France

Lucy (2014)

André Crous

Luc Besson’s fantastical, mad rush of a movie reminds us that the cinema is capable of wonderful things.

lucy-luc-besson-posterFrance/USA
4*

Director:
Luc Besson
Screenwriter:
Luc Besson
Director of Photography:
Thierry Arbogast

Running time: 90 minutes

Effortlessly referencing films as disparate as Nymphomaniac, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Transcendence, although with a deliberate lack of seriousness, Luc Besson’s Lucy is a breathless combination of visual effects and sympathetic fantasy like only the cinema can deliver. It never strives for anything more than pure entertainment and even sidesteps issues of power in favour of showing us unexpected domination, often by very gentle means, but the result is a thrilling ride you won’t want to miss.

The central (widely debunked) idea is one that most people have heard about at school or at college: Humans use a very small amount of their brain, and there is no telling what deeds we may be capable of if we used more. The screenplay hypothesises what would happen in a scenario where someone absorbed large quantities of CPH4, which is supposedly formed in the bodies of pregnant women to help the fetus grow, thereby rendering the individual almost infinitely brilliant.

Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, the girlfriend of a smalltime drug dealer in Taiwan, who is kidnapped and forced to be a drug mule carrying CPH4, hidden in a bag stitched into her stomach. But when one of her kidnappers tries to fondle her and she fights back, she also gets kicked in the stomach, and the CPH4 bursts into her veins, filling her with immense power and boosting her mental capacity into the higher double-digits.

The person who gives meaning and a measure of credibility to her rapid development is the brain researcher, Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman, who provides the fantastical plot with the right measure of gravitas it needs while also linking the material with that of Wally Pfister’s Transcendence, a similar but far inferior movie in which he played a very similar part). Norman has written volumes on the potential of the human brain, but most of it is pure conjecture. That is, until Lucy contacts him. She has just read all his work in a matter of minutes and tells him he is on the right track. However, she has only about 24 hours left on Earth as her mind will expand to the point where her body cannot contain her any longer.

And so the clock starts ticking while director Luc Besson points us in strange but thoroughly entertaining directions. The first half of the film is unexpectedly closely tied to Lars von Trier’s two-part Nymphomaniac films, as simplistic metaphors are made very vivid, although the effect is at times laughable, such as when Lucy is in danger and there is a sudden cut to an antelope being chased by a cheetah. These references culminate with Besson’s use of Mozart’s “Requiem”, which Von Trier also used in his film.

But the film’s loose structure enables Besson to incorporate references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in particular the stargate sequence but also the unforgettable monkey, obviously played by someone in an ape suit, with which both Kubrick’s and Besson’s films open. By the time we meet up with the monkey again towards the end of Lucy, having gone through something of a magical ride on a time machine that conjures up haunting images, we realise that Besson is attracting us on a primal level, through memories and desires to see moments from the past in a way only made possible by the technology of the present.

The film is not entirely successful, however, as it suffers from a few dialogues that don’t come across as particularly believable, such as the overly descriptive telephone conversation between Lucy and her mother, and a faux stargate sequence that simply cannot compete with the one that came 45 years earlier in one of Kubrick’s masterpieces.

A few details are also missing, such as an explanation for her ability to learn languages without any significant exposure to them, or her inability to notice her car being tailed when her level of brain use is nearing 99 percent. But in general, the plot is very easy to follow and while the film never appears to be pretentious, it certainly strikes a very able balance between amusement and intelligence, inasmuch as the one is constrained by the other in a form of mass entertainment like this one.

This may seem at times like a dumbed-down version of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, but while there is enough to keep the popcorn gallery entertained, Lucy also shows us the wonders the cinema can make us a witness to by recreating time in its almost unimaginable richness. Words cannot adequately describe the sense of awe we feel seeing the world going in reverse in fast motion, and while these sequences are also slightly comical, they remind us what movies can make us see and feel that we can never experience in the world outside the theatre.

