a second life (w&d laurent slama, w. thomas keumurian)

Slama’s Paris based film is mostly English language. It’s constructed around the charismatic presence of Agathe Rousselle, star of Titane, who looks as though she was born to play a moody bilingual traipsing round the streets of the capital in an indie movie. The aesthetic is breezy, handheld, capturing the energy of the city on the opening day of the Olympic Games. Elizabeth, a US citizen who is more French than American, works for a concierge firm, welcoming rich tourists. She’s also quasi-suicidal, for reasons we never get to understand, beyond a certain Camusian gallic leaning. One of her clients, pink-haired Elijah, played with a winsome charm by Alex Lawther, becomes fascinated by her, perhaps because she comes across as an alt-Parisian it-girl, and tags along with her as she gets increasingly stressed out by her job. Elizabeth (name derived from a Bergman character) is also deaf, and inevitably loses her expensive hearing aids. Slama directs with an energy which perhaps compensates for a somewhat whimsical narrative which never confronts the source(s) of Elzabeth’s disaffection with the world. At the same time, this feels like guerrilla filmmaking done with a certain aplomb, benefitting from great casting. The fact that it’s made mostly in English, with several sympathetic gringo characters, makes one wonder if it was conceived with one eye on the US festival circuit - it’s hard to empathise with North American tourists in Paris, even if they are hypnotists. (Is this supposed to be the anti Emily-in-Paris?)

alpha (w&d julia ducournau)

The critics have not been overly kind to Alpha. It is indeed, a messy film, so full of ideas and concepts that they seem to overflow. There’s a pandemic storyline, as society becomes gripped by a disease which turns people to crumbling stone. There’s a junkie storyline, as Amin, played by Tahar Rahim, struggles with his addiction. There’s a double timeline, with teenage Alpha and young Alpha living side by side within the film’s framework. Gradually we piece together that the pandemic scenes, with Alpha’s heroic mother, Golshifteh Farahani, sporting a different hairdo, happened in young Alpha’s past. There’s a coming of age storyline, as Alpha, (Mélissa Boros) fights for her independence and tries to reconcile with the family ghosts. There are loose strands featuring the anglo-french actors Finnegan Oldfield and Emma Mackey, which feel as though they might even have been included to keep the financiers happy. Finally, there are some great moments where the director explores her Berber heritage, a heritage from which Alpha feels alienated. The red wind whose myth permeates the film clearly has a saharan origin. So there is a lot going on, probably far too much and even more so than with Titane, one feels that the director might benefit from working with a screenwriter…. But none of this means that Alpha makes for anything less than a fascinating, visceral ride. As ever with Ducournau, there’s a vigour and energy to the filmmaking which propels the film over the course of its two hours, no matter how many highways and byways it goes down. It’s not perfect, but then who is?

 

nada (jean-patrick manchette tr. donald nicholson-smith)

Manchette’s tale is something of a political-policier potboiler. A group of anarchists kidnap a US diplomat and encounter a predictable fate. It’s pacy, pulpy and seems very much rooted in its time. To think that in the seventies politicians and businessmen were kidnapped or assassinated on a fairly routine basis in France, Spain Germany, Italy, the UK, USA. It must have made the countries on the other side of the iron curtain seem like oases of peace. That kind of terrorism has been scotched, seemingly, to such an extent that the instinctive response to a supposed assassination attempt (cf the USA) is to dismiss it as a false flag. Manchette mentions the Tupamaros, who also kidnapped a diplomat, this time British, but whose fate differed from those of his anti-heroes. That event was part of the other Cold War, the war of idealists against the military-business consortium. It was a war that was definitively lost, as we can see from the way in which the weapons industry now exerts an outsized influence on political action, just as much if not more so than in the seventies. The tragic, unheroic deaths of almost everyone involved in the kidnapping operation feels like cynical but truthful takedown of the thwarted dreams of an alternative society to the capitalist model. 

