make him a substitute, and what his reaction to the inevitable, practically Greek tragic moment of realisation will be is the crucial question, one that hovers as not entirely resolved until the very end.

In the meantime, Rebecca keeps the truth of Tommy’s origins from him, and when he has an encounter with another cloned youngster, Dima (Gina Stiebitz), he learns of the intense social hatred toward clones. Other concerned mothers, worried when Rebecca invites Dima unknowingly to Tommy’s birthday party, meet with her and explain, in a note-perfect transposition of such anxieties from more familiar worrisome types, how they don’t want their children exposed to the unknown influence of these strange, unnatural entities. But word soon reaches the parents of Tommy’s friends about his genetic origins, thanks to Rose, and when Tommy asks Rebecca why nobody came to his party, Rebecca only says, “Because they’re stupid!” The next day she packs up and moves them both out to the remote house glimpsed at the beginning, where Rebecca continues to live until Tommy is grown, burgeoning into a man eerily similar to his earlier incarnation, with a deep interest in nature and a loopy sense of childish fun. When he moves a girlfriend from college, Monica (Hannah Murray), into the house, the stage is set for possibly the strangest ménage-a-trois, seething beneath the surface and constantly sensed by all parties without quite taking shape, in cinema history.

Fliegauf maintains a tremendous formal control over Womb, which could easily have toppled into torpid psychodrama or arty sterility. His film bears a distinct resemblance, in setting as well as style and the chilly anthropological deconstruction, to the early work of Roman Polanski. Shot in the Sylt region in Germany, near the Danish border, with its many gradations in hazy beauty, the setting presents a perfect barometer for the oedipal drama unfolding with the mood of increasing isolation from the real world. As far as films that use natural settings to define and dominate the mood of a film, Womb stands far above just about any work of recent cinema, except ironically Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (2010).

The womb of the title is both Rebecca’s physical womb, of course, cradle and battlefield of this experiment in human intransigence and longing, but also the house into which she moves to continue her experiment in peace. Fliegauf pieces together telling detail as he effectively describes a warped family situation with cues, usually subliminal and yet constantly accumulating, occasionally to overflowing, as when Rebecca offers herself to a barely adolescent Tommy in a fashion he doesn’t at all understand. Simultaneously, there’s a distinct echo of biblical myth in the very Garden of Eden where the second-generation man Cain must marry his mother Eve as a precursor to new life: Rebecca retreats into her own little Eden. Images of mother and infant bearing distinct similarities to those seen in The Tree of Life flow by, except whereas there is mystery in familiar human growth—no one’s ever quite sure what a child will look like as it grows—here there is a chilly, preordained sense of how Tommy is going to grow up, what he’ll think, feel, what he’ll be excited by—and what he’ll be turned on by.

There’s a particularly keen condensation of parental affection, childish destructiveness, and unspoken suspicion in a movement in which Rebecca gives Tommy a toy robotic dinosaur, as cruelly adorable as possible, which Tommy along with a boy he befriends then buries in the sand: it’s the sort of thing a boy his age does to toys, an act that’s usually thoughtless but that parents can feel is somehow a rejection of them, and imbued here with another layer as Tommy acts out a detestation of simulacrums. Fliegauf relies on the audience blanching at a lifelike thing being treated in such a fashion, aware that Tommy himself would be considered such a thing, requiring Rebecca’s retreat to the edge of the earth to pillow him from that treatment. “Dima is the victim of artificial incest!” one of the village mothers says in a key, wryly amusing, yet highly discomforting scene: “Her mother gave birth to her own mother!” The ground seems set for another portrayal of small-mindedness and reactionary impulses through a gimmicky prism, but Fliegauf loads the situation thanks to the awareness that Rebecca’s intentions for her own clone are not entirely wholesome. Rebecca, sensing the danger of being caught outside the herd, immediately acquiesces and plays along. Where exactly all the ethics review panels went to in this brave new world isn’t stated, but it’s clear the act of cloning has already been commercialised out of sight, as one of the reasons Tom was protesting the cloning centre was its plan to make most of its money out of “cyberbitches”, cloned prostitutes, and endlessly reproduced household pets.

At the outset, Womb seems cast in the mould of something like Julio Medem’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1999) in portraying Rebecca and Tom’s intense connection as something almost sublime and preordained, and Tom’s quirky energy seems quite in line with that familiar variety of lively young man. Smith, however, has a gift for suggesting something slightly alien and asocial in his characters as well as charming and zany. When Rebecca walks back into Tom’s life after years, she doesn’t even need to say her name for him to recognise her, and soon they’re so fixated on each other that they completely ignore anyone else in their world. Their initial reuniting is painfully brief, so Rebecca seems to hope that this innate bond will be sustained as Tommy grows into a man. Yet, for the most part, she plays the almost-perfect mother, with a job that allows her to work from home and continue constant interaction; when Tommy’s grown, she tiptoes into his bedroom to lay down a breakfast tray for him and Monica, whom she’s never met. Monica’s arrival starts a breakdown in Rebecca’s equilibrium: she’s lived without any kind of sexual contact all these years—it’s revealed in the most alarming fashion possible that she’s still a virgin—and her still-manifest physical desire for Tommy, and, it becomes increasingly clear in spite of all his presuppositions, his for her, begins to boil over.

Incest seems to be emerging as a new subject for would-be provocateurs in the artier cinema brackets, whilst films that try to describe and encompass the repetitive chains of birth, growth, and creation that govern human life seem to reflect a current wave in the zeitgeist: some of the year’s other top films, include The Tree of Life, Hanna, Attenberg, and Mysteries of Lisbon, all present some consistent thematic concerns with this developmental theme, as children become products of, and vessels for, the ambitions and mistakes of their parents. Rarely has the most profound taboo been approached with such supple, nerveless skill as in this film, whilst the theme is carefully leavened by the story frame: there is awareness that Tommy is not a natural son as it would once have been defined, and yet he’s bound to Rebecca in the most intimate way as a product of her body, if not of her genes. Whether Tommy retains an actual bond with Rebecca that transcends the liminal, or whether he’s just responding to endless subtle signals in her manner over the years, is impossible to discern; nor, is it easy to tease apart the specific ramifications of the situation it presents, with their scifi impetus, from any normal mother’s relationship with a grown son who in some ways personifies her husband grown young again. In any event, Womb is a film infused with a sonorous cool and an emotional intensity that builds to an inevitable outburst, which comes when his other mother, Judith, turns up at the house, looking like a gorgon of gnawed conscience, not speaking a word as she partakes of this remake of her son and reels away with profound and baleful knowledge.

This episode lodges a fresh disquiet in Tommy which Smith realises as a marvellous climax of actorly slow burn. Tommy, Rebecca, and Monica are at the breakfast table, his final exhaustion with Rebecca’s evasions and estrangement exploding as he slams a clogged salt shaker repeatedly upon the table and turns the kitchen upside down until he procures a handful of salt to smother his meal, before pointing to his mother and saying the fateful words in regards to Judith, “I know her.” Monica’s pathos in trying to plead for her lover to emerge from the bathroom where he locks himself and realising that she’s the superfluous point in this triangle, causes her to flee. At last, Rebecca delivers self-knowledge to Tommy, and he rests for a bleak and terrible moment on an edge of powerful feeling that will resolve either in matricide or sex—either way, a primal taboo. As it happens, sex prevails. Tommy finally ends Rebecca’s virginity and then flees the house, having fulfilled exactly what Rebecca wanted—to have a real child by Tommy—and finally free to find some purpose for himself. The mood seems at last unbearable, except that in the final shot, as Tommy disappears into the murk, Rebecca switches on a light within the house: now, at last, each is only just recommencing life. Womb is a strange, troubling, fascinating waking dream.

CIFF 2011: What Love May Bring (aka, Ces amours-là; What War May Bring, 2010)

Director: Claude Lelouch

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Claude Lelouch has been making films for 50 years. The hot tickets at the Chicago International Film Festival are not his two films From One Film to Another and What Love May Bring. That’s a shame. While I’m sure David Cronenberg’s and Lars von Trier’s new films are well worth seeing, there really is nothing like seeing the work of a master filmmaker completely in command of his form, not to mention a chance to see the man in the flesh and ask him questions. My experience of seeing What Love May Bring is one I will treasure forever.

What Love May Bring compresses everything Claude Lelouch knows and wants to say about cinema through a series of true stories that he has fashioned into a single narrative—the life and loves of Ilva Lemoine (Audrey Dana), the daughter of a filmmaker who was killed in World War I and the stepdaughter of Maurice Lemoine (Dominique Pinon), the projectionist at the fictional Eden Palace Cinema in Paris. The story begins in the present in a studio where the score for the film is being recorded. In the booth sit several people we will come to recognize as actors in the film, including Ilva (Gisèlle Casadesus) as a very old, blind, but still beautiful woman. As she hears the music, she nods in remembrance, and then we get a brief interlude (done as a silent film) of her parents meeting and her father’s death. Much of the rest of the story is told through the summation of Simon (Laurent Couson), an attorney who is defending Ilva from a charge of murder. His defense, basically, is that Ilva’s entire life has been in service to love, and it was love that drove her to shoot her husband, completing a suicide he was too cowardly to do himself. Only in France (or, possibly, only in a Claude Lelouch film) would such a defense be offered as legitimate.

Whatever conclusion you might come to about Ilva’s actual guilt or innocence in the case is overwhelmed by seeing how much life she has lived—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Living in occupied France, Ilva goes to the German high command to beg for the life of her stepfather, an innocent who is to be one of 20 random French citizens executed in retaliation for a Resistance bombing that killed two German soldiers. She ends up throwing over her boyfriend (Raphaël) and taking up with Horst (Samuel Labarthe), the Nazi who initially rejected her plea and then changed his mind. Just after the liberation of Paris, she will fall into bed and love with two men at the same time—Jim Singer (Gilles Lemaire), heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, and Bob (Jacky Ido), a black boxing champion who saved Jim’s life and became his best friend. To reveal more would be to reveal too much; suffice to say that Ilva’s convoluted love life will continue, loop back on itself, and renew itself as the film progresses.

Lelouch has this to say about Ilva and his film:

I knew that the heroine of What Love May Bring would be a woman, and that the backbone for the film would be her portrait. All wars have helped to make the modern woman what she is, but it was during the Second World War that she really emerged. Who were the winners of that war? Women. The world we are living in today is the result of that victory by women. They know how to juggle their dreams and the hardships of daily life. They can take a blow and bounce back, they can heal. Love can kill them but it is also love that cures them. I understood very early on that women are ready to sacrifice themselves for love, that they were at the essential heart of things.

Ilva may be the backbone, but observations about the costs of human emotion and Lelouch’s own history are the appendages. Simon, for example, is a very gifted musician who can’t decide between music and law. He and his family are sent to a concentration camp because his neighbors want to be rid of his piano noise, yet his ability to play and entertain the camp soldiers saves his life and keeps his belly full. On the train to Auschwitz, he meets and instantly falls in love with the beautiful Salomé Blum (Salomé Lelouch), who, with her family, is denounced and sent to her death because the family are so successful at making wedding gowns that their concierge (Lise Lamétirie) never has a chance to use their sewing machine. After the war, Simon visits Madame DeBois and asks her the price of the sewing machine. She’s a bit confused at first, until he asks about the Blums and then says, “I know the price of that sewing machine.” He makes her squirm a bit, but chances are she won’t be eaten with guilt the way Jim is for the way he stole Ilva from Bob.

Lelouch’s story appears in the person of Coco, a Jewish boy who is hidden from the Gestapo in a basement but is kept from going stir-crazy and betraying his location when Ilva looks after him as he watches films at the Eden Palace. In an affecting scene, Coco at age 7 (Boaz Lelouch) goes up to the screen to see where the people are. Ilva redirects him to Maurice, who shows him how the magic lantern works and begins his apprenticeship. Later, Coco at age 19 (Sachka Lelouch) will film the first of many kisses to come when Ilva and the man who becomes her final, enduring love kiss for the first time. Lelouch has stated flatly that movies literally saved his life and that that kiss inspired all the ones that followed.

Music is a very important part of every one of Lelouch’s film. He said in the Q&A that he has two actors that come first in his movies: the camera and the music. He developed the score for the film even before he shot a single frame, and he hit the jackpot when he cast Laurent Couson as Simon. Couson is actually a very accomplished musician, playing piano and trumpet simultaneous in a Paris nightclub in one scene and conducting the orchestra that is scoring What Love May Bring. A slightly amusing and effective scene shows him auditioning for a music academy after the war. He plays a very impassioned classical piece as images of Salomé, the gaunt faces of other camp survivors, the neighbors who betrayed him, flash through his mind; overwhelmed, he breaks into “Stormy Weather” (Ilva’s song, he will learn one day in the future) and other jazz tunes, only coming back to the classical piece in the last couple of bars. A judge says “Well?” and he only answers “I’ll study law.” He never closes himself off from his creative side, however, as he plays at the nightclub after every case he wins.

Dana is incredible as Ilva. She is very attractive and seduces us along with every man she meets in the loving close-ups Lelouch favors. Dana is bold in playing a survivor who uses sex to thank people for doing her favors, for example, saving her father or saving her from the partisans who are arresting collaborators. She, like Piaf, regrets nothing when it comes to love, though she realizes too late that her decision-making skills often cause quite a lot of hurt. In the end, Dana maintains Ilva’s character as a straight throughline, and she becomes, if not the most noble character, at least one deserving of respect for her personal integrity.

Anouk Aimée makes a brief and quite lovely appearance as an actress on her way to the death camp. We see her on the train talking into a telephone to someone who might be her agent. She says she is to appear in a Cocteau play and will clear it up with the authorities once they reach their destination. She seems terribly self-absorbed and self-important, as the other passengers stare at her impassively. Modern audiences used to using cellphones might be fooled into thinking she really is on the phone, but of course, she merely brought this prop to rehearse a performance she still thought she would be giving. The other passengers on the train applaud her at the end. The film is filled to overflowing with such wonderful vignettes that put people rather than film technique at center stage.

