Movies I’m Watching: Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders

Everyone knows that Godard is a bit of an acquired taste, and that no matter how much some cinephile effuses about the man’s genius, there are plenty of people that are going to find his movies unwatchable. This film, however, is a bit of an exception. It’s a rollicking tale with quirky narration (done by godard himself) and digressions. ALso worth mentioning is that slightly off kilter and shaky, grainy and contrasty black and white cinematography of Paris streets that has become, thanks to Godard more so than other filmmakers, an essential addition to our cinematic imagination and vocabulary.

The plot follows the familiar two men and a woman triangle, as they live their lives in Paris: they are layabouts, dandies, not bad but perhaps bored by something in their lives. Anna Karina’s character, Odile, tells them about a stash of money that her aunt’s employer has, a huge wad of cash, and they hatch a half-baked plan to get the loot and then leave Paris for some place better.

But this film is not about the story or the plot, but about the very texture of films themselves; the ways they make you feel, the idiosyncracies of each section. There are so many classic conversations and pieces in the movie, it’s hard to talk about them all: from the opening sequence, the almost still but machine gun fast montage of their three faces, to the classic game of suggestive looks and innuendos when they are in English class together: this movie is a several course dinner, and while you appreciate the whole, you get there by separately savoring its parts.
Of course, there are things binding the whole thing together: the beauty and grace of each one of the actors. Their sense of cool, of what to say, when to say it: the games they play, the way they offer and then light cigarettes: you can’t tell if these are the imaginations of a movie man or have some root in Parisian youth culture of the day–but no matter. That is perhaps what makes for its magic: this creation of a familiar yet alternative universe, right in front of us.

Of course, I am not the first and will certainly not be the last to rave about that classic cafe dance scene. The dance they are doing is called the Madison, and you can see the scene here. Its heyday was, i believe, in the late 1950s.

If I could make movies, I would really love to do a “remake” of this movie in Shanghai, or else do some kind of sequel, but of course, that’s thinking like a HOllywood producer, and movies like this, and filmmakers like godard, survive insofar as they find a breathing space outside that system. And thank god that they have managed to do so for as long as they have.

Movies I’m Watching: Paris Nous Appartient

Well, after taking a look at the blurb on the DVd cover and feeling in the mood for some black and white Nouvelle Vague classics, i decided to get this one…and was quite disappointed. The themes treated in the movie, including the worldwide conspiracy against disaffected lefty artists in Paris, made me roll my eyes more than once. But that’s part of what makes it charming, in another sense–the refusal to do conspiracy in the conventional manner. I have to say that one of the highlights of film, like with any others of this period, is the visual delight of taking in 1960s Paris in black and white. Everything about it tickles my fancy, and in a way that i would be at a loss to explain, at least in rational terms.

The other highlight of the film would have to be Jean-Luc Godard’s cameo in the movie, which is quite funny…he’s so iconic that i didn’t have a hard time knowing when it was him, but it seems, even in that very brief scene, that the man has some comic chops and that, had he applied himself in that direction, might not have been an entirely shabby actor.

Reverse Shot has an article about this film, which i think places it in context, both with respect to Rivette’s ongoing ouevre as well as his place among the pantheon of nouvelle vague greats:

To end at the beginning, then, comparing Paris Belongs to Us to New Wave debuts might seem unfair, but it ultimately vindicates its director. Those other films (and that’s not including Cleo from 5 to 7 and Le Beau serge) immediately displayed their creator’s talent in what turned out to be—to borrow a phrase—instant classics, whereas Paris displayed Rivette’s arguably richer potential (and definitely his greater difficulty) at the expense of solidified “quality.” That’s the way it is sometimes. Artists develop in their own way, at their own rhythm and by their own logic. Fortunately, though, if Pericles is to Paris Belongs to Us as Gerard is to Rivette, then at least Rivette went on to master his craft—at least we can see and evaluate this fascinating disappointment with its future payoffs excitedly in mind.—MICHAEL JOSHUA ROWIN”

Movies I’m Watching: Un Conte De Noel

I’ve waited a long time to lose the Desplechin virginity, and finally got around to it recently by watching “Un Conte De Noel.” The films tells the story of the Vuillard family, with a history of shared mental and physical illnesses,making their family an atypically unhappy one.

The critics, from what I’ve read thus far, tend to be split along two lines:those that admire the film despite the plot not always being “coherent”, and enjoying the “spectacle” aspects of the film, versus those that believe in substance over style and found the movie to be essentially empty at the core.