la femme d’ à côté (d. françois truffaut, w suzanne schiffman, jean aurel)

Truffaut’s melodrama feels slightly misconceived. Depardieu and Ardant are former lovers. She just happens to move in right across the street from him. Both are slightly nuts but keep it under control with their respective sane partners. However, when they inevitably reconnect, it’s a tinder box. Both veer towards a shared madness, an amour fou. The charisma of the two leads almost pulls it off, but as the film veers more and more towards melodrama, it flirts with the ridiculous. At one point Ardant’s husband says that he’s not a jealous man, “I’m not a Spanish husband”, (something the subtitles struggled to translate), but Depardieu and Ardant both have a Lorca-esque streak to them (she actually comes from the south, her children’s book editor is informed). One wonders what someone like Almodovar might have made of this tale. The tension between a Gallic cool and a Mediterranean excess doesn’t quite come off, as it did in a film like L’Apartment, for example, or even Pierrot Le Fou. It’s an interesting study in how a remarkable director can slightly misfire, no matter how enticing the ingredients, actors and premise. 

wizard of the kremlin (w&d olivier assayas, w. emmanuel carrère)

Assayas is a prolific filmmaker with the rangy curiosity that goes with this desire to create. As such, this pivot to big-budget geo-political drama is perhaps not quite so surprising. This is a film about the world as it is, if not today, then at least yesterday. Adapted from a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, the film describes Putin’s rise to power, supposedly aided and abetted by the maverick guru, Vadim Baranov, modelled, so wiki tells me, on Vladislav Surkov. Baranov is a onetime theatre director and TV producer, whose communication skills facilitate Putin’s rise, and who later helps shape his bellicose foreign policy, although this is somewhat glossed over. As a device to enter Putin’s world it might work, although the script seems to struggle with that old screenwriting chestnut, the passive protagonist, because everything Baranov does is overshadowed by the actions of his two bosses, first Berezovksky and then Putin. Towards the final third of a long film Baranov appears to start to take matters more into his own hands, but then the film runs up against the paradox that its ostensibly sympathetic central character, played with a wan intelligence by Dano, is just as psychopathic as Putin, as his participation in the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas implies. 

The film seeks to cram twenty five years of history into its two and a half hours. For the world of nineties russia, the novels of Pelevin or Sorokin might offer a more intriguing entry point. There will be several books on Putin’s rise - Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People gives a forensic account which a film cannot hope to emulate. One also wonders if Assayas might have been influenced by the work of Kirill Serebrennikov. The Wizard of the Kremlin is a valiant stab at documenting contemporary history within a dramatic format, but it also sometimes feels as though the screenwriters may have been biting off more than they could chew. 

the monroe girls (antoine volodine, tr. alyson waters)

A strange post-civilisation world. A world where the dead and living live side-by-side. Mysterious squad of female assassins, who may or may not be coming back from the dead. A narrator who is two people, first person and third person. Discursive scenes followed by staccato moments of violence. Volodine’s text has something of Burroughs about it, with added humour and a post-apocalyptic slant. 

sirat (w&d oliver laxe, w santiago fillol)

This is, as they say, a polemical, marmite, movie. It walks in the footsteps of Sorcerer, (which walked in the footsteps of Wages of Fear.) The film deliriously refuses to give the viewer what they want. The westerners who have taken their colonial noise war into an alien desert are not going to get off scot free. As a road movie, influenced by the above named films, it’s clear early on that there will be those who survive and those who don’t. What Laxe does with a certain gleeful degree of emotional manipulation is ensure that this equation is always in the balance. And the final shot speaks of another, real-life road movie, where other souls, less privileged, are also rolling the dice to see who will make it to their destination, and who will not. 

the shepherd and the bear (w&d max keegan, w. sabine emiliani)

Keegan’s doc is what might be called lovingly made, as it follows the travails of an ageing shepherd in the Pyrenees. The shepherd is one of the last of his line, happy to spend months living in a small shack in the high country. When bears are released into the wild, re-establishing a bear community, local livestock owners are fearful. The ancient conflict between man and nature has a new battleground. The shepherd keeps doing his thing, no matter what, even after a few savaged sheep carcasses make spectacular appearances. The film, like the conflict, simmers rather than coming to a boil, but it’s a well crafted portrait of a remote rural society which highlights the paradoxes around ideas of re-wilding and environmentalism, concepts that can lead to the sense of an agenda being imposed by metropolitan diktat on the rural communities who inhabit the countryside and the wild places the environmentalists seek to preserve.