A last homage Lelouch pays to cinema comes at the end of the film, which contains images from his many films and the many great actors, including Aimée in her younger days, he immortalized. After watching this, Lelouch’s 43rd film, I had an overwhelming feeling that I never needed to see another film again. Of course, this was a fleeting emotion, but it did express how swept up I felt in this chronicle of many grand passions and how fulfilling the experience was for me. A veteran observer of love, Claude Lelouch dedicates this film in an opening intertitle to his seven children; anyone who sees this film will recognize the profound love of this gesture and feel it as part of Lelouch’s extended family—his audience.

*Here’s a personal shout-out to Mark and Tom, two people who live in Mt. Prospect who have a clue about cinema. Thanks for making our evening at the AMC more enjoyable with their company and conversation.

What Love May Bring will screen Tuesday, October 11, 3:30 p.m., at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

Good Bye: Mohammad Rasoulof, a director in prison for making films critical of the Iranian regime, gives viewers some insight into his ordeal through the story of a woman desperate to leave Iran, but feeling the noose tightening with each step she takes toward her escape. (Iran)

Le Havre: A gentle comedy in which an aged shoeshine hides a young illegal immigrant and works along with some generous neighbors to reunite the boy with his mother in London. (Finland)

King of Devil’s Island: Naturalistic and suspenseful look at life in an island detention center for boys and their rebellion against their harsh treatment. (Norway/France)

Cinema Komunisto: This entertaining and eye-opening documentary provides a loving look at the little-known national cinema of Yugoslavia and the film fanatic who made it happen: Marshall Josif Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s president for life. (Serbia)

Inshallah, Football: One young man’s struggle to get a passport to play soccer in Brazil is the lens through which this documentary examines the Indian oppression of Muslims in the occupied region of Kashmir. (India)

George the Hedgehog: Irreverent and adult, this comic-book-based animated film pits George, a pleasure-loving hedgehog, against his clone, a stupid, vulgar internet superstar. (Poland)

The Kid with a Bike: What makes some people give unselfishly of themselves is the question examined in this intense tale by the Dardenne brothers of a boy abandoned by his father and the single woman who takes him in. (Belgium)

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

Klimt (2005)

Director/Screenwriter: Raúl Ruiz

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The world of cinema was shocked by the not-unexpected, but relatively premature death of Chilean-born filmmaker Raúl Ruiz on Friday. The 70-year-old director was known for his parodic approach to film styles, his lush canvasses, his sometimes overstuffed plots, and his extremely fecund output. For those seeking a deep dive into this complicated, experimental filmmaker, I recommend this survey/memoir by Jonathan Rosenbaum for starters and a date to view his Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), which has started to show in the United States and likely will be booked in more venues in tribute. As a Ruiz novice, I will try to honor his legacy as best I can with a review of Klimt, one of his more recent and accessible films, and a style of biopic more filmmakers should adopt.

Ruiz takes an ingeniously elliptical approach to film biography, one that puts the spirit of artist Gustav Klimt and fin-de-siècle Austria at the forefront as it drops the details of his life almost subliminally into our consciousness. As such, the film does something that is nearly impossible to do—find a channel, however speculative, into the creative process itself.

The film opens with Klimt’s protege Egon Schiele (Nikolai Kinski) going to visit Klimt (John Malkovich) as he lays dying in a bath. The doctor greets Schiele by swinging a skeleton in front of him and pointing out the various bones that comprise it, each from a different donor, all of different nationalities. Schiele comments that while there may be a scarcity of many things, there is no shortage of dead bodies. Klimt died of syphilis February 6, 1918, a few months before the “cure” for all war, World War I, formally ended. Klimt was treated with mercury, the standard remedy of the time and a poison that may have hastened his death and one that did not save him from the madness that accompanies advanced syphilis. Thus, the parallels Ruiz sets up between Klimt’s private disintegration, delusions, and madness and those of Europe at this time are established. Klimt’s mental free-fall through his life comprises the rest of the film.

Klimt’s life could be a template for the stereotypical successful Artist. He was a sensualist who bedded many women and fathered many children out of wedlock, who enraged the art establishment while still enjoying great popularity. We meet him in memory first in his studio, as three naked models move above his head on swings of cloth and another lays down on a bed in the background. Klimt ignores all of them as he pours water on a square of glass to examine the images it creates. He dismisses the models. The one on the bed remains. He says, “What about you?” She answers provocatively, “What about me?” Malkovich lets virtually nothing cross his face to indicate his state of mind, though perhaps the tiniest of smirks does escape by the end of the scene; it’s a bold choice, to keep Klimt in the state of sexual abstraction he must have needed to do his work when faced with an off-hours temptation.

This containment marks much of Malkovich’s performance, even in scenes where he declares his ardent love for an actress (Saffron Burrows) who plays dancer Lea de Castro (Georgia Reeve) in a short film by Georges Méliès (Gunther Gillian). Their embrace is one of the more awkward in film history, though Brown is wonderfully natural in her nakedness considering that her character is being watched from behind a two-way mirror by the real Lea to see how Klimt behaves. The fracturing of personality, the real and the false fronts, the interchangeability of human beings as seen in the mix-and-match skeleton in the first scene, all are preoccupations of both Ruiz and the Klimt he has written. Indeed, any representational artist is faced with how his or her creations poach from many sources and create illusions that are, nonetheless, physically real and real experiences for those who take them in.

Ruiz’s hallucinatory touches are inspired. Klimt’s long-time companion Emilie Flöge (Veronica Ferres), called Midi here, quarrels with him in his studio while he is applying gilding to a painting. Suddenly, her lips are gilded as well, an incarnate inspiration that Klimt would transfer to his canvas. When she slams the door to his studio, she blows the small squares of gilding into the air, sending Klimt, childlike, chasing after them to catch them on his brush. His cat starts mewling, and Klimt comes face to face with the Secretary (Stephen Dillane), a government functionary who becomes Klimt’s projected guide through his life and desires and, finally, his death. The Secretary, though sympathetic to Klimt’s art, seems to contradict Klimt’s outsider stance as part of the Vienna Secession, and suggest that his life was a function of bureaucratic manipulation.

Ruiz isolates the artistic claptrap of the day in a wonderful scene in a Vienna coffee house. A waiter takes orders from some of the patrons, calling their names and having them respond “as usual.” Klimt is dining with a friend who gives him the lay of the land of the different artistic schools of thought. A camera tracks around them, the background spinning one way, and Klimt and his friend spinning in the opposing direction, suggesting Klimt’s contrarian state of mind and bringing a liveliness to the Viennese art scene that ends with Klimt pushing a cake into a rival’s face.

The proper Viennese bourgeoisie, represented by Klimt’s mother (Annemarie Düringer) and sister (Marion Mitterhammer), are placed in a cool, utilitarian setting. His mother scolds him for his many illegitimate children, and his sister insinuates something unnatural about him for choosing only Jewesses to bear his children: “I didn’t make it up, I read it in the paper.” Klimt retorts, “You didn’t have to make it up because the papers already did it for you.” The poisonous atmosphere that would later engulf Austria gets a brief, but effective airing, but so do the distortions of media about celebrities, a very modern concern.

Apparently, no expense was spared in putting this film together. The costumes and sets are utterly sumptuous, and artists were brought in to recreate the scandal-inducing paintings Klimt produced for the University of Vienna that were destroyed in a fire in 1945, as well as a fictitious portrait of Lea and various Klimt canvasses in different stages of completion. Little is known about Klimt’s life, so the decadence of the times is brought to bear on his womanizing reputation while creating an atmosphere that helps the viewer sense the forces that influenced his sensual art. For example, Klimt goes to the Moustache brothel, where gentlemen play games in various rooms—Klimt is locked in a cage wearing a gorilla head in the African room—before going off with one or more of the moustachioed whores.

The anteroom of Klimt’s death is filled with the atmosphere of his life—the ever-present Viennese snow, stuffed cats, a bare-bones studio, and doors opening onto different paths. I hope Ruiz’s anteroom was just as inviting.

The Sleeping Beauty (La Belle Endormie, TV, 2010)

Director/Screenwriter: Catherine Breillat

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I think it’s very interesting that Catherine Breillat has continued her recently begun survey of female-centric fairy tales (the first, Bluebeard, premiered in 2009) with a film made for French television. Only in France, perhaps, could a controversial director with a penchant for filming explicit sex make a film certain to be watched by millions of girls—and that is certainly good news for the future women of France. For Breillat brings her feminist sensibilities to the story, borrowing freely from other fairy tales (mainly Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”), to create a hero’s journey for girls and both subtly and directly confronting male audiences with the damage they do to women.

The film opens with an old woman (Rosine Favey) laughing wickedly while holding in her arms a baby who looks only minutes old. She is a powerful fairy who intends to curse the child, a princess named Anastasia, to die at age 16 after pricking herself on a spindle made from a yew tree standing in the graveyard. Three young fairies (Douina Sichov, Leslie Lipkins, and Camille Chalon) arrive too late to prevent the old fairy’s curse because they stopped to bathe in a nearby pond. After a comic scene in which the fairies peck at each other about their boasts to more power than they have, each nonetheless is able to mitigate the sentence when they arrive to bestow their blessings on the princess: one says the girl will sleep rather than die, the next says she will fall under the spell at age 6 and dream a full life for 100 years, and the third offers her the gift of awakening at the age of 16 because “childhood lasts too long.”

The film moves immediately to a 6-year-old Anastasia (Carla Besnaïnou) who strains at the restrictions of being a girl and even proclaims she is really a boy named Vladimir. Perhaps in a fitting punishment for rejecting her gender, she is stricken with the spindle prick while dressed in a ridiculous pink kimono over a short, lacey tutu as she prepares to dance en pointe among a flock of similarly garbed girls. She finds herself in an underground cavern filled with skeletons and ruled over by a boil-covered man who says he is a reflection of her rotting flesh. She wins her way out of the cavern by bowling down some bones and goes into the wider world.

Anastasia is whisked by an empty train to a country of dwarves, who eject her. Her next and most important stop is a trackside cottage, where she is taken in by a woman (Anne-Lise Kedvès) and her son Peter (Kerian Mayan), and becomes Peter’s sister. She is delighted to shed her ballet costume and dress in Peter’s clothes, and the pair becomes inseparable. From this point on, the film moves forward in a faithful rendering of most of the parts of “The Snow Queen.” Peter looks into the face of the Snow Queen (Romane Portail) one snowy night. His heart is pierced with ice and his eye is tainted with a snowflake; his subsequent rejection of Anastasia and desire to break free is diagnosed by his mother as Peter reaching that Awkward Age. But one night, he leaves with the Snow Queen, and Anastasia sets off on her hero’s quest to find him and melt his heart. Her quest will take her back to the country of dwarves and a meeting with their albino king and queen, onto an encounter with the bandit maiden (Luna Charpentier) and her gang when they attack her coach, and finally on a doe-back ride to Lapland before we return to the castle where the story began. The 16-year-old Anastasia (Julia Artamonov) awakens to the sight of Johan (David Chausse), a handsome descendent of Peter, looking down upon her. If you’re waiting for a title card that says “They lived happily ever after,” you haven’t taken the lesson of the quest to heart.

Although the film is titled The Sleeping Beauty, all the action really occurs in “The Snow Queen” section of the film. This, I think, is Breillat’s strategy for turning the negative images of women Charles Perrault set to paper right on their head. First, Anastasia is no passive beauty who falls asleep just as she is awakening to sexual feelings. She may be a princess whose wish is others’ command, but she knows that she belongs to a second-class gender. The evil fairy is old, an image of a woman deformed by the self-loathing patriarchy engenders in women. The young fairies know they aren’t strong enough to fight the power, but it seems that the 100-year dormancy is a prayer that things will be better for women in the future.

Anastasia’s journey resembles Dorothy’s in Oz, right down to the little people, and ends with the shaman telling her that she has always had the power to defeat the Snow Queen, as evidenced by the fact that she won over many powerful and dangerous people and got them to help her. But the journey offers additional lessons. For example, Anastasia tells Peter he is being cruel by cutting back the rose bushes outside their home. Peter explains that brambles benefit from a cutting back, sending more shoots out during the growing season and producing flowers of many colors for all eternity. Anastasia answers that there is no eternity. Is it best to please ourselves by making the rose bushes produce abundant blooms, or might it be better to let them grow their own way, even if they stop looking beautiful or spread their prickly branches widely? Anastasia has an instinctive feeling toward the roses, but trusts in Peter’s love—a trust he will betray by falling for a projection of the feminine rather than the real thing.

When the film reaches past the traditional ending of “Sleeping Beauty,” Breillat brings Anastasia into the present. Anastasia flirts with Johan, letting him unbutton only a few of the many buttons running down the back of her old-fashioned dress. Her desire awakened, she imagines a mature version of the bandit maiden (Rhizlaine El Cohen) has returned. The young bandit excited Anastasia during her adventure by threatening to stab her, and their mutual excitement erupts again in a fantasy of lesbian love. Now prepared, Anastasia is ready to consummate her passion with Johan, but honestly tells him that her true love is Peter, that all men must understand that women stay true to their idealized lover. The next time Johan comes to see her, he finds only her dress. Heartbroken, he does not see her again until a few months later, walking down the street dressed provocatively in modern garb. She’s pregnant but rejects him nonetheless to live on her own terms, saying that she entered his world alone. The world of fairy tales, it seems, has nothing to offer modern women, a condition Breillat’s films might begin to repair if only she didn’t express so much pessimism about the possibility of gender equality and mutual support.

