France

Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958)

André Crous

A trial run for one of the most famous scenes in Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s Charlotte and Her Boyfriend puts two people in a room but only lets one of them speak (non-stop) for 10 full minutes.

Charlotte et son JulesFrance
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 13 minutes

Original title: Charlotte et son Jules

After the previous year’s lovely All the Boys Are Called Patrick, which Eric Rohmer, one of his colleagues at the Cahiers du cinéma, had written, Jean-Luc Godard tried his own hand at writing a short film. The product had a much more narrow focus but clearly never went through many drafts. Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is a stream-of-consciousness rant for a full 10 minutes in a confined space, and it loses steam very quickly.

It reunited Godard with Patrick‘s Anne Collette (whose character in that short had the same name) and features Jean-Paul Belmondo in one of his very first roles. Unfortunately for the director, Belmondo was called up to serve in the French army in Algeria shortly after the shoot. As a result, Godard filled in for him during post-production, so every time Belmondo speaks, it is Godard’s own voice, immediately recognisable by his higher pitch and slight lisp. It doesn’t fit Belmondo at all, although it does make the character sound fairly pathetic.

Collette plays the titular Charlotte, an aspiring actress who arrives at the apartment of her ex-boyfriend, a writer named Jules. It quickly becomes clear that she had left him, and he is still seething with rage. Serious about giving her a piece of his mind but unable to control his rage, he lashes out in a torrent of half-formed ideas that become more and more ridiculous as he spins out of control. All the while, she smiles, remains perfectly silent and is unaffected by this mood swings. It takes a very long 10 minutes, but ultimately, it is very satisfying to learn exactly why she decided to visit him.

While Jules moves passionately about his own apartment, marching back and forth with determination, Godard delivers the voice-over mechanically, like a robot half-awake. The film is clearly on Charlotte’s side, however. During the opening credits, the music only plays when the camera is on her, which turns to silence when there is a cut to Jules. Later on, when she tilts her head at him to the right or to the left, the camera tilts along with her. This perspective, as well as Jules’s non-stop, gradually less lucid verbal diarrhoea (he wants her to come back to him, but he keeps calling her an idiot), has a devastating effect on our perception of him.

The message almost seems to be that love drives one crazy. The film’s style emphasises this slight disconnect from reality, as we mostly see Charlotte and Jules visually separated by one-shots. This, in addition to Jules’s voice clearly coming from a voice-over that does not belong to the body we see on-screen, produces an odd discontinuity between sight and sound that is wholly appropriate to the story.

And yet, while Charlotte’s happy-go-lucky attitude offers a fresh contrast to Jules’s self-involved but utterly tedious diatribe, the film is mostly a bore and feels much longer than its brief running time. The setup obviously anticipates one of the best scenes in Breathless, in which Belmondo and Jean Seberg spend 20 minutes talking in a small apartment. But whereas Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is basically a monologue, delivered with a dubbed voice that lacks emotion, Breathless features two palpably living and breathing characters interacting with each other like real people. Charlotte and Jules, by contrast, very much remain rather shallow creatures of fiction.

The Carabineers (1963)

André Crous

The Carabineers has a thought or two about wars and the people who fight them but is mostly just an excuse for Jean-Luc Godard to separate image and sound from each other.

Les carabiniersFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean Gruault
Roberto Rossellini
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Les carabiniers

There are moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Carabineers when it seems the director is about to say something of real importance about the immorality of warfare or the pointlessness of killing one’s fellow men and women. But no. Nine times out of ten, he would rather engage in experimental (mostly audio, sometimes visual) gimmicks. As a result, the film ends up being about as ineffectual as its dimwitted central characters.

The opening screen may be the most important of the entire enterprise. Quoting Jorge Luis Borges in a 1963 interview with Madeleine Chapsal from L’Express, a handwritten title card informs us that “More and more, I’m striving for simplicity. I use worn metaphors. Basically, that’s what is eternal. For example, stars resemble eyes, or death is like sleep.” Given the eccentric behaviour of its characters and the minimalist sets they inhabit, Godard’s film can’t be considered even remotely realistic. This quotation seems the best possible key to understanding the film as a kind of macabre caricature of reality, closer to theatre than cinema.

For one thing, the main characters are two brothers inexplicably called Ulysses and Michelangelo. One of them is married to a vampy but rather dishevelled woman named Cleopatra, the other to a Venus. No one resembles their literary or historical namesake in the slightest. It is possible Godard simply attributed high and mighty names to these floundering fools as a way of extending the film’s attitude toward war in general – an activity that, after all, is often described in undeservedly glowing terms.

Godard, whose The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat) – made in 1961 but not released until 1963 – already showcased the director’s ambivalent (to say the least) relationship to war, disabuses the viewer very quickly of any notion that warfare is heroic. In the opening scene, riflemen arrive at a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere (the surroundings are more barren than the moonscape) to deliver a letter from the king to draft Ulysses and Michelangelo into the army. Importantly, we are never told what country or which ideals they are fighting to protect, nor who the enemy is. But one of the carabineers (riflemen) tells the young men they may do whatever they want because “in war, anything goes”. And this is where Godard lands his most direct blow:

Michelangelo: I got a question.
Carabineer: Go ahead.
M.: In the war, can we take slot machines?
C.: Yes.
M.: No charges if we take old men’s eyeglasses? Can we break a kid’s arm? Both arms? Stab a guy in the back? Rob apartments? Burn towns? Burn women?
C.: Yes.
M.: And steal classy trousers?
C.: Yes.
M.: If we want, we can massacre innocent folks?
C.: Yes.
M.: Denounce folks, too?
C.: Yes.
M.: Eat in restaurants without paying?
C.: Yes, yes. That’s war.

