PARIS OCTOBER 2007: briefly noted
Nadine Labaki: Caramel (2007)
Local flavor
Caramel (Arabic title: Sukr banaat) is a Lebanese film with its own vernacular charm. It's as messy and disorganized as the echt bourgeois interiors and the ordinary, chummy hairdressing establishment that is the hub of the action. This is a woman's picture, a syrupy but perhaps fortunately disorganized comedy of the street and beauty salon. It slips around among subplots with nothing really central, uses sloppy jump cuts, doesn't tell much of a story. . . but there's one sweet lesbian, one aging would-be TV actress (Jamal (Gisele Aouad)) who keeps showing up for disastrous tryouts. There's a fiancee about to be married who's afraid the groom will discover she's not a virgin. (That's Nisrine: Yasmine Al Masri).) There's an old maid seamstress courted by a dignified, well turned out elderly chap. There's a handsome cop outside (Youssef, Adel Karam) who all the ladies have their eye on. Maybe a dye job can change your life; and the cop comes in for a "treatment" that involves trimming his eyebrows (that's what they use the caramel for, as a depilatory) and shaving off his mustache.
Layale (Labaki herself) has just broken up with someone. Stylist colleagues Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) and Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) commiserate. Rima gives very special facial massages to a beautiful lady (Siham Fatmeh Safa); it's those that are arousing her lesbian tendencies--but her manner and dress already give it away. Rose (Sihame Haddad) is the seamstress, whose efforts to open up to the courtly Charles (Dimitri Staneofski) are constantly thwarted by her annoying nutty sister Lili (Aziza Semaan).
Labaki, whose feature debut this is, has a background of videos and TV commercials. Perhaps the holdover from that is the preponderance of beautiful women. There's nothing slick and commercial about her movie, though. Something about this suggests Francois Dupeyron's charming 2005 Monsieur Ibrahim, where also there is much focus on the quartier and people are drifting and longing for love (or losing their virginity). There's a good, natural feeling about Carmel. Funny thing: all this happens in Beirut but you would never guess that was a place torn by civil war every other decade and recently bombed by Israel. Life goes on; caramel's still sticky; and women bond, whether they're Christian or Muslim. But let's face it: as flavorful as it is, and valid as a slice of Lebanese culture, Caramel is weakly structured, characters are superficial and too broadly drawn, and Labaki may not be invited to Cannes again for a while. Still, this is a rare artifact, and the women are easy on the eye.
Seen in Paris October 2007
Mia Hansen-Love: Tout est pardonne' (2007)
Mia Hansen-Løve: Tout est pardonné (2007)
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Marie-Christine Friedrich and Victoire Rousseau in Tout est pardoné
Scenes from a failed marriage, failed life
This pan-European first feature focuses on people rather than dramatic events and concerns a Frenchman Victor (Paul Blain) married to an Austrian woman, Annette (Christine Friedrich). When we meet Victor and Annette they're living in Austria in close proximity to her large family, and they have a six-year-old daughter, Pamala (Victoire Rousseau). Take one look at Victor and the face says, lazy, hedonistic, dissolute, frustrated, angry--with a smiling, people-pleasing exterior. This is some great casting. Friedrich, on the other hand, simply seems one of those healthy, slightly stolid Nordic moms. Victor is a failed writer. His drug addiction is going to lead to heartbreak, and worse. Half the time she speaks to him in German and he answers in French. They aren't on quite the same wave length.
The couple moves to Paris, where Victor is no happier or more productive. Whatever Annette is doing, he's spending his days dabbling at writing and hanging out and his nights out getting high with Annette's knowing his whereabouts. His moods are not good and he's verbally and physically abusive. Eventually Annette wises up, gets angry herself, and goes off to Vienna for the holidays with Pamala. Victor seizes this opportunity to get further involved with his user girlfriend, Gisele (Olivia Ross), who teaches him to shoot up. Before long in this linear, but choppy narrative she's dead of an overdose. After a while he has a mental and physical breakdown (the time sequence always a bit vague, and winds up in a sanatorium.
