France

Holy Motors (2012)

André Crous

There is little sense to be found in the dream wrapped in a fantasy inside an illusion that is Leos Carax’s Holy Motors.

Holy MotorsFrance
3*

Director:
Leos Carax
Screenwriter:
Leos Carax
Directors of Photography:
Caroline Champetier
Yves Cape

Running time: 115 minutes

Though always entertaining, Holy Motors is almost impossible to decode at the first viewing, if at all. This is Mulholland Drive territory, and, even if you find yourself laughing at the madness or having your jaw drop at the sight of some utterly bizarre moments, in the end, the ludicrousness of the situations makes it difficult to truly absorb what you have just been exposed to.

The first scene should already give you a very good idea of where — well, in the vaguest of senses — this film is headed. A man, played by director Leos Carax himself, lies on a bed in a gaudy hotel room, a Jack Russell at his feet. He gets up, walks slowly towards the window, where an airplane is landing on the runway on the other side of the road. He walks on, to the wall, where he lifts his arm and sticks his middle finger, made from metal, into a hole, turns it and unlocks the wall. Nothing happens, so he punches through and breaks down a concealed door.

He continues down a passage to arrive at a cinema, where he and we see the backs of the viewers’ heads. He looks down, to where a big black dog is walking slowly down the middle, which now resembles a church aisle, before a fade-out. None of these characters, either human or animal, reappears, but it is difficult not to be intrigued. It is this intrigue that Carax will rely on throughout his two-hour film, though the latter has no payoff and only hints at possible interpretations, none of them ever probed.

Things seem to occur for no real reason other than to provoke extreme bafflement in the viewer, as the film’s main character — not the guy in the opening scene, however, because he disappears entirely from the film — embarks on a daylong journey of adventures, role-playing his way through the most random assortment of situations without any clear aim other than getting the job done.

The main character, simply known as Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), is picked up one morning at his fancy Art Deco residence by a white stretch limousine driven by the wonderful Céline (Édith Scob), whose voice is firm yet tinged with notes of vulnerability, and we wonder whether her relationship with Oscar is professional or personal. Céline informs him he has nine “meetings” for the day and proceeds to deliver him to the first, for which he dresses up as a decrepit old Gypsy woman with a crutch begging for money on the streets of Paris. He doesn’t meet anyone and always stays in character, even speaking Romani to himself. He is followed and perhaps minded over — here, but never again — by heavies in black suits.

Eight other meetings follow, which become progressively more violent without ever losing their capacity to shock, either by having Oscar (made up as Monsieur Merde from Carax’s contribution to the anthology film Tokyo!) bite the finger off a PR girl at a fashion shoot in the Père Lachaise cemetery before kidnapping the all-too-willing fashion model and curling up to her in his birthday suit, in a way that unmistakably calls to mind Jesus Christ, specifically Michelangelo’s Pietà, and the model taking the role of one of the two Marys, in a sewer that runs below the centuries-old tombs.

Between each meeting, Oscar returns to the limousine, where he reads through a folder prepared for him, perhaps by Céline, perhaps by someone higher up, and transforms himself during the short period of time that the car takes to navigate the streets of the city. This transformation, both physical and behavioural, inevitably raises the notion of performance, and thereby of actors playing roles. Oscar’s second meeting is at a film studio, where he writhes around on a floor with another woman in a dark room, dry humping each other as their motions are captured by sensors and used to create the images of dragons engaging in carnal knowledge.

Later in the film, in one of the only moments that seem to tell us something about this man whose real identity is a complete mystery, he says he does the work “pour la beauté du geste” (for the beauty of the act). There is no doubt this man is deeply devoted to his craft, but what the craft is exactly, what purpose it serves and who is financing all these trans-Parisian rides in a stretch limousine remain enigmatic to the bitter end, before things end on a note that is beyond weird.

That is not to say the film isn’t entertaining, but one keeps hoping for a scene or an exchange that would bring some clarity to this surreal dream of which we can only be certain there will be nine meetings. Well, maybe it’s 10, but that’s another story…

During the fashion shoot in the cemetery, the photographer, dressed up only in PT shorts, repeatedly mutters “beauty” at the sight of the model and “weird” at the sight of Oscar/Merde. Those two words sum up the film as well as anything else.

 

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

Amour (2012)

André Crous

Amour, a film about death, is all about hanging on to one’s better half and reminds us what intimate cinema is capable of.

AmourFrance
4.5*

Director:
Michael Haneke
Screenwriter:
Michael Haneke
Director of Photography:
Darius Khondji

Running time: 127 minutes

For most of Amour, the viewer feels absolutely confident she is in the presence of greatness. This is what a film looks like that takes its subject seriously and tries to present it in all its complexity through small moments that all have a very human dimension to them. The human dimension is born out of an intimacy that depends on the chemistry between and very likely also the life experience of the lead actors. And yet, these moments are immediately accessible to those of us who have only had a taste of the life depicted onscreen.