As usual with Godard, the point could have been made much more succinctly, but it still lands. And soon, egged on by Cleopatra and Venus who see dollar signs where others see violence and bloodshed, the two men are off to war. What follows are snippets of life on the front. One of the biggest action scenes involves a lone tank driving around an ashen countryside with fewer than 10 riflemen in tow. We hear a lot of gunfire but see almost nothing. From time to time, a bomb explodes in the fields, but no one is injured. The representation is clearly theatrical and not meant to be taken as a realistic depiction.

Unfortunately, Godard’s distinct brand of alienation continuously prevents us from becoming emotionally involved. Everyone is shot offscreen or shown getting killed very far away. Onscreen excerpts from the soldiers’ letters back home speak of incredible violence (“We rip women’s rings from their fingers and make people undress before shooting them, naked, next to an anti-tank trap”), but we never witness any of this. Perhaps the men are lying, or perhaps Godard is too busy reinventing the war film to realise a fully functional machine (a story told on film) is more interesting than seeing it disassembled, rearranged and barely operational.

Not only is the violence made banal by being presented in its separate audio and visual components, but there is not a single recognisable human soul we can empathise with. Confronted with loud shots of gunfire but rarely seeing guns being fired or people getting killed, we feel nothing. The presentation of a near-rape is so matter-of-fact it is almost comical, and Godard’s willingness to steer us in this direction is monstrous.

Moreover, the film does not contain a shred of everyday humanity. When the men return home at the end of their tour, they are emotionless. Cleopatra and Venus, who have been cheating on them, show no emotion either. For nearly 10 minutes, they throw some postcards around, which appear as stand-ins for the real things, but what exactly Godard is trying to say about this blurry distinction between life and representation is unclear. Earlier in the film, Michelangelo had saluted a Rembrandt self-portrait, and Ulysses was mesmerised by Barnaba da Modena’s painting of “Madonna and Child”, but everything feels terribly ad hoc, not part of a larger, well-developed message.

After an extensive mish-mash of scenes from the “battlefield”, the story comes to an abrupt conclusion, closely following in the footsteps of Godard’s previous feature, My Life to Live. In this respect, the film does tie itself tightly to the fate of its characters: When it ends, their story ends; and thus, they must end, as well. While far from unappealing, The Carabineers lacks characters for us to become attached to, and ultimately, this mostly feels like just another contrarian exercise for the director to amuse himself with.

All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1957)

André Crous

The Rohmer-scripted All the Boys Are Called Patrick is among the most straightforward, playful films of Godard’s oeuvre, although the number of references to the world of film already start to pile up. 

All the Boys Are Called PatrickFrance
4*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Eric Rohmer
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 20 minutes

Original title: Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
Alternate title: Véronique et Charlotte, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick

With two rather conventional début films – a documentary (about the construction of a dam in southern Switzerland) and a genuinely delightful short (about a woman deciding to spice up her life by engaging in some prostitution) – under his belt, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on his next project in the autumn of 1957. Shot on 35 mm, the result was All the Boys Are Called Patrick, 20 minutes in length and based on a screenplay by that great fanatic of dialogue, Eric Rohmer. Although unexpectedly cute for a Godard production, it clearly anticipated the budding director’s future (pre)occupation with films and form.

The titular Patrick is actually just one playboy who chats up and arranges to hook up with every girl he meets. What makes this story so interesting is that the two girls he happens to cross minutes apart one afternoon are roommates, and it is a shrewd idea to give them different perspectives on being flirted with. However, while the central narrative idea is wonderful, everything that Godard was responsible for (most notably, the multiple references to art and other films) makes this immediately recognisable as the work of a young film enthusiast rather than a director.

Véronique (Nicole Berger) and Charlotte (Anne Collette) are two young women sharing a flat in Paris’s Montparnasse district. Véronique has a lunchtime appointment but tells Charlotte they can meet up at the Luxembourg Gardens between 2 and 3 o’clock. Charlotte, who reads Hegel in the morning and flips through some pulp fiction (The Fate of the Immodest Blonde, which Godard probably chose because it was written by Patrick Quentin) over lunch, is immediately hit upon when she arrives in the public park.

The chatty flirt is called Patrick (played by Jean-Claude Brialy), who is clearly as shallow as a puddle but spouts off multiple references to the world of film in an attempt to impress her. Pretending to speak Japanese, for example, he merely drops the names of two of the era’s foremost directors from the Land of the Rising Sun: “Mizoguchi-Kurosawa?” It would not be a leap to equate the character with Godard himself, although Brialy is infinitely better-looking.

Charlotte eventually acquiesces to having a quick coffee with him. At the café, the two share a table next to a man whose face is buried in a copy of Arts, whose cover provocatively proclaims that “French cinema is dying under false legends”. This article by François Truffaut appeared in May of that year. Patrick persists with the falsehoods as he claims to be studying law, although the film slyly reveals that he has a geometry textbook. Despite herself, Charlotte ultimately arranges a date with him the following evening.

Moments after parting, Patrick runs into Véronique, who is just returning from the Luxembourg Gardens where Charlotte was nowhere to be found. All but beating her into submission to have a drink, they go to another nearby café, where Patrick runs through more or less the same lines as before (he told Charlotte it has been a month since he has picked up a girl and tells Véronique it has been a year) but somehow scores another date out of this forced meeting. The atmosphere of widespread cinephilia evolves as Véronique is also carrying around a copy of Cahiers du cinéma (it’s the July 1957 edition, with Orson Welles on the cover; later in the film, the magazine’s co-founder, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, also gets a shout-out).

