Marriage Humorous
White Christians spend years studying and memorizing Bible verses, from Sunday school to, well, adult Sunday school. Throughout their lives they will look to these verses for comfort or direction. However, just as normal people will quote from Tommy Boy, The Princess Bride, or The Big Lebowksi to be funny, white Christians can't help but use their vast reservoir of memory verses for humorous, rather than spiritual purposes.
For example, if a teenager is leaving the house on a Sunday afternoon to go shopping, a white Christian parent will take delight in asking her "Is your ass in a pit?" (Luke 14:5), playing on Jesus' comments (KVJ) to the Pharisees about the Sabbath. This works perfectly, because it casts just the right amount of judgment to cause a slight tinge of guilt without being preachy and it's a great excuse to say "ass."
Expert level white Christians do not say that someone was "driving like a bat out of hell." Rather, they will slyly reference 2 Kings 9:20 - "Marge tore out of the parking lot driving like Jehu." A particularly dense object is not said to be "hard as a rock," but "hard as Pharaoh's heart" (Exodus 7:3).
Bible verses can even be used as pickup lines. Young white Christian men are known to break the ice with the ladies by using lines like "Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from Gilead" (Song of Soloman 6:5) or "For your hand in marriage, I would bring your father the foreskins of two hundred Philistines" (1 Samuel 18:25-27). These women then joke to their friends "Be merciful to me, O God, for men hotly pursue me" (Psalm 56:1).
In the event these pickup lines are successful and two white Christians get married (right out of college, of course), throughout their marriage the husband will delight in telling his wife to submit to him and wash the dishes (Ephesians 5:22). If she chooses to respond by making fun of his baldness, the follicly challenged husband will threaten to make like Elisha and call down bears from the woods to maul her (2 Kings 2:23-24).
LFF Enfants (et Adultes) Terribles
The 53rd London Film Festival
The Ferrari Dino Girl (Jan Nemec; Czech Republic; 2009)
Firstly, I should confess that I have seen only one other of Nemec’s previous films, the Czech New Wave lynchpin ‘The Party and the Guests’ (1966). I certainly sit here unaware of any of Nemec’s later works, which are more Art Installation, or ‘silly little films which no-one sees’, as Nemec himself describes them here, than cinema. However, ‘The Party’ is one of the Czech New Wave films which most appealed to me, hence my presence here. ‘Ferrari Dino’ opens with conventional white on black credits rolling and, a little less conventionally, a voiceover describing them, which cuts to a somehow suave yet haggard man gesticulating with an unseen audience about how the credits should not be centralised, because everyone does that, whilst a/the film is projected over him and onto a screen. When a subtle shift in camera angle means that he is turned to address us, which he confirms with a knowing smile, he starts ranting about the conventionality of the work as its flickering images cascade over his body and face, and how people are trying to beguile him using alternative takes in the edit etc; a megalomaniac director. The humour and the self-referentiality of the film are evident from the outset and are, most often, indivisible as the work progresses.
Then begins a narrative voiceover, describing one mans (a film director by coincidence) experience of the evening in 1968 when Russian, and others, tanks rolled into Prague; an invasion in order to halt the reforms that had lead to the Prague Spring, at which time, Czechoslovakia was described as “the freest land ever known”. The narrative plots the directors ‘escape’ through the streets at night, travels with him until dawn.
Shot in modern-day Prague, the images flowing beneath this voiceover are just, to start with, ‘establishing shots’- setting a scene, no details, the camera is in a car travelling with the narrator, photographs of abandoned streets the outside of buildings…
Then the narrator, who is slowly revealed as an avatar of Nemec, recounts when he starts to film the tanks, the soldiers, burning trucks, bloodied Czech flags, dead bodies, blood splattered pavement, people lost, inactive…He says it is like filming fiction, not a documentary. Simultaneously Nemec shows an aged camera being loaded, readied for shooting.