Jean-Louis Trintignant basically came out of retirement to take the role of the octogenarian Georges, whose wife, Anne, played by Emmanuelle Riva, has had a stroke but refuses to be hospitalised. They are both former music teachers and live in a comfortable apartment in the middle of Paris. In one of their first conversations, after attending a music concert, they speak passionately and with erudition about the music they heard.

At first, Georges cares for her and helps her to get into her wheelchair. But gradually her condition worsens, until she has another stroke and becomes nearly incapacitated.

How does a lifelong partner deal with this sudden change? The question is made all the more urgent and unnerving by Haneke’s sudden acceleration of the timeline in unannounced fashion. There are no supertitles to indicate the passage of time: Again and again, Anne’s condition has suddenly deteriorated again, and we are shocked every single time we become aware how much farther down the slope of mortality she has slid once more, and that there is no way back up.

Haneke shoots many of his scenes in single takes and all but eschews the use of close-ups. The film’s characters are thoroughly respected, with two small exceptions. In one of the film’s first scenes, at the breakfast table in the kitchen, at the moment when we realise what will be the beginning of the end, Haneke is a little too rough in his treatment of Anne. The moment itself, the first revelation that something is wrong (we later learn something was obstructing her carotid artery, causing her to switch off for a moment), is perfectly controlled, balanced between tenderness and tension, but the scene could have done without a final pouring of the tea into the saucer rather than the cup — something that emphasises without a shadow of a doubt that things will soon go downhill very quickly.

There is also the matter of a character not properly developed, only to serve as a vessel to elicit our emotion for Anne and her plight: the second nurse who comes to take care of her. She quickly shows her true colours as an arrogant uncaring little snip; her brief appearance and a particularly hurtful exchange with Georges feels like a typical Haneke moment in which evil is revealed to be embedded in society, and he obviously enjoys pushing the knife just that little bit more into our stomachs, though frankly, this was quite unnecessary. His subject matter is already powerful enough.

But the film is magnificent. It is a restrained piece of work that is set almost entirely inside the old couple’s flat and unwinds at Haneke’s leisurely pace inside scenes but frighteningly quickly from one scene to the next. Despite a feeling the film may at times be slightly jumpy, there is no disputing that it is consistently effective.

Amour does not venture into the generalities of the care of the elderly, but it does address a number of pertinent issues, including the unspoken pity the world has for this kind of situation, a pity that Haneke himself was probably banking on while making this film.

But there is a complete lack of cheap tricks to tug at our heartstrings. Trintignant and Riva bring with them many decades of experience not only in acting but in living; their characters’ gentle interaction, their frustration with the limitations of old age and the steadfast determination to still have a say in their own lives despite the intervention of different kinds of unexpected forces on their lives make them both strong and fragile at the same time. This kind of complexity is what the cinema often lacks, and what Haneke, Trintignant and Riva have brought to the screen with care and commitment.

Only towards the end does Haneke’s evident fear of a straightforward conclusion or an easy explanation strain the experience a little, but it is a very minor flaw in an otherwise first-rate film about perseverance in love and coping with the inevitability of death

Amour is personal, intimate and, together with The White Ribbon, one of Haneke’s least intellectual and most accessible films to date.

 

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

Games of Love and Chance (2003)

André Crous

L'esquiveFrance
4.5*

Director:
Abdellatif Kechiche
Screenwriter:
Ghalia Lacroix
Director of Photography:
Lubomir Bakchev

Running time: 119 minutes

Original title: L‘esquive

Taking a place among the most moving and insightful films about the lower-income suburbs, known as la banlieue, that surround the French capital, together with Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film la Haine and Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs from 2008, this is a remarkable film shot on a very small budget with few if any professional actors.

Thematically close to Games of Love and Chance, the three-act play by Marivaux that is explicitly cited at many turns in the film, the story is set among a group of teenagers who come face to face with very real emotions as friendships are tested and they deal with the problems that separate them from the innocence of childhood. 

Abdelkrim (“Krimo”) is a quiet boy around 15 years old. His father is in prison, and he lives alone in a small apartment with his mother. In one of the first scenes of the film, his girlfriend Magali breaks up with him because she says he isn’t paying enough attention to her. Not one with words, Krimo stays mute in the face of this rejection and focuses on one of his longtime friends instead: Lydia, who has the starring role in a school production of Marivaux’s play.

Lydia, played by Sara Forestier, is a girl who has the gift for the gab, and the talented cast, without whom this project would have been impossible, engage in a number of lengthy verbal exchanges that will test the skills of even the most fluent of French speakers. With a rapid-fire delivery of combinations of swear words and verlan (the “inverted” speech of the suburbs) that is as colourful and creative as it is offensive to whomever it is directed at, the aggressive interactions keep our exchange by virtue of the passion of the actors and actresses alone.