 

l’histoire de souleymane (w&d boris lojkine, w. delphine agut)

The second screen at the Ipswich Film Theatre is small enough to make one miss Cinemateca and question whether it’s worth spending ten quid to watch something you could project larger on your wall. However, the cinema is also half-full on a bitterly cold night, and this engenders the sense of a communal experience which reminds one why it is still worth it. Lojkine’s film is a classic piece of neo-realism, following a day and a half in the life of Souleymane, an illegal immigrant from Guinea, trying to get by in Paris. The line between documentary and fiction feels suitably fine, and the film feels credible, even when the narrative takes advantage of every possible twist to make his day as bad as possible. If this smacks of script development, the film wraps up with a brilliant scene where Souleymane states his case for asylum to a sceptical if sympathetic female official. The scene is a long dialogue scene, but we as the audience are right inside Souleymane’s experience, and look on with the same pained hopelessness as the interviewer. This is the brass tacks of the world, the place where life-changing decisions are made, where the pitch has to be more than perfect, it has to be authentic. The scene is theatrical, urgent and compelling. For a small moment in our privileged world we get to live, from one side of the fence or another, the arbitrary cruelty of our geo-political system. 

la maison sous les arbres (d. rené clément,, w. sidney buchman, eleanor perry, arthur cavanaugh)

A star vehicle for Faye Dunaway, this is a curious mash-up of US actors in Paris stuck in a ludicrous plot. The setting lends a glamorous quality to a narrative in which a shadowy, very seventies, ‘organisation’ is controlling Dunaway’s husband, for reasons that are never particularly clear. In general the film seems to have been set up to permit Dunaway a few set-piece scenes. You can’t help but laugh when she has to make a getaway from her neighbour’s flat in a nightie and the neighbour hands her some thigh length red leather boots and an exotic coat, which just happen to be on-hand. In a similar vein, the film opens, with a hint of Atalante, with a long sequence of Dunaway drifting through Paris’ canals looking moody on a barge. As such it becomes an intriguing study of how the star system both permits and limits the making of movies, in France as in the USA. 

faraway the southern sky (joseph andras, tr. simon leser)

Curiously, Faraway the Southern Sky is billed as a novel. It tells the tale of a narrator who is researching the years that Ho Chi Minh, who at that stage went by various alias’, spent in Paris. The novel recounts the narrator’s wandering through Paris as he seeks out the sites where Ho lived, and digs into the archives to find documentation of his time in the French capital, from 1918 to 1924. It is full of observations from the time of the author’s writing, about the gilets jaunes, about the changes to the geo-dynamics of Paris since Ho’s day. It doesn’t feel like a novel. It feels like the account of a flaneur with an interest in Marxism, the colonial struggle and the workings of power. It is a slight book, but anchored around the search for Ho Chi Minh, it is captivating. The level of espionage and state security around Ho, at that point no more than a dreamer, an anti-colonial wannabe, is striking. The police state was not invented by the Nazis or the Chinese or Trump. It has been around forever. Ho comes across as an elusive, idealistic soul, almost a flaneur in his own right. 

cleo from 5 to 7 (w&d agnès varda)