Marguerite (2015)

André Crous

The story of a woman who sang opera even though she did not have a shred of talent is more enchanting than it sounds.

marguerite-xavier-giannoliFrance/Czech Republic
4*

Director:
Xavier Giannoli
Screenwriters:
Xavier Giannoli
Marcia Romano
Director of Photography:
Glynn Speeckaert

Running time: 130 minutes

In Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane’s second wife’s ambition of being an opera singer, despite having a terrible voice, was bankrolled by her rich husband, a newspaper tycoon and heir to a sizable fortune. The reviews were terrible, but their isolation from the rest of society served to protect her from the overwhelmingly negative response from both the public and the critics.

Marguerite, a French-Czech-Belgian co-production, provides French comedy legend Catherine Frot with a similar role – one informed by the real-life story of the wealthy but notoriously out-of-tune opera soprano Florence Foster Jenkins. Frot stars as the titular Marguerite, a French baroness whom we first encounter at a private recital in aid of First World War orphans. She is the only one who fails to recognise her attempt at channelling Mozart’s “Queen of the Night’s Aria” (Der Hölle Rache) from The Magic Flute is so crass it sounds like a cat is being strangled. The high society audience can barely restrain themselves from snickering into their perfumed sleeves.

But while many a newspaper excoriates her performance, one even running the headline “Pauvre Mozart” (Poor Mozart), a single critic, the dashing young Lucien Beaumont, lavishes her with ambiguous praise when he remarks that her voice seemed to want to expel some demon from the room. Of course, Beaumont has an ulterior motive, as we can easily guess when we see his friend, Kyrill, regale a well-to-do woman at the recital with tales of an art gallery he wants to open and inquires about the possibility of an investment.

Set between 1920 and 1921, Marguerite makes seamless transitions across time that become veritable leaps toward the end, as the baroness, with no shortage of instigation by Beaumont, moves toward an unskilled performance on a large public stage. Small moments along the way highlight her most intimate relationships, complicated by the lies people tell to spare her the pain of the truth.

It would be easy to dismiss the central character as a thinly veiled embodiment of anyone surrounded by yes-men and yes-women who merely exacerbate a toxic situation by avoiding the potentially agonising conversation that breaks the truth: This woman cannot sing to save her life.

However, such a view of the film would be overly simplistic, as Marguerite, thanks to Frot, is endearing and close to naïve but does not have a single mean bone in her body. Persistent exposure to her singing may cause some people to pine for hearing loss, but she is not hurting anyone, and telling her she is delusional and sounds worse than a broken bagpipe may wreck her life, which revolves around her love of music.

She has accumulated in excess of 1,400 partitions, some from the great masters of opera, and she seems to know the libretti by heart. But as those in the music industry are astounded to learn, such a deep knowledge of the fifth art does not preclude one from reproducing it with utter ineptitude, albeit with heart and soul.

Frot, however, is in complete control of her portrayal of the musically challenged baroness. Marguerite is serene and focused like a laser on the task at hand: Sharing her love of the opera with those around her. In this task she is loyally assisted by her butler, Madelbos, who has her best interests at heart and, considering the impressive collection of pictures he has taken of her in various poses, likely also yearns for her affection.

Director Xavier Giannoli, who presents his material with a straight face, includes the symbol of the peacock, which we never see displaying the beautiful colours of its feathers but whose screams we do hear at irregular intervals around the house (the sound is not dissimilar from the brief meow of a cat).

All the main parts are admirably depicted, and it is to Giannoli’s credit that this inherent romp is lighthearted but never turns into a circus. Unexpectedly, Marguerite’s climax is both funny and deeply affecting, as a moment of magical realism turns the spectacle into a heartfelt recognition of the purity of Dumont’s desire to be close to her husband and to sing her heart out. The balance here, as elsewhere in the film, is highly commendable.