Fortunately, unlike many of the director’s later films, this is the work of someone gingerly experimenting with the medium and not yet trying to steamroll over its conventional form. While the editing is rather thrown together, there is still very much a story to latch onto here, and Rohmer, in particular, deserves our gratitude for keeping the dialogue snappy and spontaneous. 

All the Boys Are Called Patrick lags a bit in the second half, when Godard’s camera starts fixating on unnecessary details like the promotional poster for a Pablo Picasso exhibition (perhaps because Patrick, Pablo and the focal point of “Portrait of Paulo” all share the same first two letters, “Pa-“? I wouldn’t put such inanity past Godard) or a giant movie poster for Rebel Without a Cause that the girls have in their bathroom.

However, the verbal sparring keeps our interest, as the action we witness turns ever more complicated thanks to the way the girls tell each other about their respective Patrick. We know the truth, but it is fascinating to see them hiding and altering details about him to impress or slightly put down the other. One says he looks like Cary Grant, the other like the new American actor, Anthony something (presumably Anthony Perkins). Charlotte says she found Patrick incredibly interesting, and Véronique pretends she hates Coca-Cola, while the real events tell a very different story. There is something Rashomon-like about their interaction, albeit with fewer details and more uncertainty about the direction. 

The lack of firm direction from behind the camera is most evident in the endings of many scenes, which often consist of the characters laughing nonsensically at a non-existent joke. However, the story’s three-part structure is sublime in both its simplicity and efficacy. And despite the constant repetition of Beethoven’s “Rondo a capriccio in G Major” on the soundtrack and the camera’s unplanned (or badly executed) movements, the story loses almost none of its appeal, and the climax immediately gives way to the END intertitle. A perfect conclusion to a thoroughly enjoyable 20 minutes.

A Flirtatious Woman (1955)

André Crous

Devoid of the director’s usual pretentiousness, Jean-Luc Godard’s very first fiction short, A Flirtatious Woman, may just be one of the best films he ever created.

Une femme coquetteFrance
4.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Jean-Luc Godard

Running time: 9 minutes

Original title: Une femme coquette

Made with just a borrowed 16 mm camera and no money, A Flirtatious Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first foray into fiction filmmaking. The 24-year-old had shot a 20-minute documentary, Operation Concrete (Opération béton), the previous year, but intrigued by a Maupassant short story entitled “The Signal”, in which a married woman tries her hand at prostitution, he wrote an adaptation and filmed it without any dialogue on the streets of Geneva.

Except for the use of the voice-over and the primary focus on a female character, this feels nothing like a Godard film, which is precisely why it is so good. Technically, it was directed by “Hans Lucas”, Godard’s chosen pseudonym, which he also used on occasion as a byline for his work in the Cahiers du cinéma. The film is not weighed down by film references or political statements, and there are no silly attempts to re-invent film grammar. The French New Wave’s fascination with Hitchcock and with Bernanos via Bresson subtly infuses the narrative without ever overtaking it, and what we get is a thoroughly enjoyable, tightly focused, well-executed film with a central character who justifies her actions intelligently and with a human voice. This cannot be said of the bulk of Godard’s subsequent films. although the film does anticipate Godard’s fixation on prostitution.

In the first and last scenes, we see a young woman, Agnès (Maria Lysandre), writing a letter to her friend, Françoise. The letter is a full confession of the adultery she has committed, which we see in the flashback constituting the main body of the film. The voice-over is very clearly the words written in the letter, but even though this is a verbalisation of written material, the message is conveyed realistically and compellingly. This does not feel like something written down and read for the benefit of the viewer. Many of Godard’s feature films suffer from the burden of being lectures rather than stories. That is certainly not the case here.

Agnès recounts how she was on her way home one day to prepare lunch for her husband when she noticed a woman on a balcony. The woman was well-dressed and gave a warm smile to every man passing on the street below. Young, old, handsome, ugly… she didn’t discriminate. At one point, a serious young chain-smoker with sunglasses (a 25-year-old-going-on-45-year-old Jean-Luc Godard) noticed her, kept looking towards her and noticed she continued to smile at him. He went up, she went inside, and 15 minutes later, he came back out. Agnès is so thrilled by this overt display of flirtatiousness that she innocently dips her toe into the pool of prostitution, too.

On the Île Rousseau, a small island in the middle of Geneva, she approaches a man reading a newspaper on a bench. He peeks at him, again and again. This sustained series of shots culminates in the man being so taken with her coy glances that rushes towards her with a frenzied lust he can no longer control. After all, men are very simple creatures – if anyone good-looking shows the slightest bit of interest in them, they easily turn to putty. Surprised that her ruse was so successful, and also a little shocked by the passion she managed to rouse, Agnès runs back home. But the man pursues her by car, and when he catches up with her, he offers 50 francs (around $250 today) for the pleasure of her company. She doesn’t say no.

A Flirtatious Woman does not contain any dialogue or diegetic sounds. The soundtrack consists exclusively of Agnès’s voice-over reading of the confessional letter, along with bits and pieces of Bach playing continuously throughout. The narration is compelling not only because it comments on the action but also because it informs us about the narrator’s state of mind. Moreover, the words come across as spoken rather than read, which adds dynamism to this part of the soundtrack. The cinematography and the editing both seem a bit flimsy and thrown together from whatever footage Godard managed to collect, but the film’s appeal comes from its simple story told in a compelling way – largely thanks to the voice work, for which I presume the credit goes to actress Maria Lysandre.

