Author: André Crous

Dheepan (2015)

André Crous

Plight of Sri Lankan refugees in Parisian suburb underlines not only the difficulty of integration but also the risks that sometimes follow people across borders. 

France
3.5*

Director:
Jacques Audiard
Screenwriters:
Noé Debré
Thomas Bidegain
Jacques Audiard
Director of Photography:
Eponine Momenceau

Running time: 110 minutes

Of major topical significance and sketching its characters and those in their lives with compassion and understanding, Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan has the makings of a masterpiece but loses control in the final minutes, which feel rushed and underwhelming, partly because its graphic violence marks such a radical departure from the rest of the film.

A trio of characters pretending to be a family – the titular Dheepan, who is a former Tamil Tiger; Yalini, a woman who is still very much a girl; and the shy, school-aged Illayaal, who lost her mother during the war – in order to use a dead family’s passports and thus escape to Europe and settle in a diverse, low-income neighbourhood simply titled “Le Pré” (the Field), presumably Paris’s Le-Pré-Saint-Germain. They do not speak French, although Illayaal picks it up remarkably quickly at school, but Dheepan quickly finds a job as caretaker of part of the housing estate.

He has to be careful, however, as drug dealers have one part of one building to themselves, and it is better not to cross the always paranoid bunch of young men. Thanks to Youssuf, the municipality liaison, Yalini also secures a job cooking and cleaning for an elderly Arabic gentleman named Mr. Habib, at a rate she considers to be a fortune: 500€/month. Mr. Habib never says a word, which suits Yalini just fine, as she starts speaking to him in Tamil.

The film offers a great many sensitively handled glimpses of the new reality the characters have to confront, from being outsiders (even in an already heterogeneous community) because they do not speak French to coping with their fake setup as a family. Dheepan is still in mourning over the loss of his wife and two daughters, but his proximity to Yalini elicits sexual feelings in her, but at the same time his experience as a father makes him more understanding of the challenges his “daughter”, Illayaal, is facing. Audiard’s use of small incidents to give colour and texture to his characters is very effective and goes a long way towards making the viewer empathise with these three individuals who are technically breaking the law.

The choice of Antonio Vivaldi’s wistful “Cum dederit” during the opening credits is deeply moving and indicates that this will not be a film like most others. A black screen is eventually illuminated by a big, blinking, blue bow tie that Dheepan has attached to his head and uses as a visual device when peddling trinkets to uninterested café-goers around Montmartre. Indeed, there is little drama or anxiety, right up until the end, when two strange things happen. The first is the sudden transformation (or regression) of Dheepan back to the soldier he used to be, filled with rage and determination. He suddenly takes over the drug den and establishes his strength, but this development does not lead anywhere. The second is the climax, during which he wields a machete and an ice pick and murders everyone in his way in order to save a desperate Yalini.

Some have taken this very graphic scene, and the absolutely serene scene that follows, as a dream, which would be possible were it not for one thing. The climax, which shows Dheepan climbing the stairs and killing people on his way up, is shot as a close-up of Dheepan’s legs, surrounded by black smoke, and could easily be read as a reality affected by flashbacks of the war, it ends with Dheepan inside Mr. Habib’s apartment, which he has never seen before. Thus, this has to be happening for real. Whether the final scene, which is a Hollywood ending wholly at odds with the rest of the film, is a dream or a fantasy is, therefore, both unjustified and unlikely, but not outside the realm of possibility.

Dheepan is at its best when it is showing us how the three refugees interact with each other and with the different members of the community, including an old Moroccan lady who speaks Arabic to Dheepan and Mr. Habib’s drug lord son, Brahim, who has to wear an ankle monitor but towards whom Yalini feels an undeniable, childlike attraction. The film’s only serious missteps are the way in which the final sequence is framed (it could have been much better if Dheepan’s “rescue” of Yalini had occurred offscreen) and a peculiar shot from Dheepan’s point of view, through which we see Yalini seducing him one night, guiding him into the bedroom and dropping her towel before the screen fades to black.

The events of the final 30 minutes are jarring when contrasted with the gentle curiosity, though never devoid of intense feelings, that is so apparent in the rest of the story. Seeing the climax and the epilogue as a dream has the benefit of neatly separating two realities, but as the film clearly shows, events continue to inform those that follow, whether we want them to or not.

