belle de jour (w&d buñuel, w. jean-claude carrière)

That curious moment in history when men were permitted to make contentious films about women, something that is less and less condoned. And perhaps, looking at Belle de Jour, one might say that it was a prime example of why this shift has happened. Does it really make sense for a male director to make a film about a beautiful woman who has perverse fantasies and decides to take up prostitution for no very good reason? Is this either plausible or praiseworthy? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that Belle de Jour is an uncomfortable watch, which might be a virtue was as well as a vice. Is this not actually a film about Freud and bourgeois manners? No-one comes out of the film looking good, from Deneuve herself to her husband to the madam who runs the very genteel brothel Deneuve decides to work for. Part of the complexity of the film arises from the fact that the director would not appear to be in the least bit interested in naturalism or psychological accuracy. Rather, he is using the story of Severine as a lens through which to gaze at the fucked up nature of desire in the civilised world, something the film undoubtably achieves. Few have had the nerve to go beyond naturalism to explore the subconscious mire of the modern mind and watching Buñuel now, albeit it feels dated in some ways, one is also made aware that when a director is willing to use cinema as a tool to prise open consciousness, it leads to the most unexpected of places. 

le voleur (d louis malle, w carrière)

It’s a slightly strange experience watching this Malle film, written by Carrière, two giants of late twentieth century French culture. It has the feel of a project which has been dashed off, lacking any real narrative depth. Except for the fact that the film is so over-extended and the budget was presumably so high that it doesn’t feel as though it could have been a side-project. A period romp set in late nineteenth century Europe (Paris, Brussels, London), Le Voleur is essentially a showcase for Belmondo’s splendid ability to pout. He was one of the great faces of post-war cinema, with features that express everything whilst seemingly doing nothing, a classic cinema actor, like Caine or Monroe or Connery. The film tells the story of how his character, out of revenge, becomes a crack thief, living a glamorous life of crime and high society, pursued by an array of women in fetching dresses, whilst pining for his cousin, played by Genevieve Bujold. There’s the suggestion of an anarchist subtext, a hint of the criminal as society’s Outsider (pace Camus), embodied most clinically in the downbeat final scene where Belmondo is alone on a train, but all in all this feels like window dressing to give a smidgeon of intellectual sauce to what is an otherwise mundane period piece. All of which proves the old adage that the jewel thief directors who can pull off the cursed caper movie genre are few and far between, and even being a cinematic genius doesn’t help.

that obscure object of desire (w&d. buñuel, w. carrière)

Buñuel’s famed late seventies parable of the gender wars is a curious shaggy dog story of a film which appears to be about a wealthy older man trying to get his end away with a fetching, poor younger woman. In these banal terms, it might be thought that this is another dubious sex comedy, something out of the apolitical wing of the Aries studio, or primetime seventies ITV scheduling. However, from the outset, we get hints, in spite of the light-hearted tone, that something stranger is occurring. Firstly, the film is framed in flashback. Fernando Rey’s Mathieu boards a train at Seville and begins to narrate a tale that will last all the way to Madrid. The framing device lends the piece an unreliable air: the narrator is always going to present the story, which is triggered by his throwing a bucket of water at a young woman before the train leaves Seville, from his point of view. Secondly, radically, the woman in question, Conchita, is played by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). This is a device worthy of a Milo Rau or Pirandello. It’s unsettling, awkward, it leaves the viewer struggling to work out why two in place of one. The story doesn’t flow with the same naturalness as an ordinary romantic tale. As viewers, it feels all wrong. Finally, in the background, things keep getting blown up. These are times of terror, with young idealists belonging to bizarre political sects blowing up cars and kidnapping people. 