Except for the Bach (mostly the “Brandenburg Concertos”) constantly blaring on the soundtrack, this is a wonderful piece of work. It may lack the formal playfulness and the philosophising we tend to associate with Godard, but the film is all the better for it. If only he had kept this up in his later work, though without appearing in them to the same extent as here (this is not merely a Hitchcockian cameo but a major character role), his motion pictures may have been infinitely more relatable.

Mouchette (1967)

André Crous

Robert Bresson was a thoughtful theorist on how to construct a film, but his characters do not resemble flesh-and-blood human beings. The widely praised Mouchette is among the worst offenders.
Mouchette

France
2.5*

Director:
Robert Bresson
Screenwriter:
Robert Bresson
Director of Photography:
Ghislain Cloquet

Running time: 80 minutes

Sometimes, even when confronted with material that ought to bring us to tears, there is no other way to respond than with boundless laughter. This is the case with Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, a terribly acted film about an innocent girl enduring one tragedy after another without any hope of salvation.

In a way, the audience should be able to sympathise with her because for them the possibility of salvation is equally elusive. Mouchette is a tragic pile-up of calamities, both in the life of its main character and in the art of filmmaking itself. Transitioning from one disaster (humiliation, death, rape) to the next is just one part of the equation, but Bresson rarely knows how to direct scenes with dialogue and is even worse when it comes to personal interaction.

(In)famous for using non-actors in his film, Bresson gives the titular role to the 16-year-old Nadine Nortier. She had never appeared in a film before and would not do so again. Her character is in a truly miserable situation. With a mother on death’s door and an alcoholic father, she has to take care of her baby brother. She has another brother her own age, but somehow he manages to be absent from most of the film. And because of her simple clothing, clog-like shoes and reserved manner, her classmates and imperious teachers relentlessly pick on her. Of course, as with many other female characters in Bresson’s films (Au hasard Balthazar immediately comes to mind), she bears it all with a brave face but no push-back.

The one glimmer of hope peeking out from among the rubble of the girl’s existence is a bumper car ride. Although the staging lacks even a modicum of creativity, we finally see Mouchette emote without looking like a wooden Bressonian model. A well-dressed young man her age repeatedly bumps into her car, which turns her melancholy into joyful laughter. However, we can’t forget that this is a tragedy with a capital T. The scenes ends almost as quickly as it begins. When she is about to speak to the boy, her drunken father suddenly appears and hits her across the face. She silently yields to his authority and accompanies him back to the bar, albeit with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Halfway through the silent agony that is her existence, Mouchette is raped by a sleazy poacher named Arsène. Fortunately, unlike her counterpart in Balthazar, she doesn’t start dating the rapist. (Although she eventually calls him her lover, her motivation for doing so is much clearer than it was for Balthazar‘s Marie.) But the scene is an absolute farce. Mouchette and Arsène move hesitantly, in slow motion and without emotion towards and away from each other. He weakly grabs at her, she weakly repels him and then silently relents. We only hear the crackling of wood in the fireplace – a shockingly unsavoury metaphor for a director renowned for his use of sound.

Another metaphor – morally less objectionable but even more ham-handed – that the film deploys involves the hunt. In one of the first scenes, we see Arsène setting traps for pheasants. And in the film’s penultimate scene, Mouchette, whose name literally means “little fly”, witnesses a rabbit hunt. The viewer would have to be blind to overlook the explicit comparison.

But what is really grating about the film is Bresson’s apparent inability to create realistic drama. When Mouchette somehow loses her shoe in the mud, she takes a seat a few feet away. Quite a while later, Arsène appears, notices that she has lost her shoe, then takes her to his cabin and leaves her there before going back to the same spot to retrieve the shoe in the middle of a rainstorm. None of this makes any sense. The director so desperately seeks to inject drama into his film that he grasps as wholly incredible straws. Despite some nifty editing, the film’s final scene is not much better.

It boggles the mind why Bresson continues to be hailed as a visionary filmmaker. He certainly benefited from the admiration of the Cahiers crowd, but frankly, he was a one-trick pony. One of his first films, A Man Escaped, released in 1956, was a minimalist but tense work of genius. But it seems like the work of an entirely different and much more capable man than the one who subsequently made Pickpocket (whose interesting visuals barely compensated for the performance of its lead actor), and then Balthazar and Mouchette, both of which contain extraordinarily inept bits of acting throughout.

Mouchette feels out of step with its time, and not in a good way. Except for the bumper cars and the two hunting scenes, there is little dynamism, and a succession of setbacks suggests there is little to hope for and disengages us from the narrative. This little fly deserves to be swatted away.

Carnage (2011)

André Crous

Based on the Yasmina Reza’s play, Roman Polanski’s Carnage tightens the screws when two couples sit around the coffee table.

CarnageFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Yasmina Reza
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 75 minutes

The main premise of Roman Polanski’s Carnage is to have two couples stuck in an apartment, unable to leave because of the hosts’ social obligation to offer their guests more coffee and cobbler, the guests’ obligation to indulge their hosts by accepting said offers, and above all, the collective obligation to keep smiling despite a shared desire to skip forward in time. Social commentary forms an important layer of this 75-minute film, though the most interesting aspect is the way in which the confined spaces of a New York apartment – of which we see the lounge area almost exclusively – can serve as a pressure cooker for the frustrated emotions of four seemingly level-headed individuals.