There are some real family conflicts here, but I can see how some people think the pathos of that has been lost amid all the black comedy and sketch-like scenes. Part of this is due to the fantastic ensemble cast, including Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Almaric, Melvin Poupaud and others. With actors as talented as these, one would believe that Desplechin would just get out of the way and let them act–which is usually not a bad strategy, but which can backfire when the arc and rhythm of the film are sacrificed along the way.

There are some parts that I found a bit off-putting or confusing, like the bit with the cousin and one of the wives of the sons. The wife is played by Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello. She combines the physical look of her father (esp. the features of her face) and the sultriness of her mother. It’s all that stuff about former, unrequited and uncompleted loves, and whether or not we can go back, salvage some of that emotion, reverse and change, if only for a night, the inalterable.

Almaric’s madcap performance is quite enjoyable, though it kind of grates on you after awhile. Other notable performances include the father and the mother, the latter portrayed by Catherine Deneuve. The elders of the cast were, in my opinion, the best, wearing these roles like old shoes. There is a soothing naturalism to such performances that only happens when you get a good match between actor and role, and that’s something that cannot entirely be prepackaged into a script, even if you are writing that script for a particular actor. In any case, it’s that naturalism that makes these performances so eminently watchable.

Movies I’m Watching: Les Valseuses

I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago but never got the chance to write about it: There’s a Channel4.com review which sums it up nicely:

For Blier, the surreal agent provocateur who would make a career out of winding up the bourgeoisie, the film’s male aggression, absurd black humour and absence of any clear moral perspective proved both a calling card and a template. The characters are meagre and obnoxious but there’s something playful about the determination to cause outrage, and Stephan Grapelli’s whimsical score introduces a lyrical undercurrent which events, on their own, can’t muster.

Verdict
Blier’s rude and rambling farce occupies a similar position in 1970s French cinema as Trainspotting in 1990s Britain. It’s chaotic and obnoxious, but executed with a fair degree of Gallic swagger.

“Gallic swagger”! Love that phrase.

One can definitely see how, at the time, this movie ruffled some feathers. The sexuality isn’t overly explicit, but the film and the characters are quite frank about their sexual needs.

I don’t have much to say about this film, not that I didn’t enjoy it. I will mention two things that struck me. First, the young Gerard Depardieu. I had never seen a film of his from this far back (1974) — most of the films that I have seen him in are from the 1980s onwards, and probably mostly those from the 1990s and early 2000s. So of course, seeing him
this young, giving what the Channel 4 reviewer calls a “ferociously energetic performance from a rangy young Depardieu”, is a real revelation. And I agree with that description as well, the young Depardieu is just bristling with energy, sexual and otherwise. Even in the very first scene when his character Jean Claude and his friend Pierrot are tormenting a poor bourgeois woman they are going to rob, you can see it in his eyes. This is no actor is lower-class drag, your eyes tell you — this is the real thing. There is something menacing in his eyes, his posture, the way he carries himself. He’s much more the loose cannon than is Pierrot. Maybe he can afford to be, because Pierrot does get shot in the balls in the beginning, and soon Jean Claude becomes his friend/steward (and maybe gay lover?). Jean Claude is clearly the brains of the operation, the one that comes up with the ideas (he’s always saying “I’ve got an idea”), the one that launches them into all these madcap adventures.

You feel that his anger and his hurt is the most real: what is more revealing than the eternal hunt for pussy is the inchoate rage he hurls at rural, suburban France. There is one scene where they are wandering through a remarkably drab town where even the flies seem to be on siesta. It’s a gray, overcast day and they are walking around this ghost town and Jean-Claude says something like “town of shit! This place is such shit” (I don’t remember the line, and I don’t speak French). And then there’s the scene where Marie-Ange, Jean-Claude and Pierrot take the young rebellious teenager (Isabelle Huppert in one of her first roles) and “rescue” her from her stifling bourgeois parents. The Channel 4 reviewer mentions that director Bertrand Blier has made a career out of winding up the bourgeoisie, and I find this interesting, both within the film itself and also in the sense that I wonder why more filmmakers don’t take the piss out of the bourgeoisie more often, that being, after all, the holy and eternal right of angst-ridden young people in developed countries throughout the world.

The other thing worth mentioning is the Jeanne Moreau, the Eternal Feminine of postwar French cinema. There are never enough superlatives in the dictionary for women like that, or should we say that the extant ones are deficient for capturing the essence of what a woman like that is.

Jeanne is just released from prison. They stalk her. Cajole her. Eventually she gives in. Two men and a woman they share… sound familiar? Throughout she’s like a mime; there isn’t much dialogue. She’s just been released from jail. No one knows what she is thinking. Certainly, she wants some delicious food and a side order of young cock. But what lurks behind the guarded smiles?