Madame Courage (2015)

André Crous

Taciturn, troubled Algerian teenager steals necklace from girl to finance his drug habit, but upon seeing her face, he develops a crush that quickly escalates into unwanted devotion.  

madame-courage

Algeria/France
3.5*

Director:
Merzak Allouache
Screenwriter:
Merzak Allouache
Director of Photography:
Olivier Guerbois

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: مدام كوراج
Transliterated title: Mdam Kuraj

The teenager at the heart of Madame Courage is a boy with many troubles, but it is difficult to dislike him. With high cheekbones, a gaunt face, full lips and big eyes that expressionlessly stare straight ahead, Omar lives in a squat with his mother and older sister. Despite the constant stream of religion-based indictment of debauchery broadcast on the family’s television set, his sister Sabrina is involved in prostitution, which their mother appears to sanction for the sake of having food on the table.

The thing the taciturn Omar is most focused on, however, is not food but drugs. The title refers to the name popular among Algerian youth for Artane, which helps Omar to disconnect from reality. He always carries a plastic bag in his pocket filled with these tablets and slides one of them down his throat when the going gets tough, which makes him look like a zombie most of the time, and he buys these pills with money obtained through thievery on the street.

Having established the criminal side of his life in the opening chase scene taking place late at night through deserted streets, the film’s second scene shows him grabbing a necklace from around a high-school girl’s neck before running off. She is devastated, as the piece of jewellery had belonged to her late mother, and her friends comfort her in the relative safety of a café in downtown Mostaganem. By chance, Omar walks past the café a few moments later and is about to enter when he notices her. The rush of the grab having receded by now, he watches her face more intently and is mesmerised, so he decides to follow her home.

The film never offers any real insight into this fascination that Omar has for her (her name is Selma). He doesn’t know she has lost her mother, and she doesn’t know that he has lost his father. However, because of the instability at home, Omar decides to start spending as much time as possible waiting for her next to a rubbish dump in front of the apartment she shares with her senile father and older brother, a policeman. For obvious reasons, the brother makes it clear he doesn’t want Omar around, but there is something about the boy that greatly intrigues Selma, and even though they never speak a word to each other, the teenage sexual tension between them is unmistakable and handled with great sensitivity by director Merzak Allouache.

Small digressions from the storyline, which include a sub-plot with Omar’s sister, Sabrina, and her pimp (who, it appears, is always supposed to marry her) and Omar’s continued life of petty crime are always connected to the main character, who is present in almost every single scene. The hand-held camera further lingers on him to emphasise his presence as the focal point of interest, for example by framing him in the middle of the shot when he is driving his motorcycle. This latter image allows us to see him as being immobile against a mobile background, which is a perfect visual depiction of his life in general.

The relationship, or association, between Omar and Selma is mysterious and beautiful, although one cannot help but wonder whether the chances of them ending up together would ever amount to more than the fantasies Omar likely conjures up when he is high on Madame Courage. This is not exactly Pickpocket, but Selma’s arrival in Omar’s life certainly has a positive effect on him. Her brother, Redouane, is one of the film’s more complex characters, and while he obviously wants to protect his sister and can use the powers afforded to him as an officer of the law to do so, he does not abuse his authority (despite a moment of offscreen violence) but instead seeks to find out what Omar is thinking, which makes him something of a substitute for the viewer.

Although far from comprehensive, Madame Courage offers a striking glimpse of life on the streets of a lower-class teenager in Algeria who has to combat feelings of loneliness, protect himself and his family and deal with the struggles of being a teenage boy infatuated with a girl.

Viewed at the Black Nights Film Festival 2015

 

The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895)

André Crous

An 18-second reconstruction of a historical event hints at the violence and invisible special effects that would ultimately become integrated into the stories told on film.

execution-mary-stuartUSA
4.5*

Director:
Alfred Clark
Screenwriter:
Alfred Clark
Director of Photography:
William Heise

Running time: 18 seconds (0.3 minutes)

It is an indisputable fact that movies as we know them today, at least as we have known them for decades, projected to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people watching and enjoying them as a film-going community, originate with the French Lumière brothers. But the great U.S. inventor Thomas Edison does have a claim on inventing one kind of moving picture. Thanks to his Kinetoscope, which he was inspired to develop by another giant of the early moving picture industry, Eadweard Muybridge (best known for his Horses in Motion images, a series of pictures that showed for the first time exactly how horses gallop), stories could now be told with life-like movements. Many of these glimpses of real-life movement that the Kinetoscope recorded pre-dated the Lumières’ Cinematograph.

