The film’s titles are composed of fetching little cartoons of the characters we are about to meet. Then there is one of Dennis Potter, who had recently died, and the note that the film is a tribute to him. The film’s use of music is a clear homage to Potter, but In so many ways other ways On Connais La Chanson feels nothing like a Potter project. Resnais’ trick in the film is that the cast of his romantic comedy will suddenly start lip synching to popular French songs, not one of which I recognised. This intervention feels at times extremely effective and at other times laboured. Sometimes it’s expositional and at other times it offers a striking insight into a character’s mind. All in all the film feels like an intellectual exercise with little of the pathos Potter managed to wring from his use of popular music. Having said which, The Singing Detective and Brimstone and Treacle and Pennies from Heaven felt, in my memory at least, like punchier, more challenging pieces. On Connais La Chanson is beguilingly French, a soft-edged Parisian comedy of thwarted passion and small betrayals. All the characters are white, middle class, and potentially, one imagines if one was French, irritating. This is the same world that La Haine and early Gaspar Noe emerged from. It’s a world where mobile phones are just starting to be a thing, where property development (a theme also picked up in Paris, 13 Arrondissement) is starting to change the Parisian landscape. Resnais touches on these themes, but they are couched within a doggedly bourgeois narrative, which gives the film a slightly clumsy apolitical air. For all its formal playfulness, we are a long way from Marienbad and Hiroshima.
No comments:
Post a Comment