An inter-title announces an interval of eleven years. Annette and Pamala are living in Paris again and part of a comfortable bourgeois French family; that is, the new husband is French. Victor is around somewhere too, rehabilitated, looking healthy enough, a bit better dressed, and working at some sort of job as a reader for a publishing house. Pamala of course is now a grownup girl (and played by Constance Rousseau, Victoire's older sister), and she wants to meet her father again after all these years. At first this goes well, with sincere feelings on both sides, and an exchange of letters that are read to us while Pamala is away on summer holiday. For Victor the meeting is hugely important but also a terrible reminder of all he might have done and might have been. It awakens bad memories, and the ultimate outcome is tragic.
The co-authors Hansen-Love and Clementine Schaeffer skip narrative collective tissue in telling their tale, nor do they necessarily include all the key moments to dramatize. Exactly how Victor gets into the sanatorium isn't dramatized, for instance, nor when he and Annette get divorced, and so on. There is a certain casual elegance in this, a simplicity, a naturalness with setting, a focus on conversation, but at times the progression is simply unclear. There is no effort made whatever to make Annette or Victor look any older in their scenes set over a decade later. Rousseau as the adult Pamala is not impressive. She seems just a conventional bourgeois girl reciting her lines. Annette's new French husband is a good posh bohemian Parisian. Annette has a comfortable job cataloging things at the Musee d'Orsay. All this is casually sketched in.
All is Forgiven is an elegant, artistic, if minimal production, with a spare, striking use of Scottish folk tunes and hand-held camera work. The acting by Blain and Friedrich is convincing. This first film is a sincere and creditable effort that promises quality work to come, but it does not overwhelm.
Part of the "Quinzaine des Realisateurs" (Directors' Fortnight) at Cannes 2007, shown at the semi-rep MK2 Hautefeuille in Paris, October 2007. The series also included Avant que j'oublie and Caramel as well as Control, Chop Shop, and Araki's Smiley Face.
Jacques Nolot: Avant que j'oublie (2007)
Jacques Nolot: Avant que j'oublie/Before I forget (2007)
Drier than dry
Another Cannes 2007 Directors' Fortnight film, Jacques Nolot's latest continues a distinctive body of work in which an apparently dry, ironic, openly gay French point of view predominates. Nolot himself, a rather handsome Mediterranean type in his late fifties, stars as Pierre, a blocked writer, former gigolo, HIV-positive for 24 years (rather unusual), reveals himself starkly in dark opening scenes where he tosses and turns, vomits, and exhibits a sagging chest and protruding belly. (He still has all his hair and a tan and looks stylish in his clothes.) He pees into the sink and orders up a call boy for fellatio. All this is surprisingly elegant and even witty as the film progresses from conversation to conversation, cigarette to cigarette in a diaristic look at the artist as a jaded gay man who sees one friend who's maintained him for years die, another inherit a fortune in art work, and arranges at the end with a muscular gigolo to act out his wildest fantasy.
Pierre sees a shrink three times a week--a younger gay man who encourages him to go with younger gay men, believing it will give him a boost. Nolot is frank about his own sexuality, which seems to be of a well-off bourgeois kind, but he doesn't show gay society as we know it in America. Where are the gay parties, gay bars, gay couples, or even just gay support groups? The solidarity available to urban gay men in the US seems missing here, where French gays have full intellectual self-acceptance but don't seem to envision the possibility of a positive lifestyle--of political action, for example, longtime companionship, adoption (or fun?). Depressed coping is the rule of the day. To what extent is Nolet/Pierre's aloneness self-imposed? There is also a fascination with money, who has it, how to get it, how to keep it. One sequence given climactic position is of the auction where the big art collection is sold off.
