Paris movie report (oct. 2011)

[Chris Knipp]

BRUNO DUMONT: HORS SATAN (2011)


ALEXANDRA LEMATRE AND DAVID DEWAELE IN OUTSIDE SATAN


Poverty poetry

Hors Satan (Outside Satan) is vintage Bruno Dumont, elemental, brutal, poetic, nearly dialogue-free. Its main character (played by David Dewaele, also seen in Hadewijch) known only as "le Gars," "the Guy," is one of Dumont's odd rural types, small and lean, with a faroff look, his face pinched and shopworn. But also many other things. The film is all about faces. Almost all the action takes place outside, and the rough, unspectacular rolling landscape -- the other ever-present main character -- provides beautiful colors and lights that, shining on the face of "le gars," make it at times seem transcendent and beautiful. He is, after all, "outside Satan," beyond good and evil, because he can both murder and cure, crush and bring back from the dead, and humbly, unspectacularly, mysteriously, is ready to disappear, like Caine in Kung Fu, wandering the earth.

In a sense Hors Satan isn't "about" its action or its characters at all. It's pure cinema, creating a world out of nothing, like Lisandro Alonso in Los Muertos, with a Carl Dreyer-esque breath of transcendence such as Carlos Reygadas introduces into the Mexican Menninites in Silent Light. But of course there is not the suspenseful narrative of Los Muertos or the rich social world of Silent Light. This could only be Dumont, and those who like his work will love it and those who dislike it will hate it. This is abstract art, ugly-beautiful, and it will hypnotize you if you don't ask it too many rational questions; if you want something linear, progressive, and parsable, you'll squirm in your seat. If you let it flow over you, it sings in that strange way Dumont's best films do. With reserve but some fairness, Variety's critic Rob Nelson, calls the film "Maddening, pretentious, hypnotic and transcendent in roughly equal measure." More of a non-responder is the reviewer for Hollywood Reporter, whose critique is summed up thus: "Inarticulate characters, long blank stares, forced camera angles and allegorical nonsense make up this pretentious study in quasi-religious ennui." But then, one man's ennui is another man's trancelike state. The inarticulate characters evoke great silent film. The long blank stares allow the camera to explore the complexity of the faces. The "focrced camera angles" balance intimacy with detachment. The pretentious study allows simplicity to become reverberant richness.

Le Gars is a loner with a rifle who poaches and builds fires. He's joined by the sad, punkish girl known only as "Elle," "She" (Alexandra Lematre), who forms a bond with him, brings him food, prays with him, and makes a kind of platonic love by simply resting her head briefly on his shoulder, a curiously touching and meaningful gesture in this minimal and heightened world. Le Gars has powers that include immunity from detection when he commits acts that in ordinary terms are criminal. He kills Elle's abusive father, and a young man who has bothered her. What he does with an earthy female backpacker (Aurore Broutin) is harder to interpret. He brings Elle back to life. And then, like Caine, he hoists a makeshift sack on his back and wanders off.

But somehow that's not what Hors Satan is about at all. To begin with, these acts, these deaths, are understated, and seem like only poaching or taking potshots or carrying a heavy burden across a field. What happens on the screen is more about the sound of the wind; the rain; brush fire across the horizon recalling a photo by Bernard Faucon (but without the ragged boys); rich, beautiful grasses, dunes, and marshes; and the narrow river. (This is the Côte d'Opale region of France bordering on Belgium.) The wide aspect ratio contributes to this sense of a living, ever-present landscape that envelops the characters. This is why the camera often drops back to a long shot, a device Dumont has used often, in his war picture -- Flandres, for instance. Dumont works with poverty: poverty of landscape, of personality, of speech and emotion. This goes back to L'humanité (1999), with its rape, murder, police investigation, and unsolved mysteries. I remember walking out of the theater debating the film with a stranger, and that's what you could do with Hors Satan. That's what Dumont wants you to do, I suspect. If his films were more linear and coherent, if they didn't have elements that shock and confuse, they wouldn't awaken those raw feelings in viewers and start them thinking and arguing.