In the very first scene, which takes place in New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, there is an altercation between two teenage boys symmetrically framed by big trees on either side. Visually wedged in the middle of the shot, one boy swings a stick and hits the other in the face, leaving him visibly injured.

In the subsequent scene, the parents of the two boys are in front of the computer, typing out a carefully worded statement that seeks to establish the facts (one boy’s teeth were knocked out) without offending either party. The parents of the alleged victim invite the parents of the alleged aggressor to their apartment to figure out how to proceed.

They all walk on eggshells, scared of being perceived as aggressive, for that would reflect on their children’s roles in the fight, but equally scared of being perceived as weak, for the same conclusion could be drawn just as easily. These people, acutely aware of the meaning of reputation, suddenly find themselves embroiled in a story of teenage aggression and need to find a solution.

But in twists that oscillate between purposefully frustrating and hilarious, and despite simmering tension and mutual contempt, the two couples, as a result of common civility, find themselves unable to leave the apartment. The setup is more realistic than, say, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which guests at a dinner party can’t leave and ultimately eat themselves to death, but such thoughts couldn’t have been far from the dark mind of Polanski.

Carnage depends heavily not just on the sharpness of the dialogue but also on the delivery by the four actors. In this respect, it is a very successful ensemble piece, pairing the slightly reserved Jodie Foster with the garrulous John C. Reilly, and the very uptight Kate Winslet with the snotty Christoph Waltz.

Based on a play by Yasmina Reza called God of Carnage, Polanski’s film is about the way dialogue can be wielded to gently do away with belaboured niceties. All that is required is some time and an airtight lid. It becomes obvious how laughter is used to alleviate moments of social uncertainty, though laughter itself can easily turn awkward, leading to a vicious circle of self-inflicted torture.

Ultimately, this Gordian knot of awkwardness is cut in a way that is greatly satisfying, though it comes at some personal and professional cost to Waltz’s loudmouthed character, whose devil-may-care attitude generates the most laughs by far and allows the actor to channel some of his Inglourious Basterds persona.

It is fascinating to watch the cracks appear in the formal pairings of the couples and alliances shift to give the characters the illusion they are not weak, although much dirty laundry is aired in the process of re-establishing a zone of social comfort.

As opposed to David Fincher’s Panic Room, in which Foster also starred, or Polanski’s own Death and the Maiden, both of which took place in one location, Carnage lacks a central animating force, some big goal, and the viewer has no real narrative expectation. There is much verbal mudslinging and even a few moments of physical conflict, but the conversations go off on multiple tangents, and after an hour, the whole muddle becomes a bit draining.

Luckily, Polanski doesn’t outstay his welcome, and when the conversation runs dry, the film simply ends. Carnage has a great deal of the explosive potential that its title suggests, featuring generous performances by its four main players. Unfortunately, the plot is too thin to make this a truly great piece of work.

An Officer and a Spy (2019)

André Crous

Roman Polanski’s simplistic portrayal of the historic Dreyfus trial makes An Officer and a Spy a rather lifeless affair.

An Officer and a SpyFrance
3*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Robert Harris
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: J’accuse

Non-Jews often prefer to think of antisemitism as something that began and immediately peaked under the Nazis. That is a simplification of history that would border on baloney if it wasn’t so tragically uninformed. While history offers countless counterexamples, the two most notorious trials involving innocent Jews took place within just five years of each other: Leopold Hilsner (1899/1900), accused and convicted of two murders, and Alfred Dreyfus (1894), twice convicted of treason. In both cases, a man’s alleged culpability was supported by a passionate wave of antisemites frothing at the mouth for a conviction rather than actual facts. The story of Hilsner, a native Czech in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sadly remains untold on the big screen. Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy recounts the fallout of Dreyfus’s trial and, ultimately, his quasi-exoneration.

We meet Dreyfus on the worst day of his life. On 5 January 1895, he is stripped of his rank in front of his fellow soldiers. It amounts to a public humiliation ceremony. Born and raised in France, he had joined the military as a young man. Towards the end of the 19th century, he registered at the prestigious War College, where he was an outstanding student. Then came the accusations that he had shared state secrets with the German Empire. Handwritten notes were produced as evidence, and he was found guilty. His sentence was lifelong solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, offshore from French Guiana, where even the guards were not allowed to speak to him.

One of his former teachers at the War College, Georges Picquart, gets a promotion to lead the “Statistical Section”, which is really the counter-espionage service. This section had been responsible for collecting (rather, creating) the damning evidence that established Dreyfus’s guilt during the trial. Full of purpose and moral clarity, Picquart seeks to shake up the dusty bureaucracy immediately. When he learns that one of his officers regularly receives intelligence from the German Embassy passed on by the cleaning lady, he decides to do the pick-up himself, despite having no intelligence-gathering experience whatsoever. That night’s pick-up produces incriminating snippets of paper that quickly lead him to suspect a French officer of being a spy for the Germans. And it isn’t long before the officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, is revealed to be the real culprit in the affair that convicted Dreyfus.

Under Polanski’s direction, evidence simply falls into Picquart’s hands on countless occasions. Whatever avenue he pursues is always the right one and leads him on a straight path to crucial evidence that proves his intuition correct. It is to be expected that a screenplay based on real events will simplify life’s messiness for the viewer. But the facile jumping from one point to the next here cannot be exciting to the viewer because it all feels totally contrived. In addition, the army’s top brass are antisemitic across the board, and none of them appears to harbour any doubt whatsoever about the cover-ups and forgeries that sent Dreyfus to prison. Except for Picquart, no one wants to track down the real criminal, which is mind-blowing and not particularly convincing.