One big difference between his films and those of the French brothers was that Edison’s productions were not projected onto a screen: They could only be watched by one person at a time through a peephole on top of a large machine. Another major difference is that these early Edison films were shot (and “projected”) at an astounding rate of around 40 frames per second, nearly twice as fast as films today (24 fps) and much faster than the Lumière films (16 fps).

But what they lacked for in technical wizardry, Edison’s directors made up for in creativity, and The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (also known as The Execution of Mary Stuart) is likely the first film to use the possibilities of the medium to produce a film that is not a mere recording of sights and sounds. It was recorded on 28 August 1895, after the production of some of the Lumière films but before they were screened in Paris exactly four months later. While it falls into the tradition of the “tableau”, a single unmoving frame in which all the players appear together and are nearly immobile, this special effects film uses editing to obscure an important replacement of an actor by a mannequin.

The film is not about a story but – like so many other films during the 1890s – about an event, namely the 1587 execution of the former queen of the Scots, Mary Stuart, following more than 18 years in captivity. The film does not provide any context, but to the viewer of 1895, when the film was produced, it must have been an unusual experience to peek into a Kinetoscope and see someone decapitated.

This 18-second film depicts a throng of soldiers bearing spears who have gathered around a masked executioner waiting next to the chopping block. In front of him, the berobed former queen (actually, in full Shakespearean style, played by a man, Robert Thomae) walks closer and kneels on the ground. The executioner picks up his axe and brings it down on the woman’s neck. A quick cut later, the head has been separated from the body and falls over the other side of the block. The executioner picks up the head and lifts it proudly into the air while the soldiers rush forwards to have a look for themselves.

The event has a melancholy but tense beginning, a violent middle and a triumphant, gory ending. The scene is brightly illuminated, and the focus is tight and narrow, although the soldiers standing around are something of a stand-in for the viewer and her own curiosity.

Director Alfred Clark, who was only 21 years old at the time and had replaced WK Dickson as the official photographer at Edison’s company after Dickson’s departure in April 1895, shows how even at the early stages of the film business, there was already a desire to elicit a visceral reaction from the viewer. In the case of this film, which hints at the subsequent evolution in editing and special effects, this desire compelled the director to get creative and produce one of the most interesting landmarks in early cinema.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

André Crous

In this captivating Woody Allen dramedy, a penniless former socialite has to learn the hard way that the whole world no longer dances to her every whim.

blue-jasmineUSA
4*

Director:
Woody Allen
Screenwriter:
Woody Allen
Director of Photography:
Javier Aguirresarobe

Running time: 100 minutes

Blue Jasmine differs in two important ways from most of Woody Allen’s films. The first difference is that the film does not primarily have comedic intentions. Although it has many moments of humour, some of them sure to elicit roaring laughter from the viewer, it is a drama filled with tension. The other difference is that it is actually a great film.

While not a thriller like his 2005 film, Match Point, which involved adultery and murder, Blue Jasmine has its fair share of suspense — the product of a very careful balancing act between the past and the present. Allen constantly flashes between the current state of affairs, when Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is sharing a tiny apartment with her sister in San Francisco, and the past, when Jasmine was living a life of vast riches for more than a decade with her businessman husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin).

In the film’s very first scene, we find Jasmine in a first-class seat talking the ear off the passenger next to her. At first, she seems to be talkative, but as the scene progresses from airplane to airport terminal to baggage claim, and Jasmine doesn’t let her interlocutor get a word in, we realise she is delivering a monologue and is entirely self-obsessed.

In fact, at many points in the film she doesn’t even need an ear to listen to her; she is content to simply deliver her speeches or comebacks, many of them in response to characters or situations from the past, all on her own.

Having lived an opulent life style for as long as she can remember, and never having worked in her life, Jasmine (real name Jeanette) is completely blind to the lives and needs of the rest of the country, including those of her adopted sister, Ginger, who lives in San Francisco, works as a grocery store clerk and couldn’t care less about who Louis Vuitton is.

