emilia perez (w&d audiard, w. thomas bidegain, léa mysius, nicolas livecchi)

Audiard’s film has become a bizarre phenomenon. Feted by awards, condemned by word of mouth. At once a blow for non-gringo, anti-imperialist impulses, and a betrayal of Mexico, trans people and the countless victims of Mexico’s dirty war. A radical reinterpretation of how to tell a political story which is mundane and over-simplistic.

There are many elements of the film which are either laughable or questionable. Audiard laces his story with songs, some of which feel cloying and witlessly sentimental. The whole premise of a reformed narco financing a charity to locate the dead victims of the narco wars feels wrong, before we even get to the issue of the arbitrary sex change. The closing shoot-out is generic and unimaginative. Audiard apparently didn’t do much if any filming in Mexico itself and there is an undeniable whiff of the interloper rolling into town and appropriating other people’s tragedies for his own benefit.

And yet, having said all of this, in comparison to a film like Villeneuve’s Sicario, it does feel as though the director is seeking to do more than just cash in on a suitably cinematographic conflict as a backdrop for his film. It’s a far cry from Escalante’s Heli, but Audiard at times feels as though he is seeking a more poetic or lyrical discourse on the issues of power and violence. Regular narrative structures struggle to do any kind of justice to this topic and run the risk, as was the case of Sicario, of resorting to caricature. Audiard seems to have succeeded in offending, whilst intending to avoid these caricatures. Something he formerly succeeded in doing in The Beat that my Heart Skipped, for example.

Working in the business, one often comes across people suggesting ideas that at first glance seem preposterous, but, within the strange economy of cinema aesthetics, seem to work (Carax, Lynch, to name just two.) Going out on a limb sometimes pays off. One can imagine Audiard positing ‘Sex Change Narco,  the musical’, and the execs looking at him blankly. Thinking either he’s a genius or an idiot. When maybe the truth is a bit of both. It’s a position that has both paid off spectacularly and backfired, spectacularly. 

paris 13th arrondissement (les olympiades) (w&d audiard, w. nicolas livecchi, léa mysius, céline sciamma)

It’s been a while since I’ve been fortunate enough to watch an Audiard movie. Paris 13th, (which has a much better title in French), showcases all his verve and style with the expected aplomb as it tells its multi-racial story of what we take to be the new France, or at least the new Paris. Three characters come together in a chirpy love triangle, with both Émilie and Nora sleeping with the charismatic but feckless Camille. The action is resolutely set in the 13th Arrondissement. I tried to think where might be an equivalent in London, and couldn’t come up with one, as even the margins in London are becoming gentrified. A decade ago it might have been Peckham, where I am now, but these days you can’t buy a house for less than half a million in Peckham, so I have no idea. It’s almost as though the city has eaten the poorer suburbs, and one wonders if this might not also be the case in Paris. Audiard studiously avoids any shots with the Eiffel Tower or any other prominent landmark in Paris 13, keen to assert that this is a film about Paris really lives, rather than how it is mythologised. Perhaps more surprisingly, there’s no overt racism either. The second generation immigrants are fully assimilated Parisians now, the multi-cultural society flourishes in a way that the last great Paris banlieu film, La Haine, suggested might never happen. La Haine hangs heavy over Paris 13, which is filmed in an assertive black and white. La Haine in turn smouldered in the wake of the films of the nouveau vague, Paris Nous Appartient, A Bout de Souffle, etcetera. It’s as though all these films have set out to own Paris, to marry their vision of that cultural beast, French cinema, with its most celebrated icon, the city of Paris itself. Audiard presents an ultimately optimistic view of a diverse, sexually liberated society which is still underpinned by the conservative notion of romantic love. Perhaps this is why there remains something slightly unconvincing about the movie. The sex is too well filmed, the characters are too pretty, the surface never feels as though it’s really ruffled. There are too many loose threads and convenient solutions in the script. (Camille just happens to find himself running an estate agents, and when one thinks about the realities of estate agents in this era of housing inflation, the set-up feels scarcely credible.) The notional naturalism, fundamental to a narrative that is so ostentatiously set in a particular barrio, doesn’t quite hold up. (The philosophical sex worker is another unconvincing trope.) Ultimately the film feels too feelgood, too much of an excuse to put pretty bodies through the motions, before they will become middle aged and flaccid and disillusioned. The optimism of Paris 13 might charm, but as a depiction of a capital city in Europe in the 2020s, it feels more Rohmer than Godard, and given the stakes that Audiard flirts with (race, sex, gender, immigration) it doesn’t entirely convince.

a prophet (d audiard, w audiard & thomas bidegain)

The French like a good crime movie. Godard played around with the genre. Truffaut admired it. Les flics y les crims. Recently there was the Mesrine double bill. So Audiard's latest slips into a well-worn tradition, and it does so with predictable style and verve.