Breillat’s visual lyricism creates magic and whimsy. Watching Anastasia riding on the back of a doe across a snowswept vista is positively breathtaking, and the cast creates weirdly compelling tableaux awash in color and grandeur. The switch to the flat, unadorned world of today is a rude awakening that is perhaps a bit too bleak and heartless. Breillat has done much to explicate the feminine world to itself and to astute male viewers, but perhaps she is getting impatient at the lack of progress. I can only send words of encouragement to her and those who find so much inspiration in her work.

Spirits of the Dead (Histoires Extraordinaires de Edgar Allan Poe, 1967)

Directors: Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini

By Roderick Heath

As concept and finished product, Spirits of the Dead takes on the aspect of a fever dream, where the strangeness of the vision that arises before one’s eyes defies credulity. Did Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini really make an omnibus horror movie out of stories by Edgar Allan Poe? How the hell did that happen? All heroes of the iconic European cinema of the era, it’s nonetheless hard to think of three more temperamentally and stylistically disparate directors.

Omnibus horror movies are generally associated with Amicus, the British studio that tried to rival Hammer in the late ’60s with a string of such films, usually a bunch of loosely stitched episodes with a ramshackle unifying structure. Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1963), another Poe anthology film, was essayed in variations on his already formulated, hyperstylised gothic. Whilst Spirits of the Dead spurns any connective tissue, segueing from chapter to chapter by surveying a bleakly cloudy sky, and each episode is announced with its own credits, calling attention to its own multiauteur production and the resulting stylistic smorgasbord, it’s also, interestingly, bound together by a choice to film three of Poe’s more moralistic stories. In all three episodes, the protagonist is a wilfully amoral, yet doggedly human and uncertain beast struggling desperately with mortality and the certainty of judgment.

The project was actually supposed to be helmed by Fellini, Orson Welles, and Luis Buñuel, and it’s hard not to admit the producers traded down, certainly with Vadim. There’s something left of Welles’ spirit left in Malle’s episode, which resembles in production and visuals the similar, delicate work Welles did in his later adaptation of The Immortal Story (1968). As a whole, the Spirits of the Dead doesn’t entirely mesh, but it’s still an invigorating by-product of late ’60s cinema culture, and represents horror for the connoisseur. The most famous episode of the film is Fellini’s contribution, “Toby Dammit,” a version of Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” and indeed that short work comes close to being Fellini’s best, a hallucinogenic romp through the movie business and jet-set modernity as Faustian nightmare. But the chapters that precede it are worthy of attention in their own fashions. Vadim’s “Metzengerstein” is a real oddity, a blend of Vadim’s lush kink and fantasy with a visual naturalism that Malle extends in his own entry, “William Wilson.” “Metzengerstein” is built around a weird joke: Vadim cast his then-wife Jane Fonda as the wicked Contessa Frederique de Metzengerstein, who falls in love with her distant cousin, Baron Wilhelm Berlifitzing, played by her brother Peter Fonda.

Anticipating the SoGo scenes in Barbarella (1968), Vadim uses the material as an excuse to indulge a louche libertine’s mise-en-scène in portraying the Contessa’s depraved lifestyle. She suspends a serving boy in the air and shoots arrows at him with her ladies-in-waiting, conspires with her lover to rape another of his women, fondles her best friend (Françoise Prévost) in the bath, lounges about with tiger cubs and parades around in abbreviated hoop skirts and kinky boots, as if Elizabeth Bathory had been reincarnated as Zsa Zsa Gabor. It’s a reinvention of the Middle Ages as a haute couture, sexualised wonderland, albeit one that’s insanely unfair and cruel. The Contessa is so used to being able to indulge her whims and vices that she’s completely unable to express herself when she’s stricken with ardour for her misanthropic but essentially decent cousin, after he saves her from being caught in a bear trap. The Contessa finds an outlet for her rage by burning down Wilhelm’s stables, and he dies trying to save one of his horses from the conflagration. The Contessa receives a bizarre punishment, however, for the Baron seems to return reincarnated as a black steed with which she falls in love, and finally rides to her death on him in a grassfire started by lightning in a liebestod consummation.

“Metzengerstein” would be better if Vadim hadn’t been such an unvarying tease: his provocations remain firmly on the near side of mere naughtiness, whilst never achieving sensuality. As in Barbarella, there’s something slapdash about the way he develops his ideas, unable to reconcile his lazy, playful touches with the need to create a deeply morbid atmosphere. The mix of solidly naturalistic settings, highly stylised costuming, and incipient perversity does, however, imbue his work with a deceptive cumulative impact. The location shooting, particularly in the use of the Finistèr coastline, aids in drawing out the theme of natural forces exacting merciless reminders of mortality on mere humans, whatever their social pretentions. Vadim’s real talent for highly rhythmic editing and intensely composed sequences comes out in flashes: during the apocalyptic menace of the stable burning, smoke blackening the sky and the Baron’s fleeing horses erupting out of the smoke, and in the latter stages as the Contessa’s dooming bestial passion intercut with a weaver’s efforts to repair a singed tapestry depicting just such a great black horse, as if fate itself is a patient embroiderer.

Malle’s episode is, if less showy than either Vadim’s or Fellini’s, is actually close to perfect, wielding Alain Delon’s excellent performance as the titular William Wilson, an icy egotist and sadist with a pristinely pretty face tormented by a double who heads off his own worst impulses. In confessing a murder to a priest, Wilson recounts his life story, from attending a military boarding school as a child where his overlordship of his fellow students and his vicious regime was first challenged by the arrival of another student named William Wilson who stood up to him and freed a young schoolmate the sadistic Wilson had dangling over a pit of rats. Years later, as a medical student, Wilson had become even worse, this time leading a cabal of fellow students in attempting to dissect, whilst still alive, a young woman (Katia Christin) snatched off the street: again the mysterious other Wilson intervened. When serving as a soldier and having matured into an infamously violent rake, Wilson engaged in a battle of wills with a female gambler named Giuseppina (Brigitte Bardot), whom he delighted in cheating out of a victory and then getting his kicks by flogging her. But the double again intervened to reveal how he cheated. Finally losing control, Wilson murdered his alter ego after losing a duel with him.

It is, of course, a story about the nagging presence of conscience as the only limit on the desire for gratification, as if Wilson has been split at birth into living embodiments of his ego and superego. The subject is also contiguous with Malle’s interest in the porous limits of acceptable behaviour, and the kinds of experience that make or mar people, whilst stylistically it evokes the subverted romanticism of Visconti’s Senso (1954). He essays the stages of Wilson’s life, each building to the crucial moment of interruption, with beautiful control, conveying the relish with which Wilson anticipates gratification and his agony when he’s cut off each time like a frustrated orgasm finally gained when he stabs his double to death, only to realise his self-destructive mistake. A personally nostalgic mood infuses the schoolyard images of the young lads pelting each other with snowballs, juxtaposed with the alien flavour of young Wilson’s dead-eyed junior psychopath stare as he tears up a letter from his mother and tries to strangle his double in bed. The especially frigid cruelty of the scene in which Wilson airily mocks his medical lecturer’s cant as he relentlessly circles the bound young woman, caressing her bare skin with the edge of his scalpel, builds to a wicked punchline as the woman, freed by the second Wilson, can’t tell the two apart, and moves to embrace the wrong one, receiving a hideous gash from the scalpel Wilson still holds. The assured slow burn reaches a crescendo in Delon’s lengthy encounter with Bardot’s glorious Giuseppina, full of anticipated sadomasochistic designs, with this black-haired, cigar-smoking, female equal and opposite to Wilson taunting him all the while, his inner tension is palpable all the way. She thinks she knows exactly what he’s about, and expects mere sexual gamesmanship, not the calculated viciousness she gets.

Both Vadim and Malle’s chapters, whilst interesting, do fall victim somewhat to the usual problem of omnibus horror films: the brevity of the structure limits the creation of atmosphere and density of detail. Fellini, on the other hand, works wonders with his allotted time. “Toby Dammit” is a total antithesis to Malle’s work: where Malle’s slow burn purposefully cheats fulfilment, Fellini’s episode is excess rendered all-consuming, and the desperation of the title character is his desire to escape the realisation of all his ambitions. The realism of Malle’s approach and Vadim’s, too, is swapped for a neo-expressionist orgasm of colour and artifice of filters and back-projection, with vaguely science-fiction adornments and a hint of apocalypse added to Fellin’s stygian contemporary Rome, to which Toby, a world-famous but disintegrating actor, comes to make a Marxist-Christian Western. Fellini cranks up the sweat-inducing, alcoholic miasma around Toby, stalked by reporters and star fuckers on his arrival at the Rome airport where everything is bathed in a reddish infernal hue and full of bizarre dioramas of human behaviour. He’s assailed with modish moviemaker jive by the producers and writers (“The busty girl is the illusory escape into the irrational!”), grilled by interviewers (“Is it true you’ve done unsavoury jobs?” “Yes, but I’ve never been a TV reporter.”), and dragged out to officiate at a gruesome industry awards night that plays the orgiastic self-congratulation of such events as the sheerest definition of damnation.

Toby wallows in booze, torturous self-pity, and violent displays of pique alternating with moments of rugged charm and motions that suggest the grace and inspiration he once had as a living artist. But, of course, he’s sold his soul to the devil of success and phoniness, a fact Fellini carefully reveals as Toby is secretly hounded by a vividly blonde, creepily smiling little girl carrying a ball, invisible to everyone else, who wants him as a playmate. Fellini goes to town with a gusto that’s quite amazing even for him, from the epic, bizarre drive from the airport to the TV studio, as out on the street, fashion shoots take place amidst madcap industrialism. At a ceremony, all sorts of rancid weirdoes with too much money and makeup surround Toby in a sweltering atmosphere full of smoke and clashing lights, as fashion parades, unctuous hosts, interpretive dancers, and a variety of other guests strut their stuff upon the stage. A woman sees the pain Toby is in and approaches, promising that she’ll take care of him: “I know you. I’ve always known you!”—a line of pseudo-empathic blather he’s heard dozens of times before. His final escape from the ceremony, taking off in the gift Ferrari that was the only reason he signed on to the film, sees him move with relentless speed. But he cannot find his way out of the labyrinthine streets of Rome’s outer suburbs, and when he does make it onto a freeway, he comes to a collapsed bridge, where, inspired by the little girl dancing on the far side, he decides to try to jump as his final defiance of all natural force.

“Toby Dammit” seems partly inspired by Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), from which it borrows the motif of the anguished movie star visiting Rome and trying to exorcise his demons in a terrifying exercise with a speeding car, whilst the touch of the Devil represented by the malevolent girl is clearly indebted to Fellini’s friend Mario Bava’s Operazione Paura (1966). But it’s truly a superlative exercise by Fellini, and Stamp’s inspired performance is almost sui generis, even for that restlessly protean actor. His Toby seems to be in deep physical and spiritual pain all the time, and he races towards his end grateful for a chance to bust the dogging curse either way. It’s Fellini’s most extreme version of his semi-surreal portraits of high society from La Dolce Vita and 8½, pushed right to the limits of coherence and grotesquery, as befits the supercharged mood of late ’60s superstardom. One of the film folk insists that the film they’ll make “reflects the death throes and decay of our capitalist system,” but Toby perceives those death throes from the inside out, in a world in which everything’s dissolving into chaos, and it’s far from rhetorical for him. He makes that final defiant jump, but Fellini follows up with a slow, menacing zoom shot that peers deeper through the darkness until the cable suspended at just the right height to sever Toby’s head can be seen swinging on the far side of the gap, smeared with blood—the little girl has a new ball to play with. l

Trouble Every Day (2001)

Director/Screenwriter: Claire Denis

By Roderick Heath

Claire Denis is one of the best directors working today, a maker of films that are poetic and cryptic, humanist and yet lacking illusions, fascinatingly artful and creatively evasive. Trouble Every Day is both a key Denis film and her most atypical work: the ugly violence and horror-movie motifs she explored in her much-discussed 2001 film stand in contrast to the fonder instincts she displayed in her other notbale films of the decade, including Friday Night (2003) and 35 Rhums (2009). Some feel Trouble Every Day was the film that gave new impetus to the visceral, attention-seeking, but largely silly wave of extreme Euro-horror. But Trouble Every Day takes its place in Denis’ canon with ease, not only in style, and in the multifarious ways it explore human intimacy, but also in the extension of the notion presented more tangentially in Beau Travail (1999) of the human body as both an object of fetish and warfare.

In terms of pure story breakdown, Trouble Every Day toys with the essential ideas of many late ’70s European horror films, like the works of Lucio Fulci and Ruggiero Deodato, in which interloping white westerners who have travelled into foreign lands return infected with a taint that drives them to nihilistic violence. The literal plot is, however, only presented in tangential, hinted terms, the key occurrences having occurred long in the past, and the familiar patterns of those model stories are partly inverted. Trouble Every Day, both more exactingly grotesque and personal than many undeniably but often juvenilely brutal films, is also far more attuned to its protagonists as physical and moral entities.

Denis commences with a series of what appear barely connected events that all contain the threat of horror. A young woman (Béatrice Dalle), wandering the desolate outer suburbs of Paris, eyes a truck driver with evident sexual interest, and he responds; later, a motorcyclist (Alex Descas), coming across the man’s parked truck and the woman’s van, penetrates the vacant lot nearby and finds the man’s mangled body and the woman dissociated and caked in blood. Simultaneously, a newly married American couple, Dr. Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his bride June (Tricia Vessey), arrive in Paris for their honeymoon, but only after Shane has locked himself in the plane toilet and had a panic attack whilst conjuring visions of June drenched in blood.