Lydia is one who often engages in this kind of behaviour, and an early scene between her and her good friend Frida, who feels threatened by Krimo’s presence at an outdoor but private rehearsal of the play, is the first of many similar scenes that nonetheless never lose their tension. We keep wondering whether acting out with words will lead to more violent reactions.

Although not single takes, the takes in these scenes are sometimes shot in a way that the camera has to constantly pan between two faces, each taking up the whole screen in close-up, which emphasises the speakers’ importance and fully directs our attention towards the particular speaker instead of the (temporarily) silent party.

The audience cannot escape these shouting matches, and although we get a false sense of security sometimes that things won’t get worse than words, the threat of violence and the assumption of authority that goes along with it sometimes pops up to ensure some stomach-churning moments — including one that involves the police patrolling the low-income suburbs constantly on the lookout for trouble they assume to be ubiquitous. While La haine treated the threat of the police much more aggressively, Games of Love and Chance uses it with great success to underline the potential for one’s life to suddenly be turned upside down, simply because of living in one of these neighbourhoods.

Although there is little development in Krimo’s character (as opposed to the crises faced by Lydia and Frida — of whom the latter arguably has the hardest job confronting not only a threat on her life but also theft, as well as some personal issues she has to resolve), we are glued to him perhaps because he says so little yet is not inscrutable. As Krimo, Osman Elkharraz delivers a wonderful performance that, like his interpretation of the character of Arlequin, which he plays when he decides to get closer to Lydia, says too little to be fully engaging, and never really seems to enjoy his life or the emotions that go along with being alive.

The film is edited together so there is no padding: Everything that happens is necessary and we get no dead space in between the important points.

A work of immense interest for anyone who wishes to see the Parisian suburbs as a vibrant hub of emotions rather than simply la banlieue, Games of Love and Chance benefits from the talented cast, including theatre actress Carole Franck as the teacher who tries her best to get Krimo to crawl out of his shell, express his emotions and enjoy the feeling of being in love. The language of the characters is one of the most interesting and impressive aspects of the production, as it becomes a part of the very fabric of the film. But while it admirably refuses to develop in the same way a film with a bigger budget would, it doesn’t thoroughly take advantage of some themes it raises through its intertextual use of Marivaux’s play either.

*The original title, L’esquive, refers to a line in the play and translates as the action of shying away from something, or dodging it, instead of submitting to it. The connection with the material should be obvious.

À Nous la Liberté (1931)

André Crous

France
3.5*

Director:
René Clair
Screenwriter:
René Clair
Director of Photography:
Georges Périnal

Running time: 83 minutes (see review below for details)

René Clair’s À nous la liberté (“Freedom is ours”) is a heartfelt film about friendship in the face of capitalist greed. Its one lead is a die-hard romantic and the other is a guy full of ambition who, once given his chance, quickly establishes himself as the businessman of the decade. But the film has become more well-known for the controversy it caused years after its release than for its plot or its technique.

The film was released in 1931. Five years later, in 1936, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times showed a remarkable similarity to Clair’s film, and the French producers decided to take the Americans to court in a case that was only settled after World War II. On careful viewing, it is clear that Chaplin had not stolen from Clair: The characters and the storyline are both very different, and even the one scene at the root of all the trouble is so enjoyable it would be hard to imagine either film without it.

The scene in question takes place around an assembly line at a factory. It’s one of the first sequences of Chaplin’s film, taking place during the opening minutes, and it shows the Tramp hard at work tightening the screws on some nameless implement the company is producing. He continues to be distracted and as a result comes up against the next person in line, creating a domino effect of chaos.

More or less the same thing happens in À nous la liberté, in that occupational chaos ensues when the aforementioned romantic is distracted at work in the factory. But Clair does not give the mechanical nature of the work environment the same priority as Chaplin; instead, his story looks at the friendship of two former prison inmates. Their work behind bars very obviously resembles the work in the factory — both take place around a conveyor belt, and in both spaces they are watched over by powerful individuals (guards or supervisors) who ensure they don’t steal anything, but Clair doesn’t belabour this point.

The two former prison inmates are called Louis and Émile — when they both attempt to escape at the beginning of the film, only Louis succeeds. He goes on to sell records on the street and in a very quick succession of shots that anticipates the editing of the famous decline of the marriage sequence in Citizen Kane, we witness his meteoric rise to becoming a very wealthy producer of gramophone players.

Émile is not so lucky and remains in prison a while longer. Upon his release, he is found in a field by two police officers and in resisting them he gets locked up again, albeit briefly.