Pierre talks about considering suicide. Life is a string of cigarettes, or cups of coffee taken with a world-weary air. Pierre copes, but he does not thrive. Where are life's enthusiasms? All in the past, it seems. He reads aloud a love letter from the Eighties with slightly tearful wistfulness. Lost perhaps in the hedonism of a vanished youth, he can't get a positive grip on the present, but won't let it go either. This is a very urbane and European treatment of a life that's been reduced to mechanical coping. But isn't it a bit of a pose, since Nolet has the energy to produce a distinctive sequence of works--to act in 65 films and direct four of his own--the 1986 Manege, the 1998 Arriere-Pays, the 2002 La Chatte a' deux tetes,/Porn Theater, which had limited US distribution; and this, which, "low-budget" or no, did cost 400,000 euros to make?
Seen at MK2 Hautefeuille, Paris, October 2007. Also featured at the even more arthouse-focused MK2 Beaubourg, where handsome large posters of Nolot's last three films are on display.
Jia Zhang-Ke: Still Life (2007)
Jia Zhang-Ke: Still Life (2007)
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Offhand and astonishing
Though perhaps Stilil LIfe/Sanxia haoren (the Variety reviewer thought so) is indeed primarily for the Jia devotee or the festival-goer (it's already been awarded the Golden Lion at Venice) and certainly it's totally uncommercial, it's a lovely, hypnotic piece of work, another haunting picture of the vast creation, disruption, destruction that is modern China from that country's most exciting and original younger-generation filmmaker.
Three are layers of irony in the title, because in the incredibly turbulent, ceaselessly active events on screen in this world of life that is anything but "still," the most amazing images slip by without comment. A construction boss on a rampart one evening cell-phones a technician and says, "The VIP's are here. Why aren't the lights on? I'll count to three; then turn on. One, two, three. . . and a huge bridge and arch are suddenly illuminated behind him. One of the two estranged couples the film follows to tentative reunions is talking with a vast city behind them and in the background a big skyscraper suddenly, silently collapses. There is no comment. It just miraculously happens. In the final shot, amid the debris of the Three Gorges where the world's largest dam will eventually displace 1.4 million people, Han Sanming (non-actor Han Sanming's actual name), a mine worker who's come to find his wife and daughter, who left him sixteen years ago, stands looking out at the urban landscape and a trapeze artist is quietly walking across a tightrope between tall buildings. Again, no comment.
Han Sanming can't find his wife right away and her brother doesn't trust him at first, so he stays for months, working with the brother in demolition. A perky young fellow, who quotes John Wu star Chow Yun Fat and imitates Hong Kong gangster gestures, befriends Han Sanming and they put each other's numbers in their cell phones--a contemporary pledge of solidarity that has a sad sequel later. The young fellow, who could easily have been one of the lost, hopeful young men in Jia's 2002 Unknown Pleasures, is lost in a demolition accident and gets a sea burial like the one accorded to Johnny Depp's character in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.
Focused on the displacement of people for a vast industrial and engineering project, Still Life also contrasts classes--the humble working-class stiff who can make 50 yuan a day pulling down walls or 200 going down in a coal mine not knowing if he'll come back out, versus the handsome lady, Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) whose estranged building magnate husband she wants to divorce because she's found a younger man. She has options; Han Sanming is simply drifting and lonely. And in the background for both, though, is the enormous turbulence and activity in which we see both protagonists as tiny helpless figures, their own lives indeed "still life" by comparison.
There's another unexpected, astonishing sequence of a fat rock singer, naked from the waist up like most of the Three Gorges demolition workers Han Sanming encounters and drenched in sweat. He sings of nostalgia for his youth, a time when everybody was happy, and old men in the audience shed tears while garish go-go girls gyrate: where does this fit in? This is another symbol of social upheaval. But what is really happening? Won't Chinese society have to return to its heritage of Mao and the Eighties aftermath chronicled in another of Jia's unwieldy masterpieces, the 2000 Platform? Perhaps the titles Still Life ironically points to the way people are frozen in isolation (broken couples, estranged children) and unhappiness (or quiet desperation) in a China that all the rampant economic progress both masks and perpetuates.