Denis’ peculiar, eliding film grammar, alive to the minatory pleasures found in the focused tranquility of a commute home from work, or the cigarette break when at one’s job, meshes here with her bizarre story to create a rare texture. The long prologue, consisting of decorous dissolves between shots of Paris at sunset, romantic and yet dark, sonorous, to the music of The Tindersticks (their soundtrack is generally admired, and rightly so), remakes Denis’ Paris as a depopulated, drowsy, faintly forbidding place, and much of the rest of the film is shot either early in the morning or in the late evening. Her purpose, to both evoke and undermine the romantic glaze of the city as one for lovers, is slow to congeal, but ineffaceable once done. Gallo’s own debt to what he learnt (or mislearnt, as some might have it, from Denis) for his own The Brown Bunny (2003) is evident in how he tried to counterpoint textures of grief, expressed in lingering images of ceaseless travel, with grossly intimate physicality and brutal discoveries.

Denis explores bodies with the eye of an astronomer craning closer and closer to see all the multitudinous shapes and intricacies charged with mystery and beauty. Here it contributes to the slow conditioning of a sense of uneasy eroticism, her camera playing over the minute pores of Vessey’s skin as Shane suffers from initially inexplicable, repeated spasms of anxiety as he fondles himself, pops mysterious pills, and avoids intimate contact with June: at one point he locks himself in the hotel bathroom to masturbate rather than conclude sex with her, to June’s pleading, despairing reaction to being locked out.

Slowly, the facts begin to solidify. The young woman glimpsed at the start is Coré Semenau, and the motorcyclist was her husband Leó, a doctor and former research fellow of Shane’s. Leó has dropped out of sight in the scientific research community because of his wife’s mysterious illness. Shane visits a lab where Leo used to work in attempting to find them, and he meets the sceptical reaction of one of Leó’s former colleagues about a theory of his that Shane is interested in following up on. A lab assistant, Malécot (Hélène Lapiower), contacts Shane later and gives him a lead as to where Leó and Coré have retreated. It is a large, old house that’s been fortified by Leó to try to keep Coré locked up, but every now and then she escapes, and he has to track her down, inevitably finding her next to another mangled body. In one of several hazy flashbacks that punctuate the film, Shane recalls an icy conversation with a fellow scientist, Friessen (Marilu Marini), in which he explained how he and Coré had an affair when they accompanied Leó on a jungle research expedition, and Shane also stole some of Leó’s data to advance his own career. But the darker secret soon reveals itself when two young men (Nicolas Duvauchelle and Raphaël Neal) break into Leó and Coré’s house, believing that because of the security it must contain all sorts of riches. One of them instead finds Coré, making a hot and sultry come-on, and he joins her in bed, where she commences to eat him. And that’s not a euphemism.

Denis’ films are often about patiently withheld secrets and veiled truths of great importance. Here, the hidden crux is monstrous. Coré and Shane both have a disease that drives them to acts of cannibalistic sadism when they engage in intercourse: desire portrayed as a literally carnivorous act. Shane’s keeping his disease partly controlled, but in his new, frustrating marriage he’s clearly being driven closer and closer to the edge of total enslavement to the disease that Coré is gripped by. The story evokes some classic metaphors and images of sexual anxiety, particularly in the scenes of the young men trying to penetrate that mysterious house and gain access to the woman who is raw passion personified, and, in the mythic tradition, the price to be paid for this transgression is not small. In its own hypermodernist way, then, Trouble Every Day is about taboos that are ancient and figurations that are primal. When the young man who will be Core’s last victim finds her eyeing him from behind wooden slats, he’s violating a sanctum, a common fairytale motif, and unleashing the contained yet always straining feminine libido (the similarity to Michael Cacoyannis’ vision of Helen contained in The Trojan Women leapt out at me).

The subsequent visions of Dalle—large teeth dripping gore like one of H. R. Giger’s aliens, laughing and toying with her prey who’s unable to fight off her supercharged strength, as she bites off his lips and slides fingers under flaps of skin, all the while giggling like a child—aren’t easily forgotten. Perhaps even more affecting, however, is the agonised spectacle of the perpetually unspeaking Leó trying to take care of his wife, who he loves in a deep, easily apparent fashion, in spite of all good sense, and Shane’s increasingly frail efforts to keep his wife from becoming the object of his own latent predatory tendencies. Questions of how people use each other, laden sometimes with both hate and love, bubble throughout. Denis’ taciturnity as an artist is actually one of her great strengths, and that’s readily apparent here as her galvanising efforts escape the facile inchoate provocations of Gaspar Noé and Lars Von Trier in trying to keep pace. Shane’s hunger for money (which he confesses through silence to Friessen) and for Coré, both of which meant fucking over (Afro-French) Leó, condenses forms of betrayal and exploitation, but Denis leaves this as a suggestive aspect of her drama. Simultaneously, whilst Denis is undoubtedly making an excellent horror movie, her approach both teases apart the fibre of old-fashioned mad scientist and vampire movies and restores and emphasises sensitivities usually excised from the gruelling modern genre. Shane’s mixture of unrequited passion and intense guilt is part and parcel with his disease, gnawing him from the inside out as much as the disease makes him and Coré gnaw on other people, and Shane’s killing of Coré, after she’s set fire to her house is part mercy killing, part self-defence, and part last-ditch effort to kill the animal in himself she embodies.

Denis’s fascination for layers of society interacting half-consciously in modern metropolitan life sees her segue now and then from the main drama to follow the maids in Shane and June’s hotel, women of various ages and states of being, and especially pretty, young Christelle (Florence Loiret-Caille). Denis follows Christelle as she’s dropped off in the morning by her boyfriend, pinches unused perks left in hotel rooms, and sprawls on the Browns’ bed when they’re both out for a cigarette. She catches Shane’s eye, and he catches her, so that when Shane tracks her into the maids’ locker room, the thrill of a quickie is nigh, but this turns inevitably into another grotesque assault, punctuated by the nightmarish image of Shane’s blood-smeared face rising from between Christelle’s legs and then kissing her, forcing her to taste her own blood. It’s as genuinely horrific a scene as cinema can offer, but one that, in ironically treading close to pornographic detail, avoids the pornographic thrill of a lot of modern horror movies, in which sexualised violence is presented through conveniently shallow characterisations. The idea that true terror lies at the end of a simple workday shift is all too resonant. Denis tries to encompass her bottom-of-the-barrel fantasia in just such a way that makes every cruel and kind act count, and in this way, Denis both heightens and reinforces the emotions that underpin many of her other films; but also the threat of damage individuals can do to each other hovers in those other works and explodes here.

Denis’ style might have felt a bit abstract, some of the power in her approach left untapped in trying just a little too hard to avoid the usual, if it wasn’t for the offhand wonder of moments like that in which June automatically helps Christelle make the bed in June and Shane’s hotel room, a telling moment of interaction; June’s not someone who’s used to or comfortable with being waited on, and also not one to let her bridal couch be usurped by anyone else, a point that has dreadful ramifications. Or the heartbreaking tenderness with which Leó cleans Coré after one of her murders. Or the polite yet remorseless way Friessen orders Shane out of her lab. Or the dark suggestiveness of Leó, and the audience, knowing what he’ll find when he spies blood dripping from stalks of grass in another of the vacant lots Coré uses as her killing ground. There’s a wonderful sequence in which Shane and June visit Notre Dame, Shane acting like the monster of traditional movieland as an overture to a magically romantic moment high in the towers, closing in for the most tender of clinches as the June’s headscarf blows away, a moment that renders her confused and despairing later reaction to Shane’s retreat to the bathroom to jerk off all the more palpable. In offering a melodramatic set-up, Denis doesn’t quite deal with how this upsets the usual balance of her style, and outsized horror grazes against fragile humanity, contributing to the finally icy, alien chill the film gives off. I suppose that’s a comparatively small complaint, considering the undeniably powerful and quite brilliant film Denis wrought.

The effect of Trouble Every Day sinks deep into the bones and doesn’t let go for hours after the chillingly curt coda. Denis manages to conjure what is at once a psychologically, physically, and metaphorically immediate sense of hell being other people. l

CIFF 2010: On Tour (Tournée, 2010)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Mathieu Amalric

2010 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Mathieu Amalric is best known outside of France for starring in the lauded and successful adaptation of journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. That meditative and mournful film dealt in part with the importance of family connections, a theme that seems to appeal to Amalric. He’s taken it up again by reviving the backstage drama through a performance form that is itself a revival of a moribund art—burlesque. The result is an ambling, entertaining, nostalgic film with a lot of charm.

Amalric stars as Joachim Zand, a former French TV producer and personality who has returned from an extended stay in the United States with a troupe of New Burlesque artists. He has planned a tour of the port cities of France from Le Havre to Toulouse, avoiding Paris until he has a confirmed booking—and avoiding telling his troupe why—because the many enemies he made there makes it impossible for him to book a venue for the show. What plot exists revolves around the loss of the Paris venue he thought he had, prompting Joachim to launch into a tour-de-force tirade by cellphone on their train and forcing him to go to Paris to grovel before his former producing partner François (Damien Odoul) and impresario Chapuis (Pierre Grimblat) to secure another theatre; he returns only with a black eye and his two sons (Simon and Joseph Roth), foisted on him by his ex-wife for a short visit.

On Tour is much more interested in personality than plot, a point made many times in many different ways through the interactions of the cast and New Burlesque itself. The dancers, all real burlesque stars (including the phenomenally inventive winner of the 2006 Miss Exotic World Pageant Julie Atlas Muz), interviewed in the movie by a French journalist, define New Burlesque as by women for women. They’re not exactly speaking about the audience, though the first show’s crowd is shown to be largely made up of women. They consider New Burlesque to be about their self-expression, their definition of themselves sexually and creatively, thereby providing a model for all women.

This is a concept that Joachim has a hard time settling into. During one sequence in which Joachim criticizes Julie as unsexy for wrapping herself up in a body-length rope and gyrating to “undress” (he says in French, “You look like an earthworm”), she says it’s their show—he’s just the tour manager. His reduction in status eats at him, and he tries to be a hotshot tour manager by booking them into hotels they really can’t afford, and getting the dancers flowers and champagne. Meanwhile, he drives a budget rental car and grabs free matches and candy by the handful from dishes at all the hotel reception desks.

Mimi Le Meaux (Miranda Colclasure), a large, heavily made-up bleach-blonde who imitates Sally Rand with her feather fan routine, is more or less the female lead. She seems closest to Joachim, trying to find out his secrets, accusing him of using the dancers to get back into the limelight in France, and successfully getting under his skin. “I could love you if you had talent,” he says to her, earning him a slap and amply demonstrating why everyone he knew before loathes him.

Yet, in the true style of show people, Joachim, Mimi, and the rest of the dancers are rather lonely, and this film is a pretty good look at how unglamorous life on the road can be. Traveling to small towns where there is nothing to see and do, the dancers break the boredom by singing in the lobby (in a great running gag, Joachim asks one hotel clerk after another to turn off the Muzak or TV in the lobby, a request that seems beyond their comprehension) or crashing a Japanese wedding that later erupts into a brawl. Mimi picks up a software programmer at the hotel bar, a great scene where she pretends to comprehend his technical explanations in French of what he does, and takes him into a bathroom stall for sex while a bunch of little Japanese girls kept in the bathroom to avoid the brawl listen and wonder if the pair has turned into wild animals.

I was absolutely enthralled by the burlesque numbers, which make up about half the film. Mimi’s number may be corny, but her stage presence is awesome. A huge dancer named Dirty Martini does a routine sending up the United States, flashing a star-striped banner and then stripping down to a g-string and pasties and stuffing money into her mouth. Julie was by far my favorite dancer, with her mixture of bawdy and artistic stripteases. In one, she inflates a see-through balloon and slowly allows it to envelope her until she is standing entirely inside it. In another, she wears a glove that looks like a severed arm, and makes it appear that her own hand is the disembodied hand that is feeling her up.

The film is absolutely gorgeous to look at, whether shot with careful set-ups or using handhelds for a more verite look. There are four credited screenwriters, perhaps because the film seems so improvised, even random. Yet, the easy movement of the dancers between English and French must have been scripted to some extent, and I’ve got to believe that the film was constructed similarly to the way John Cassavetes made his movies. It can be confusing if you care about plot and logical progression, but it’s quite a delight of found moments and everyday intimacy.

The film’s final setting is an homage to burlesque. Mimi and Joachim, separated from the rest of the troupe, find an abandoned hotel on the shore. They call the troupe, who board a boat and motor over. Joachim fires up the sound system and puts in a tape of music he likes, and the troupe romps around the faded glory of what must once have been a luxury seaside resort. It’s a lovely metaphor for a film that offers a fresh take on a faded movie genre. l

On Tour had a one-time-only screening. Look for it in limited release in your area.

Previous CIFF coverage

Circus Kids: The St. Louis Arches youth circus travels to Israel to join forces with the Galilee Circus to help bridge the gap between Arabs and Jews in this optimistic documentary. (Israel/USA)

The Matchmaker: Magical coming-of-age drama in which a teenage boy learns a message of love and tolerance from a Holocaust survivor. (Israel)

Ten Winters: Emotionally honest and lyrical study of a man and a woman whose initial attraction goes through many changes as they experience 10 years worth of living. (Italy)

Certified Copy: Elliptical tale of seduction by renowned director Abbas Kiarostami in which two strangers pretend to be a married couple in crisis. (Iran/Italy/France)

The Princess of Montpensier: The French Catholic persecution of Protestants forms the backdrop for this period drama about the travails suffered by a beautiful noblewoman desired by four men. (France/Germany)

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff: Legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff and others who knew him discuss his career, including such highlights as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. (UK)

Waste Land: A moving examination of the positive transformation of workers in Brazil’s largest landfill when artist Vik Muniz comes to photograph them. (Brazil/USA)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: This 2010 Palme d’Or winner chronicles the final days of Boonmee using magic realism and experimental techniques to explore universal myths and symbols. (Thailand)

The Last Report on Anna: A dreamy, romantic film centering on Anna Kéthly, real-life Hungarian minister in exile, and a spy’s attempt to silence her by seducing her into returning to their communist-controlled country. (Hungary)

CIFF 2010: Certified Copy (Copie Conforme, 2010)

Director/Screenwriter: Abbas Kiarostami

2010 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Ever pushing his own boundaries, renowned Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, making his first film outside of his own country, has taken on what would be a controversial topic in Iran—a love story. Saddled with restrictions on the depiction of women, largely barred from shooting in homes, and forced to suggest desire through the use of classic Persian poetry, Kiarostami has approached this common Western preoccupation almost as if he were still worried about the censors. His love story is elliptical to the point of frustration for many viewers, but in my humble opinion, his strategy is much more straightforward than some people are giving it credit for. Pity the poor Western moviegoer who is so used to paint-by-numbers plotting that a little imagination in the art of seduction can throw us into a tailspin.