The film’s subsequent handling of the reunion of these two men is smooth though never very profound, as they both seem to instantly revert to their earlier selves, without any real complications. There is a very firm sense that Émile could make Louis’ life difficult as he could tarnish his reputation as an upstanding member of society when he has in fact broken out of jail. But this line is never thoroughly exploited.

Instead, Clair has a very soft storyline that sees Émile fall in love with a girl who shows a little interest towards him at the factory — and whom he literally broke out of jail for to be with. This is where the film’s re-releases become an interesting point of discussion. While the film was initially released with a running time of more than 100 minutes, the current version has had two scenes cut, both available on video sharing sites.

The first scene develops the musical theme of much of the first part of the film by having flowers sing to Émile. The film didn’t really need this scene. The second scene, however, serves to provide some detail on Émile’s appreciation of the girl he has fallen in love with and certainly would have provided a firmer background to Émile’s apparent laissez-faire attitude when it is revealed she will remain with her boyfriend rather than hook up with Émile.

Besides one scene that, in retrospect, seems an eerily accurate commentary on the evil of the workplace (a teacher tells his students, “Work is freedom,” echoing the infamous words of the Auschwitz death camp), À nous la liberté has a humanist slant and is by no means that scathing indictment that Chaplin insinuated with Modern Times. That being said, Chaplin has a much more enjoyable film, and he offers more gimmicks than Clair that, in the end, make for a memorable production. That is not to say Clair’s film lacks importance or interest — the opening tracking shot in the prison is a particularly strong evocation of man’s potential loss of human characteristics in the prison (or work) environment, and in a very well-scripted speech towards the end of the film, someone makes the point that while machines can replace the hand of man, they cannot replace his brain.

Whether that is true remains to be seen, but as far as we can tell from this film, Clair’s heart, head and hand were in the right place at the right time.

Possession (1981)

André Crous

France
3.5*

Director:
Andrzej Żuławski
Screenwriters:
Frederic Tuten
Andrzej Żuławski
Director of Photography:
Bruno Nuytten

Running time: 124 minutes

Not even Linda Blair, starring as little Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist, screamed as much as Isabelle Adjani in Polish director Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 horror film, Possession. Adjani must have set some kind of record. In almost every scene, she is behaving hysterically, yelling, crying, spinning, vomiting blood or hurting herself so that blood gushes from wounds or even her orifices. It is a truly disgusting sight, and often I couldn’t help myself but simply had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the staging. But while Possession has its tentacles in many other pies and while the product is a bit of an incoherent mess, the actual experience of watching the film is by no means unpleasant.

Set in West Berlin, very close to the Wall, the film opens on the return of Mark, played by a dashing young Sam Neill, most likely a spy, who hasn’t seen his wife Anna and their young son Bob in quite while. But all is not as Mark remembers it. Anna seems caught unprepared for Mark’s return and very soon he realizes she has been unfaithful to him.

However, this is not a simple story of cuckolding. No, instead of making the beast with two backs, she has been humping one with two backs and many tentacles. Yes, this tale about infidelity turns into a gruesome horror when we finally lay eyes on the beast, but not before the film’s first half has solidly pushed the production in that direction by having Adjani run around her apartment, storm into the street screaming while she slobbers streams of blood, and finally give birth to a mixture of blood and milk in the subway tunnel next to the Platz der Luftbrücke U-Bahn station in the neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, where she writhes orgasmically in liquid puddles on the ground.

Adjani completely surrenders to the role, giving it her all by screaming in bouts that last many minutes at a time, her eyes big as saucers, and seemingly breaks out in cold sweat every time we see her. The performance is as chilling as Neill’s is laughable. He seems to deliver line readings robotically, his actions detached from his words and his movements wholly awkward. He knows this is a joke and he doesn’t much take the role seriously. That is a pity because a more serious approach might have given weight to the psychological trauma one would expect his character to suffer, given his wife’s insane behaviour (at one point, she comes home and starts putting her son’s clothes in the fridge).

Before the arrival of the Thing, when Anna makes the decision to separate from Mark, there is a remarkable scene in Café Einstein when they are seated next to each other on different sides of a pillar covered by mirrors, yet we cannot see their reflections. Żuławski doesn’t emphasise the effect, but once we realise it, the effect is striking as it anticipates the supernatural direction this film is about to take.

The film mixes many different genres, from the most intimate to the most bombastic, and in all cases the camera is used effectively, often hand-held, surging down a narrow corridor or framing the character by a door frame, to make us uncomfortable. 

“Maybe all couples go through this,” says Adjani, referring to their domestic troubles and her feelings of unhappiness. That may be right, but they quickly take a turn for the rather unusual, as her desire for something different means the creation of something truly abominable.

There are many other bits and pieces to the story, including the teacher of the couple’s son, who looks exactly like Anna, and a secret agent with pink socks, who is discussed during a strange business meeting in which the camera very ominously circles all parties involved, and whose identity is revealed towards the end of the film without any consequence.