Meanwhile, thanks to smooth, textbook editing by Dumont and Basile Belkhiri, with blackouts separating main sequences; fine work by cinematographer Yves Cape; and sound design by Emmanuel Croset so precise even the footsteps on grass have a distinctive echo, Hors Satan looks and sounds perhaps better than any previous Bruno Dumont film, achieving beauties and religious overtones without the overt references resorted to in Hadewijch.

Hors Satan debuted at Cannes and has been in other international festivals. It opened in Paris October 19, 2011, to excellent reviews. Cahier du Cinéma's critic thought it "perhaps.... in the simplicity of the fable and the impressive economy of the mise en scène, his most direct and most beautiful film."

Screened for this review October 25, 2011 at MK2 Danton cinema in Paris, where the respectful and substantial matinee audience suggested increasing acceptance of Dumont by the French filmgoing public. Outside Satan opened in NYC 18 Jan. 2013 to generally favorable reviews (Metacritic: 63).

[Chris Knipp]

NADINE LABAKI: WHERE DO WE GO NOW??


VILLAGE LADIES EXAMINE RUSSIAN VISITORS IN WHERE DO WE GO NOW?

Ladies take over

Hallaa lawein / Et maintenant, on va où?, or Where Do We Go Now? in English, is Lebanese director Labaki's more ambitious but less successful second film. While in her somewhat desheveled but appealing debut Caramel she stuck to the telenovella charms of people circulating around a Beirut hairdressing establishment, she now uses an Italian neorealist style with dashes of musical comedy to address a vaguely Lysistrata-like fable about her war-torn country's Muslim-Christian conflicts. Too many characters, a patchy script with undeveloped elements, and very uneven tone mar this sincerre and tumultuously colorful effort. The main topic: the Christian and Muslim women of a remote village (they can barely get TV reception) band together after the accidental killing of a teenage boy using any possibe means to stop their religously divided menfolk from taking up arms again. Trouble: the funny and the tragic don't mesh very well. Result: one may watch the spectacle sometimes puzzled, sometimes amused, but not moved or quite convinced. However this film, introduced in the Cannes Festival's Un Certain Regard category, offers enough drama and lively visuals to entertain Anglo as well as French audiences.

Labaki seems engaged with a series of set pieces that don't fit together very well and sometimes are oddly conceived from the start. The opening, a hillside parade of black-cressed Muslim and Christian women who dance their way across the landsape, declares that the preceedings are not meant to be realistic. Then a busy scene introuding the town's generally comical or boorish men sets another tone, perhaps drawn from Egyptian movies. Later, a traveling group of far from classical female Russian dancers comes to town, stuck when their bus breaks down. For a while they seem like they might be the film's motor or subject, but they just sort of blend in, underused. Later still comes the boy's death while on a trip with a friend. His corplse falls into his grieving mother's arms. After much weeping and wailing, the women band together to hide the arms, weave hashinsh into a bake-off of local delicacies, and try various other ruses to keep the men from killing each other again. The cemetary is already full of mostly good-looking young males sacrificed to the country's endless sectarianism. This final sequence is the occasion for several big set pieces, but when the ladies, who've deliberately reversed Muslim and Christian insignias, the Muslims donning crosses and the Christians headscarves, stop in the cemetary with the boy's corpse and say, Where Do We Go Now?, it makes for a somewhat baffling, abrupt finale. There's a lot of vivid local color here, but when one thinks of something like Villeneuve's Incendies this just seems a travesty on Lebanon's tragic history offering no solution to its deep problems. On the other hand, the sincerity and ambition of the effort deserve credit, and the film is full of women's empowerment symbolism that will appeal to female audiences of various cultures.

Et maintenant on va ou? Opened Sepotember 14, 2011 and was showing a month later at a dozen Paris cinemas and was watched for this review on October 26, 2011 at MK2 Hautefeuille. According to Allociné it received good if limited reviews (3.7 from 19 critics), but CahierS du Cinéma said the film's only merit was replying frankly to its title's question, "Right into a wall." Les Inrockuptibles kindly said it was "a feel-good movie in the best and least cynical sense of the term."