Jasmine is a vapid piece of work whose condescension is only equalled by her complete ignorance of how the other 99 percent lives. She sees the world in shades of green and gold and has no sense whatsoever of the kinds of challenges that confront people who do not have the comfort of being kept and cared for by their well-to-do spouses.

Much of this ignorance is self-imposed, we learn, because learning the truth about the origin of the money may be too risky, for it could too easily upset the comfy status quo. Until recently, Jasmine’s life had consisted of the one dinner party after the other, all of them filled with dull conversations about money, investments, fancy restaurants and important diplomats.

When it all came crashing down, Jasmine had a nervous breakdown, and that is where we find her at the beginning of the film. She seems to have the right intention to make something of herself, but the arrogance that defined her life in Manhattan follows her wherever she goes in San Francisco and reveals her as being untethered to reality.

The film has a very clear purpose in divvying itself up into present and past tenses: to fill in the blanks as we need them, to indicate Jasmine’s frame of mind, to create a sense of tension as we come to understand we do not know as much as we thought we did, and to make us take notice of the carbon copy that her present life is of her husband’s while they were married. The irony of the latter point is visible to everyone except Jasmine, although there is still a final twist that gives an enormous amount of clarity and texture to her character and to the film.

Blanchett’s portrayal of the bored Manhattan housewife/professional socialite is breath-taking and should be lauded for never making us bored or for alienating us, despite the near impossibility of empathising with her self-inflicted predicament. Blanchett reverts to the Mid-Atlantic accent she deployed so well as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and in an instant conveys an ennui we never feel for the film. The scenes she has with her two nephews are priceless.

The deception that goes along with making money is not a new topic, but the double whammy of being hurt by such deception and becoming used to it is a very potent combination for a film that is rich in colour and slowly builds to a climax that is entirely necessary though not necessarily cathartic.

Along with Match Point, this is Woody Allen’s most satisfying film since the early 1990s and is enough to beg the question why he doesn’t make serious films more often.

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.

The Martian (2015)

André Crous

Sentimental and sloppy, this depiction of Mars may well be more realistic than its predecessors but has a long way to go to catch up to the focused brilliance of Gravity.

the-martianUSA
2.5*

Director:
Ridley Scott
Screenwriter:
Drew Goddard
Director of Photography:
Dariusz Wolski

Running time: 140 minutes

On a planet more orange than red, a botanist is reduced to eating vegetables grown in his and his former crew members’ excrement. That sounds a little icky, but the premise is obviously fascinating. One man has to survive the elements, including a lack of the two most crucial elements for human existence — oxygen and water — and wait it out until a rescue team can locate him and bring him back.

Matt Damon stars as said botanist, Mark Watney, who is left behind for dead by his five fellow astronauts during an evacuation from Mars, where they had been stationed for close to three weeks as part of the Ares 3 mission. Thanks to a bit of luck, which in this film always arrives just at the right time, and with remarkable frequency, Watney survives, but has to combat extreme loneliness and a decreasing supply of food and water.

Fortunately, the botanist has an oxygenator and enough hydrogen (thanks to the copious amount of fuel) for him to make water, which he subsequently uses to irrigate his newly cultivated nursery inside the mission’s space habitat. He is mighty creative, and it seems like everything he puts his mind to turns out to be a complete success.

That is certainly one of the film’s major dramatic issues. Despite the fundamental fact that this is a man alone on an entire planet with very few resources and, at least initially, no contact with the (outside) world, his psyche does not seem particularly affected nor do we see him struggle to accomplish any tasks. Granted, astronauts do receive an extraordinary amount of training prior to lift-off, but the sheer effortlessness of Watney’s actions here makes it seem like this whole survival business is a cinch, which serves absolutely no dramatic purpose for the viewer.

The only major challenge for Watney comes in the second half, mere seconds after the director of NASA tells his colleagues their plan to rescue him will work only on the assumption that everything on Mars keeps going well. Without so much as a breather, the film cuts to a giant explosion on the Red Planet that all but eliminates Watney’s chances of survival in the long term.

This is one of two unbelievable low points in the film. The other comes during the rescue at the end, when multiple problems, including speed and altitude, make it appear there is no way for the team to extricate Watney from the planet’s atmosphere. But lo and behold, as if by the hand of God, Watney inexplicably manages to steer himself right up to the spacecraft with minimal effort.