After a brief visit to his parents’ apartment and rallying phone calls to friends, he is persuaded to smuggle the footage he has captured out of Czechoslovakia with the intention that it is shown on foreign TV. Seeing it as a romantic adventure in his beloved Fiat sports car with his friend, the titular Lena, and her boyfriend, they use the boyfriend’s Italian heritage and border papers falsely authorised by friends at the Italian embassy as currency to cross the border into Austria. As he travels, the narrator talks about Fellini, revealing, with his obsessional adoration for his own Fiat and the Ferrari Dino, an Italophilia.
Once together these three friends start re-enacting rudimentary approximations of the scenes described in the narrative, still the description is more detailed in the voiceover than onscreen.
When trying to be Italian to persuade the Russian soldiers and Czech border-guards of his Italian-ness, to let him cross, our narrator relies on names from Fellini films; “Gelsomina, Marcello, Guido…”
After what is meant to be an amusing interlude, but is in fact dry and interminably long, the director crosses the border and takes the film-stock to Vienna, this part of the story narrated over film processing machines at work.
The actual footage is then projected, as if for the first time, and importantly the narration ceases, replaced, unfortunately, by a dodgy chill-out track like the Orb, circa 1993. The footage reflects what the Nemec-narrator has already detailed; a lot of people milling about, tanks, swastikas graffiti-ed on tanks, bullet-holes in cars, tanks breaking barricades, trucks on fire, bloodied Czech flag, dead bodies, blood splattered pavement, most people are lost, inactive. In opposition to the earlier scenes, it is the image here that takes precedence, whereas the narrator’s words which parenthesise this documentary insert is more important than the amateur reconstructions. This places, of course, the correct gravitas on the invasion ‘proper’, the violence of ‘68.
However, in the real documentary footage of the invasion, Nemec quite openly reveals the authorial hand, ‘directing’ the crowd, motioning them closer to the camera, and the cameraman. To include this must have been deliberate. By my calculations the footage shot, four cans of 120 metre rolls, would run to, approximately, 45 minutes. Whereas the footage shown here, is only 20 minutes long. According to Peter Hames, who is far more expert than me on the films of Nemec and Czechoslovak cinema in general, this black and white footage ‘shown without commentary’ (true) ‘or editorial interventions’ (false) ‘attains something of the original traumatic impact’. If this footage was not edited, then it would be twenty-five minutes longer and is not Nemec’s auterial direction editing in itself
This insert is, shot in a sombre tone, a documentary, cinema veritè if you will, and tells the story in front of the camera. The colour, contemporary footage, shot on DV, often irreverent, and even a little salacious, is indeed, the story behind the camera, re-told after a 40-year interval.
This mixture of footage and contexts affects a sort of Bergsonian ‘sheet of time’ where we are hopping form one point in the past to a point in the present and back again. This contextual skipping, flitting from ‘68 to 2008, from narrative and colour to non-narrative B&W, from personal to general (all in Prague) from in front of the camera to behind it. Which is not as difficult to follow as it reads, it is more conceptual skipping.
After the documentary is shown Nemec becomes renowned, moves to New York, where he meets Chabrol, offering Nemec a chance to drop hints to the French and Czechoslovakian New Wave ‘movements’, and makes his first film in which he recycles the Prague ’68 documentary footage, Oratorio to Prague. Which is key here. ‘The Ferrari Dino Girl’, however jocular and competent, has a sniff of stagnant revision about it. It lacks the incongruous, Kafka- and Beckett-influenced absurdity of ‘The Party and the Guests’, or the succinct parodies of Svankmajer’s surrealist shorts from the mid-sixties, Karel Kachyna’s ‘The Ear’ (1970), or others. Its barbs have been blunted with age.
I certainly liked this film, but it does not compare to Nemec or his contemporaries’ works when they were working under The Party regime. Admittedly, without having seen anything more by Nemec, I would suggest that, as with JM Coetzee and Tarkovsky, once the repressive regime that he was railing against has disappeared, once the authorities have lost control of his creation, the art itself lacks purpose and atrophies without its iron brace. As Nemec himself said, once he felt that he had “settled accounts with the ‘forces of reaction’, it was time to change his approach and seek contact with a wider audience.”1
1 Hames, Peter; The Czechoslovak New Wave (Second Edition), p7, Wallflower Press 2005.
Enter The Void (Gaspar Noè ; France; 2009)
I have, as yet to decide on whether Noè ’s latest is worth a review of its own, outside of this, or maybe I have run out of bile. Watch this space.
Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza; Phillipines; 2009)
This Filipino film arrives at the film festival already branded with fame and infamy having won the Best Director Award at Cannes in May for Brillante Mendoza and being widely regarded as more brutally confrontational than the offerings of those notorious provocative infants Gasper Noè and Lars von Trier. It opens with the, Christian, wedding ceremony of Peping and Cecille, a handful of friends and family present, banter is shared with the registrar, followed by a meal in a restaurant, primary characters are introduced, much hilarity and synthetic family bliss is revealed. On the journey from the ceremony all the family cram into a People Carrier, the cameraman and his tool squeezed in too; the handheld camera is always sat just behind or follows closely beside the each character, there are occasionally medium shots, framing a couple of characters, but otherwise the first third of the film is intimate.
The second scene is set in a Police Academy, where we sit watching police recruits, including the ‘protagonist’ Peping, in training, in a lesson on gathering evidence from a crime scene, an irony that sits in counterpoint to a later scene in the film.
Instantly we are made aware, purely through dialogue, that money, and, more importantly, external signs of it are what drive the gathered men here, especially Peping. Cars, cars, cars! Everyone wants a cool, expensive one, and everyone talks about, cars! Peping and his friend and colleague, Abyong, are seen collecting, what one would assume to be, protection money from street hawkers, roughing one up a little, when he cannot pay the full amount. Money is an obsession and corruption is an acceptable means, a commonplace one as the lads go about their crooked business chatting about sport, home-life etc., of attaining this affluence.
Shortly after these glaring character announcements, Peping is taken on a ‘job’, with Abyong and other police associates, the ‘Chief’ and ‘Sarge’ amongst them. Initially Peping argues that he must leave and see his wife and then that, at the very least, he must call her, text her, oh, never mind, he does none of these and goes with them. They stop at a strip-joint, where we are welcomed by some pendulous nudity, thrust in the camera’s eye, as if we were a paying customer. A stripper called Madonna, the name can be no coincidence in a country infested with the words of Jesus, is enticed to the people-carrier where the policemen await, is beaten, trussed and abducted, although I’m not sure at which point it becomes abduction, whether immediately one is trussed one is abducted, which is almost the height of ambiguity for this film.
In the darkness of the car, where much is not seen, the lighting is saved for close-ups of Madonna’s suffering, although the violence occurs off-camera, her frightened bloody face is the entire screen for gruelling seconds. Again, the handheld camera sits us within the action, and even, when the camera moves seats around the multi-seated vehicle, it can become difficult to keep track of all the characters. Of course, this expedition is meant to be viewed in counterpoint to the lovely, happy one taken by Peping and some of these men after his marriage, where his newly pregnant wife is the centre of their attention. Again, we are even stuck in traffic with them; another tool of audience implication, which also highlights the mundanity of this act for those, involved. Except Madonna, of course. I‘m sure much of this has never happened to her before. Especially that which awaits her.
If we hadn’t noticed the overbearing neon devotion of the country before, this car journey makes it clear with, it seems, hundreds of ‘JESUS IS….’, ‘JESUS DOES…’ billboards filmed from the car window. Quotes from the Old Testament, evoking the sort of justice meted out therein. As if the characters frolicking, stopping to pee together during a roadside break, of course Madonna is still left in the car, flesh exposed, face hidden in the shadows, making STD jokes, and using the stripper as a foot-mat, is not enough to give us an idea of the types of characters these chaps are, they run down a dog in cold blood. No mention is even made of it.