It becomes clear that the army really targeted Dreyfus for the crime of, in today’s parlance, “breathing while Jewish”. The xenophobia among the powerful is evident and unabating. In an early scene, Picquart’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Sandherr, is shown bedridden with syphilis, whining about how outsiders have invaded the motherland. “When I see so many foreigners around me, I notice the degeneration of moral and artistic values. I realise that I no longer recognise France. [Please protect] what’s left of the country!” he pleads with Picquart. But this moment, which finds a strong echo in the current resurgence of nationalism, is left undeveloped. Polanski also fails to detail how the Dreyfus affair exacerbated feelings of Christian Gallic pride among the general population.

But Picquart goes it alone, persevering despite his inherent antisemitism, driven by a desire for justice. He carries out his investigation without the help of anyone else in his intelligence office. No amount of pushback from the generals above him can douse his passion for the truth, and no one intimidates him. These might be admirable characteristics in a man, but we do not see him emotionally tested. Everything always works out. By the time all sense of justice seems lost, he suddenly meets not only Deputy (and future Prime Minister) Georges Clemenceau but also revered novelist of the working class, Émile Zola. Within days, Zola’s famous newspaper article, “J’accuse!”, lays into every powerful individual involved in the Dreyfus conspiracy. And thus begins the final legal brawl.

But despite France being a colonial power, the scenes in court, openly biased in favour of the military, paint the country as little more than a banana republic. What should be the most intense part of the film is staged and edited together as a comedy.

Jean Dujardin stars as Picquart, but despite his amiable demeanour, the character doesn’t undergo any change – a point strikingly made in the film’s final scene. An unrecognisable Louis Garrel plays Dreyfus, whose lack of presence in the film makes him a peripheral character in his own story. But in the scenes where he does appear, he responds to the constant humiliation with brave stoicism that sometimes cracks under the pressure of boiling anger. In other words, like a real human being.

It is well established that in 1977, a 43-year-old Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, later identified as Samantha Gailey. He admitted to this in court. So, while he has said explicitly that he understands Dreyfus’s persecution, their cases are in no way the same. Dreyfus was innocent and was framed because he was Jewish. Polanski was and is still guilty because he committed a criminal act. In this regard, his being Jewish is about as relevant as his being 5’5″. If the director really wanted to make a film about his alleged innocence (despite pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor), let him stage a re-enactment of his starring role in the vile 1977 rape. 

But there is no connective tissue whatsoever between An Officer and a Spy and Polanski. The film isn’t good or bad because of his personal life. It is just mediocre because he couldn’t be bothered to imbue it with the authentic messiness of life.

Venus in Fur (2013)

André Crous

Venus in Fur is a two-character, single-location film by Roman Polanski that is delicious, sexy and gripping.

Venus in FurFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
David Ives
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: La Vénus à la fourrure

The term “masochism”, which refers to the feeling of excitement some people get from being hurt, abused or degraded, comes from the surname of the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz), published in 1869, revolved around a man who willingly lets himself be dominated by the woman of his desires.

The novel has been adapted for the big screen at least five times before and is the source material for Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, which ignores the side plots and focuses like a laser on the central couple. Besides having only two characters, the master filmmaker has gone for even more minimalism by setting the action in a single location, a theatre.

It is the kind of setup Polanski knows well from another film he made, Carnage, which saw four characters stuck in an apartment, determined to solve the problem of the one couple’s son having beaten up the son of the other. Both Carnage and Venus are tightly wound pieces that rely on powerful acting and subtle shifts in the power balance to hold our attention instead of the camera.

Venus in Fur is set inside a small, rather rundown theatre in Paris, where a middle-aged theatre director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is holding auditions for his upcoming play – of course, based on Sacher-Masoch’s book. He is desperate, having seen too many actresses who have absolutely no grasp of the main character and is about to leave when in stumbles Wanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), who is wet to the bone; however, the rainstorm outside hasn’t doused her garrulousness in the least, and Thomas wants to get this chatty, slightly overbearing (or intimidating?) woman out of his sight as quickly as possible.

She has her ways to break down his defences, however, and it is only a matter of time before they end up on stage, with Wanda (also – coincidentally? – the name of the main character in the play) gently wresting control from the director after she impresses him with her interpretation of the role.

Films that take place in a single setting are few and far between. The best-known examples are probably Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, both of which starred at least a dozen different characters whose interactions we could follow, which made the director’s job very easy when it came to keeping the viewer interested.

But those two films were from 1957 and 1947, respectively. An equivalent may be found in one of Ingmar Bergman’s last films, After the Rehearsal, from 1984, which is also set in a single space, and moreover takes place on the stage of a theatre and only has a total cast of five. There are a few other examples of note (such as Richard Linklater’s Tape, the overlooked but tense Buried and the modern-day triumph starring Robert Redford, All is Lost). However, this kind of self-imposed minimalism is something directors tend to avoid because the setup doesn’t showcase their dazzling use of the camera or innovative editing or control of a crowd of extras.

It takes an individual with a certain kind of talent to film what is essentially a theatre piece and make it come alive despite the obvious limitations. Polanski, who co-wrote the screenplay with David Ives, infuses his story with sexual tension, comedy and the word that keeps popping up in Thomas’ vocabulary, “ambiguity.” (Wanda keeps confusing it with ambivalence, and with good reason.)