Compare this scene with the opening of Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning Gravity, in which we get a real appreciation of the smallness of man and the near-futility of his actions in an environment as unfathomably extensive as outer space. In Gravity, things often go wrong, and when they do, the character responds with emotion-fuelled but not emotion-driven reactions while putting all her scientific knowledge to use. In The Martian, Watney is clearly intelligent, but his intelligence and creativity are a simplistic solution to the screenplay’s lack of desire to develop any of the obstacles he has to overcome.

This is not where the film’s problems end, however, as the cinematography is an absolute disaster, too. Consider the shot that re-introduces us to the Martian landscape following the calamitous wind storm that sent the crew members off into space and left Watney to fend for himself. Instead of calmly presenting us with the spectre of one man on the planet, Scott decides to fly over the landscape like a majestic eagle looking for prey. In the words, exactly at the moment when the director should be conveying the desolation of his main character, he opts for a point of view that suggests some being floating right above him.

At another point, there is an absurd camera movement when the camera, clearly hand-held, rushes towards Watney at a particular action-packed moment inside the habitat. Scott, who is known as a serious director because of films he made more than 20 — some would say more than 30 — years ago, should now throw in the towel. While one may admire his above-average devotion to creating a more-or-less realistic depiction of life on Mars, the screenplay also combines the sentimentality of an Independence Day with the mind-numbing verbosity of Cast Away.

In the latter film, which Robert Zemeckis directed in 2000, Tom Hanks spent most of the film on a deserted island and spent most of the time speaking out loud to a basketball, “Wilson”. In The Martian, even though we get many different points of view (a conventional but deeply alienating way of providing a God’s-eye panorama of events), Watney makes continuous video logs, which ensures that not a minute of silence intrudes on the film’s generally chaotic propulsion.  

Down on here, there is plain confusion among some of the most intelligent minds in the world. Teddy Sanders, the director of NASA, is played by an expressionless Jeff Daniels; Chiwetel Ejiofor channels a frustrated head of Mars missions whose every effort is stymied by Sanders; NASA’s director of media relations always discovers important information right as it is made public, and she never knows what to do; and astrodynamicist Rich Purnell acts like a stoned college student rather than the genius behind the execution of the final act.

The film is divided into too many points of view, from Watney on Mars and his team on the Hermes spacecraft to astronomers at NASA in Houston, the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, Purnell in what appears to be a dorm room rather than at office, and even the Chinese National Space Agency, which comes to the aid of its American counterparts out of sheer, unadulterated big-heartedness. Clearly, Scott was scared to bog us down with a two-hour close-up of his main character’s actions all alone on Mars, but if J.C. Chandor could tackle this problem head-on in All is Lost, with unrelenting success, why did Scott have to be such a coward?

The Martian is focused on box-office success like a laser as it tries to inject humour (mostly via the disco music that the mission commander, Melissa Lewis, left behind upon evacuation to Watney’s great dismay) into the goings-on. But we cannot take events very seriously when everything keeps going rights, every time. Sure, there is a missile misfire and an explosion on Mars, but these issues are resolved within a scene or two and without any major time spent on the development of these solutions. Scenes such as Apollo 13’s brainstorming sessions to “invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole” are sadly missing here, as we only get an abridged final presentation of the solution played for laughs, which detracts from the hours of overtime spent coming up with a plan that makes sure the person being saved doesn’t die in the process.

Although entertaining, the film loses focus and skips over important stages on Mars by padding itself with scenes of comedy played on Earth. Scott does very little to distinguish his film from similarly conventional fare, especially insofar as (the lack of) character development is concerned, and delivers a film far less intelligent and creative than its main character supposedly is.

Paulina (2015)

André Crous

Rape victim seeks to understand reasons for assailant’s behaviour, but despite creativity, depiction ultimately just skims the surface of complexity.

la-patota-paulina

Argentina
3*

Director:
Santiago Mitre
Screenwriters:
Mariano Llinás
Santiago Mitre
Director of Photography:
Gustavo Biazzi

Running time: 105 minutes

Original title: La patota 

There are always at least two sides to a story where more than one person is involved, and in the case of Paulina by Argentine filmmaker Santiago Mitre, looking at and weighing all the sides can be discomfiting to anyone intent on clinging to black-and-white beliefs. The exercise may even produce immense confusion in the viewer looking to reconcile all these points of view.