The intensely boring pilgrimage finally ends when the car passes into the grounds of a, literally, signposted (disused) slaughterhouse, which, either as gallows humour or a signifier of future crimes, does not work. Each for the same reason, it is too obvious. Apart from that, the film’s title in its home country, ‘Butchered’, would act as signpost enough.
In the Slaughterhouse itself, on the wall of the corridor leading to the room where the abominable crime is t take place is a picture of Jesus, gazing piously at and blessing his flock. Whether Mendoza is suggesting that our lord Jesus is aware of the acts about to take place and condoning them as Old Testament justice, Madonna has taken advances on her wages from the strip-joint to feed her ‘drug’ habit and not repaid, or that, regardless of the beliefs of these men, they can justify their actions, is not yet clear.
Mendoza, again, acknowledges the callousness of these bastards as they begin preparations for the ‘execution’ by gathering, sending Peping and Abyong for, beer, cigarettes and duck-eggs. The misogyny of the language from now on is so gratuitous to be puerile and ridiculous, as if a 14-year-old was acting all 50-Cent to impress his equally gormless friends. Of course, things read differently in subtitles, but some of the ‘Chief’, the main perpetrator of crimes and insults, seems to be straining to offend.
Before the hub of the film is reached, Mendoza scatters some last-minute details of Madonna’s life into the narrative, and we are, one guesses, meant to feel something her, as we learn her real name, Gina, and that she has a son. I don’t want to sound as callous as the swine depicted here, but in the context of this film, I couldn’t connect with, or, therefore, care about anyone, not Madonna, nor Peping, the two characters we actually find out more than a name about. This is too little, too late.
Thankfully the scenes of brutal, rape, murder and dismemberment are in long-shot (finally), not the intimate close-ups of the previous forty-five minutes and much of the actual violence is off-camera still, relieving the tension somewhat, although we are still stuck in a basement room with these men. There is, however, a close-up of Madonna’s face as she is stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen, her pain and blood the focus, once again. When the Chief starts thrusting a knife into her genitals, we are saved from any graphic detail as it is filmed from behind him, his broad, fat frame obscuring her petite, lifeless body; only the motion and placement of his upper arm indicating the superfluous damage and humiliation he is inflicting. Then, when they hack off her limbs, delayed, as they cannot find a blade sharp enough for the job, we are only shown Peping’s reactions to the mutilation. But, the respite is brief, as we are soon party to legs, arms, and finally her head rent from her torso.
After inflicting the above scenes on us, Mendoza offers some darkly comic relief in almost every scene after. As he carries the severed head in a bag, we are shown the back of Peping’s police-issue T-shirt which says, “Once integrity is lost it is always lost’. Once more, it is unfortunate that subtitling has to translate this for the non-Filipino speaker, but, in doing so, emphasises it too much. The four junior policemen then gather to clean the crime scene, using the skills learnt at the police academy to destroy evidence, not gather it, reiterating the film’s use of point and counterpoint; the chiaroscuro of a positive and light scene reflected in corresponding darkened one, often refracted through irony.
This device finds its most succinct usage in the following scenes. As they leave the abattoir, the killers dumping the mutilated body parts on the roadside, they get stuck, briefly, behind a truck-full of oinking pigs. This humorous criticism, if indeed intended as one, is not enough, however.
Peping leaves the rest of the gang after vomiting in a restaurant toilet and the gang, anonymous, identities, again ironically, unknown to the authorities investigating this slew of killings, is referred to on the radio of the cab he travels in. There is finally a crosscut away from these reprobate, corrupt cops, to the site of the detached head, which has been found, where a police investigation has begun.
Peping goes home to his wife and child. Done
There is here, like Gaspar Noè , a straightforward message. Everything is shit. Apart from, or possibly because of, the religious fervour and capitalist aspirations imposed on all, everyman is corrupt, confused, immoral. There is little ambiguity in this violent tale, which, like Lynch, uncovers the bright façade to reveal a seedy, grimy, crime underneath, but little else. It is something like shorter, stupider and drama-free Crime and Punishment with Raskolnikov and Petrovic in one body.