Let me say from the get-go that the “theoretical” set-up for the film is better dispensed with as an elaborate McGuffin Kiarostami sets in motion to have a little fun with the intellectuals in the crowd. To wit: Certified Copy, the book that brings English author James Miller (William Shimell) together with an unnamed antiquities dealer played by Juliette Binoche, posits that a copy of a work of art can be just as valuable as the original. Offering this theory to audiences amounts to giving them a security blanket of rational thought to cling to as their confusion grows in the second half of the film.

The film begins in a lecture hall in the Tuscan town of Arezzo where Miller will discuss his book. He thanks the Italians for giving his book a warm reception that he regrets it did not receive in England, and feels that if the country that gave birth to Michelangelo and Da Vinci can embrace his ideas, he must have done his job well. Coming late, the woman sits down next to her friend (Angelo Barbagallo), who translated the book into Italian, and chats with him quietly while her son Julien (Adrian Moore) stands against a wall and texts. His hunger forces them to leave almost as soon as they arrive, but before she goes, she gives her phone number to her friend to give to Miller. We watch as she and Julien walk in fits and starts down the street, she far ahead of the lumbering boy who forces her to stop periodically, look back, and then continue walking once he has caught up. The two stop for a hamburger, and Julien taunts her for buying six copies of a book she says annoyed her, accurately assessing that his mother has romance on her mind. She becomes furious with him and leaves the table when he asks her why she won’t let his surname be used; this exchange and her reaction cannot be understood by the audience and is one of several moments in the film Kiarostami leaves unexplained or out of our reach.

That Sunday, Miller arrives at the woman’s shop for their date. The shop is below street level and very dark. He hears her speaking on the phone in French in her home above the shop, calls out a weak “hello,” and waits for her to find him. Rather startlingly, she descends the stairs wearing a spaghetti-strap, silk top with her bra straps and the top of her bra visible, but Miller seems to take no notice. He suggests they abandon the dungeon-like shop to enjoy the beautiful day. The woman asks him why he doesn’t like her shop. This is the beginning of a lengthy sparring match they will have as they drive to the town of Lucignano, whose famous L’albero della vita attracts couples on their wedding day who believe it bestows blessings for a happy married life.

From the moment the woman and Miller find themselves surrounded by couples in tuxedos and wedding gowns, things start to get strange. Initially, she takes him to a museum to show him a famous painting that was thought to be an original for centuries, but was found to be a reproduction. Although now labeled as a copy, the painting is still protected by an alarm-rigged glass box of the type in which such famous works as the Mona Lisa are now encased. Miller shows no interest, having finished his book and feeling unwilling to argue his points yet again. After being dragged around Lucignano, he begs for a cup of coffee. Just as they are served, he gets a call on his cellphone, which he takes outside. The cafe owner (Gianna Giachetti) mistakes the woman and Miller for a married couple and talks to her about marriage. The woman tells her they have been married for 15 years and complains that he works all the time, but the cafe owner thinks this is good. When Miller and the woman leave the cafe, she tells him they were mistaken for a married couple, an error she did not correct. “We must make a good couple,” he replies, with intrigued bemusement in his voice. For the rest of the film, the pair will pretend to be that married couple.

Play-acting is a common enough aspect of romance. If we are not actively living out the illusions that come with the first blush of love, then we may try to spice up a longer-term relationship with a bit of fantasy—a wife will dress up like a parlor maid, for example, or a couple will pretend to be strangers who meet in a public place and go home for a one-night stand. The odd aspect of the play-acting the pair in Certified Copy engages in is that their “marriage” is in crisis. The sparring that began as their real selves in the drive to Lucignano—master of the filmed car ride, a great touch Kiarostami includes is photographing them so that the reflection in the windshield of the buildings that line the narrow streets of Arezzo appear to be crashing down on them in some seismic disaster—only escalates when they get to Lucignano. For example, they sit down to a late lunch, and the woman goes to the restroom to apply a screaming-red lipstick and attach one of two pairs of large, gaudy earrings she brought with her to pretty herself up. Coming back looking like a child who has played dress-up, she finds Miller enraged by a corked bottle of wine and a waiter who is ignoring his request for a fresh bottle. She says it tastes good to her. “Of course, I forgot, the French know everything about wine!” he bellows before leaving the restaurant.

This film is troubling not merely because it goes in a direction that is played so sincerely that we become confused about whether the pair is actually married or not. The woman seems if not outright unbalanced, then certainly emotionally distressed. Miller first becomes aware of her vulnerability in the cafe when he relates a story of seeing a mother and son walking through a square in Florence that is identical to the way she and Julien walked together at the beginning of the film. A tear streams down her cheek, and she says by way of explanation that it seems very familiar. Could she and Julien have been that mother and son? Was this a time in her life when her loneliness in her marriage led to divorce? The speculation will remain just that, but the possibility of reliving a hurt to arrive at a different outcome may have occurred to them both on some level at that moment. When they end up sitting on the steps of a pensione, an invitation for a “do-over” of their wedding night is sure to follow. How far Miller is willing to go—it’s clear from the start that the seduction has been part of the woman’s plan all along—is the greatest mystery, one Kiarostami leaves hanging for us to meditate on.

It is hugely satisfying to see how Kiarostami weaves his career-long obsessions and filming techniques into an entirely new type of film for him. While he films indoors, quite effectively, he never actually shoots inside a person’s home. He is able to shoot a married couple in the privacy of their honeymoon suite, but only because they are not really married. It’s ingenious, really. And, of course, his concerns with identity, most movingly rendered in Close-up, and reality versus fantasy, seen in such films as Taste of Cherry, are at the core of this film.

By having Shimell and Binoche move into such a realistic portrayal of a married couple, Kiarostami confuses the audience about what the story “really” is, though, of course, both parts of the film are entirely fictional. He continues his habit of mixing verité location shooting with storytelling and calling attention to the artificial barrier we put up when we suspend our disbelief to enter the narrative. For example, he shoots inside the museum that houses the talismanic golden tree of life, offering a scene in which a marrying couple wishes to have their photo taken with the woman and Miller. We see in the background a bride putting eye drops in her eyes. Moments later, the woman and Miller move into the room that holds the artifact, and a weeping bride sits on the bench Miller vacated. The camera lingers on her, and we are made to wonder what her story is, but Kiarostami has already clued us that whether or not she is a real bride, her tears are fake.

I’ve heard this film described as a screwball comedy, but it could be considered as such only if you thought Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a screwball comedy as well. The marital quarrels, much more intense than those over Miller’s theories at the beginning of the film, are painful to watch and not my idea of an aphrodisiac. Why Miller agreed to play along is still a mystery to me. Some have suggested that the game was related to his theory about copies being as valuable as originals. There is something to this thinking, since we go to the movies in part to watch stories that can tell us about our real lives, but I don’t think it holds water as a motivation for the actions of these characters. Binoche is superb in the subtlety of her seduction, playing the game expertly while giving us a window into the woman’s feelings at critical moments. Shimell plays an annoyed husband quite well, but is less able to convey Miller’s feelings; I wasn’t really sure he was attracted to the woman and therefore wondered why he wanted to play the game. This reservation aside, Certified Copy is one of the most ingenious and thought-provoking romances you’re ever likely to see.

Certified Copy screenings are completely sold out. Check the CIFF website for added screenings or inclusion of the film in the Best of the Fest showings. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous CIFF coverage

The Princess of Montpensier: The French Catholic persecution of Protestants forms the backdrop for this period drama about the travails suffered by a beautiful noblewoman desired by four men. (France/Germany)

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff: Legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff and others who knew him discuss his career, including such highlights as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. (UK)

Waste Land: A moving examination of the positive transformation of workers in Brazil’s largest landfill when artist Vik Muniz comes to photograph them. (Brazil/USA)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: This 2010 Palme d’Or winner chronicles the final days of Boonmee using magic realism and experimental techniques to explore universal myths and symbols. (Thailand)

The Last Report on Anna: A dreamy, romantic film centering on Anna Kéthly, real-life Hungarian minister in exile, and a spy’s attempt to silence her by seducing her into returning to their communist-controlled country. (Hungary)

CIFF 2010: The Princess of Montpensier (La Princesse de Montpensier, 2010)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Bertrand Tavernier

2010 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The Princess of Montpensier was booed by some critics at its Cannes press screening, and it’s not hard to understand why. The lavish, period, literary adaptation they had just seen must have seemed like a return to the “bad old days” of the “quality films” the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers were rebelling against. Indeed, in the United States, such films are often seen as Oscar bait—inert displays of wealth and old-fashioned values that have no relevance to modern life.

While it can’t be disputed that this film looks expensive, takes place in France’s far past (the 16th century), is based on a literary work from that period by Madame de Lafayette, and concentrates most of its 139 minutes on a sort of love story, there is nothing inert or irrelevant about it. The Princess of Montpensier may seem like just another costume ball concerned with a beautiful woman all want to possess. But that modern audiences accept as commonplace such a plot—a woman as a prize in a macho contest—is evidence that we haven’t progressed as far as we think. And the background of religious persecution and warfare also resonates in many parts of our world today.

The film opens on a battlefield. Survivors of a routed fighting force of French Protestants (Huguenots) attempt to hobble out of sight, but are cut down by a trio of soldiers on horseback who are fighting for the Catholic cause. As they ride off the battlefield, three Huguenots on horseback pursue them and confront them as they retreat into a farmhouse. “In the name of Christ,” yells the Count of Chabannes (Lambert Wilson) before they all fire pistols into the house and break in. Swords are crossed, and during the fray, Chabannes runs a pregnant woman trying to defend her dying child through with his sword. A close-up of her stricken face communicates the horror of the moment. After this terrifying fight, Chabannes deserts, disillusioned with the senseless slaughter in the name of a Christ both Protestants and Catholics worship. Banished by both the Catholic King Charles IX and his Protestant compatriots for deserting, Chabannes turns to his former pupil, the Prince of Montpensier (Grégoire LePrince-Ringuet), for sanctuary.

The prince and Chabannes have a surprise waiting for them when they return to the prince’s home. The Duke of Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz) has persuaded the Marquis de Mézières (Phillippe Magnan) to end the betrothal of his daughter Marie (Mélanie Thierry) to Mayenne de Guise (Césare Domboy) and to give her to his son. This is a very serious breach of promise, one that Marie and Mayenne’s brother Henri (Gaspard Ulliel) take very badly—the two are in love and are tormented by the idea that they will be parted. Marie’s mother (Florence Thomassin) advises her to submit, telling her that she and Henri have been indiscreet and that being so close to Henri while married to Mayenne would bring ruin to her and her family. Reluctantly, Marie agrees and warns the headstrong Henri not to fight their fate.

Sadly, the prince and Marie are all but strangers, and he lacks the charm and confidence to woo her. While she dutifully mouths words of affection toward him, she cannot match them with her feelings. It is also Marie’s misfortune to be breathtakingly beautiful, causing the prince’s jealousy—particularly toward Henri—to bubble out of control, further alienating Marie. He is summoned to battle time and again, leaving her alone with only Chabannes, his trusted tutor and friend, as a companion, with instructions to educate her before she is presented at the court of Versailles. She is intelligent and eager to learn, easy around the older Chabannes, and therefore quite shocked when he tells her he, too, has fallen in love with her.

Her problems are compounded when the Duke of Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz) and Henri happen near the prince’s estate, encounter Marie, and she offers them the hospitality of her home. The duke covets her as well, quite openly, and poor Marie must contend with four men at the dinner table eyeing her like a prize goose. Things come to a head when Marie finally travels to Versailles and Henri tempts her to renew their love affair.

Bertrand Tavernier is a very versatile director who can make any subject he chooses to tackle come to life. You might catch yourself wanting to swat flies while watching the goings-on in the colonial backwater of his Coup de Torchon or rub your elbows in pain after a cop takes down a drug dealer in L.627. So, too, does The Princess of Montpensier put you into the times these characters lived through and make you identify with their struggles and restrictions. The warfare in this film is brutal and realistic; we watch a fighter on the ground stab a horse to death with a lance to unseat its rider and witness the lack of mercy shown to civilians, women, and children during battles and in the pogroms carried out in Protestant areas. The Duke of Anjou is shown studying Polish while encamped with his army, explaining to the prince and Chabannes that the Polish king is the weakest in Europe and his family thinks he should simply take the crown—he behaves similarly with Marie, yelling at Henri for wanting something that should rightfully have been his, and assuming his authority as heir to the throne will cause the prince to just step aside when the moment is right. This is the arrogance of hereditary rule that would see his kind lose their heads in France two centuries later.