[Chris Knipp]

PIERRE SCHÖLLER: THE MINISTER (2011)


MICHEL BLANC, OLIVIER GOURMET IN POSTER FOR L'EXERCISE DE L'ÉTÂT

The loneliness of the long distance transport minister

With L'Exercice de l'Étât/The Minister, Pierre Schöller (of the very different Versailles) does an intense film about the pressures of being a French government minister in the film starring the Dardennes' regular Olivier Gourmet and produced by the Dardennes, costarring Michel Blanc, Zabou Breitman, and Laurent Stocker. This looks at the social issues from the top where the previous film looked at them from the bottom. The film takes Bertrand Saint-Jean (Gourmet) through the ringer of several kinds of shocking accidents and pressures from every direction as he strives as a new Transport Minister to maintain his idealism. This is a wonderfully intense film, which may evoke for the French things like the recent Sarkozy story "The Conquest" or for Americans The West Wing, but it takes several odd turns. Its failure to lead to a satisfying payoff is no doubt quite intenntional.

Variety's French film specialist Peter Dubruge thinks "Subtitles alone won't be enough to translate The Minister for export," and indeed like The Conquest its top-levil politics are particularly Gallic. Though it's true that the French audience will read more allusions to their own specific politics here, political junkies of any nationalities will feel the juice. Moreover Michel Blanc is impeccable as ever and Goumet shines as much in a white collar role as he does for morally challenged working class men for the Dardennes. Gourmet is excellent here, conveying a sense of both power and vulnerability.

Bertrand wakes from a Helmut Newton dream of a naked girl climbing into the mouth of a live crocodile -- a not-so-subtle metaphor for his own state, and gets a call summoning him to a gruesome bus accident out in the country in which parents and children have died en masse. When he gets there, though, he's in constant touch with Gilles (Blanc), his assistant, and Pauline (Breitman), his PR person is on hand: what counts are the sound bites, more than the sympathy. Bertrand knows that and must live with it, but he doesn't exactly like it.

Bertrand is from nowhere. Most the pols are ancestral, as it were (like Gilles), and what the PM in particular wants from Bertrand is to carry out a process Bertrand himself opposes on deep principle, privatization of the railway system. It's a bit unilkely in France with its strong surviving social network, but this recurrent push to privatize stands for the compromises Bertrand must battle 24/7.

The film is best at showing Bertrand's personal struggle, but weak at working out a real drama of warring personalities and exciting developments in the manner of The West Wing's creator, Aaron Sorkin, or some of the British dramas of political conflict (Stephen Frears, Peter Morgan, et al.). We get the point that Bertrand sees his wife only for a caress or a quick roll in the hay and has no real company but the overly correct Gilles and the inarticulate unemployed person who's hired, with dubious practical judgment but perhaps a good eye for publicity, to be Bertrand's driver. A non-actor, Sylvain Deblé, was cast for the driver role and he adds an authentic flavor.

The Minister is full of passion for its subject even if it can't make fully satisfying drama out of it. The emphasis is not on machinations or heroics but the sheer struggle of maintaining one's dignity and one's functionality under incredible pressures. Amid all the talky sequences, there are several very striking set pieces that leave you with strong visual memories. A second accident sequence is well filmed, again emphasizing the protagonist's near-total isolation; but it seems located as a bit of a faux-climax. Julien Hirsch's photography is intense, if relying a bit much on closeups. Schöller's self-composed abstract concrete music backgrounds, sparsely used, add an original kind of harsh alienation effect.

The film debuted in the Un Certain Regard series at Cannes and won the Fipresci Prize there. It opened in Paris theaters October 26, 2011. When screened for this review during a matinee the UGC Danton at St. Germain all seats were filled. With a somewhat small critical aggregation (17 reviews) the result on Allociné was universal acclaim (4.2, pretty much spanning the range of media audiences).