The 127-minute film never feels like a drag; on the contrary, some characters – like Hazel, a talented young graduate from the conservatory, or the slightly mysterious Madelbos, who likes to take pictures of objects being consumed by fire and leaves an indelible imprint on the viewer – are sorely underdeveloped. Nonetheless, the effortless distinction with which the director and his leading lady present the comedic melodrama of this peculiar individual whom we cannot but pity makes for a very gratifying film.

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

 

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

Tom at the Farm (2013)

André Crous

Tom at the FarmCanada/France
3*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Michel Marc Bouchard
Director of Photography:
André Turpin

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Tom à la ferme

Xavier Dolan is an immensely gifted filmmaker. His début, I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mère), was experimental, visually stunning and inventive, and it had a grasp of rhythm that belied his age — he was 20 years old when it screened in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2009. Most importantly, it suggested a voice all its own with little recourse to the works of other filmmakers, even if one of the best sequences in the film was very similar to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (le Mystère de Picasso).

But his follow-up, Heartbeats, was infused with slow-motion and repetitive music immediately recognisable as being inspired by Wong Kar-Wai. And his third film, Laurence Anyways, about a man who wishes to transition to a female body, had images that brought to mind the perfectly framed visuals of Stanley Kubrick.

Now comes the Hitchcockian Tom at the Farm, in which a young man is virtually held hostage on a farm by the older, homophobic brother of his late boyfriend. But things are not quite as they seem, and the significance of all of Dolan’s personal touches to the narrative are outweighed by the heavy-handed use of Gabriel Yared’s bombastic music that liberally borrows from Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo and Psycho, in other words: Be prepared to hear a lot of strings played very loudly.

It is a real shame, because Dolan’s story has a lot to work with at the outset. Main character Tom (Dolan) drives to a farm deep in rural Quebec that he clearly has never visited before. He is anxious and upset, and when he arrives at the lonely farmhouse, covered in fog, no one is home. He finds a key on the front porch and enters, but not before we notice the passenger door on his black Volvo is a different colour, obviously recently replaced.

Inside, Tom falls asleep on the kitchen table and is awoken by the elderly woman of the house, Agathe (Lise Roy), asking him what he is doing in her house. Tom was the boyfriend of her late son, Guillaume, whose funeral is the next day. But Tom dare not say anything to her, especially when her eldest son (whom Guillaume, bizarrely, had never mentioned) grabs him during the night and tells him how he will behave if he cares about his own survival, or something like that.

This scene with the brother, whose face is obscured at first and then revealed in a loving close-up as the handsome, bearded Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), is unmistakably homoerotic. But what Dolan wishes to accomplish is far from obvious. The audience will almost certainly expect, because of this confrontation in the dark and many other ambiguous moments, that Tom and Francis will end up together. That is not exactly the case, although because of his physical resemblance to his later brother, Tom forms an attachment to him, and because of Tom’s presence on the otherwise deserted farm, Francis grows closer to him, too. All the while, he continues to bully Tom into fabricating stories about Guillaume’s supposed girlfriend back home in Montreal, which will engender enormous frustration in anyone who values equality and rejects discrimination.

We are taken on wild goose chases, as Dolan seems to suggest Francis is on the verge of revealing some big secret to him before the moment evaporates and we are left with nothing but our imagination. In one bizarre scene, Francis snorts some cocaine and decides to start dancing with Tom in the shed. This is one of the most sexual scenes in the film, but as with all the others, it seems to come out of nowhere and ultimately confuses us more than it answers any questions. Tom’s reluctance to ask some of these basic questions, including the reason for the entire town being openly hostile to Francis, also leaves us shaking our heads.

The worst, however, is a chance encounter right at the end that is almost too ridiculous to stomach and has us wondering how on earth Dolan thought he could get away with having a scene that is so implausible because it neatly ties up a story from an earlier monologue.

Tom at the Farm has some beautiful scenes, and Dolan’s face keeps our interest even when the shots tend to drag on for a very long time, but the film lacks the humour of Hitchcock and the claustrophobia of Polanski to turn his material into gold.

Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)

André Crous

la-vie-d-adeleFrance
3*

Director:
Abdellatif Kechiche
Screenwriter:
Ghalia Lacroix
Director of Photography:
Sofian El Fani

Running time: 175 minutes

Original title: La vie d’Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2

There is nothing subtle about Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour. The main character, Adèle, spends most of the film in tears, always desperately clinging to an ideal that is based on very little except naïve lust, and even though at first she is successful, her constant bouts of waterworks never endear her to the audience, who in a three-hour film certainly need more to hold on to.

This winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, centred on the relationship between a high-school girl, Adèle, and a slightly older student at the Academy of Fine Arts with blue hair, Emma, may have been pushing the envelope in France at a time when the issue of same-sex marriage was at its most polarising. But even if you didn’t know the film was directed by a man, it is very obvious from the presentation of the material that he finds the world of lesbians (and women, in general) rather peculiar, and it is a terrible shame that the mere instance of women kissing becomes something of a focal point for the camera, pretending that it is somehow unusual.

The clearest example of this approach is the eventful evening when Adèle meets Emma, as she first goes with her best friend to a gay bar — and in another moment of “revelation”, we see him kissing another man, indicating that (yes!) he is gay — and then strolls around the corner to a lesbian bar, where every second couple is making out in a seemingly orgiastic atmosphere that leaves little to the imagination and suggests that any man or woman hanging out in a gay bar will likely spend most of their time making out with random strangers. This is an incredibly simplistic depiction and may very well support many people’s view that homosexuality is the “other”, as these bars seem to have very little in common with your average “straight” bar. It is not just the background that is teeming with loose-lipped lesbians, but the camera makes a concerted effort to swing around from one couple to the other, its breath taken away by every new make-out session it notices.

This meeting between the two girls is like the realisation of a fantasy: Kechiche, who will eventually present a sex scene in almost its full duration, making sure to show close-ups of genitals being licked and sphincters being penetrated, and later on show Adèle taking a shower for no narrative reason whatsoever, visibly enjoys having all these women make out onscreen. There is little tension, unlike what Adèle must be feeling (this is her first time hooking up with someone who is a complete stranger), and therefore we don’t experience the event through her eyes, which is another shame. But this meeting is also the realisation of Adèle’s fantasy, who had actually noticed Emma on the street once and masturbated very loudly thinking of her one night at home.

“Chapters 1 & 2” in the title can refer to any number of things, as the film covers a lot of time in an unconventional way. There are no fade-outs or dissolves, only cuts, and therefore our usual expectation that time changes are signalled more visibly is not met by Kechiche. The most likely conclusion we can draw is that there was life before and life after Emma. From the outset, we can see that Adèle is not exactly confused about her sexuality. She keeps it a secret, she makes up convoluted excuses when confronted by her circle of friends, and she doesn’t even tell her best friend, Valentin, who is gay, that she likes girls, but she openly stares at Emma when she sees her on the street for the first time. But when Adèle kisses another girl from her class, she becomes so hysterically happy and needy, it’s embarrassing to watch, and we fear the same would eventually be true if she ever met Emma — and it happens exactly as we expect.

Kechiche has to be given credit from the scenes in high school, however. As he showed in his marvellous Games of Love and Chance (L’esquive), he likes the French author Pierre de Marivaux (also discussed here at length), and he knows how to direct teenagers to come across as passionate and extremely engaging. The first hour of Blue is the Warmest Colour has some of the best scenes, including the expected outrage from Adèle’s friends who confront her about her spending time with such the blue-haired Emma who they say looks like a boy. Verbal combat in Kechiche’s films is one of his finest skills as a director.

But the constant skips in time, sometimes a few months, sometimes a few years, does great damage to the development of Adèle’s character, not only because she seems to develop very little, but also because scenes that are required have simply been omitted. The scene of Emma at Adèle’s parents’ house underscores Adèle’s secrecy about her sexuality towards her own parents (in contrast with an earlier scene at the house of Emma’s very accepting parents), and yet Adèle has no “coming out”, which is truly regrettable and makes us wonder whether she ever tells them. As their only child, this silence and the lack of communication leave a very bad taste in the mouth.