One feels for the prince, hoping that his beautiful wife will love him, only to have her say she will if he “orders” her to, but his irrational explosions are horrible and his intentions to basically lock her away after he learns that Henri is back in the picture are barbarous. Marie, who has had little agency in the film, tells him she will ride back to their estate on horseback rather than be conveyed in a carriage to her confinement; when she arrives, she nearly falls off her horse in exhaustion, showing this act of free will to be merely masochistic. Marie’s life in this film is commodified at every step. Her wedding night, another excrutiatingly authentic scene, is a horror of having a crowd watch as her naked body is washed and perfumed—her father inspecting the proceedings as he would a horse being brushed down in his stable—and a group of family and servants waiting at the foot of her curtained bed for her cry of pain when her hymen is broken. The servants are sent immediately to the bedside to gather evidence that blood was shed, and the new fathers-in-law tip glasses at this sealing of the deal. Perhaps worst of all, the aggressive attentions this young, unsophisticated woman is subjected to by her admirers are covetous rather than sincere and are rather frightening to watch. Only Chabannes, because of his age and wisdom, remains chivalrous toward her, even sacrificing his place with the prince to save Henri. He will sacrifice more in defense of the innocent before the picture ends, acting as a moral compass in a rather immoral film.

I think it is to Tavernier’s credit that he continues to plumb the depths of French history and bring a less pretty sort of period drama to life. His message about the senselessness of religious warfare and the horror of “collateral damage” isn’t hinted at but plainly spoken and shown—a lack of subtlety that seems suitable, not something to criticize. His choice to tell a drawn-out love story has rankled many critics for its apparent puffery, but women at this time were little more than property, a specific situation that Western cultures have outdistanced but that still informs the inferior status women hold throughout the world. Finally, Tavernier has argued with French critics for ignoring the financial pressures of the European Union on the French film industry by denigrating the efforts of commercial filmmakers:

In a series of interviews and letters, Tavernier issued an impassioned attack on the state of film criticism in France. He accused critics, lost between the savage tastes of the public and their own self importance, of employing a cynical triple standard, giving a free pass to virtually all the Hollywood blockbusters, championing marginalised filmmakers from around the world, while ignoring or dismissing French commercial cinema. (Source: Carloss James Chamberlin, “Bertrand Tavernier,” Senses of Cinema)

The Princess of Montpensier, in the mold of the successful The Duchess, is a film that can compete in the world marketplace. Thierry is an appealing actress who holds the center of the film quite well. She is ably supported by the quartet of men who play her suitors. I especially liked LePrince-Ringuet, a handsome actor who manages to contain his charisma and appear a man more comfortable crossing swords in battle than exchanging words with his own wife. The film goes beyond its commercial appeal with its extraordinary attention to detail, as well as a dedicated and talented crew in front of and behind the camera.

The Princess of Montpensier screens Sunday, October 10, 8:15 p.m., and Tuesday, October 12, 8:15 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous CIFF coverage

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff: Legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff and others who knew him discuss his career, including such highlights as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. (UK)

Waste Land: A moving examination of the positive transformation of workers in Brazil’s largest landfill when artist Vik Muniz comes to photograph them. (Brazil/USA)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: This 2010 Palme d’Or winner chronicles the final days of Boonmee using magic realism and experimental techniques to explore universal myths and symbols. (Thailand)

The Last Report on Anna: A dreamy, romantic film centering on Anna Kéthly, real-life Hungarian minister in exile, and a spy’s attempt to silence her by seducing her into returning to their communist-controlled country. (Hungary)

The Comedy of Power (L’ivresse du Pouvoir, 2006)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Claude Chabrol

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The film world is awash today in notices about and tributes to Claude Chabrol, the French New Wave director who died yesterday at the age of 80. Noted for his leading-edge championing of Alfred Hitchcock, Chabrol himself relished in making many a good thriller. But he was also interested in power and corruption in society, in families, and in the human heart.

I can’t pretend to be extremely well versed in Chabrol’s career, nor have I seen nearly as many of his movies as I would have liked. But the films I have seen (This Man Must Die and La Cérémonie are reviewed on this site) have led me to an instant kinship with this critic of the smug, excavator of hypocrisies and depravity, and bemused observer of the strivings of men (mainly) whose ambitions are not only unworthy but surprisingly simple-minded and, ultimately, modest.

The Comedy of Power, his 2006 takeoff on a real-life scandal, is a rewarding exercise in watching him perform a perfect balancing act between a drama of corruption and a comedy verging on slapstick. That he has some female enforcers hand some very self-impressed men their dicks on a platter is even more deliciously humorous.

The first comedic moment comes right at the start, with an explanatory title in bold lettering that contains the boilerplate disclaimer that usually appears at the end of all feature films—that the movie is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and real persons is strictly coincidental. In fact, any French viewer would recognize this story as “L’affaire Elf,” a worldwide, multiyear scheme in which politicians and business leaders enriched themselves through kickbacks paid by corrupt African governments and businesses. But you don’t have to be French to get the inference. Political and financial scandals know no borders, and this movie’s theme strikes an all-too-familiar note.

Chabrol sets up the adversarial sides with economical visual gags. We meet the first corrupt businessman, CEO Michel Humeau (Francois Berlèand), as he prepares in his office for a weekend trip. He speaks on two cellphones at once as a flurry of assistants buzz around him. When the phone that has his wife on the other end cuts off, he shakes it and then uses it to—what—shave? No, he has a skin condition, and he’s always scratching at his face; perhaps his wife literally makes his skin crawl. Outside of his office building, he is accosted by a complement of gendarmes and arrested. Amid protests of “Do you know who I am?!” Humeau is forced to strip at the prison—a literal dressing-down.

We get an inkling of what’s ahead when two of his associates, hearing of his misfortune, say that a magistrate named Jeanne Charmant-Killman (Isabelle Huppert) is the investigator. She is known as “The Piranha.” Cut to a shot of some enormous goldfish sitting at the bottom of a small fish tank—a hilarious and perfect metaphor that is rounded out when the camera pans down and we observe The Piranha in action, eating sushi with a man who is involved in the scheme but who thinks he has her where he wants her.

Of course, no man in this film is any match for Charmant-Killman. Huppert gives her a spine of steel wrapped in a painfully thin form of pure energy fueled by nicotine. She has a short, sarcastic laugh ready for any of the dubious, ridiculous statements made by the buffoonish conspirators she interviews one by one. Descarts (Jacques Boudet), a rubberfaced politician who is fond, as all the conspirators are, of enormous cigars, decides to contain Charmant-Killman by coopting her and setting her in competition with another woman. He has her promoted, moved to a spacious office, and gives her a very sharp assistant, Erika (Marilyne Canto). But, instead of ending The Piranha’s crusade, this move only doubles the conspirators’ trouble. The only person the plotters manage to corrupt is a man, and they show the famous honor among thieves by shamelessly ratting each other out.

This film would have been a farce in other hands, and probably a good one. Chabrol, particularly by casting Huppert, adds the necessary gravity to the story. This really is how the world works. Greedy, stupid, condescending men are lining their pockets with taxpayer money in countries all over the world for luxuries they could well afford with their executive salaries, or a mistress, or some other bit of ephemera to balm their overtended egos. Dedicated prosecutors like Charmant-Killman keep putting their thumbs in the dike, but the pressure is too great to hold out for long. In one particularly tragic case, anti-Mafia fighters Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were Excellent Cadavers, and in the film, Charmant-Killman eventually comes under 24-hour police protection.

The only misstep is the depiction of Jeanne’s rich husband Philippe (Robin Renucci), who becomes ever more lonely and depressed as his wife develops tunnel vision for her quarry. He makes a desperate choice near the end of the film that seems to reach her, and hints are that she may have a change of heart toward her work. This character transformation, if genuine, is unnecessary. Chabrol should have trusted Huppert more. Her performance is so vibrant that it is impossible to see Jeanne Charmant-Killman as one of the caricatures that surround her.

Indeed, Chabrol has shown an affinity for detective stories and their keen-eyed sleuths to such an extent that this collaboration led me to envision Huppert as Charmant-Killman in a series of films to offer a realistic antidote to the fussy concoctions of Agatha Christie. Although Chabrol can no longer offer his amazing touch to the proceedings, I sincerely hope to see The Piranha hunt another day. l

David Hudson at MUBI has a comprehensive round-up of articles, observations, and more here.

Longtime Chabrol enthusiast Ray Young (Flickhead) has a tribute and links here.

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

Director: Luis Buñuel

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If ever a great director ended their career on a high, prototypical note, it was Luis Buñuel. I’ve always said that everything Buñuel was about as a filmmaker is in his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire. Among his many dreamscapes—from his early, surrealistic L’Âge d’Or to his mysterious, blasphemous Viridiana and kinky sex farce Belle de Jour—That Obscure Object of Desire must be seen as Buñuel’s ultimate dream, the final, clear telling of the story of his inner life. It recycles his trademark obsessions almost as jokes on himself and his fans and foretells that this will be the last time he and his anima will spar on camera.

We are barely into the film before Buñuel dispenses a couple of his trademark flourishes. Opening shots of Seville segue to a large home as its master, Mateo Fabert (Fernando Rey, Buñuel’s marvelously pompous alter ego in a number of films), walks through a red, upholstered door into an ornate bedroom and instructs his valet (Andre Weber) to burn a blood-stained pillow he is picking off the floor. “Burn it all!” he says in disgust, as the valet picks up and shows Buñuel’s favorite fetish objects—a pair of high-heeled shoes and a pair of lace panties.

Mateo has decided to leave for Paris, and climbs in his large American car to be driven to the train station. We see another man get into a chauffeur-driven car and a close-up of the car ignition. With one turn of the key, the car explodes in a ball of fire. “They’re even here,” Mateo says, in a “there goes the neighborhood” manner, of the terrorists who will plague the film. As he boards the first-class train carriage, it fills with people he knows—a neighbor (Milena Vukotic) traveling with her young daughter and a judge (Julien Bertheau) who is a friend of his cousin’s. Last into his car is a dwarf—a psychologist whom the judge knows from the courthouse, where he gives expert testimony. As Mateo looks out the window, he sees a woman (Carole Bouquet), black-eyed and forehead bandaged, striding along the platform looking into each carriage. We see him hand some money to a reluctant train porter, who goes into the toilet and emerges with a bucket. When the woman reaches Mateo, the object of her search, he dumps the full bucket of water on her head. She brushes at the water with disgust, throws her suitcase to the ground, and boards the nearest carriage. This act provokes the curiosity of Mateo’s carriagemates, and they listen with relish as he relates the story of “the worst woman on the earth.”

Mateo met Conchita when she was engaged to serve as his maid. She knew nothing about being a maid and had hands too delicate to have done serious housework. Smitten, Mateo made plans to seduce her that very night, but was politely rebuffed by Conchita (now played by Angela Molina). Upon arising the next day, he learns that the object of his desire has quit and left for parts unknown. He loses her and runs into her by chance a couple of times, first in a nightclub, where she is working as a coat checker, and later, in Lausanne, when he is robbed of exactly 800 francs by a couple of young men, and finds out Conchita was behind the robbery to get them only what they needed to buy train tickets back to Paris. He tells her to keep the money she tries to return and extracts her address in Paris, a humble flat on an ancient block of buildings that she shares with her religious, widowed mother, Encarnación (Maria Asquerino) who is too bourgeois and useless to work.

Mateo becomes their benefactor, and eventually the coy Conchita agrees to be his mistress in his rarely used home on the outskirts of Paris. Their encounter at his estate is a teasing comedy in which Conchita is disturbed by the photo of Mateo’s late wife in the bedroom they are to occupy and insists on another room. Once there, Conchita tantalizes Mateo by exposing her breasts, only to reveal that she is wearing a garment that amounts to a chastity belt. They take up residence in the villa, but Mateo catches her sneaking one of the young men with whom she was traveling into her bedroom. For the rest of the movie, Conchita will toy with Mateo, dancing naked for some tourists in a cabaret where she is employed, and wheedling the deed to a lavish home in Seville, only to lock him out, curse his very existence, and make love to a young man in the courtyard while Mateo watches briefly in fascinated horror.

And perhaps predictably, even after relating the entire story to his captive audience, he and Conchita disembark the train and go off together on a shopping spree. After viewing yet another Buñuel trademark, a seamstress sewing a rend in a lace garment Conchita has left with her (reminiscent of Arturo de Córdova’s character’s plan to sew his wife’s vagina closed to prevent her from straying in El), the pair walks off, only to be obscured by the smoke and debris of the explosion that ends the movie.

In his wonderful autobiography, My Last Sigh, Buñuel writes at length about his lifelong fascination with dreams and imagination. That Obscure Object of Desire is, I believe, his most completely realized dream. Despite the resemblance to reality that is Mateo’s train journey, Buñuel has populated it with the ultimate dream cliché—a dwarf, who, humorously, is a psychiatrist trying to analyze Mateo’s experiences with Conchita—as well as people he knows in some way, as we all do in our dreams.

Buñuel, born in Spain, adopted France as his home and returned to work there in his last years after many years in Mexico, during which he became a Mexican citizen. The director actually has two mistresses—France and Spain—to which he feels affinity, if not fidelity, creating an unstable situation. But it seems to me that what he is really trying to do is to join harmoniously his male aspect and his female anima; this explains why he can’t just break with Conchita with resolute finality, for which of us can truly escape ourselves.

He doesn’t understand his female aspect. She is constantly changing, signified not only by the two actresses who share one role, but also by their different levels of refinement. Carole Bouquet, the face of the most chic couture house in the world, Chanel, is effortlessly beautiful, sophisticated, and importantly, French. Angela Molina is earthy, more brazenly sensual, and Spanish. The language Buñuel chooses for the film is French, but he dubs both actresses with a third one, confusing the issue even further. Buñuel dubs Rey with Michel Piccoli to bring perfection to Mateo, who is called Mathieu in many reviews and subtitling, though we can clearly hear Conchita call him Mateo. The duality of Buñuel’s expatriate status, therefore, also is acknowledged.

For once, Buñuel gives his antipathy toward the Catholic Church a bit of a rest, even though he ascribes most of the terrorist attacks to the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. Again, this seems like an in-joke, a way to get one of his trademark themes out of the way so he can focus his attention on his main project of reconciling the duality in himself.