Tales from the Golden Age (Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru; Romania; 2009)
This portmanteau is the multi-limbed, torso-sharing, Siamese quintuplet spawn of ‘2 Days, 3 Weeks and 4 Months’ (2007) writer/director Cristian Mungiu. Although the father/directors (including himself) of each segment are various, Mungiu wrote each screenplay and produced the entire ‘project’. According to the Press Kit, each showing of the film will contain different segments, so, if you ever do watch this film, it may be a child with an extra head or a different one entirely, to the one here. The whole enterprise is built around the irony that in the Romania of the 80’s official propaganda issued by Ceausescu’s regime referred to the era as a “…golden age…”, when the reality for the people was somewhat different.
Two of the five shorts here are slightly longer and a little more serious than the others; relying on the absurdity of the situations the characters find themselves in, rather than singular comedic conceits. However, consistency is achieved through Mungiu being the sole screenwriter- that each tale, allegedly, is based on a ‘real’ urban myth and that they all have the same, single target; the ludicrousness of ‘the Party’.
The first, ‘The Legend of the Official Visit’ follows its titular narrative as a small village scrambles to prepare itself for one of Ceausescu’s working visits. The humour here is primarily derived from the giving, receiving and delegation of orders, however bizarre or contradictory they may be and the lengths normal folk will go to in order to impress party delegates. Immediately the pre-visit party activist orders the Mayor, he cascades to his party secretary, who passes the order on, most frequently to the beleaguered local policeman, whose clichéd facial reactions and portly frame suggest he is a graduate of the Comedy School of Messrs Laurel and Hardy. The debasement of nature is also a motif, with cowpats ordered to be removed from the roadside, an order for pigeons to be painted white and even a suggestion by the Mayor that they hang fruit in the trees, as they “are too bare”. The Party, it would seem, is so illogical that it bends the laws of nature.
The orders given are, it is frequently stressed, for ‘everyone’ and the punch line is derived from this; everyone must drink, says the Party Activist, and everyone does, everyone must take a drunken, ride on the carousel, says the Party Activist, and everyone does. Everyone including the carousel owner-attendant and consequently everyone is sat on the ride until it “runs out of fuel”. I laughed! No, I did not, but I was meant to.
The Second, ‘The Legend of the Party Photographer’, is just as slight as the latter and framed around a central joke that also holds a microcosm of ‘the Party’ at its centre. The farce is broad, of course; shocked middle-aged men clutch at their chests, clichéd Party officials are lampooned, etc. This is the weakest of the five, playing more like a skit from a TV comedy show.
The bureaucracy behind the publication of the Party’s daily paper, “Scinteia”, specifically the rules governing a photograph of Ceausescu meant for the front page, is parodied. The eponymous photographer must re-touch the photograph, to meet unspecified guidance, whilst his assistant cracks wise and answers back to the Party officials and he, quite hilariously, stops to clutch at his heart every five minutes. Although the barbs aimed at ‘the Party’ hint at the world of Kafka sometimes, the segment relies on the banal too frequently.
Of course, in this burlesque, the photograph of Ceausescu is printed with a mistake and the Militia attempt to confiscate every copy of “Scinteia”, but overlook the odd edition, which is much to the amusement of those in possession and, I am sure, many other people with a less evolved sense of humour than your average brick.
The third segment, ‘The Legend of the Chicken Driver’, anchors the first four parts, and is a more solemn and lengthier installment that reminded me of 1990s Aki Kaurismäki. However, the humour is no less obvious, the majority of it stemming from one man’s sexual desires; with a pop at religion and the compulsory digs at the Party, of course.
Grigore is the Chicken Driver, or, driver of trucks full of chickens to be exact, and he never breaks the rules, never considers breaking the rules and has never even thought about questioning the rules. He in fact quite likes imparting the rules to the new chap. He would also like to sleep with his wife, I couldn’t see why, but she will not acquiesce to his rather pliant advances, which mainly consist of him sitting on the side of the marital bed looking at her bared thighs as she dozes. This drives him to attempt to, only a tad more actively, flirt with a parochial restaurant owner, where he rests on his long hauls, which leads to him breaking the rules and being arrested. Predominant here is the director’s (I don’t know which one) comment on the rarity of food, especially meat, and the lengths people will, and had to, go to to get it. Here, everyone wants eggs, but there are not enough eggs to go around in this l’age d’or; an acute metaphor for the failures of this particular dictatorship.