This film, a little like the Haneke film I recently watched in London, is perhaps another of my Ur-texts. (As might be Performance, so this is a year for the father/mother texts). I would guess I had only seen Cleo once before, but the simplicity and urgency of the filmmaking left its mark. To tell the story of a woman, a character, in 90 minutes, which are more or less 90 minutes of her life, a way of sticking to the unities of time, place and action, is to create a lightning flash of a film, to stop and capture time. Varda’s Cleo has no great profound storyline to pursue. She’s scared she’s got a fatal illness, but we the audience are never sure whether this might be real or part of the drama she creates, part of her beauty and appeal. Aside from this she drifts around Paris, meeting friends and lovers. It’s inconsequential, but that’s part of its charm. Where film narratives seem so dependent on dramatic tropes, Varda resists, letting the star and the camera and the city guide us through the timeline. Indeed, in many ways the film, with the brilliant cinematography of Paul Bonis, Alain Levent and Jean Rabier, is a love letter to Paris, a Paris which still feels like it might be the city of the flaneur, a set on which its inhabitants play out their roles, blessed to be framed against the backdrop the designer has given them. 

the deserter (enard, tr. charlotte mandell)

I read a long essay on this book after finishing it, detailing the way Enard has been a defender of the idea of Europe, a Europe that stretches from Galway to Beirut, a Europe to which the Maghreb countries also belong. It’s a particular vision, which permits him to incorporate the Arab intellectual world, thereby paying homage to these cultures, so formative in the shaping of Europe, so constantly misrepresented as the colonial vision of Western Europe focused on mercantile expansion came to dominate. This is the fourth book of Enard’s I have read and I recognise, as the essay writer observed, that part of the fascination of his texts is precisely this investigation into what it means to call something European, above and beyond the economic or even socio-political perspectives.

The Deserter, as the writer of the essay observed, perhaps offers a more pessimistic vision than his previous books. It dovetails two narratives. Firstly, that of a deserter in an unnamed war, fleeing for his life. He connects with a traumatised woman, also fleeing, and her donkey. The prose and the story are stark, elemental. Enard makes much play of the sensory elements of their experiences. It might be described as a bleakly poetic text, albeit one which contains, perhaps, a hint of optimism, at the last. The deserter’s tale is interwoven with the account of the life of an East German mathematician, who survived Buchenwald, and who bought into the flawed aspirations of the DDR. His story is narrated by his daughter, and the kernel of her account is set on a boat near Berlin on the fateful date of 11/09/01, that foreboding hinge of two centuries. One steeped in atrocities and idealism, the other in a world without values. The daughter, now 71, is writing her account looking back at events from 2022, just as the war in Ukraine is igniting. These references suggest a fearfulness in Enard’s writing which hasn’t been seen before. As he looks into the future he sees more of the same: a vision out of a Sarah Kane play, an unravelling of all that has been stitched together to create that thing we call European civilisation. A process which has been in the process of beginning, of course, for centuries, in the concentration camps and the gulags, and the colonial misadventures.

The Deserter is a strange, slightly unsatisfactory novel, which feels as though it’s reaching for something that the writer cannot quite grasp. But an unsatisfactory Enard novel still makes for an absorbing, provocative read. He is a writer who uses the novel as a means to flex our thought processes, to make us question, if we see ourselves as European, what the hell that means, or if we don’t, who the hell those people might really be. Because, filtered through his imagination, they sure as hell are not the people they think they are.

Have looked up the essay - the essayist is Nicholas Dames and it can be found here.  

municipale (w&d. thomas paulot, w milan alfonsi, ferdinand flame)

In Municipal, a playful documentary, actor Laurent Papot goes to Revin, a small town in the Ardennes, where he plans to stand as mayor. He makes it clear that this is an exercise in the functioning of democracy, saying that if he wins he will return to Paris and leave the chair vacant for his supporters. Perhaps unsurprisingly the project meets with some resistance, even as he garners some unlikely supporters.