The English title, which actually comes from the French title of the graphic novel by Julie Maroh that the film is based on, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude, is made visible in most of the scenes in the film, as they usually contain a blue object, more often than not a piece of clothing. In the French flag, blue is the colour of freedom, but whether or not Adèle ever finds the same kind of freedom Emma clearly has is an open question that the film refuses to answer. As far as we can tell, Adèle remains a desperate, lachrymose mess up until the end.

Not worthy of the hype it has received as a result of its award at Cannes and the much talked-about graphic scenes between actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, Blue is the Warmest Colour is flawed because it is made by someone who is more interested in titillating the audience and himself than in telling the compelling story of a woman on the verge, pushed there by her own needs and a refusal to share her life with anyone except Emma, someone who, most significantly, is comfortable in her skin. Were it not for the all-too-rare instance of verbal warfare, handled with aplomb by Kechiche, this may very well have been a completely forgettable film.

The Beloved (2011)

André Crous

Les Bien-AimesFrance
1.5*

Director:
Christophe Honoré
Screenwriter:
Christophe Honoré
Director of Photography:
Rémy Chevrin

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Les Bien-aimés

Just because it’s French doesn’t mean it’s any good.

The Beloved (Les Bien-aimés) tries to be everything and nothing at once, incorporating some terribly dramatic events into a film that shrieks with ostentation yet encourages us to forgive its sins because it is set to the melody of so-called love. Over a period of more than four decades, in a globe-trotting tale played out in locales from Paris to Prague to Montreal, we get a look at the world’s oldest profession with many songs that are somehow supposed to lift the mood but only make the viewer roll her eyes at the exasperating ordeal.

In a very promising opening scene that takes place in Paris during the early 1960s and pays homage to François Truffaut, we see plenty of women parading their legs onscreen. These legs are clearly meant to seduce, and they work their charms a little too well: A Frenchman mistakes Madeleine, a young demoiselle leisurely lingering on the sidewalk, for a prostitute. But she has nothing better to do and, seizing the day for a quick buck, unexpectedly finds her calling.

News travels fast, and before long, Madeleine is approached by every Tom, Dick and Harry for a good time. One day, she meets a young Czech doctor called Jaromil — for some confounding reason played by Raša Bukvić, a Franco-Serb actor who speaks Czech with an accent — and elopes with him to Czechoslovakia, shortly before 1968.

Love can make the world turn round, but it makes this film fall flat on its face, and we know things are going pear-shaped when the actors soon start belting out dreadfully dull songs on the street. The songs are too long, too numerous and too boring to make us care about the characters, and while (or, perhaps, because) director Christophe Honoré tries to jazz up his sets by using bright colours or, on one occasion, lighting his characters with an enormous spotlight, the action has a consistently phoney feel to it.

As the young Madeleine, Ludivine Seignier does bring a certain shine to the boggy waters of the plot, but once she disappears, any interest disappears along with her. As an adult, she is played by the grand dame of French acting, Catherine Deneuve, and Madeleine’s daughter Vera is also Deneuve’s real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni. Perhaps the casting of these two actresses as the film’s mother-daughter duo of nymphos could have provided some wonderful moments of chemistry, but in this event, it brings nothing of note to the production and appears as gratuitous as much else onscreen.

Vera quickly takes centre stage and has an interesting face but fails to be a force strong enough to join the rambling series of plot developments. At one point, it seems we should believe she has magical powers of seduction since she more or less turns a gay man straight, but even this ridiculous development has no pay-off since there are merely hints at complex human emotions without any real engagement of the questions raised.

Furthermore, we get scenes built around narrative threads no less bleak than Prague Spring, AIDS and 9/11, without any attempt to integrate such topics in a less than flippant fashion. Honoré tries to be both courageous and playful but ends up with a very cowardly treatment of his material.