The film belongs to the blood, the tentacles and to Adjani, whose tenacity in depicting fits of hysteria is something to behold. Her presence in every scene is magnetic, as her silence in the presence of the Thing is as uncomfortable as her outbursts in any other scene. Żuławski’s film is a big mystery, as there are many aspects to the story that are never really examined, yet his staging of many of the scenes is beautifully done. In one particularly tense scene, Neill is on the phone, his wife has disappeared and we do not know how mobile the Thing is. He switches the light of the room he is in on and off, while he is framed by an open door. We expect the worst — for something to appear behind him at any moment — and Żuławski lets the scene play out as long as possible before letting it reach its end: It’s not what we expect, and serves to emphasise that we have been taken hostage by the fear he’s created already.

Possession is bizarre and most of the characters lose their mind at one point or another… if they have ever been normal at all. But Adjani is fearless and ties the film together with her big eyes, her constant screaming and her lust for something bestial. The film is a potent work of horror.

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

André Crous

France
5*

Director:
Georges Méliès
Screenwriters:
Georges Méliès
Gaston Méliès
Directors of Photography:
Michaut
Lucien Tainguy

Running time: 11 minutes (at 20fps)

Original title: Le Voyage dans la lune

Méliès was the magician of early cinema. He didn’t only lift the seventh art form to new heights by using it to depict fantastical stories, but in the process, he evoked a sense of wonder in his audience that would colour and enrich many different kinds of films and inspire most of the filmmakers that came after him. He was the first who dared detach the medium of film from its realistic basis – the Lumière brothers had filmed real trains arriving, real human beings leaving a real factory, and real water spewing from a real garden hose to water real flowers. But Méliès had other plans. He had stars in his eyes and his desire to make the impossible visible, even with very rudimentary means, led to this masterpiece called A Trip to the Moon.

Jules Verne, if not an inspiration for the film, was certainly an influence, or at least a kindred spirit. The film opens in a grand hall where astronomers with big pointy hats have gathered to listen to their astronomer-in-chief, Barbenfouillis, who gesticulates very animatedly and makes a drawing on the blackboard indicating his intention to send a spaceship (though it rather resembles a missile) to the moon. Five astronomers are chosen to accompany him on this mission: Nostradamus, Alcofribas, Omega, Micromégas and Parafaragaramus (yes, the spelling is correct).

The names of theses characters have both real and fictional origins, and the combination is quite appropriate to the kind of film that Méliès was producing. Nostradamus, of course, is the renowned 16th-century clairvoyant. Alcofribas is the name used by the novelist Rabelais, whose works incorporated the grotesque and is best known for his novel about two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Micromégas was the title of, and the name of the main character in, a short story by Voltaire. Said Micromégas was an alien visitor who lands on the earth and observes the strange customs of humans. Besides the Greek root of Omega (the word refers to the last letter of the Greek alphabet), I know nothing about it, nor does Parafaragaramus mean anything to me, though it conjures up images of characters in the world of Goscinny & Uderzo’s “Asterix & Obelix”.

After surviving a fall into a bucket of nitric acid, Micromégas joins the other astronomers aboard the spaceship, which is shot from a cannon into space. The décor throughout is theatrical but never expressionist, and though many of the sets are clearly painted pieces of cardboard, the effect of having these characters move over the painted roofs into a spaceship gains a lot of its energy from the adventure inherent in the imminent exploration of outer space.

Exactly halfway through the film, the spaceship hits the moon, in one of the most famous shots of silent cinema. It is a moving human face, and this man-moon fits perfectly with the slightly strange atmosphere of the film that is about to become even more peculiar. Once the astronomers land on the moon, and their presence is seen as an intrusion, they are punished by Phoebus, who covers them with snow. They hide in a crater, filled with lunar flora, where a planted umbrella takes root and grows to become a giant mushroom. The surreal image is wonderful to behold because of the continuous growth of the “plant”, its movement, inside the frame without any cuts.

With this film, Méliès, the first master of cinematic magic, showed how to dazzle an audience, and he deserves all the recognition of being the first dreamer of the cinema and for engaging our fantasies in a way that demonstrated the far-reaching possibilities of filmmaking.

Z (1969)

André Crous

France
4.5*

Director: 
Costa-Gavras
Screenwriters:
Jorge Semprún
Costa-Gavras
Director of Photography: 
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 127 minutes

It might be dialogue-heavy and overtly ideological in its unashamedly anti-establishment approach to historical events, but director Costa-Gavras’s Z is passionate, personal, and pushes the envelope the way very few films dare to. Based on events in the director’s native Greece  in the early 1960s, where freedom of expression was threatened, and democracy ultimately supplanted by dictatorship, the film is a direct depiction of the assassination of a Greek political figure in 1963 and the subsequent investigation that shook the government. The title, which stands for “ZEI”, meaning “He lives”, refers to the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, who was assassinated under circumstances almost identical to those shown in this film.