His anima entices him with words of love, pursues him when he rejects her, deceives and berates him, and tells him she doesn’t need his money and can’t be bought. When he calls her the worst woman on the earth, he is actually chiding himself, seeing the native intelligence, integrity, and mischief in himself in terms of his feminine aspect. Does he want to dominate her? Would he if she yielded to him? That, Buñuel seems to suggest, could never happen. The final scene—the closing of the symbolic vagina—leads to an explosion we can assume causes Conchita’s and Mateo’s annihilation. Perhaps this is Buñuel closing the book on his career and life, feeling that a final reconciliation of the anima and animus can come only in death—or at least, he won’t be making any more movies trying to work on the problem.

Otto Rank is one of the many psychologists whose theories come up frequently when looking at Buñuel (much to the director’s amusement, claiming his imagination was not a subject for psychoanalytic study). In looking at this Wikipedia passage about Rank, however, you don’t have to be Fellini, so to speak, to figure out Buñuel:

On a microcosmic level, however, the life-long oscillation between the two “poles of fear” can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one’s uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other. Living fully requires “seeking at once isolation and union” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both simultaneously, without succumbing to the Angst that leads a person to be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting, space between separation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said Rank in Art and Artist, “originate solely in the constructive harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life” (1932/1989, p. xxii).

That Obscure Object of Desire moves in a dreamlike way, its flashback structure encouraging the mixture of reality and imagination (as Buñuel said “Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories”) that becomes a dream truth. The switching between Molina and Bouquet is confusing, disorienting, further plunging the viewer into the undersea world of the unconscious. That’s when the great director is most effective in weaving his magic, a truthful untruth we are seduced into following to its illogically logical conclusion. l

Duelle (une quarantaine) (aka Twhylight, 1976)

Director: Jacques Rivette

By Roderick Heath

Unlike most of the New Wave directors to emerge from the critical collective at Cahiers du Cinema, Jacques Rivette’s most admired work came in the early ’70s, a time when compatriots like Truffaut were either negotiating with the mainstream or in total retreat from it, like Godard. Rivette seemed energised by the mood of the waning days of the counterculture and concurrent intellectual flowerings of post-modernist and feminist theory, and he made his best-loved movie, Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), in this period, as well as his highly regarded made-for-television epic Out 1 (1971). As if rejecting all explicable comment or interest in the fallout of political revolts and the New Wave itself, Rivette began to celebrate imagination, play, and ambiguity of the self as a counteraction and commentary on a repressive backlash in contemporary life.

Rivette embarked on what was to be a quartet of films titled “Scenes from a Parallel Life,” each playing on a generic mode and employing a peculiar unifying concept—a war between two goddesses, daughters of the sun and the moon, over a cursed jewel. Rivette made only two of the films before suffering a breakdown and experiencing harassment by authorities, and the completed works were barely screened. Those two films, however, Duelle and Noroît (1976), have a status as hidden treasures.

Rivette’s an acquired taste, but for anyone who can adjust to his wavelength, which isn’t so much obscure as merely reticent, he’s an alluring artist entirely dedicated to realising the most beautiful effects through the simplest means. Rivette’s interesting, if ill-shaped debut, Paris Belongs to Us (1960), introduced many of the elements he found intriguing: the dynamic exchange between life and art, ties of family threatened by worldly trials, and an ironic juxtaposition of humdrum reality and fantastic theorising, arch paranoia, and forces of power. The goddesses whose war Duelle describes embody the anxiety over the place of everyday humans between blocs of power and favour that can be associated with the counterculture shadow-enemies of Paris Belongs to Us.

Rivette had come a long way since his debut, for Duelle is a carefully paced and utterly controlled work, all the more fascinating because like many of Rivette’s films, a high level of spontaneity was utilised in its production, if not quite as much as he often otherwise favoured. This time Rivette had written a story outline and created the characters and situations rather than give his cast all the room to invent their own, but still did not actually write the scenes until a few hours before they were performed (the scripting credits are given to Eduardo de Gregorio and Marilù Parolini). This edgy, happenstance energy infuses the performances even whilst Rivette’s camera maintains a balletic grace.

Rivette, like all the other New Wavers, was also an inveterate film buff, and Duelle sports a magpie’s selection of tropes lifted neatly from favoured films of French poetic realism and Hollywood noir. The initial model was the great Val Lewton/Mark Robson horror film The Seventh Victim (1943). This is immediately apparent in the way Rivette renders his Paris, like Robson’s New York, a depopulated, magic-realist space full of poets and changelings, dreamers and sufferers.

Duelle’s basic plot is slowly fleshed out, and the era it is set in only hazily defined, evoking a Paris where dance halls and gambling clubs unchanged since the heyday of Jean Gabin rubs shoulders with more definably modern locales and styles. It begins on “the last night of the new moon for this winter.” A woman calling herself Leni (Juliet Berto) approaches a young hotel clerk, Lucie (Hermine Karagheuze), searching for an Englishman named Max Christie who stayed at the hotel a year before. Leni claims to be his concerned sister, and pays Lucie to dig up what she can about where he’s gone. Lucie suggests Leni talk to her predecessor at the hotel desk, Elsa (Nicole Garcia), who now works as a taxi dancer at a decrepit nightclub called the Rumba. Leni, in an entirely different guise, approaches Elsa, who recalls Max’s expansive joie de vivre and tells Leni to look up his companion, Sylvia Stern (Claire Nadeau). Another mystery woman, the jaunty Viva (Bulle Ogier), and her helpmate Elizabeth (Elizabeth Wiener), trail Lucie’s brother Pierrot (Jean Babilée) and Sylvia when they return by train from Amsterdam. Later, Viva pays Pierrot’s debt when he loses at cards and ensnares him in her plans to locate the “Fairy Godmother,” a legendary cursed diamond that Max, Pierrot’s former partner in shady deals, had first turned up.

When Leni tracks Sylvia to an aquarium, Sylvia babbles to her about how Max had “fought and defended,” and that he suffered and has recently died. Sylvia is wracked with guilt and sees herself as heir to his struggle. Leni runs off when Pierrot arrives, and shortly after, Lucie receives a phone call asking her to come to the aquarium. When Lucie arrives, she finds Sylvia dead, with a bruise or burn mark on her neck. Lucie hides when Viva enters the aquarium and bends over Sylvia’s dead body, and trails Viva back to a gambling club she frequents, where the two play roles and try to elicit information. Viva theorises that Lucie was brought to the aquarium to set her up. Elsa, whose real name is Jeanne (she felt her real name was vulgar), is falling in love with Pierrot, who promises he can give himself to her completely now. And she discovers the Fairy Godmother itself, attached to a choker band now in Pierrot’s possession, and fondly places it around her neck, setting in motion a fresh chain of contest, decay, and death.

“Duelle” is an invented word, a feminised version of “duel,” and it’s with good reason the film has such a title: the story is strung along by a series of intimate pas de deux between competing characters who exhibit and swap places of command and submission, desire and pathos. Every sequence up until the very central one is dominated by interactions of only two characters; in that centrepiece, a crucial sequence in both the literal (as the 15th of the film’s 30 individual scenes) and narrative sense, as the core characters encounter each other in the Rumba and William Lubtchansky’s gliding camera absorbs them as they chase, challenge, flirt and dance with each other. It’s here the story finally becomes less opaque, whilst, ironically, the cinematic technique becomes more overtly surreal; The Fairy Godmother works an influence on Pierrot, who approaches a mirror, raises his hand—as Elsa recalled Max once doing—and cracks the glass with magical force. This gesture reveals to him the two demi-goddesses, Leni and Viva, in their true forms, approaching each other in ritualistic style and pledging to continue their metaphysical contest for the jewel, holding their hands up like Pierrot’s gesture. This, it seems, indicates the mirror-image, dualistic bind of the two supernatural forces (even if, in their disco-glam outfits, they look like they’re about to start singing “Dancing Queen”).

Lucie, the first and last person we see in the film, is glimpsed initially looking fearful and unsteady on her feet—it proves she’s trying to keep her balance atop an inflatable ball—with Pierrot helping her remain steady. It’s a superb metaphor for both their relationship at this point, a conflation of the film’s parable of human life, and its tenuous, reinventing-the-wheel approach to cinematic form. Leni’s recurring line, “You’ll see me again,” is, at first, a throwaway, but becomes a phrase laden with threat; the intrusion of the goddesses into the everyday lives of the protagonists heralds annihilation in a situation that works in cruel cycles and seems to have happened before, with Max and Sylvia having played out the parts of Pierrot and Elsa—indeed, the drama is built around a pantheistic rhythm, linked to seasonal shifts.

And yet Duelle’s unique approach plays out nearly straight according to the dictates of a noir narrative: the characters battle over an emblem of wealth and steadily annihilate each other and themselves in the process. The Fairy Godmother jewel plays the same poisoned-chalice device at the heart of The Maltese Falcon and especially the Great Whatsit of Kiss Me, Deadly: like that manifestation of raw, consuming power, the jewel leaves marks upon the flesh of those who encounter it and spells inevitable doom. However, Rivette’s dialectic removes standard, dependable props from those familiar arcs, rendering the tale overtly mystical and inexplicable, and the spaces have to be filled in with intuition. Rivette begins with a familiar theme of his, Lucie’s desire to save her brother who’s enmeshed in a mystery (a la Paris Belong to Us), and plays her honest naïveté against the femmes fatale, Viva and Leni. The familiar economic and social parables of noir are present: Lucie, Pierrot, and Elsa/Jeanne all come from a low social bracket and are desperate to rise; the demi-goddesses live and pose as aristocrats, and the jewel is what they all covet.

Such aspirations shade into less modest ambitions, to take on gods and transcend fate and nature. Viva and Leni’s prize in gaining the stone is a chance to live like a mortal for longer than their allotted 40 days in winter: “I’ve been young for far too long,” Leni confesses sadly to Pierrot. As Jonathan Rosenbaum cogently pointed out, the goddesses seem purified metaphors for the idea of movie stardom itself, locked in perpetual, pristine shape. The conceit of employing supernatural drama is on one level amusing and defiantly ludicrous, and yet Rivette, an aficionado of ancient Greek drama (several of his films revolve around attempts to stage the works of Aeschylus and Euripides), employs the idea of gods taking on human form and interacting with mortals with the same blithe tone as those classical works, and for similar ends. Rivette simultaneously exploits the way his characters encapsulate refined concepts often conceived in the traditional binary oppositions of mythical works—male/female, power/impotence, desire/hate, mortality/transcendence, and so on, beginning with the utterly archaic dialectic of sun and moon—and also deliberately evoking the wider pantheon of sexual identity inherent in pagan traditions. Thus, the characters constantly alter the parts each plays in relation to each other. This dedication to fairytale logic is reflected by a recurring motif, a quotation from Cocteau’s play Knights of the Round Table, in which Merlin explains a breakdown of purely mathematical and physical logic: “Two and two no longer make four/All walls can be shattered.”

Similarly, in Duelle, people, within themselves and in relation to others, contain multitudes. Pierrot changes personas with the various women according to their natures (and vice versa), caring and soft with his sister, firm and solicitous with Elsa, challenging and aggressive with Viva, and finally, with Leni, both combative and in sympathy—both of them love Elsa and yearn to escape their lot. Pierrot’s the only major male character in the film, both with the potential to defeat them all and yet also at their mercy. In a droll sequence, Viva, who otherwise is the more constant of the two goddesses, sheds her imperious Marlene Dietrich-ish suits and air of utter command to play the ditzy, seductive drunk to tie Pierrot closer to her. Berto’s Leni alters from genteel fragility in approaching Lucie at the outset, to trenchcoat-clad femme fatale with Sylvia, to seductive butch with Elsa. There’s a vein of tongue-in-cheek costume-play here, one that emphasises the teeming talents of its actresses, but also constantly smudges settled sexual and social identities. Both Berto and Ogier affect ambiguous looks and roles throughout the film as they contend for control, and a crackle of sexual attraction lies underneath all the characters’ dealings with each other, except for Pierrot and Lucie, whose relationship is forlorn in its anxious sibling protectiveness and anxiety. A strange empathy runs between all the characters, alternating with a determination on each person’s part to emerge victorious—that is, alive.

Rivette is a classic art house director, of course, but as I’ve noted before in my review of Fascination, Rivette’s aboveboard filmmaking in works like this bears many similarities to Jean Rollin’s underground horror (the aquarium scene particularly resembles a similar one in Rollin’s Lips of Blood), and I’m starting to wonder if there’s a phrase that can describe this specifically French style of fantastic cinema, airy, beautiful, but deliberately lacking in artifice: perhaps “surrealist-naturalism” would cover it. Rivette’s deconstructive approach is perhaps most amusingly, and oddly manifest in utilising pianist Jean Wiener to provide only source music, at the Rumba Club but also in other, rather more bewildering situations. The links with other traditions are equally apparent—Rivette revealed the depth of homage to Cocteau not only in quoting him but in casting the sinuously graceful, very cool Babilée, who had danced in Cocteau’s stage productions of the 1940s, and his character possesses the kind of haunted taciturnity wielded once by Louis Jouvet in Marcel Carne’s Hotel du Nord. His death—he is put down out of pity by Leni as he begins to succumb to the stone’s corrosive influence—exudes delicate tragedy.