By the time the very Czech Miloš Forman (taking over as the elderly Jaromil from the youthful Bukvić) appears as a bumbling fool halfway through the film, serving as a kind of comic relief, it is with a sense of dread that we realize this is as good as it will get.

At 2 hours and 20 minutes, The Beloved is grossly overweight, and despite the 40 years covered in the script, one has the sense we’ve spent half the time looking at senseless close-ups of the mole on Mastroianni’s face and listening to an excessive amount of second-tier songs. The sight of people like Deneuve prostituting her talents for an awful film like this one makes the viewer plunge into despair. There is nothing to love here, so move along.

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

Delicacy (2011)

André Crous

La delicatesseFrance
3*

Directors:
David Foenkinos
Stéphane Foenkinos
Screenwriter:
David Foenkinos
Director of Photography:
Rémy Chevrin

Running time: 108 minutes

Original title: La délicatesse

That first half-hour of Delicacy (La Délicatesse) is as gorgeous and as heart-rending as the famous kissing scene in Amélie, whose quirky Audrey Tautou also takes the lead here. It is a gamble the directors, brothers David and Stéphane Foenkinos, bet on big, but even while we are watching it we know deep down they could never keep up with the rhythm, the beauty or the emotion captured in those first few moments of the story.

If only the rest of the film were as delicate as its first 30 minutes.

The moments are all big, and few films — with the notable exception of Mike Nichols’ Closer, a film that alternated the meeting and the breakup scenes in many different relationships — have gone down this road before. The moments certainly evoke feelings of near-ecstasy in the viewer, as the acting is smooth, yet we sense a breathtaking rollercoaster in the lives of these characters we still know so little about.

The film opens at a café, where a young man is sitting alone at a table. Close by, he sees a woman entering, who takes a seat and scans the menu in front of her. He tells himself he will go and talk to her if she settles on … apricot juice. She orders coffee, then corrects herself to order apricot juice instead, and smiles in the direction of the young man. Next, we see them right outside the café as they are leaving arm in arm, celebrating the anniversary of this first encounter.

Many similar moments follow, in which time is gently elided, from first meeting and celebrating the anniversary to getting married and discussing having children, before the young man is suddenly run over by a car. All of this happens in the first 30 minutes, but luckily the rest of the film is not a dreary series of shots that highlight her loss. It is, rather, a look at the difficulty of having a new relationship while her memories continue to affect the way she behaves.

The film is based on a book by one of the directors, David Foenkinos, but the two brothers have beautifully adapted the story for the big screen with spectacular transitions early on and a very thoughtful use of the colour red, a tactic borrowed from a film explicitly featured in the background of an early scene, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.

The colour red, manifested either in the clothing worn by main character Nathalie (Tautou), the strong disco lights or the interior of a restaurant she visits with her boss on a disastrous dinner date, clearly refers to love or a bleeding heart, but as time goes by the red mostly disappears, which raises all kinds of questions about the character, who certainly hasn’t forgotten her late husband François.

The directors’ vision becomes a bit muddled as the story progresses. A shy introvert called Markus (François Damiens) who works with Nathalie takes a liking to her, and though he isn’t much to look at, she finds he understands her, and they always have something to talk about. This is, however, an instance where Delicacy would have greatly benefited from those seamless time jumps so frequent at the beginning of the film, as we don’t have any idea what this relationship might look like in a few months or a few years.

One important thing the film gets right is the difficulty of moving on after a relationship, especially one that ended as unexpectedly as the one between Nathalie and François. Scenes where we can see her wondering whether she should delete his number from her phone or toss out his toothbrush are poignant and show an understanding of the underlying pain in her life that can take a very long time to heal.

Nathalie’s interaction with friends is another element that deserves praise, as the friends want the best for her without things changing too much. But that is exactly what happens when she meets Markus. He seems to be perfect for her right now, but her friends don’t agree because he is not as good-looking or as outwardly interesting as François was, and she has to find a compromise.