The opening credits make clear that the film is not in the business of subtle allegories: “Any resemblance to actual events, to persons dead or alive, is no coincidence — it is deliberate.” One doesn’t have to dig very deep to notice the parallels between the historic events in Greece in 1963 and the blood-curdling hunger for control and suppression of a pacifist opposition that Costa-Gavras puts up on the screen.

Yves Montand appears as the anonymous “Doctor”, probably a reference to Lambrakis’s profession as a physician, a calm but determined man who is set to deliver a major speech against the bomb – he obviously has some influence in the public sphere, because the government puts every possible obstacle in his way to ensure that the venue for his speech can accommodate as few people as possible. He has a small group of very loyal supporters around him, including Manuel (Charles Denner) and Georges (Jean Bouise).

Though the film is set in an unnamed city where all the characters speak French, the Greek music on the soundtrack, by left-wing exile Mikis Theodorakis, leaves no doubt about the film’s real-world underpinnings. Costa-Gavras also cast the famous Irene Papas as the Doctor’s wife – a casting decision that has theoretical soundness but since she is barely given any dialogue, her performance becomes a bit schmaltzy and seems out of place given the aggressive nature of the story.

The two characters at the centre of physical violence in the film are named Vago and Yago, and the former is portrayed as a real creepy fellow with suggestions of homosexual paedophilia. At the same time, the police force is not only heavily anti-communist (though they have no objection to anybody attending the Bolshoï ballet), but anti-semite and anti-Chinese. The man at the top is the Chief of Police (Pierre Dux), whose disgust for the peaceful opposition protesters is equalled by the violence with which he attempts to suppress them. Comparing their “ideological illness” to mildew, he states in the opening scene that the “treatment of men with appropriate solutions is indispensable”, and thereby pre-emptively washes his hands of all wrongdoing.

The person tasked with establishing the truth is the inquest judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who learns both sides of the story and needs to weigh his own sense of justice against the possibility of prosecuting persons at the highest levels of government. Working separately but with the same goal of finding the truth is the photojournalist played by a very youthful Jacques Perrin (here he reminded me of Diego Luna).

This highly ideological film is certainly much more willing to take sides than a film such as Oliver Stone’s JFK (about another assassination in 1963), and yet it easily ropes us into the political malevolence and sinister conspiracy taking place in a foreign country. Director of Photography Raoul Coutard, known for his work with a filmmaker who would like to see himself as politically savvy yet producing films of cerebral rather than entertainment value, Jean-Luc Godard, records the events with a sense of intimacy that produces images both informative and deliciously suggestive. Two significant examples are the arrival of Papas at the hospital, when past and present alternate in fragments (the result of a certain kind of jump cuts called “faux raccords”), making her own confusion very visible and teasing us with moments from her life with Montand, and the final sequence of close-ups on uniform medals and ribbons that build to a very satisfying conclusion.

It is refreshing to see a director who goes big, both ideologically and cinematically, and Costa-Gavras succeeds in capturing our attention on both counts. Z is a spectacular film that provides a window on events in Europe in the 1960s (don’t forget that the film was made around the time the student riots shook Paris in May 1968) and reminds us, as did Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, that authoritarian regimes find imagination suspect, for it signals a lack of control on their part.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

André Crous

France
4*

Director:
Agnès Varda
Screenwriter:
Agnès Varda
Directors of Photography:
Jean Rabier
Alain Levent

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Cléo de 5 à 7

A morbid sense of impending doom hangs over this seemingly lighthearted frolic in the Parisian sunshine. Cléo is a young woman who is expecting the results of a medical examination, which a fortune-teller leads her to believe might be catastrophic and certainly involves the prospect of death. We follow her as she passes the time buying a hat, driving in a taxi, meeting friends and trying to relax in the Parc de Montsouris.

Cléo from 5 to 7 takes place in real-time, though director Agnès Varda crams much more into her 90 minutes (the film is really Cléo from 5 to 6.30, but the title wouldn’t have had the same zap) than is actually possible, but never mind – the effect of watching everything unfold in apparent real-time is exhilarating. The audience shares the ups and downs of the main character, Florence Victoire, nicknamed Cléo – for Cleopatra – by her friends, though admittedly her melodramatic nature (a point made over and over again) does make her appear wholly unstable at times.

Varda as a director is very active in this film, which seems deceptively improvised, but contains many moments that visibly enrich the thematic texture of the film. Starting with the tarot card of death in the opening scene, the only part of the film that is in colour, Cléo from 5 to 7 has a whole array of very brief shots – either from Cléo’s point of view or from the camera’s point of view, though the camera often identifies with the main character and we get many looks on the street directed at the camera. Besides a broken mirror and a scene at the aftermath of a gunshot, we also see funeral homes, a café called “Bonne Santé” (Good Health), a street performer piercing his biceps in a scene of real body horror, and we hear a radio report of Edith Piaf’s latest operation. Another very well-crafted moment occurs in the darkness of a tunnel when Cléo tells her friend Dorothée that she might be seriously ill.