After his colorful land pointed but somewhat leaden 2004 The World/Shijie Jia Zhang-Ke has shown again as in Platform and Unknown Pleasures that he can touch and astonish. The human events are dwarfed by capitalist Progress in the new China, but people (after all, they are a zillion of them there) are still very much in the foreground. Still Life is an impressive, organic-feeling movie that refers to Jia's earlier films but, extraordinarily, seems to bring together both post-war Italian neorealism and the desolate urban landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni.
Seen at the MI2 Hautefeuille in Paris, October 21, 2007.
Jorge Duran: Proibido proibir (2007)
Jorge Duran: Proibido proibir (2007)
Academic meets practical in the streets of Rio
Jorge Duran's story of three university students in Rio may sound a little like a TV hospital drama, but its location in an authentic-feeling Brazilian environment and deeply committed acting by Caio Blat, Maria Flor, and Alexandre Rodrigues, as the three principals, make all the difference. What makes this a terrific film is the way it handles important social issues while engaging us with personal, amorous stuff. The momentum is powerful and the way things are going is never obvious in this passionate but never preachy story.
The politically disillusioned medical student Carlos (soulful Che Guevara-lookalike Caio Blat) is lazy and smokes too much dope, but when he correctly identifies the illness of Rosalina (Edyr de Castro) as leukemia while interning at University Hospital, he begins to develop an intense bond with this lovely middle-aged lady from the favelas and eventually goes out to discover how her two young sons are doing. Not well, it seems. Cops allied with local gangsters have killed one of the sons for trying to make a living as an independent street vendor. The other one, Cacao, a witness to the murder, has gone into hiding.
Carlos' best pal and roommate is a black sociology undergraduate from Sao Paolo named Leon (Alexandre Rodrigues) whom Letitia (Maria Flor), an architecture student, is deeply in love with. Leon is a happy, hard-working guy, who as Letitia says may not be the best looking but has the most charm of anybody around, and is at the top of his class as well. When Carlos eventually meets Letitia (which doesn't happen right away), there's chemistry neither can long ignore. Carlos attempts to keep up Rosalina's morale, while Leon inevitably learns about her and then about Cacao. Since Leon has had the same thing happen to his own brother and comes from a world of poverty himself, he inevitably becomes deeply involved in the project to save Cacao.
Dialogue early on shows Carlos once was a student leader but has given up on demonstrations and social reform, but his cynicism fades in the face of physical suffering.
Proibido proibir (also title of a Caetano Veloso song --E' proibido proibir") or "(It's) forbidden to forbid," i.e., "everything is permitted, is Carlos' motto. It symbolizes his unwillingness to commit, or to be straight-laced in the interests of ideals. The film gets at a gut level sense of emotional values. Carlos and Leon truly love each other. But this undercuts our possible expectations of a menage a trois triangle of two boys and a girl. Leon and Carlos eventually both love Letitia, but their feeling for each other is a commitment to honesty and fairness. Carlos is deeply troubled by the idea of stealing away the girl of his best friend.
That becomes irrelevant but the three become more tightly entertwined than ever when Leon goes out and tries to get Cacao out of the favela and is attacked by the police himself and almost dies. Carlos saves him and the new focus is getting Leon to safety away from Rio. The confrontations during these later sequences are over Cacao, not the love triangle.
Proibido proibir vividly dramatizes the authenticity and vibrancy of Brazilian personalities along with the desperation of Brazilian poverty and the lingering death-squad tendencies of the cops in the favelas. A final scene symbolizes the attempt, passionate but perhaps doomed, of these three young people to rise above these overwhelming social issues. Wisely, Duran leaves things unresolved but doesn't settle for an easy pessimism either. Technically the film is smooth and seamless but unexceptional; Luis Abramo's cinematography however makes skillful and appropriate use of contrasting images of grand modern buildings and panoramic slums. There is also a vibrant soundtrack. Where the movie most excels, however, is in the supple writing, the vivid sense of place, and excellent acting, particularly by the appealing Blat. The Chilean-born, Brazilian resident Duran achieves some of the complexity of Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien in this engaging second film. It won prizes at five festivals focused on Latin American films in 2006 and is in limited release in France, October 2007. Great stuff--and it will be surprising not to see more of Cao Blat.