But the film is rather superficial in its depiction of this dilemma, and we never really get a sense she is struggling to juggle all these new developments in her life.

Delicacy is not another Amélie, but it is certainly charming, and a final scene is particularly honest about the role of memory and pain in relationships, and the place two people must find in each other’s lives in order to make things work.

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

The Assault (2010)

André Crous

assautFrance
2*

Director:
Julien Leclercq
Screenwriters:
Simon Moutairou
Julien Leclercq
Director of Photography:
Thierry Pouget

Original title: L’assaut

Running time: 85 minutes

A very daring assault of a hijacked Air France aircraft took place Dec. 26, 1994, on runway three of Marignane Airport on the outskirts of Marseille. Broadcast live on national television, images of the successful rescue of the passengers onboard and the neutralization of the hijackers, four members of the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA), made heroes of the SWAT team that carried out the operation.

It would later be determined that the gunmen wanted to redirect the airplane to Paris and send it on a collision course toward the Eiffel Tower. After the Algerian government had nullified the election victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut) in 1991, the latter’s more militant GIA wing tried for years to overthrow the government and install an Islamic State. Algeria sought the help of their former colonial power, and the GIA targeted France in order to make its displeasure known.

These events show enormous potential for either a straightforward action film with a dimension of human drama (think back to the stories of the passengers in United 93, in which the terrorists’ target eerily resembles the one in this film) or a more subtle evocation of the bickering that unfolded in the corridors of power while people’s lives hung in the balance.

Instead, The Assault opts for an awkward three-legged balancing act that, given its running time — a breezy 85 minutes — provides too little information for the viewer to be involved at any level. In fact, some of the main characters are never even introduced by name, and we get no real motivation for the actions of the fighters. The film simply wants us to infer they are bad because they are Islamic terrorists (or, in the parlance of any U.S. politician, “radical” Islamic terrorists). And yet the passengers also remain a vast mass of individuals with whom we cannot possibly relate, except to infer, once again, they are good, simply because they are not Islamic terrorists.

This lack of sophistication in the screenplay is reflected by the film’s colour palette: The images have been desaturated to the point where all we see are shades of blue, black and grey. These colours would suit a post-apocalyptic movie just fine, but in The Assault, where so much depends on the interaction of real people, all of them involved in a struggle for life and death, such cold, alienating colours drain the life from the story.

While the hijackers are waiting, first on the runway in Algiers, then on the runway in Marseille, a French special operations team is preparing to storm the plane. One of the officers is called Thierry, and we know he will have some special role because his wife is always watching the events on the television screen, seemingly in a state of permanent anguish, her face contorted to express her fears as visibly as possible, while she is either sniffing or sobbing in quiet desperation.

The ringleader of the gang of four on the plane is Yahia, though we have no idea what his plan is or whether he has a plan at all: Throughout the film, he seems oddly confused, his non-stop screaming making him appear to be a hysterical nut job driven by emotion rather than ideology.

The third main character is Carole, the always-confident aid at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, who assures things get done even though she gets none of the recognition she deserves. This political power play could have been fascinating, but sadly the film spends little time mulling over its own story.

None of the characters has a back story, and therefore no one’s actions can really be explained — nor can anyone’s demise elicit feelings of sadness or loss from the viewer. We need not sympathize with the terrorists, but some clear motive for their actions would have gone a long way toward our understanding of their mission, aside from the continual cries of “Allahu akbar” (God is great).

Films about terrorists are usually approached with much more circumspection regarding the characters involved and the political or religious driving force behind their actions, but The Assault doesn’t seem very interested in telling its story in a more than cursory way. This is a shame, since similar incidents from the past, from Munich in 1972 to Waco in 1993 and New York City in 2001, have captivated audiences around the world who watched these events unfold live on television.

But we are not captivated, because the characters are remarkably superficial. The story is inherently interesting, but very little thought has been put into its execution, and the result is this sad excuse for a “based on true events” biopic. It should have been made for television.

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