[Chris Knipp]

VINCENT PARANAUD, MARIANE SATRAPI: CHICKEN WITH PLUMS (2011)


GOLSHIFTEH FARAHANI AND MATTHIEU AMALRIC IN CHICKEN WITH PLUMS


Sweet nostalgic gloom

Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, whose animated film of the autobiographical graphic novel about a girl growing up in a leftist family in Iran was such a success, are back now with a different treatment. This time another graphic novel, Poulet aux prunes/Chicken with Plums, has been storyboarded and turned into a film with live people. The stellar cast includes Matthieu Amalric and Maria de Madeiros in lead roles, with Edouard Baer, Isabella Rossellini, Chiara Mastroianni and others as backup, including the popular Djamel Debbouze in a couple of colorful turns. Beautiful Iranian star Golshifteh Farahani plays the almost wordless part of the lost one true love of the fine violinist Nasser Ali (Matthieu), the protagonist of this film set in a nostalgic 20's-50's Iran with dialogue entirely in French. The Paranoud-Satrapi team has scored again: this is a perfect little tale whose narrative dreamily slips back and forth between past and present, narrated by the Angel of Death (Baer) after This is a cheerful, pretty tale of utter disappointment and suicide. Well, that's how it seems. The versatile Amalric looks soulfully sad throughout as he goes through his disappointments and moments of hope. Don't think the tale is meant to be taken quite seriously. It's more than anything a wistful playing about with romantic dreams.

The story begins with the ultimate cause of Nasser Ali's death wish. His long suffering wife Faranguisse (de Medeiros), who has loved him from chlidhood but whom he has never loved, becomes fed up with his indifferance as a father to their two small children and smashes his violin. He goes looking for a replacement with unsuccessful results, then settles on suicide as the best solution, though various methods, playfully visualized, all seem unsuitable. Running into a sad but lovely older woman who claims not to recoognize him (Golshifteh Farahani) is what brings on the big depression. He takes to his bed and memories sweep over him. Flashbacks show how in his younger days he was told by his violin master that his playing had great technique but no soul. Then he falls in love with a clock seller's daughter (Farahani, young and charming) -- and she with him. But her father refuses to allow the marriage. This makes Nasser Ali so sad, his playing becomes soulful, is certified by his music guru, and he travels the world giving concerts.

The nostalgic picture of the western-leaning middle class of Fifties Teheran was lovingly recreated in idealized form at Berlin's Babelsberg studios. No realistic Savak prisons or other recollections of the earlier autobiographical tale: the pain is all self-inflicted and dreamy. Some details, such as a flashforward to son Cyrus' comical future life in America (with a daughter so fat she doesnn't know she's pregnant), seem choppy, a quality that follows from the blending together into a 93-minute continuous film of a lot of separately constructed graphic novel episodes. This was true of Persepolis too, but the autographical narratige held them together a bit better. This film totally lacks the punch and intellectual bite of the earlier one.

Nonetheless fans of Franco-Iranian nostalgia and droopy romanticism will adore this classic narrative. Others may find the crepuscular world merely dreary and uninvolving. As a Guardian writer suggested, the "chicken with plums" may "prove too honeyed for some." But no one can deny the craft here, which includes the color, lighting, editing, and Satrapi's direction of her pro cast, not to overlook Enna Balland as young daughter Lili and MAtthis Bour as the uncooperative tyke Cyus, who wants to become a pastry-maker.

The film debuted at Venice and continued at Toronto, Zuich, Hamburg, Sao Paolo, Pusan and Tokyo. It was released in Paris cinemas October 26, 2011. Good reviews (3.5 out of 19 sampled), but some critics felt (as I frankly do) that the sadness comes too easy and with too little pain here.

[Chris Knipp]

PHILIPPE GARREL: UN ETE BRULANT (2011)


MONICA BELLUCCI AND LOUIS GARREL IN UN ETE BRULANT

Fuzzy Roman moodiness

The presence of many Garrel themes and gestures make this film of interest to devotees of the French auteur. His heyday was in the Sixties and Seventies, but he made a memorable and atmosphereic film with his son Louis in the three-hour black-and-white 2005 Regular Lovers. That made Louis emblematic of 1968, a role designated to him first by Bernardo Bertolucci in his 2003 The Dreamers. After the favorable reception of that flm, the senior Garrel used his son once more as a suicidal poetic type in the attratively photographed but unmemorable black and white film The Frontier of Dawn (2008). This new digital color film is a meandering, badly motivated and clumsily photographed effort. The director is clearly just treading water. A shame for both father and son (and granddad Maurice, who was briefly in Regular Lovers, and has a scene here again). Céline Sallette, who was in the 2005 film, is appealing again here as Élisabeth, the girfriend of best friend Paul, played by TV actor Jérôme Robart. Again the striking-looking Louis, often used by Christophe Honoré, arguably with more success, is cast by his father as a suicidal artistic type, this time a painter.