The film itself is not confusing; on the contrary, even though it sometimes jumps back in time to cover events once more but from a different perspective, the story is very simple: Paulina, who has started her Ph.D. in law and is also the daughter of a judge, has decided to leave Buenos Aires and head back to her hometown in the Northeast of the country, close to the border with Paraguay, to teach human rights and democracy at a small school. The children, most of them of indigenous heritage, are sceptical of her presence, and the first classes get off to a bad start when Paulina seeks to discuss the concept democracy and is quickly confronted with a different outlook from these children who feel that white Argentines do not or cannot represent their needs in the system. 

One night, when Paulina drives back home on her motorcycle, she is attacked. Suddenly, without warning, the film flips back on itself to show us characters we had not seen before. A young man, Ciro (Cristian Salguero), who works at a sawmill, learns that his girlfriend has broken up with him to hook up with a man from outside the community. He is outraged, and when he sees someone driving a motorcycle in the dark, he takes it to be her and encourages his friends to rape the woman.

This is where the film’s path converges with the previous storyline, as we see Paulina mistaken for the girlfriend and her being gang-raped by the group of boys, most of whom attend her class. The tense build-up, covered very competently by the director and his cameraman, who use short takes that positively vibrate with adrenaline, as well as the shocking incident itself, leaves us stunned, but Paulina’s subsequent actions turn the film into an unexpected examination of the different ways in which people can respond to the same events.

At the centre of the story is Paulina, who feels a desperate need not only to teach but to understand the people in this community. This understanding, we come to see, extends to her rapists and their situation, as well as a questioning of the rationale for punishment as meted out by the law. Her personal life takes a major hit, as well, because of her way of dealing with the fall-out of the rape, but she is determined that the cold rules of the law not be applied to people if the judicial outcome is more or less as pointlessly cruel as the act itself.

Such thinking sends her father, who had his hopes pinned on her to follow in his footsteps, flying into a rage, and we can understand his concern for his daughter’s personal and professional situation very well. On the margins, there is also Paulina’s boyfriend, Alberto (Esteban Lamothe from Villegas), who finds her drifting away from him with every new revelation.

At the same time, it becomes clear throughout Paulina’s arguments that she is the one who should decide over her own life, just as the people affected by the government’s decisions should also be allowed to decide on their own rules. The film does not answer the question whether one should intervene if someone makes a “wrong” decision but instead highlights the fact that people have their reasons, and just because we do not understand them does not make them irrelevant.

Paulina is at its best when it shifts the audience’s empathy between the father and the daughter, and the departure from the linear narrative is effective in this regard, although it would have had a greater impact if it had been used more than just a couple of times. As things stand, it seems more like a gimmick, which is unfortunate.

The film handles its difficult material, including the brutal plot elements of a rape and the mulling of an abortion, but also the marginalisation of a community with little formal education, very competently. There is also fertile ground for discussion, especially about Paulina’s decisions along the way, which seem ever more difficult to comprehend, both for those around her and the audience.

In its effort to create ambiguity by showing us the world is more complex than we might like to believe, however, Paulina only skims the surface of a number of important issues. Had any one of them been exploited with greater care, this may have been an engaging film worthy of deep reflection, but instead, its reluctance to dig below the surface rather than merely hint at the turmoil makes this an incomplete production, well-intentioned though it certainly is.

Viewed at the San Sebastián International Film Festival 2015

Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

André Crous

Sadly, another case where it is (far) better to read the book than watch the movie.

hitchcock-truffautUSA/France
2*

Director:
Kent Jones
Screenwriters:
Kent Jones
Serge Toubiana
Directors of Photography:
Nick Bentgen, Daniel Cowen, Eric Gautier, Mihai Malaimare Jr., Lisa Rinzler and Genta Tamaki

Running time: 80 minutes

It may share a title with one of the most accessible studies of a filmmaker ever published, but in his documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, director Kent Jones (assisted here on the screenplay by Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana) forgot to take a page from the very book with which it shares a title. As a result, it fails to present its facts, few and far between though they may be, in a compelling way.

What we end up with here is a messy assortment of thoughts and reflections on the Master of Suspense, countless extracts from his films (none of which is indicated to the uninitiated) and a mish-mash of audio excerpts taken from the legendary eight-day interview back in 1962 between the young but ultimately immensely influential French film critic/director François Truffaut and the ageing sage who had been thrilling the masses for many decades with his tales of murder but whose status as one of the cinema’s great auteurs was still underappreciated, Alfred Hitchcock.