If you’ve seen the movie, you know: she gets her food, gets her menage-a-trois on, and then shoots herself in the head. It’s a strange episode within the movie, almost self-contained, and few scenes hence, the boys are back on their adventures. They do find her son, but that’s about all that ties the latter part of the film with the Moreau scenes. Maybe I’m just morbid, but I liked this “episode” or a least it stood out above the rest of the film.
Or maybe Jeanne Moreau just has that kind of effect on me!

french, cinema, movies, films, depardieu, valseuses, jeanne moreau, 1970s, sex, sexuality

Movies I’m Watching: Les Amants （The Lovers)

Les Amants (The Lovers) is another of the Louis Malle CC films I’ve picked up before the DVD shop got harmonized for the Olympics. They say this is the film that made Jeanne Moreau into a star. She had already been famous before this (1958), most notably as the youngest woman to ever become a full-time member of Comedie Francaise.

On the face of it, the film is about the quandaries faced by the unfaithful bourgeois wife. Can she keep the secret from her husband? Will she elope or run away with her lover?

The premise gets unexpectedly complicated when Jeanne meets yet another man in the movie, and (spoiler alert!) runs off with the third. Bernard, the man she runs off with, is from the same bourgeois milieu as Jeanne’s family and friends, but has a marked antipathy for them. He describes her husband as a “bear” and describes her best friend Maggie and her ilk as “horrible people.”

What’s strange is that she ends up running off with Bernard. You don’t really know why they fall in love, at least there is no psychological realism to it unles you consider love and first sight to be something real. There’s an accidental rendezvous at night. Bernard says “it’s you,” as if they were destined to meet in the moonlight that night. At first she resists, and like most good girls, puts up a bit of a fight before relinquishing. The film supposedly broke the taboos of on-screen eroticism, and perhaps that’s true if you think about the fact that it was released in 1958/9. Some movie theater in Ohio had obscenity order placed on it for showing the film and it took the Supreme Court until 1968 to overturn it. But then again, that’s Ohio. I was a bit surprised to see Jeanne and Bernard making out in the boat by moonlight, and even more surprised when they get back to the mansion and start taking off each other’s clothes. You don’t see more than that, so the whole thing seems tame by today’s standards. Still, it was romantic in its way. I just don’t know if I really bought the whole romance. It just came out of nowhere and I suppose that she was tired of these staid, groomed bourgeois men and wanted a younger, more intellectual and seemingly more virile man like Bernard. But she doesn’t beat around the bush. The affair doesn’t drag on for years. They leave the very next morning. She packs a few things, they get in the car and leave. Everyone watches them as the car drives away.

I’m not sure what to say about the film: I loved the film for what I got to see of the life of the provincial bourgeoisie in France (Dijon is where the story takes place). Everything looks spectacular in black-and-white. You see those typical French country roads lined with tall trees. You see the provincial mansions and manors, with their huge verandas and gardens. You see the beautifully decorated insides as well.

Jeanne Moreau is the center of the film, and she is excellent. The idea that someone could be unhappy in life and love, try extramarital affairs and THEN find someone else, by chance (she meets Bernard when her car breaks down)—is, in some way, extremely romantic. But putting this on film and making it not seem cheesy is a challenge indeed. When they drive away from Jeanne’s home, the reality of what they’ve done dawns on them. You see in their faces. Even Bernard, who through their night-long courtship had always seemed to be the prime mover behind their decisions，seems to have his doubts. It would have been interesting to see how these lovers ended up, but that would have involved another movie. The point of Les Amants is not to be descriptive and epic in that way。 The point of the movie is are the elisions and ellipses, the things that are clouded in ambiguity and shadow.

Movies I’m watching: Le Feu Follet and Naked

I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.

Of course, it turns out that this isn’t the case. Johnny (from Naked) and Alain (from Le Feu Follet are in various states of Sartrean nausea. They’ve lost existential traction but no one seems them slipping, at least not in the way they really are. The inner context is a secret we all possess, but they so more than others, more than the rest of us. They are outsiders—it could not be otherwise.

Maurice is about to commit suicide. No one sees it coming. Everyone thinks there is hope for him. Everyone thinks that he’s been down, but he’s a plucky and resilient type of guy. From what we can surmise from the film about his past—he was a socialite, maybe a playboy, and most certainly the life of the party. He used to have it so together. And yet, something happened to him. It seems to be something more than issues with his estranged American wife. Surely, a failed relationship is no reason to commit suicide, right? His suicide doesn’t come at the end of some vicious mood—it’s premeditated, methodical.