But the big question is, what are all these French men doing around Monica Bellucci in Rome? And what is Bellucci, who appears overweight and sullen, doing in this picture? If her name was meant to add cachet, the idea backfired.

Other reviewers have pointed out that although the film begins with the car-accident suicide of Frederic (Louis Garrel) -- or was it only an attempted suicide?, there is nothing besides his mopiness and weepiness with his Italian wife (yes, they are supposed to be married, and he's supposed to be a painter, and the paintings are bad enough that the actor might have painted them himlself) to explain why he would want to kill himself. Just general Weltschmerz, perhaps? or a growing awareness that he's not a good painter and his wife isn't faithful? She has a new Regular Lover of her own, someone picked up on the set of the two apparently mediocre films we see little moments of. Cinecittà is used as the set.

There are pointless and inexplicable comings and goings, and there is a scare when
Élisabeth and Angèle (Bellucci) become hysterical over an unexpected rodent. All these things doubtless have a significance for Garrel, and would be understood by adepts of his work. As a film they are inexplicable and uninvolving and add nothing appreciable to what can be found in Garrel senior's other films.

The tech elements are sloppy. The occasional piano music is too loud and drowns out the dialogue at one point. There are moments when half the screen is out of focus and sometimes the color is hideous. There are a few, but too few, moments of visual beauty, when the people and the locations look great. Sometimes Garrel seems to be transparently feeding off his previous successes, with imperfect success. There is even a dance sequence exactly like the long poetic one in Regular Lovers -- same grouping, movements, gestures. Only then it worked and here it doesn't.

Un été brûlant/A Burning Summer debuted September 2, 2011 at the Venice festival, and opened in Paris September 28 to fair reviews (Allociné 3.2 from 16 press reviews), with the hip Inrockupibles and Cahiers du Cinéma rating highest. The Inrockuptibles' claim that Bellucci is "very moving" and there is "a refined use of color" suggests that critic was on another planet.

[Chris Knipp]

This begins a run at the excellent San Francisco Film Society Cinema July 20, 2012.

A Burning Hot Summer/Un été brulant: SFFS page.

he stormy relationship between a painter and an Italian film actress is seen through the eyes of another young couple in Philippe Garrel’s latest exploration of twisted emotional ties. An aspiring actor and self-professed revolutionary, Paul is working as an extra when he falls in love with another bit player in the film, the emotionally fragile Elisabeth. Around the same time, Paul meets the painter Frédéric (Louis Garrel) through a mutual friend, and Frédéric soon invites Paul and Elisabeth to Rome to stay with him and his Italian wife Angèle (Monica Bellucci). In the heat of a Roman summer, Paul and Elisabeth face the delicate start to their new love while Frédéric and Angèle’s begins to implode. Shooting in full color after several productions in black and white, Garrel allows the actors to give full range to the troubled passions that rule and rile their characters. The film was reportedly inspired both by the death of a friend of Garrel’s and by Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt. Written by Philippe Garrel, Marc Cholodenko, Caroline Deruas-Garrel, Photographed by Willy Kurant. Music by John Cale. With Louis Garrel, Monica Bellucci, Jèrôme Robart, Cèline Sallette. In French with subtitles. 95 mins. Distributed by IFC Films.--SFFS blurb.

Even though I didn't feel this film was a success, nor did my friend whom I saw it with, I would never deny the infinite coolness of both Garrels, père & fils.

SF Film Society Cinema 1746 Post Street (Webster/Buchanan). San Francisco.