In the film, we meet 10 directors, among whom only David Fincher proclaims a personal connection with the book, first published in 1966, which contains a wide-ranging discussion between the two cinephiles of all of Hitchcock’s films up to that point, just four short of the ultimate tally by the time he passed away in 1980. The conversation, which sadly was not filmed but only recorded, was facilitated by the bilingual Helen Scott, who gets only one shout-out here without any further information about her. Truffaut spoke no English, and Hitchcock spoke no French, so Scott interpreted back and forth between them from morning till late afternoon every day for more than a week.

Besides Fincher, some of the most loquacious speakers here are French directors Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas, with speed talker Martin Scorsese also called upon to share his views of Hitchcock’s most famous works. However, it is wholly unclear why these particular filmmakers and their ilk, including Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and the little-known James Grey, are recounting their impressions. Had we listened to someone like Brian de Palma, or Steven Spielberg, perhaps we could have learned something about tension, art and entertainment, but while these particular filmmakers are amiable enough, it remains a mystery why they were chosen to share their opinions of Hitchcock. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, they’re no François Truffaut.

Time and again, we return to the question of whether Hitchcock was an entertainer or an artist, a doubt he even expressed to Truffaut. Predictably, the film leans very heavily towards the latter, as was the intention of Truffaut at the time: Along with his colleagues at the Cahiers du cinéma film monthly, he praised the Hollywood-based British director for being the force that drives every one of his films, in other words, for being an “auteur”.

According to Truffaut, the work of an auteur might not always be good, but it is always better than the work of a non-auteur (he used the examples of French filmmakers Jean Renoir and Jean Delannoy as representatives of these two respective kinds of directors).

Hitchcock/Truffaut, unsure of its own raison d’être, turns towards armchair psychoanalysis in its second half, as the directors, most of whom are too young to have met Hitchcock, speculate about the fetish objects in Hitch’s films. Fortunately, we are spared any significant amount of discussion about the blonde actresses he employed, but the topic of dreams does come up, and it is truly puzzling that there is no mention of Spellbound, which was Hitchcock’s big “dream” film and also dealt very cynically with psychoanalysis.

Most frustrating is an extended sequence that encompasses an analysis of Vertigo, during which we learn precious little, except that the film works not because of its narrative, which is deeply flawed and more than a little silly, but because it is, in the words of Scorsese, “poetry”. Such bland statements about Hitchcock the artist, as opposed to Hitchcock the mass entertainer, bring absolutely nothing to our understanding of the director’s undeniable appeal.

What would seem to be the most important point of discussion is one that is mentioned all too briefly: Hitchcock’s problem with realism, especially following the brutal reality of World War II.

Scorsese admits that Vertigo has a “spirit of realism”, but that the film cannot possibly be described as realistic. This is in fact a larger issue in the director’s works and ultimately led to his ex-communication from the world of entertainment because of his stubborn refusal to renounce outdated techniques such as rear projection. This gimmick, often utilised in studio pictures during the age of black-and-white cinema, made Marnie — released in 1964 in between the French New Wave and in the middle of the British New Wave, both of which focused on the lives of people in the middle or the bottom half of society and whose films were shot on location — look downright laughable.

Truffaut, who was just 30 years of age at the time he conducted the interview in 1962, is always a magnetic speaker, his enthusiasm for Hitchcock palpable, and it is a shame Jones only very superficially compares an incident in the Frenchman’s début feature, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) with a famous story Hitchcock often told. But he fails to share with the audience, for example, that Truffaut asked himself “What would Hitch do?” when he shot the suspenseful scene in which the rebellious Antoine Doinel’s mother shows up at school to confront him about his lies.

It is all well and good to assemble a few friends to talk about a man who was a giant in the industry before they came along, but this film does not contribute to a deeper understanding of the man, his life or his films. At best, it may serve as a starting point for students who need to write a film review for their high-school English class. Those who did not know anything about Hitchcock or Truffaut before watching the film might very well learn the basics, but for everyone else, this film offers less than the bare minimum. Go out and buy the book instead.

Viewed at the San Sebastián International Film Festival 2015