At the time of the film’s release, the spectre of colonial war, the conflict in Algeria, was pervasive but also serves an important function in this film – a function that only becomes clear towards the end of the story, in the calm setting of the 14th arrondissement’s Parc de Montsouris.

While Cléo from 5 to 7 was not Varda’s first feature-length fiction film (her 1955 film, La Pointe courte, had already established her as a force to be reckoned with, or rather one to be inspired by, and anticipated the revitalisation of the French film industry at the end of the 1950s that would be called the Nouvelle Vague), it has the same kind of playful humanity that made Godard’s À Bout de souffle such a charm, and the play with form is best appreciated in a short silent film which the boyfriend of Cléo’s friend Dorothée, a projectionist at a cinema, screens for them. The film shows two different kinds of realities, one seen through darkness (or sunglasses), the other without them, and perhaps the only other silent-film-within-a-film that I have seen which has amused me as much was Almodóvar’s Shrinking Man in Talk to Her.

The film constantly reminds the viewer how much time has passed, and how much time is left, by means of text on the screen that informs us of the current time as well as the main protagonist for the next part. A little tongue-in-cheek, the different “chapters” go up to number 13, clearly linking with the numerous mentions of superstition throughout the film; it is an unexpectedly beautiful and emotional moment when we realise who the protagonist(s) of the final chapter are.

Cléo from 5 to 7 has a ditzy central character who is waiting for some news that might change her life, or maybe her life will be changed in the process of waiting. The film is simple and consists of small conversations from daily life that do not seem staged for the benefit of a fiction film, but rather evoke a certain feeling of humanity that is so important in a film that wants both the dread and the sunshine.

Summer Hours (2008)

André Crous

France
4*

Director:
Olivier Assayas
Screenwriter:
Olivier Assayas
Director of Photography:
Éric Gautier

Running time: 103 minutes

Original title: l’Heure d’été

Trees and children are reminders of the passage of time. In the first scene of Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, the grandchildren of the oldest surviving member of the family, Hélène, who is celebrating her 75th birthday with her family, are playfully running around her garden in search of treasure. Hélène lives alone in a big house outside Paris, in the upper-class suburb of Valmondois. The house is filled with works of art, either bought or made by Hélène’s late uncle, the painter Paul Berthier.

Berthier’s name is central to the first thirty minutes, during which Hélène’s conversations with her children mostly serve to gauge their readiness to deal with the house and its memories after her death. Of course, the subject is more or less taboo, and they don’t like the idea of discussing things that have not yet come to pass. Her eldest son, Frédéric, seems especially determined to reassure her that nothing will change and that the family will still spend their holidays at the house that they will maintain as well as she has done.

But Hélène wasn’t born yesterday and has no qualms about her children selling off her collection after her death: “No need to become keepers of the tomb”, she tells her son. She realises that her other two children, Jérémie and Adrienne, have their lives abroad – in Shanghai and New York, respectively – and that it would become more and more difficult for them to call her house home. Memories may last forever, but the development of the present shouldn’t be stunted for the sake of physically preserving the past. As the child who has spent the most amount of time in the house, Frédéric is naturally more attached to the place, and the events of the past strongly echo in the present, for example, the plastic bag from Leclerc containing loose pieces of plaster from a sculpture by Edgar Degas that Frédéric and Jérémie had broken decades earlier.

Somewhat reminiscent of the famously sudden demise of Mrs Ramsay in brackets, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, we learn that Hélène has passed away, but it takes some time before we realise that weeks, if not months, have elapsed since the family reunion at her home. And Assayas uses the medium of film to elide the jumps in time almost imperceptibly, the content making clear that important events can quickly become mere memories.

Besides all these memories and the different weight that objects have in the eyes of the beholder, the film provides a very refreshing look at the social complexity of inheritance, without ever stooping to the level of melodramatic backstabbing. While Frédéric had counted on his brother and sister to help out with the upkeep of the house because he assumed that the house and its objects are as important to them as it is to him, Jérémie and Adrienne have their lives elsewhere and have not only lost touch with the house but even with the culture and with their country. They have no wish to disillusion their brother, nor to seem like they are acting as a united front against him and shattering his wishes, but the fact of the matter is that the memories of the past cannot extend into the future, because they are no longer the people they were when they were young.

All three siblings are warm, engaging people who like to laugh and don’t have a malicious bone in their body, but want to get to the business of making their own memories. The actors (Charles Berling; Jérémie Renier, looking more mature than ever before; and Juliette Binoche), despite their pedigree, are kept in check by Assayas, who ensures that a character always trumps the actor playing the part.