The sexual tension is expected, but the film really earns our admiration through its comedy. Look how the ring tone of Thomas’ mobile phone references Wagner (definitely not a good omen), or the jacket Wanda pulls out of her bag is not only historically accurate but fits Thomas like a glove. This may not sound like comedy, but the actors let the moments sink in just long enough to thoroughly enchant us.

Despite our better judgement, we are constantly aligned with Thomas in the position of victim. We know this Wanda is up to no good, but Polanski’s camera always returns to a spot at the same level as Thomas, who seems to be getting ever more enjoyment out of her game of domination. In terms of content, there is not much going on here – Wanda seems to be omniscient and always in control, and she displays no real signs of character development – but the mystery of who she is very effectively animates the film throughout its 90-minute running time.

Polanski cleverly elides the space between the worlds of the film and that of the text, either by having Wanda respond in character to a question posed by Thomas (rather than the play’s Severin), inserting the name “Thomas” in the play, or even adding sound effects to give invisible objects a measure of existence, exactly as Lars von Trier did in Dogville.

Although we are captivated by the two characters, whoever they are, there are one or two big jumps that spoil the film and seem to come from nowhere. The first takes place right at the beginning when a misunderstanding leads to Wanda taking to the stage and Thomas simply yielding to her brazen informality. The other happens at the end when we are asked to believe Thomas has surrendered his sanity to the point where he would give up everything for a moment longer with his crazy actress.

More bizarre moments follow, and the film ends with some strong, dramatic catharsis that is both powerful and hilarious, answering some of our questions without removing all the ambiguity about Wanda’s identity.

Venus in Fur is a highly entertaining film that, although not as strong or as entertaining as Carnage, proves Polanski’s skills as one who can manipulate his audience’s emotions. Even while he deals with a story as intimate as that of two individuals vying for power, he deftly draws us in with a laugh here and a lingering question there.

Les misérables (2017)

André Crous

Although the resolution is surprisingly anticlimactic, Les misérables pulses with a pervasive sense of injustice. It is a masterful time bomb that keeps ticking until close to the end.

Les Misérables (2017)France
4*

Director:
Ladj Ly
Screenwriter:
Ladj Ly
Director of Photography:
Julien Veron

Running time: 16 minutes

For most people (especially for a middle-class white man like me), the low-income suburbs of Paris have a quality of mystery around them similar to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Known as the banlieues, they are filled with expansive but dilapidated high-rise apartment blocks around half a century old. They are widely known as places of poverty and unrest, and in recent years they have been the venue for countless riots directed at the police. Films like City of God (Cidade de deus) and Hate (La haine) draw attention because they offer a glimpse of this eventful but often dangerous other world that is visible from the city centre (of Rio and Paris, respectively). They also make waves because of their politics and their skill at making this world accessible to a viewer who may be too scared to set foot there.

With a few caveats, let’s add Ladj Ly’s 16-minute Les misérables to the two aforementioned masterpieces. In this short film, a trial run for his acclaimed 2019 feature with the same name, the director sets two polar opposites against each other: a group of three policemen patrolling the streets of a notorious banlieue, Clichy-sous-Bois Montfermeil, and a trio of teenage boys, likely the sons or grandsons of immigrants, who are flying a drone over this (their) neighbourhood.

The policemen patrol the streets and harass the locals under the guise of laying down the law. But their approach is both verbally and physically violent, more than likely as a way of pre-emptively defending themselves against any potential enemy in this part of the city where they don’t belong. In an early scene, they drive past a bus stop where they see a young girl smoking. The loudest cop in the group, Chris, (arguably, sexually) assaults her in an effort to uncover any amount of drugs on her person. This confrontation is followed by another arbitrary shakedown and a violent altercation in which the police appear to shoot a defenceless boy.

But it is all captured thanks to the drone, whose owner the policemen do their best to track down and… assault. Mathieu Kassovitz’s Hate also deployed a drone (when the film was shot in the summer of 1994, such a thing didn’t exist, so the 27-year-old fashioned one out of a camera tied to a remote helicopter), and Ly clearly pays homage to his cinematic predecessor. This time, however, the point of view does not belong to God but to the very real technology of today. By 2017, surveillance drones had become commonplace in modern warfare, and while they can kill from far away, they can also record things that would otherwise remain unseen, as Dziga Vertov already made clear nearly a century ago.

Les misérables opens and closes on Laurent, the newest member of the police team. Having recently been transferred from the relatively quiet city of Poitiers, he has to balance the pressure of his peers to quash any alleged wrongdoing with his own moral code, which is more accommodating and less pugilistic. Between those bookends, a firestorm erupts and his life changes.

The best shorts show how quickly things can change. In his rush to string all the parts together, however, Ly botches not only his staging of the critical police assault but also the series of events leading up to the film’s (anti-)climax. It feels like essential contextual tissue was cut in order to bring the film in at a certain length, and we are left with a central scene that appears out of nowhere. The expected clash between the two trios of characters also fizzles out as the teenagers and their lives are all but ignored in the second half, which makes it less easy to empathise with them as people.

With an ominous bass line supporting the minimalist electronic score that builds ever higher, couching the latter’s optimism in a vague sense of dread, the film rises to its climax only to stumble momentarily at the finish line. And yet, this restless short film’s portrayal of the Parisian banlieue and the injustice of living under corrupt police rule in a supposedly democratic society is nothing if not visceral and in-your-face.

Synonyms (2019)

André Crous

In Synonyms, a former Israeli soldier forsakes his country and its language and turns up in Paris only to find that knowing French is very different from being French.