Seen in Paris at the MK2 Beaubourg October 25, 2007.
Idit Cebula: Deux vies plus une (2007)
Idit Cebula: Deux vies plus une/Two Lives Plus One (2007)
Emmanuelle throws up
The French actress Emmanuelle Devos, who has graced films by Jacques Audiard and Arnaud Desplechin, among others, is so soulful and cinematic it's fun just to watch her smoke a cigarette (which she does a lot); smile; roll her big almond eyes; or put her head back and shake her lovely mane. I confess I am her devotee and slave. This little film does not disappoint as an arena for her many charms. But otherwise I'm afraid it's very, very thin stuff. In this blunted feminist comedy Ms. Devos is Eliane Weiss, an elementary school teacher of Jewish ancestry who--desperately bored with her conventional life--buys a laptop, explores her options as a writer using an old journal, and finds a young publisher to whom her jottings appeal. This upsets her husband, the silver-haired Sylvain (Gerard Darmon), surprises their grown daughter, Bella (Maea Riviere), turns her little life upside down, and eventually charms her extended family. But the whole thing seems a little ringard (old fashioned) in its plaintive approach to women's lib--as well as cliched in its version of the Jewish family gemutlichkeit, with the invasive, demanding mom, the Yiddish phrases, the crowded dinners--the whole schmear.
Gerard Darmon may have the put-upon look appropriate for the stereortypical protective husband in this kind of story--the kind of guy who's lost the minute his wife develops the least independence. He may even look Jewish. Bu he has an edge about him that is wasted away from a gangster flick. He was one of the colorful nasties in Beinix's classic, Diva and even though that was 64 movies ago for the active Darmon, I still kept expecting him to pull out a long knife and look at it and somebody's neck with a lover's gaze. As the young publisher, Michel Joanez has a stammering eagerness that's just this side of grating. Devos is called upon to go overboard a few times too. When she learns for sure that her collage-book's to be published for sure, she falls on the floor, then rushes to the W.C. and throws up lengthily. To do her credit, she manages to make this amusing (it's heard, not seen). But when a few thumbnail reviews say Agnes Jaoui could do no better, one wonders what Agnes Jaoui they've been watching. Pu-lease! This has none of the dry wit of Family Resenblances, The Taste of Others, or Look at Me.
What I like about Deux vies plus une (Two Lives Plus One) is the way it feels as if nothing is happening. The screenwriter (Cebula, presumably) is so laid back she's almost asleep, and it's nice for this kind of comedy to feel so unforced in that way. Despite the cliches, including a hoary father visited at a cemetary, the casualness does achieve a certain naturalism.
One would not want to say Ms. Devos is wasted. She is never wasted, because she turns her moments to gold. In the end Deux vies plus une, which Le Monde's reviewer called "terribly superficial and conventional," is, one may venture to say, too thinly plotted to provide material for a Hollywood remake. And that's a plus.
For a more interesting lightweight recent comedy featuring Devos, see, if you can find it, Sophie Filliere's whimsical Gentille/Good Girl (2005), which has a more interesting cast that includes Bruno Todeschini, Lambert Wilson, Michel Londsdale, and Bulle Ogier. Or go to the good stuff, which would include Desplechin's Esther Kahn, My Sex Life, and Kings and Queen, Audiard's Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped, and Frederic Fonteyne's Gille's Wife.
Seen at the MK2 Odeon in Paris, October 26, 2007.