The film has three strands. Firstly it interrogates how democracy functions on a local level, showing how local people become involved, tracing Laurent's journey towards polling day. Secondly it is a study in post-industrial decline. Revin used to be an industrial hub, and its economy thrived. Now, in common with so many Western European towns, it has no industry left and has consequently declined. The gilet jaunes candidate both befriends and harangues Laurent, and he clearly represents a more militant critique of 21st century European politics. Thirdly, the film ends up being a surprisingly tender portrait of a man struggling to find his place in an alien culture. Revin is still France, but the distance to Paris seems vast. Laurent is also on a voyage to feel as though he belongs, one the film, which is perhaps directed by his brother (?), traces with elegance and sympathy. 

time of the wolf (w&d haneke)

We had just arrived in London. A muggy summer afternoon in Whitechapel. Walking past the Genesis, I see that Time of the Wolf is on, re-released for some macabre reason. I contact Rob’s son, who says he’s not sure. A minute later he sends me a message saying he’s watched the trailer and it looks boring. Then he gives in and decides to come, munching popcorn through Haneke.

Is it boring? As ever with Haneke, it is a bit, but that’s kind of the point. The end of the world will be boring, interspersed with moments of sheer terror and classical music. When the daughter listens to the tape of a sympathetic survivor, I realised how much I must hace stolen from this film in the writing of Truck. My blog informs me that this is the third time I have seen the film (and the second time I have claimed to have stolen from it). It still feels fresh, unpredictable, treading a line between tedium and high tension. Rob says it’s not his greatest work, but his son seemed, in spite of the boredom factor, to have been sucked in by it. As was I and will probably watch another decade down the line, when it will feel just as novel, just as dull, just as radical. If we still have cinemas, ten years down the line. 

pd - a few weeks later Rob's son chose to go and see White Ribbon which apparently he loved.

a short history of cahiers du cinema (emilie bickerton)

I don’t know if young romantics like I might have been, once upon a time, still grow up with Les Cahiers du Cinema acting as a kind of idealised wallpaper for what life, cinema and the arts ought to be. I don’t know if I ever actually read the magazine, but it inhabited a mythological place in my mind. The space from whence the young turks of the Nouvelle Vague emerged, encompassing a cultural diversity which ranged from Hitchcock to Godard, a place where cinema was treated as an art form rather than a business. All of this blended with the romanticism of Paris as depicted in the works of early Godard, Truffaut and company. All of this was summoned up by the title of the magazine itself, so allusive, so distant from the philistine perspective of the Anglo-Saxons.

Bickerton’s book is both a guide and a corrective. The early chapters document the magazine's origins, the incorporation of these young turks (even if Rohmer wasn’t so very young.) The relationship between Truffaut and Bazin is alluded to, and suggests a book or movie of its own. The middle part of the book deals with the way the Cahiers became consumed with ideological dogma, so much so that it excluded most cinema, treating it as beyond the Maoist pale. (Or whichever other pale was the dominant ideology of the day.) Finally, the book looks at developments in the 80s and 90s when the magazine abandoned ideological pretensions and became, according to Bickerton, just another film mag, competing for shelf space.

In her account of this final development, Bickerton is unflinchingly critical. Her thesis is that the magazine effectively sold its soul. Its repute was constructed on the independence of intellectual thought, which permitted it to distance itself from the idea of cinema as industry. Whilst Hollywood might be capable of making films which are beyond this paradigm, the marketing machine and festival circuit determine that, in general, films which refuse to acquiesce to their formulaic demands will be marginalised. Whereas in the sixties and seventies, Cahiers was interested in discovering and vindicating those films which were outside of the system, (and the early works of the Nouvelle Vague were informed by this), now it has become just another industry rag. Bickerton is deeply critical of what has happened to Cahiers, and, by implication, the way in which market forces have become the regulator of directors’ aesthetic choices. Cahiers, and cinema as a whole, has become the poorer for this, even as the magazine pretends to be richer and more popular than ever. But the romantic vision which I had as a teenager is, she avows, categorically dead. 