SynonymsIsrael/France
3*

Director:
Nadav Lapid
Screenwriters:
Nadav Lapid
Haim Lapid
Director of Photography:
Shai Goldman

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Synonymes

The opening shot of Nadav Lapid’s Golden Bear–winning Synonyms is one that will be repeated on many occasions throughout the film in a (surprise, surprise, given the title) way that looks different but has essentially the same meaning. Moving forward and sideways with no clear sense of the horizon, we alternate between pavement and sky. In between, we catch brief glimpses of buildings, immediately recognisable as Parisian. It is our point of view, but then and later again and again, it always floats away to show the person whose view it actually is: the twenty-something Yoav (Tom Mercier), a former Israeli soldier who has “escaped”, in his words, to France and shunned his life in Israel.

Somehow, oddly, we never learn exactly what his motivation for leaving was. The film deals almost entirely in the present without recognising the past, which is exactly what Yoav is intent on doing. On his first day, he arrives at an expansive but bare apartment in the French capital, where he spends the night. The next morning, while taking a shower, his backpack disappears, and he is left without a stitch of clothing. Lucky for him, his curious upstairs (and upscale) neighbours find him passed out in the bathtub and take pity on him by dragging him up to their place, laying him down in their bed and covering his naked body with their goose down. One of them notices that Yoav is circumcised.

That “one” is the boyish Émile (Quentin Dolmaire), a struggling writer with perfect skin and an exquisite wardrobe, who also gets under the covers to warm up the stranger’s body by rubbing against him. It turns out Émile runs a factory (somewhere, making something) and likely inherited it from his family, who also pay the rent. The other is the oboe-playing Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who is ostensibly his girlfriend, although there is no apparent affection between the two. Affection is reserved for the newcomer, Yoav, who shares many an intimate moment (though never explicitly sexual) with Émile in the first half before Caroline makes a (sexual) move in the second. The setting may be comparable, but the tension of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Dreamers is completely missing.

Yoav is nothing if not absolutely entrancing. In his feature film acting début, Tom Mercier draws us closer to his character primarily by having the face he has and by utterly devoting himself to his character. Yoav’s chosen uniform of Frenchness is an extravagant orange overcoat, given to him by the extremely French, polo neck–wearing Émile, which he wears almost throughout the entire film. Looking like a Jewish version of Jean-Paul Belmondo in his youth, albeit with the eyes of a zombie, Mercier exudes a sex appeal that is derived not from his body (although the many full-frontal shots will thrill a sizable part of the audience) but from the combination of vulnerability and devil-may-care self-confidence.

And yet, very little of substance actually happens. When it does, it comes up against Yoav’s self-imposed obstacle of language. Whatever happened in Israel was so terrible that he has given up speaking Hebrew, although he gladly engages in accented French with Hebrew-speaking Israelis in his newfound home, including at the Israeli Consulate General in Paris, where he works (!). But when an old girlfriend Skypes him or his father turns up in Paris and somehow tracks him down, his refusal to speak his mother tongue cuts off all avenues to us gaining a better understanding of his motivations. A small scene that shows (unwanted) remnants of his past in the present – even a dream with him speaking Hebrew – would have helped enormously to overcome this linguistic absurdity. 

The film takes nearly two full acts to arrive at anything resembling a raison d’être. While we know all along that Yoav’s integration into French society is limited to his frequent interactions with Émile and Caroline, it is only in the final stretch that he takes his duty to assimilate semi-seriously. This is where the film finally starts to look more earnestly at the drama associated with changing one’s national identity and the struggles one faces while trying to be accepted into the fold.

But the screenplay and the directing fail in many of the scenes where Yoav speaks French. Despite the accent, he speaks the language fluently and even uses multiple complicated constructions. And he relies on an erudite vocabulary to expatiate on everything from his own experience in the military to Hector’s adventures in the Trojan War. Then, suddenly, everyday words, like “chaussette” (sock) or “tiède” (lukewarm), trip him up. Such moments feel completely unrealistic. Besides, we have no idea where or how Yoav learned to speak French so well in the first place. He even seems to understand it almost perfectly, which is a miraculous feat for a non-native speaker who just moved to a new country. These instances remind us that the film is manufactured, and they alienate us from the experience of living the diegesis that Mercier, in so many other respects, fully embodies. 

The wild camerawork out on the street can be nauseating, but director of photography Shai Goldman does an exceptional job of the more intimate moments. In particular, the kissing scene in the tiny apartment where Yoav stays for most of the film is shot in a way that conveys feeling and puts us inside the two actors’ private bubble but leaves us scratching our heads at how he managed to pull off such a show of dexterity.

But dextrous is not a word that can be applied to the screenplay. Besides the structural issues – in particular, the number of scenes that fail to advance the plot – there is also the issue of character development or just presence. Some characters that play a major role in the first half simply fall out of the narrative by the latter part of the film. One memorable example is the roid-brained Yaron, who suspects everyone of being a potential anti-Semite and seeks to smoke them out by loudly humming the Israeli national anthem while invading everyone’s personal space on the metro. His behaviour has us on tenterhooks for a while, but then he disappears in one of the many gaps between scenes.

In a flashback, we see Yoav during his military service shooting a target to smithereens to the beat of Pink Martini’s “Sympathique”. The song’s lyrics continue to resonate in the present, as most of the film consists of Yoav channelling the sentiment that, “Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas déjeuner, je veux seulement oublier” (“I don’t want to work, I don’t want to have lunch, I just want to forget”). Some viewers may feel the same way.

Synonyms might have been better titled Ellipsis. Or Suspension Point. Or Three Dots…