Johnny is a bit different—we first get acquainted with him as he’s raping a woman. He’s not instantly likable, and it would hardly beggar the imagination call him an emotional parasite. He seems to play with people, goading them, leading them on, a demonic actor-director of dramas in his mind that we (and the other characters) cannot even begin to fathom. There’s something inherently vengeful and misogynistic about how he treats the women in the film, even including the ones he supposedly cares for.

His emotional vampire act left me bewildered. How can someone sustain themselves like, that for long. My answer is that most people cannot, and that’s why Johnny is at the end of his tether. The real source of his angst is not Y2k, and it’s not his exile from Manchester, and it’s even more not the feelings that stirred by being around old flame Louise. The source of his angst is his aloneness and outsider status.

There are tender moments in both films, where old friendships seem, at least for awhile, to offer the possibility of redemption. But in the end, neither Alain or Johnny can dally too long. In the case of Alain, I was never under much illusion that he would change his mind, it seemed a foregone conclusion that he would die on the 23rd of July, and the only question left was how. On the other hand, when Johnny and Louise are having that conversation in the bathroom, and she decided to go back to Manchester that very day, you wonder or not if this is the happy ending that we had all hoped for. Actress Leslie Sharpe, who plays Louise, is resplendent in this deceptively simple scene—the shots of her face as she talks with Johnny and they find out that they still have feelings for each other and might go back to Manchester together. That scene left a deep impression on me, if only because it the ONE bright light in the bleak landscape of the film. I had seen the film before but had forgotten how it ended, so the scene and the end of the film still hit me as if I’d been watching it for the first time. So when you see Johnny taking the money and limping away, the sun behind him, it’s a bit devastating. It’s as if he knew that he couldn’t really make good on his promise to Louise. It’s as if he knew that getting close to another human being—opening to them to the point that you might become an integral part of their happiness—was just something he couldn’t hack. And so he drifts, yet again. The selfish impulses of the man are nothing if not consistent.

Alain, never seems to waver. You begin to admire the man for being so methodical. He ends a visit to his old friend by lambasting the fellow for choosing the path of mediocrity. The says in reply that although outwardly he might seem mediocre, with his nice apartment and kid and bourgeois lifestyle, but that his passion is still there. It’s that he lives without passion, but that his passion has been transferred to these extremely mundane things. Throughout the film you don’t get the sense that Alain is killing himself out of artistic principle—that is, there is no great ideology behind his suicide, it’s just an intractable sadness that transforms him, a huge glitch in the neurons that throws everything off. Yet in this scene, with his friend, you really hear him speak out, about the choices that people make, the ramifications of those choices, for him, for the friends who made those choices, for their lives, for their friendship. It’s one of the more rare “outbursts” that Alain has during the film.

I’m not sure where to end this. These are both excellent films that etch themselves in my mind in a way that ensemble pieces or movies with dense plots lines cannot—I suppose that there is just something inherently more captivating about movies that deal with the inner depths of the individual.

Movies that I’ve watched: La Pointe Courte

It’s amazing the kind of stiuff that you find at your local DVD shops in Shanghai especially if that shop.,
like the one that I go to, is run by a guy that is into art films and therefore stocks his fair share of
Criterion Collections. I’d watched Cleo from 5 to 7 before, and I thought it was pretty good,
so I was excited to find another Varda: La Pointe Courte–her first feature and what they
say was a progenitor of the nouvelle vague.

Here’s a little introduction to the film

Coming from a background as a still photographer, Agnés Varda made La Pointe Courte in 1954 on a shoestring, engaging two fine actors – Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort – to work for nothing. They played a married couple rethinking their relationship while on vacation in a small fishing village on the Mediterranean. Varda used the actual people in the village playing themselves for the parallel story of their lives, and filmed without sync sound, dubbing in other voices later in Paris. The story of the couple is stylized while that of the village people is like Italian neo-realism. The cinematography is lovely and the whole approach is fresh and completely different from the average film. Varda convinced Alain Resnais to edit her film. Her filmic debut is now considered the progenitor of the French New Wave movement which didn’t really begin for several years – with Breathless & 400 Blows.

This introduction does make clear that the two “sections” of the film are stylistically separate.
The section about the married couple is quite stylistic, with some interesting compositions
where you get half of a face facing the camera behind a full face in profile in the foreground.
There are long and languid tracking shots and poetic dialogues on the meaning of love and desire
which don’t sound like the kinds of conversations that real people, who live in this day and age
and have average IQs would have. It’s very French in that way, reminds me of Last Year at Marienbad.
You never really know what the hell they are really talking about and begin to wonder if they
engage in their affairs and romances in some kind of French dimension of the universe that the
rest of us are not privy to.