[oscar jubis]

A Very Hot Summer

My original reaction to your review was rather violent, to be honest. How could you dislike it so? That was Friday night after the first showing at the Cosford. I've realized since then that most people find it too slow or sad or indulgent. Only a minority of people I know liked it. The film does not break new ground and Louis G. can play this part in his sleep. And yet, I sense the presence of an author who is very sensitive to the lives of the characters he depicts and genuinely likes them despite, or perhaps because of, their feebleness and sometimes pathetic vulnerability. Also, I happen to like the effect of letting scenes linger a second or two longer than they should, which strikes me as typical of Garrel if memory serves. Having said that, I recognize his films are enjoyed by the few and that there is something lacking in Garrel that keeps one from truly rallying behind them. I felt that way even before reading Rosenbaum's notes on Garrel which I excerpt below:

"Considering how much admiration I have for the films of Philippe Garrel, it's hard to avoid some feelings of guilt and consternation for not liking them more – especially when I consider how much they mean to others whose tastes I admire. Why do I find myself preferring the work of his best-known disciple, Leos Carax?
This is a problem I've been wrestling with for a quarter of a century. For the past decade, I've been trying to theorize my disaffection by ascribing the passion of my younger friends for this melancholy star of the French underground to a generational taste I can't share." (Rosenbaum on Garrel)

[Chris Knipp]

You may be saying that if even Rosenbaum doesn't "get" Philippe Garrel -- or "admires" him but has never "liked" him enough -- we humbler mortals may be forgiven, but I don't fit in that category. I haven't been trying for 25 (now maybe over 30) years like Rosenbaum, by his admission, to more fully appreciate Garrel. I don't "admire" Garrel, or know exactly what that would mean. But I love those of his films that I find successful. I didn't completely feel that way about his REGULAR LOVERS (my introduction to his work) when I first saw it in the 2005 NYFF as you can see by my reserved original description but it grew on me, I soon saw it again, and it became a special favorite of mine. I amended my original comment on it when I saw it again at Cinema Village in 2007. I've seen it since on DVD. I also loved J'ENTENDS PLUS LA GUITARE when I saw it at Film Comment Selects in 2009. So I don't condemn A BURNING HOT SUMMER as a failure out of a chronic lack of sympathy for Philippe Garrel. I suppose your defense of A BURNING HOT SUMMER, concerning "an author" who cares about even his most irresponsible characters, is a recognition that he is an "auteur" whose work by definition is always relevant to his oeuvre, which is true, but doesn't make this recent film one of his successes. I disagree with your assertion that Louis can do this kind of role "in his sleep," because I think he is miscast and the setting and the wife are wrong, and one can't play the wrong role in one's sleep. Moreover I think it's a (common) fallacy to assume Louis plays suicidal poetic types so often he can play them in his sleep. Honoré has given him constant opportunities to show his giddy, silly side, characters who aren't poetic or suicidal at all, or when they are, get over it, and he's played in more films for Honoré than for his father and quite a wide variety of roles and situations. Apart from that, he may be sleepwalking in A BURNING HOT SUMMER but this is not a role he can play convincingly, as written. I'm not sure anyone can. Besides that there are other serous flaws. Things go wrong with this production, particularly with the cinematography and the improperly balanced color in some sequences. Both Garrels are out of their element in the Italy sequences. None of the cast members is acting at anywhere near his (or her) best. And you know things are not going right when the cinematographer doesn't even make Garrel or Bellucci look good.

That said, I may have judged the film too harshly and might take another look at it some time. Certainly Philippe Garrel does know his bad romances.

I've read Rosenbaum's SIGHT AND SOUND article that you quote from more carefully, but naturally I personally don't feel obliged to feel strong reservations about either Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS or Garrel's REGULAR LOVERS as Rosenbaum apparently does because their versions of Paris in 1968 fail to correspond to his personal experiences of Paris at around that time (slightly after the main barricades events in both films). THE DREAMERS to me is a beautiful, posh, more square version of roughly (not exactly) the same world and time referenced in REGULAR LOVERS, and I don't condemn either film for inauthenticity. In fact both evoke a world none of us has known, one that is cinematic and magical and highly seductive. In the case of REGULAR LOVERS the experience is more unique and has better atmosphere than Bertolucci's, and works on a larger social palette than Bertolucci's claustrophobic ménage a' trois. Rosenbaum's comments about the drugs used in Garrel's film are speculative and even a bit of a red herring. It's obvious that in the second half of REGULAR LOVERS the friends have lost their verve and energy, and the drugs are more a symptom than a cause. This situation may be not so much the despair or "voluptuous embrace" of "political defeat" as just not knowing where to go next, something that happened to a lot of non-drug useers after '68. The slowdown prepares the way for Clotilde Hesme's character to take the opportunity to drop Francois (Louis Garrel) and move to New York.