Rivette avoids standard forms of suspense-building, and yet Duelle constructs an increasingly tense atmosphere that comes to a head in brilliantly simple and riveting sequences, like that in which Pierrot, working with knowledge given to him by Viva, attempts to trap Leni by dazzling her with light, confronting her like a gunslinger in a hotel corridor and driving her back, locked in momentary shock as he opens room door after door, and, finally, when Viva chases down Lucie, threatening her with a sword-cane and teleporting her to a different location thanks to the pure magic of a jump-cut. In such a fashion, Rivette manages to both deconstruct how cinema creates excitement and still generate it. Finally, Lucie, apparently the weakest element, emerges ironically as the victor in this war, when she accidentally discovers the power of the Fairy Godmother to annihilate the incarnate goddesses when drenched with her blood, a trick that firsts destroys Viva after she stabs Lucie and her spilling blood reveals this power. With certain, vengeful purpose, Lucie catches up with Leni in the park where she was to duel with Viva, and wipes her out, leaving Lucie to dazedly recite the Cocteau poem, her fate, and indeed what is now her status (victim? dying? hero? new demigod?) entirely ambiguous. Either way, it caps a tantalising experience. l

Intimacy (2001)

Director: Patrice Chéreau

By Roderick Heath

Considering that we’re supposed to be living in an age in which cinema is freely littered with the perpetually conjoined twins of sex and violence, it’s interesting that whilst mainstream media offers copious amounts of the latter, the former is really quite underrepresented. You don’t see the makers of crappy action films trying to squeeze unsimulated sex scenes into their movies, and with good reason: they’d be far more cruelly penalised if they did. At the end of the ’90s and early new century, a handful of controversial art house pics did ruffle feathers with boundary-pushing portrayals of sexuality, like Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999); Virginie Despente and Coralie’s Baise-Moi (2000), still banned in Australia; and Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004). Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy likewise caused about 10 minutes’ worth of controversy for featuring real screwing by middle-aged actors Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance photographed, unlike just about every other sex scene in history, with the same cool simplicity a cameraman would otherwise turn on them drinking a cup of coffee or walking on the street.

But what’s truly striking and disorientating about Chéreau’s film is the utterly unflinching, merciless way he photographs Rylance’s pasty arse and grizzled face and Fox’s far from supermodel flesh, and, most importantly, the anxiety, anger, and terror that pool in their eyes. The nakedness of their bodies, as the cliché goes, is nothing compared to the nakedness of their souls, but it’s certainly true that in order to wrench the most profound communication of desperation and stripped-bare humanity in his actors, Chéreau had to remove every safeguard of actorly affectation. Not that he had to go too far with Rylance, predominantly a stage figure who, nonetheless, on the basis of his performance in this and in the underregarded Angels and Insects (1995), would count as one of the most interesting actors alive, or with Fox, beloved of movie fans since her starring role in Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1989).

Intimacy was adapted by Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic from stories by the laureate of British grunge writing, Hanif Kureishi, whose screenplay for the 1985 hit My Beautiful Laundrette helped revitalise British cinema. With exceptions—the toothless Peter O’Toole vehicle Venus (2006), for example—Kureishi’s name being attached to a movie promises fearless material. Chéreau, for his part, was a former wunderkind stage director. His two films of the new century, Intimacy and 2005’s splendidly mordant Conrad adaptation Gabrielle, evince a tense and incisive talent more at home with these gamey, literate, intimate psychodynamics. Intimacy, like most movies in this demi-genre, reflects the long shadow cast by Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, commencing with a similar conceit of a willfully anonymous, intermittent, rudely carnal hook-up between Rylance’s Jay and Fox’s Claire.

Claire shows up every Wednesday afternoon at the house Jay’s renting from his friend Victor (Alastair Galbraith), initiating protracted sessions of transcendental rutting, before disappearing again. The back story slowly resolves: this has been their habit for several weeks since meeting at a bar, and they know virtually nothing about each other. Jay is the head barman at a flashy London club, maintaining a tight, authoritative, nitpicking control over his small realm even though he really has nothing but contempt for his job. He protests to the managers about their hiring of the inexperienced but good-looking gay Frenchman, Ian (Philippe Calvario), doubting his ability to do the job. But Ian quickly proves adept, and he and Jay soon become good enough friends so that Jay invites him to move into an empty room in Victor’s house, who, like Jay, is on the run from marriage and fraying more obviously than his more composed, unreadable friend.

The circumstances in which Jay left his wife (Susannah Harker) and two sons (Greg Sheffield and Vinnie Hunter) come out in fragments of dialogue and then flashback: suffering mysterious, gnawing pangs of mid-life crisis and hinted sexual frustration, Jay simply walked out one night after heavy drinking and nearly being caught masturbating in the toilet by one of his sons. His taciturn shell, so frustrating to his family and friends like Victor, begins to unravel when it becomes apparent that he’s hooked on his weekly liaisons with Claire, panicking when Victor doesn’t clear off as usual on a Wednesday and waiting pensively, cracking the bubbles in plastic wrap. When Jay’s inspired to follow Claire across town to learn something about her, he discovers to his shock that she’s an actress currently appearing in an amateur production of The Glass Menagerie, married to cab driver Andy (Timothy Spall), and has a son Luke (Joe Prospero) of her own.

Although Jay’s viewpoint remains dominant, the structure of the film does a partial reversal with these revelations about Claire. It encompasses her travails, her frustrated efforts to make a career as an actress. Like Jay, she pours much of her energy and forceful, dissatisfied feelings into their couplings, and again like Jay, she’s also in a business she’s respected in but secretly hates—the acting classes she runs for people like talkative, grating dilettante Betty (Marianne Faithfull). Her husband generally doesn’t watch all of her performances, preferring to play pool, but he maintains a genial, interested tone and plays the theatre buff for her sake. When Jay, appalled, fascinated, and strangely fixated, keeps coming to Claire’s performances, he strikes up an acquaintance with Andy and Luke. Jay isn’t able to keep himself from describing to Andy in contemptuous terms his anonymous girlfriend whose screwing him behind her husband’s back. How much Andy knows, suspects, or is in denial about becomes a taunting question for everyone, especially once Claire discovers that Jay knows now who she is and where he can find her.

A great deal of the power of Intimacy comes from the careful interweaving of Rylance’s performance and the hungry, roving, defence-stripping filmmaking that owes so much to Chéreau’s excellent eye and the efforts of DP Eric Gautier and editor François Gédigier. The urgency of the camera and cutting escalates and subsides in deep accord with the fluctuations of emotion on screen as Jay loses control, possessed with equal parts desperation, intrigue, need, and horror at both himself and the world he sees losing interest in him. It has a quality of expressionist intent that greatly expands the film’s power beyond its kitchen-sink realist roots. This is particularly evident in a brilliant sequence in which Jay catches sight of Claire on a street and begins trying to catch up to her, only to lose track and revolve in frantic distraction before giving up and heading for the pub where her theatre group performs unaware that she’s spotted and begun following him in smiling intrigue until he arrives at the pub, and her smile gives way to glazed shock as she realises he knows that much about her.

Fox’s excellence is not to be understated. She radiates unease even as she plays the fierce taskmaster for her class, her style of dress saying a little too much about her artsy pretensions, tearing strips off Betty and another classmate (Fraser Ayres) and earning praise for it because, as Betty says, it’s what they think they need. Inevitably, when she and Andy finally lay their cards on the table, the eruption of festering resentment is concussive and humiliating, Andy channeling his anger not into the idea of having an affair but in living with her affectations (“You know what hurts the most? You’ll never be an actress!”). Infusing this intricate emotional drama are small, piquant, but very telling details, like the subtle importance of Jay’s wearing a condom during his and Claire’s couplings or Andy’s protest at Jay’s assumption of his low libido because of his portliness (and the assumptions for Claire’s straying): “Why do you think I don’t enjoy a good fuck?”

Jay’s relationship with Victor is appositional: the two men are bound together in old friendship and resentment, both experiencing as they are the same problems but not sharing them. Unlike Jay, Victor’s going off the rails, and Jay has to come fetch him one night from a fight at squat full of feral youths Ian knows. Jay calms him down, and the two men lurch through the squat looking like bleary, bedraggled survivors of some self-consuming emotional war. Jay’s steely demeanor attracts one female denizen, Pam (Rebecca Palmer), and they spend a spell happily rutting, but Jay’s distracted, preoccupied manner as he moves to leave causes her to mock him as old fart. The indignity of aging is evoked without sentiment throughout the film, but it takes care to confirm that the characters’ yearnings are based in deeper things than mere anxiety about waning opportunities for fulfilling desire, where Jay, Claire, and Victor’s varieties of panic would be written off as gender-varied menopause, but perceiving them all as beset by gnawing disaffection, having succeeded in standard forms of coupling and social roles, yet finding themselves utterly alienated and unfulfilled within that success. Jay’s rage at Claire, however, seems to be sourced in the fact that where he couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of acting out such a role, even at the cost of annihilating his sense of self and responsibility.

Intimacy doesn’t tell a dramatically neat story, and perhaps, finally, it fails to live up to all its potential with an equivocating, but admittedly realistic, conclusion. And yet, its ferocity and honesty are often as compelling as anything that can be found in new millennium cinema, particularly in the final scenes in which Jay forlornly begs Claire to stay with him rather than return to Andy, revealing just how deep the roots their carnal union planted have now grown. It’s worth noting finally that Intimacy is an interesting cross-cultural oddity, a French film in most respects, but one made in London and infused with a very post-’70s London sensibility—a revealing and fortunate confluence of energies. l

Hadewijch (2009)

Director: Bruno Dumont

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Love has subjugated me:
To me this is no surprise,
For she is strong and I am weak.
She makes me
Unfree of myself,
Continually against my will.
She does with me what she wishes;
Nothing of myself remains to me;
Formerly I was rich,
Now I am poor: everything is lost in love.

The above poem, “Love has subjugated me,” was written in the 13th century by Hadewijch of Antwerp (or Brabant), who was associated with a movement called Minnemystiek (“love mysticism”). Hadewijch carried on in the tradition of the romantic troubadours and formed a potent influence on Dutch literature. She was almost certainly a beguine—a devout lay woman of noble birth who lived in poverty and ministered to the physical and spiritual needs of the community. There is evidence in her writings that she was somehow separated from her beguine companions, though the circumstances of her “exile” are unclear.

Bruno Dumont, who was born and raised in Bailleul, France, seems to have absorbed deep influences from the country just across the border from his home town—Belgium. Not only has he used Belgian Hadewijch’s name for his film and either his main character or the convent in which she is a novitiate (this is a little confused in the film), but he has also crafted a sly comedy that echoes what modern Belgian troubadour Jacques Brel incredulously thought when some said his song “Ne me quitte pas [Don’t Leave Me],” was the greatest love song of the 20th century—that it’s a song about a man who humiliates himself, not a love song at all!

Céline/Hadewijch (nonprofessional actress Julie Sokolowski), a painfully devout teenager, is in trouble with the sisters of her convent for disobeying the rules against self-injury by fasting and scourging herself. “There can be no question of you taking final vows now,” the Mother Superior (Brigitte Mayeux-Clerget) says as she sends Céline back into the world to find out who she really is. Céline walks through a wood outside the convent crying in agony and stops at a ratty-looking cage with pieces of cloth tied to the bars: a statue of a dead Jesus is reclining in the makeshift cave, peeling paint and bird shit marring his visage.

She returns to Paris and moves back into the ornate period mansion of her wealthy parents—her father (Luc-François Bouyssonie) is a minister of France. One morning, when her mother (Marie Castelain) asks her what she is going to do that day, Céline, in a laugh-inducing moment, answers, “Pray”—and then does, in all earnestness. Afterward, she goes to a café, and three Arab boys invite her over to their table. One of them, Yassine (Yassine Salime), invites her to listen to a concert on the banks of the Seine that evening, and she agrees. All the boys comment on how agreeable she is even though she doesn’t know any of them, an uncommon characteristic for a Parisian, they say. Yassine gets the idea that she’s “easy,” which we see at the completely laughable concert—the band’s frontman rocks out on an accordian (how French!)—when he tries to kiss and put his arm around Céline. She fends him off and later tells him she’s a virgin and will to stay that way the rest of her life because she is hopelessly in love with Jesus Christ.

It would be easy to get very serious about this movie because of how the plot draws Céline into the terrorist plans of Yassine’s brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) and seems to be making a parallel between the two varieties of religious fanaticism. Nassir’s is borne of hate at what the French have done to Algeria, but when he flies Céline to a bombed-out part of his country to meet his co-conspirators, she shrinks in horror.

Céline is, in fact, a very normal teenage girl whose raging hormones are doing to her what they do to all girls her age—turned her into an erotic creature who is barely awake to her own appetites or those she stirs in others, and lost in a mist of romanticism. Just take a look at a post-pubescent fan of Twilight, and you’ll get a pretty accurate picture of the girl Sokolowski is playing. All of Dumont’s close-ups of her, reminiscent of the penetrating gaze Dreyer turned on Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, reveal ardency. But in service of what? In a cryptic conversation Céline has with Nassir after she has run tearfully out of a lesson he is giving on the meaning of the invisible in Islamic teachings, she stops short of saying that what she really wants is for Christ to become corporeal so she can fuck him. Instead, she hugs Nassir close, an action she will repeat with Yassine, and eventually with an ex-con named David (David Dewaele) who works at the convent. It is in this final hug, which occurs after David has saved her from drowning herself, that we see that she is pretending she is dead and hugging Christ as one would a lover.

I know that Céline would like me to call what she is suffering from true religious love of one’s fellow man, but I am forced to conclude that the old nuns who threw her out of the convent were right. She has fixated on Christ in a way that preadolescents try on sexuality by becoming attracted to animated characters. Although on the surface she would seem to have much in common with Hadewijch of Antwerp, her love is of a much more earthly variety.

Luis Buñuel said that romantic obsession—though painful for the obsessed one—always looks foolish from the outside. His films deftly mix the agonies and horrors of such obsessions with dark-hued comedy to create a sublime catalog of sex farces. Indeed, Dumont seems to share something in common with the perverted old master. Like Sylvia Pinal’s character in Viridiana, Céline seeks a pious life divorced from men, but when pushed by her own good intentions into an encounter with violence, she awakens from her haze. l