annette (w&d carax, w. ron & russell mael)

Two hours twenty minutes of film-opera. In a Madrid cinema called the Renoir with uncomfortable chairs, (supposed to be comfortable), still adjusting to a lost night’s transatlantic sleep and a return to the old continent for the first time in 18 months. To be confronted with Carax going the other way, making a Hollywood movie in unspoken English. It might not have been the ideal way to watch Annette, a movie whose pretensions of mystery are undercut by the banality of its narrative and the manner in which the director forces his agenda on the audience. No matter how hard he tries, Adam Driver as Henry McHenry never really comes across as having any evil in him, which means his daughter’s assertion that he kills people doesn’t feel entirely convincing, in spite of anything the plot seeks to say. Everything, including the songs, feels laboured, a wet tea-towel of a simple idea wrung out for every drop of moisture that can be extracted. It’s not that the movie doesn’t flirt with brilliance, it’s just that it doesn’t achieve it. Perhaps if the seats has been kinder and the conditions more conducive, or if I was younger and less jaded, I might not have been left so cold, but as we discussed it with Señor O, walking back through a glorious Madrileño afternoon, it felt as though this was a movie with a personal agenda so marked it’s as though the director is crying his eyes out in the seat next to you. No matter how much you want to sympathise or empathise or engage, this is distracting. All the more so as it never feels as though the movie gives any one else any kind of emotional entry point. 

mauvais sang (w&d leos carax)

The thing about becoming a cult director is that you need to deliver something that is genuinely out there. Even if that pushes you into territory that is, frankly, unintelligible. I have no real idea what is going on in Mauvais Sang. There were long periods where I was scrabbling to make sense of things, but every now and again the screen would burst into life with a vengeance. More than a coherent narrative, Mauvais Sang feels like an archipelago of moments, which are loosely arranged around selected ideas. The fact that one of these ideas is that humanity is threatened by a retrovirus and that Piccoli, Binoche and Lavant are about to steal the vaccine, adds a certain piquancy. Other moments include: they’re not really going to make Binoche jump out of the plane are they? Lavant famously dance-running to Bowie’s Modern Love, for no real reason other than to give the film an injection of unimpeachable cool; Binoche and Lavant having a shaving cream fight; and so on and so forth. Carax sets out his stall as a filmmaker whose radical imagination is enough to get you hooked, and to be fair, he has continued to deliver, with Pont Neuf, Holy Motors etcetera. Film as event, rather than narrative; film as a sensory experience rather than an intellectual one, no matter how much of a debt is being paid to Godard, or, one would like to think in this film, Roeg and Cammell´s Performance.