At the same time, the tone, framed by Rey’s laconic style, feels humorous. As he narrates how he is frustrated in his desires at every turn by Conchita, he gradually turns from being a rouê into a sap. The ‘natural’ course of events is constantly disrupted, subverting the Hollywood trope which still exists today of charming older man seducing beautiful young starlet. The old order is overthrown by the twin Conchitas, whose individuality is too much for him, eventually driving him to violence. To question the heteronormative dynamics so mercilessly in a mainstream movie was and still is an act of sly subversion by the director. Just as much as the young radicals who exist on the fringes of the film, he wants to blow up our concept of normality. The words ‘blow-up’ leads us towards Antonioni. What we can take form that generation of white male directors, which also includes he likes of Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Fellini, is that, even if they owed their place to a system that was skewed in their favour, they were prepared to play out their concerns, anxieties and doubts on the screen. This is not the film of a man comfortably settling into his pampered slippers. On the contrary, it’s a film that seeks to shake up that idea of comfort, to ridicule it, to blow it up. 

sauve qui peut (d. godard, w. anne-marie miéville, jean-claude carrière)

Godard’s mid-period film, which Richard Brody says he described as his second first film, is a rambling box of tricks and sighs. The tricks are beautiful, the sighs are ugly. The tricks are ugly, the sighs are beautiful. A trick might be the use of slow motion, as Nathalie Baye’s progress on a bicycle through the Swiss countryside is slowed down into a sequence of digital movement, frame by frame, discovering a poetry in the simplest of actions, a trick he repeats at other moments throughout the film. Another trick might be the imposition of the most lyrical music, for a few seconds, propelling the film towards a dreamy romantic level, only to cut the music off before the viewer can get lost in it. Another trick, the ugly tricks, are the turns that seedy men ask Isabelle Huppert to perform as a prostitute. Godard pushes the ugliness towards Centipedal lengths, confronting the viewer. The sighs are the human moments, when the characters who so often feel like marionettes in Godard’s psycho-sexual landscape suddenly step out of character and become real people, with real concerns. Something Baye excels out, inveighing her lost character with a pathos that seems to go against the filmmaker’s grain. Brody’s comments on Huppert’s thoughts on Godard’s direction are great in this regard: “She spoke of Godard’s control of her diction and of her gestures, of his sense that “one must imprison the actor so that his true soul can emerge.” She felt that Godard’s methods brought her closer to herself and, paradoxically, to the character she was embodying, and she found the experience artistically gratifying.” The complexity of the process the actors faced is complemented by the complexity of everything in Sauve Qui Peut: the narrative; the blurred urban/rural division; the mash-up of visual styles; the mash-up of tones. In this sense it feels, as perhaps all Godard’s work feels, like the predicted apex of a modernity which has already passed. His bricolage was ahead of its time, the time came, it went, leaving a film from the future firmly in the past. In this sense it’s a commentary on a world on the eve of the digital. Innocent pleasures of the kind to be found in his earlier films are banished, we are now in the aseptic land of sex, lies and videotape. Identity begins to fracture, the director is Godard, the lead character is called Godard, people’s lives will not flow in straight lines, they will be broken down with slow motion and out-of-synch musical interludes. Emotion no longer comes naturally, it will be constructed in spite of moral indifference. 

at eternity’s gate (w&d schnabel, w jean-claude carrière, louise kugelberg)

The film, one notes, has three credited writers. One being the distinguished Jean-Claude Carrière. However, this also might explain the tonal discrepancies in Schnabel’s scattergun movie. The film is at its strongest when the director’s eye is given priority. One can’t help thinking that this should have been an entire lyrical prose poem. Watching Van Gogh stumble through fields like a demented R2D2, slapping paint around like his life depended on it, all of this is great. What isn’t so great are the convoluted dialogues between VG and Gaugin, or the patchy scenes with his brother Theo, or even the haphazard attempts at narrative, much of which seems to be done for the benefit of having another name actor show up in a bit part role. The film smells of money compromise. Even down to the casting of Dafoe, who might look the part, but who feels, instinctively, too old for the part, a sixty year old in the body of a 37 year old. One can see the logic for casting Dafoe, he brings the necessary weight, but there’s something subtly geriatric about his Van Gogh, which doesn’t help. There are moments of lucidity from the director of photography, allied to a scaled back score, which lift the film way above the ordinary biopic, but it never reaches the heights of Diving Bell and the Butterfly.