The classic template for a successful movie is the coming of age tale. Take a young man (or less often woman) and follow them as they get to grips with their society and their psyche all at the same time. Tahar Raham's portrayal of Malik El Djebena, a French/ Arab/ Corsican petty criminal who gets six years for assaulting a policeman, is an exemplary portrayal of this coming of age. After an opening of great tension, Audiard lets the movie sprawl as Malik gradually takes control of the prison, learning from the Corsican mafioso Luciani, as he moves into organised crime, setting up his own firm and becoming a man in the process. Whilst the film has a host of influences, the movie it most closely seems to echo is Coppola's Godfather 2, with Raham taking on the Pacino role, only that his humanity is augmented by his ascension, whereas Pacino's was all but nullified.

It's a long movie, I would suggest a great afternoon movie. The sequence wherein Malik kills someone and hence becomes absorbed into the Corsican family, a sequence which occurs towards the film's beginning, is gripping, and Audiard captures Malik's huis clos with terrifying exactitude: kill or be killed. However, the tension thereafter ebbs, as it charts Malik's gradual rise through the ranks. It feels as though the director is seeking to create a more rounded, less pragmatic vision of his character's evolution, showing for example, how the act of going on a plane trip is all part of his evolution, the opening up of his world. Raham's portrayal captures the character's growing awareness of his own intelligence, and possibilities, as well as his sense of destiny. He is only referred to once as a prophet, and whilst the film plays on the notion that he can see flashes of the future, this is incidental to the plot. However, the closing sequence suggests that even more than for himself, this sense of destiny has a significance for the Muslim community he chooses to embrace, for reasons which are pragmatic rather than spiritual.

A Prophet is one of those big films whose sum is perhaps greater than its parts. Audiard seems restrained in his use of cinematic or narrative trickery, in spite of the doffing of the hat with the use of Reyeb's ghost. Most of all he seems to have set out to create a grand, overarching piece of cinema, a definitive contribution to the canon, a film that can be revisited time after time. He restricts his capacity for the extraordinary, letting the sheer weight of story, and the power of Malik's depiction do the work. Next time I see it, a few years down the line, I shall watch of a dismal afternoon, the kind of day you want to sit in a cinema, and watch a tale of how intelligence can still be used to shape the world, no matter how ruthless the world purports to be.

see how they fall (w&d audiard, w. le henry)

Audiard seems like something of a johnny-come-lately, with the success of The Beat that my Heart Skipped putting him on the map, a success cemented by his yet-to-be-released-in-the-UK, A Prophet. Of course there's rarely such a thing in cinema, no-one hands you a million squid and says, get on with it, unless you're already in the know. True to form, Audiard has been around the block a few times. However, his earlier films, whilst possessing a remarkable cinematic lucidity, (and ludicity, if such a word exists), were never overly feted, and it's difficult to connect the johnny-come-lately with the struggling auteur. So much so that when I was told in a Jaipur hotel room that Audiard was also the director of A Self-Made Hero, I couldn't quite believe it, just as Mr W couldn't quite believe after seeing See How They Fall that this was by the same director as The Beat That... There may be something heartening in this; the knowledge that early invisibility can lead to universal acclaim later in life, the fairy tale that talent will out.

In keeping with this theme, I'd forgotten that I'd seen See How They Fall, back in some kind of day, presumably when it first came out. As a result the NFT offered me that most curious of cinematic experiences, which could be called 'seeing a ghost', when everything you're seeing really has been seen before, but the original viewing is so dim and distant that its memory only exists as odd traces or intuitions, which lurk on the screen, interfering with the present. Hence, the calibrated pairing of Kassovitz and Trintignant; the lugubrious charm of Jean Yanne; and the delirious noir-ish genius of the screenplay didn't have the freshness they might have done. See How They Fall is in some ways a muddy film, full of loose ends, some of which get pulled, drawing the viewer in, an ambitious film which seems chaotic but is in fact as taut as a narrative drum. It's a film made to be seen more than once, and such is its lack of obviousness, that I found myself both trying to work out what was likely to happen next, and simultaneously trying to work out what I remembered as happening next. Only for the film to come up with something I neither expected nor remembered.

Audiard has retained a kind of intensity to his film-making. There's something feverish screaming beneath the surface, hints of violence, suggestions of love, everything draped in a white cloth waiting to be removed, like a body in a murder scene. In his first film it's there in the Trintignant's stick which helps him walk but is also a repeated weapon; in the creeping madness of Yanne, revealed through his impassioned assaults on an electronic keyboard; in the shape of the voiceovers, one by Yanne, the other by an unnamed woman - who is she? All of these are tricks which snare the audience, which keep you hooked even when you haven't got a clue what's going on or where it's heading. They're the mark of a film-maker who knew what they were doing, (even to the point of making it appear as though they didn't), part of which involves forging a distinctive style which can be picked and unpicked over the years in the films which are to follow.