The issues of time and memory are embedded in the film without ever taking on the air of abstract philosophy, and the filmmaker takes care to follow the characters, instead of leading them to contrived situations of high drama. The end does lose the plot a little, when Frédéric has to pick up his daughter at the police station, but eventually, her own role in the story is made clear, as the final scene demonstrates the possibility of making new memories even though a longtime dream may never be realised.

It is interesting to note that this film was commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, an institution that features prominently towards the end of the film, because when Frédéric and his wife look at a piece in the museum that used to be in Hélène’s study and agree that it “is nicely displayed”, it is clear that a museum is not a home but merely an exhibit: pieces without any real context, pretty vases without flowers.

The Wild Child (1970)

André Crous

The Wild ChildFrance
4.5*

Director:
François Truffaut
Screenwriters:
François Truffaut
Jean Gruault
Director of Photography: 
Néstor Almendros

Running time: 87 minutes

Original title: L‘enfant sauvage

The Wild Child is one of François Truffaut’s best films, and the key to grasping its significance for Truffaut himself lies in the film’s opening dedication: “To Jean-Pierre Léaud”. Léaud was Truffaut’s alter ego in his feature film début, The 400 Blows, in which he starred as the 12-year-old Antoine Doinel. The character of Doinel in this film had much in common with the young Léaud, and Truffaut took the actor under his wing, eventually becoming a father figure to the troubled youth.

In The Wild Child, Truffaut stars as Jean Itard, a physician who is confident that he can make a cultured human being out of a young boy who has spent his entire childhood fending for himself in the woods. The story is based on a real case treated by Itard of a boy found in the French countryside in 1798.

This treatment may also be described as training, and it is this uncertainty about the exact nature of the procedure that makes the film so interesting, for, while Itard is not presented with very much complexity of character, he uses his experience with deaf-mute children to instruct the young boy, whom he names Victor. When Victor is discovered, he is dirty, seems to be deaf and employs the most basic of gestures to express himself since he never learned to use his mouth for anything besides eating and drinking.

It is impressive to watch Victor’s development, which Itard is in a rush to complete, but which naturally takes much longer than he anticipates. In the process, Itard is rightfully scolded by his housekeeper, Madame Guérin: “You want him to catch up in one fell swoop!” Also, since Victor has no experience with the ways of people, he acts out whenever he is frustrated by dropping to the ground, waving his arms and flailing his legs about in a way that reminds one of a seizure. If he encounters resistance from someone, he is also prone to sinking his teeth into an unsuspecting arm. Itard has many clever strategies to conduct his experiments and gain knowledge about Victor’s capacity for learning, but very often he seems to ignore the bridges between one stage and the next, for example, the difference between a picture of a book, the word “book” and the book itself, which Itard takes as something quite self-evident.

Truffaut is excellent as Itard, who shows a remarkable level of commitment, patience and humanity throughout, even when it is very difficult to judge what the wild-eyed boy wants from him. We can understand both of them, both their positions, and the reason for their frustration with each other is clear because there is no easy way to bridge the communication gap that divides them. It is clear that Itard observes without taking as much trouble to learn Victor’s customs as Victor takes to learn his.

The film is a sequence of small incidents charting Itard’s progress with Victor and there are a few very moving moments that make our and Itard’s hearts beat fast with excitement at the possibility of rehabilitation. Unfortunately, the film does not sufficiently address the nagging question of whether it is appropriate to try to integrate the child into society, nor does it even question the legitimacy of erasing the useful skills that Victor had acquired on his own in nature. These are important questions in the background that Truffaut could easily have touched on, but he aimed for a more inspirational film, albeit based on historical documents.

Almendros’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is perfectly suited to the story, as is Vivaldi’s “Mandolin Concerto”, which accompanies most major events in the plot. Truffaut engages our attention throughout, as actor and as director, but one scene that fails to convince takes place when the wild boy is captured at the beginning of the film. While dogs bark and growl on the soundtrack, the images we see are of the boy’s arm grasped very gently by a dog’s mouth, and if the sound were removed, it would appear that the two were just amicably horsing around.

Jean-Pierre Cargol, who stars as Victor, the titular Wild Child, never overplays his part and is a great attribute to the film. While almost never uttering a sound, Victor will find sympathy with most viewers because of our curiosity to see the development of a boy for whom most experiences are “firsts”, including the use of clothes, shoes, a spoon, a mirror and many others. He also displays many remarkably touching characteristics in a subtle way, such as his love for the countryside that is made clear when he goes to the window every time he takes a sip of water. The film is a touching tribute by Truffaut to the boy he wanted to teach about the world, and even if it was always just a work in progress, The Wild Child makes it all somehow seem worthwhile.