Alain Corneau: Le deuxieme soufle (2007)
Alain Corneau: Le deuxieme soufle (2007)
Out of wind
There's already a heavy legacy of polar noir, gangster films, in France. What's really left after Jean Gabin, Belmondo, Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville? Of course the addictive detective novelist Georges Simenon wrote dozens and dozens of compelling novels. Bela Tarr just adapted one of the more obscure ones. And why not have a stab at it?
This movie shows you why not. The only thing justifying a director as known as Alain Corneau (Tous les matins du monde, with Depardieu and son; Fear and Trembling, with Sylvie Testud) being attached to it is that he got name actors, headed by Daniel Auteuil (in a little mustache that makes him look bloated) and Monica Bellucci (who'd look better here if she were blowsier and tackier and more soulful, as Simone Signoret was). This is the degeneration of a genre and a tradition that reached perfection in the Fifties and Sixties in France. Arguably French crime movies have succeeded better of late by following new American models, in slum-revolt stuff like Jean-Francois Richet's 1997 Ma 6-T va crack-er ("My City Is Going To Crack") or updated caper knockoffs like Florent Emilio Siri's 2002 Nid de guepes (Nest of Vipers). Todd McCarthy's Variety review of Corneau's new film says, "it will be a hard sell Stateside, where its style and substance will appear both out of step and out of date." Correct. Seen in Paris with a sparse middle-aged audience, it looked like a strictly local artifact.
I don't believe I've seen the 1966 Jean-Pierre Melville version of this Jose Giovanni novel about an escaped lifer who stages that one last big job to raise the money to leave the country. But after seeing the bargain basement Brian De Palma nightclub shootout in ugly, garish color that opens Corneau's new film, I kept thinking of the wonderful bank robbery that begins Melville's 1972 Un flic/A Cop. This garish look may be meant to echo recent US graphic novel celluloid; if so that's just another miscalculation. Where Melville was sparse understatement, Corneau's sequence is clumsy excess. It's preceded by an escape sequence featuring Auteuil as main character Gu (Gustave Minda) that is so brief it fails to establish context. The nightclub scene that blasts the opening away is so noisy it also overwhelms most of the action that follows.
Gu in Melville's version was played by Lino Ventura. He himself seemed always stolid and second rate, but in a brave, determined sort of way that was noir personified; and he shines in recent memory through the recent revival of Melville's resistence study, Army of Shadows. Auteuil has none of that inner-ness; he's pure bluster. Auteuil's perpetually uncomfortable look works well enough in a comedy like The Valet and My Best Friend. Michael Haneke used it brilliantly and on a far higher level in his 2005 Cache'. The look seems out of place in a gangster condemned to life who initiates one last big job--a desperate man of desperate courage. In Melville's version, Paul Meurisse plays Gu's adversary, the foxy Commissaire Blot. We also remember the wonderfully mournful-countenanced Meurice from Army of Shadows. Corneau uses Michel Blanc, a little bullish man with an annoying cockiness. Where is suave disdain when we need it?
The big robbery of some trucks that involves killing people (and more garish reds) is fairly effective, but is the kind of sequence that, as McCarthy noted, has been done many times before by a Hollywood that has moved on to other things. Corneau's staging has none of the kinetic energy of the warehouse robbery in Siri's Nest of Vipers (and even that was just able mimicry of recent American movies).
This is a Sixties story that keeps introducing Forties and Fifties cars. The sense of period is as shaky as the awareness of what's up-to-date.
Some of the French critics seem to have been impressed by the flashy colors and flamboyant acting of Corneau's remake. They are impressed by a roster of other actors with good recent track records that includes Jacques Dutronc, Eric Cantona, Philippe Nahon, Gilbert Melki, Jean-Paul Bonnaire--lots of reliable pros here. But that doesn't make this a good movie, or make up for the lack of chemistry between Auteuil and Bellucci. At two hours and thirty-five minutes, this is an albatross as well as a travesty.
(Le deuxieme soufle=Second Wind.)
Seen in Paris October 26, 2007 at the UGC Odeon.