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. 

the shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us (christophe bonneuil + jean-baptiste fressoz, tr. david fernbach)

Not being au fait with current trends in intellectual thought, I don’t know where this obron of Bonneuiland and Fressoz sits in the firmament. What I can say is that it is a comprehensive and disarming read, which  brings together a collection of thought and references regarding the Anthropocene in a manner that makes one think, as one reads, that this book ought to be compulsory reading for anyone over the age of six months. Not that it will be, of course, as people are soon going to stop reading and process information through visual memes, which is part of the problem. It’s hard to read this book and think there is any coming back from the brink, be that the brink of extinction or radical social change. Hopefully the latter. However, the truly dispiriting element of the book is the way it shows how every step taken towards the present situation has been contested and could have been altered. My only question is whether the book’s conclusions/ implications don’t lead towards humanity moving into post-political era; which suits some of the current usual suspects down to the ground. Some might argue that such a thing does not exist, others might say we are already on the brink. 

pacification (w&d albert serra, w. baptiste pinteaux)

Colonialism. The Honorary Consul. Graham Greene territory, Malcolm Lowry territory. Shady dealings in the tropics. Opaque conversations which hint at the greater existential battles being waged on the planet, the unnamed battles, the undisclosed wars. It’s exciting material which Albert Serra seeks to constantly mystify and de-excite. Takes are long, conversations are cryptic, the stakes are never clear. The end result is a woozy, vaguely hypnotic movie which feels as though it’s struggling to resist the weight of its own pretension, which in turn is not such a bad trope in a film, albeit one which is always likely to register higher with the arthouse crowd than the general public, whatever that amorphous body might be. I might have missed things, but I was never quite clear what the post-colonial message was saying, beyond beware men in white suits. As a spectator I felt awash in this lush world, drifting through a booze-sodden lost weekend, absolutely certain that the events unfolding before my eyes held more meaning, more complexity, more gravity, than anything I could ever hope to understand in my inebriated state of mind.  

the substance (w&d coralie fargeat)

It seemed strangely appropriate that we watched Fargeat’s Grand Guignol film on the same day I saw that Dennis Quaid, the film’s evil driving force representing the male gaze at its most lascivious and destructive, had come out in support of Trump, one of the very few Hollywood stars to do so. One suspects that Fargeat would be secretly pleased with this news, she might even have engineered it. The battle lines even more clearly drawn within the great metaphysical struggle over the beauty myth.

At the same time, it feels as though there’s something dangerously Trumpian in the film’s excesses. Trumpian in so far as the gesture and the controversy become more relevant than anything that is actually being said. Fargeat pushes the visual excesses of the story as far as she can go. This is set up from the start, with an edit style that seems derived from advertising, all fast cuts and pumped up musical beats. The characters are deliberately two dimensional. Subtlety is not going to be part of this discourse. It’s in-your-face, a punk assault on the senses. The object is firstly to titilate and then to revolt, two sides of the sensory coin.

The result is somewhere between shock and awe and tedium, two sides of the war coin, perhaps. The issue one might have with the film is that the war is woman versus woman, with woman losing twice over. It might be that everyone else also loses, in the end, but Demi Moore’s Elizabeth and Margaret Qualley’s Sue seem to get the rough end of the stick. Which again, might be the point: that no matter what, the fetishisation of women’s bodies by this society always means that women get the rough end of the stick.

I spent much of the film wondering what Mariana Enriquez would make of it. One suspects she would delight in its transgressive intentions, whilst perhaps hoping for something else to emerge from the melange. There’s no shortage of wearing of influences on sleeves. From Picture of Dorian Grey, (inverted), to Jekyll and Hyde, to Frankenstein. With direct references to The Fly and The Elephant Man. The combination of all these elements perhaps contributes to a sense that for all its outrageousness, this feels like a conservative piece of filmmaking, with few narrative surprises.

I also then found myself wondering what Trump would make of it. Suspecting he would publicly denounce it, whilst privately loving it, for all the wrong reasons.