The other section, which involves the villages of Pointe-Courte, is quite interesting since it’s shot
in a documentary style and uses mostly non-professional real actors. I think it’s fascinating insofar
as it reveals a people and way of life that you don’t normally see…most of the France that I’ve seen
in the movies (as well as real life) is the north–Paris, maybe some things from the country. Here you
get to see the way of life and the problems faced by villagers as they try to deal with love, marriage,
illness, death, and the encroachment of state bureaucracy (the coast guard, government ministries
of health, the armed services, judicial system) into their way of life.

In particular there’s a great section where you see them jousting on these large boats that
are like gondolas, with lots of rowers trying to get their man on the top the momentum and speed
he needs to knock the other guy off his perch. The film is quite warm and humanistic in these parts
which provides a counterpart to the otherwise somewhat pretentious sections dealing with the
relation between the man and the woman. The man and the woman somehow seem to resolve
their problems, and though the woman was unsure at first of what would happen to them
and if she would be able to subjugate her own feelings and take the train from Paris to La Pointe-Courte
to talk with her husband (who is a native of there). There’s a bit of dialogue that revolves around
the cultural differences between north and south, which is quite interesting, since I know a lot about
regional differences in the US and China, but haven’t been able to really get my head around
how it works in France. Sure I know about it intellectually, but not from the inside, from actual
travel or interaction with people of varying regions.

In any case, an interesting film–and piece of film history–if you see it in China, you might want
to pick it up. If you are not in China and are otherwise law abiding, try getting it on Amazon, where you get 4 DVDs from Agens
Varda all together.

China and the “semantic field” in which democracy moves

This French website of ideas and culture has, thankfully, an English section* and in it an essay enttiled “Democratic Universalism as a Historical Problem”. In that I
found the following passage:

Hamilton thus spoke of the “vices of democracy” and criticized its propensity towards excess. The terms “deathly illness,” “confusion,” and “license” were regularly associated with “democracy.” The members of Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787 generally agreed with Burke’s assessment that “a perfect democracy is the most shameful thing in the world.” [16] Images of disorder (confusion, anarchy, and violence), irrationality (passion and madness), and immorality (evil and vice) made up the semantic field in which the word democracy moved. [17] Many Americans’ rejection of the French Revolution’s “excesses” reinforced these claims, while the repellant connotations of the word “Jacobin” dovetailed, at the turn of the nineteenth century, with fears of democracy. Thus John Adams deliberately attacked his political enemies by calling them “democrats” and “Jacobins.” During the Federalists campaign against Jefferson in the presidential race of 1800, allusions to the specter of “Jacobin democracy” that might accompany his victory were a regular staple of campaign rhetoric.

One wonders if that Chinese bien-pensants that never fail to tell you that the country is not ready for democracy and that what they need now is stability are not suffering from the same problem. It’s the way they think of democracy that rules it out. They always think about the worst aspects of certain forms of democracy, but I don’t think any of those are written in stone. They say that western democracy doesn’t suit them, but if you think about it, most of the time the western democracies have been pretty stable, with little other than brief outbursts in May 68 as examples of social disturbances that might, at least in the perception of some, have challenged the status quo. The capitalist social order has proven itself to be resilient, so long as it works to the bulk of society from getting too restive, and if you look at Hong Kong, well you don’t have democracy there but you certainly have a model for the rest of China–or do you ?

In any case, I think that you could argue that democracy isn’t just messiness and anarchy and social turmoil—it’s a social condition that might help China avoid more tragedies like what happened during the earthquake. The prerogatives of the few, the elites of the political institutions, the CCP and their cronies—they don’t face enough challenge to make them stop what they are doing. There are always going to be people who think that they can get away with it, and democracy is good in that sense, because you can get impeached, defeated, or jailed. Or the fourth estate could do it’s job and tell the whole world what a bastard you are. There are more ways to get in your way. There are more ways to stop you from doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, how you want to do it. And I think China could use more of that.

An interesting quote from Tristan Tzara

Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed — persistently inquisitive — about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on the top right side, perhaps signifying it (to the author or whoever it is that has say over these things) as one of his more well-known or oft-quoted sayings:

“I consider America responsible for the shame of our age: the glorification of work, that stupid ideology which has engendered the idea of material progress and the disdain of every utopia or poetry tending toward the perfection of the human soul… I cannot help opposing those influences… with the most violent lunge forward, the idea, and the most creative of actions, idleness.”
—Tristan Tzara

Trust a poet to say something like that. And trust me, from somewhere inside my heart, to fully concur or less pretentiously (if that’s possible for me) — to second that emotion.

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