However, the set-up is protracted and the punch line not anywhere close to being funny. In fact, I am not sure it could even be classified as a joke.
‘The Legend of the Greedy Policeman’, the fourth story, shares some internal organs with the Chicken Driver, its narrative fuelled by the trade in contraband foods and the hilarious idiocy of its eponymous character. Basically, this is the tale of the trials of killing a pig in an apartment building without letting onto the neighbours or police that you are doing so, exceptionally, when you are policeman yourself. Priceless! What you do, what any grown man would do, is listen to his ten-year-old son’s advice and gas the prohibited porcine with the oven and, in so doing, cause a massive explosion bringing more notice to the fact that you were trying to kill a pig than if you had just cut the bugger’s throat and…hahahahaha. How I laughed. It is a one-note dig at the stupid officials who enforced the laws of the Party, and disposable because of it.
The final chapter, ‘The Legend of the Air Sellers’, returns to the longer more serious tone of ‘Chicken Driver’, following Crina and Bughi; she a schoolgirl attempting to save money for a trip with her school-friends and he the son of a Party Secretary, obviously trying to rebel against daddy, as they both play at inverted Robin Hoods, robbing the poor of their valuable glass containers to line their own pockets. The joke here is that…there is no joke, in fact, it is the best of the five, relying on characterisation beyond the superficial and a sense of reality that is missing from the previous four episodes.
The project as a whole is not without merit; there is cohesion throughout Mungiu’s multiple scripts, if only through the repetition of stock characters, the jocular imbecilic policeman for example, and consistent set design, every fridge is empty. Every episode also has its prodigal moment; the final long-shot of ‘The Official Visit’ of the carousel wheeling its perpetual circle, full of drunk, sleeping and sickened dignitaries in the middle of the countryside at dawn is beautifully surreal; Diana Cavallioti as Crina in the Air Sellers is magnificent in a determined female role.
Yet, summarily, it is all too easy to lambast the illogical Party and its bureaucratic automatons, and the People’s fear and acceptance of it, especially in retrospect. More courageous, controversial and important works came out of other Eastern Bloc states in the 60s and 70s. See the Hungarian ‘The Round-Up’ (Miklos Jansco, 1965), Poland’s ‘The Third Part of the Night’ (Andrej Zulawski, 1971) or Vera Chytilova’s Czechoslovakian anarchic, proto-feminist smorgasbord, ‘Daises’, from ‘66 for lessons in satiric excellence. Even Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2006 ‘12:08 East of Bucharest’ aimed higher than the soft target of the Regime itself and mocked the ‘People’ instead. The worst of it is if you compare this Pygmy Dr Ceausescu’s Monster to the, frankly, brilliantly focused ‘2 Days, 3 Weeks and 4 Months’.
Bellamy (Claude Chabrol; France; 2009)
I have tried with Chabrol of late but, as with Rohmer, I leave his films feeling, well, rather indifferent. If you are unacquainted with the Nouvelle Vague veteran, I’d advise to stay well clear of this one. Try instead the witty, laissez faire, faux-insouciance of ‘Les Cousins’ (1959) or the dark homecoming tale of ‘Le Beau Serge’ (1958), or even the dubiously un-PC ‘Les biches’ (1968). Possibly you would even be better off with Chabrol’s Cahiers du Cinema chums, Godard and Truffaut (the latter’s early films). Or Godard’s later ones. Not Truffaut’s, of course. Actually, you could even ignore the Young Turks entirely and watch anything and everything by the tenuously New Wave Rive Gauche Varda, Marker and Resnais (looking no later than his 1980 ‘Mon oncle d’Amerique’).
This crime investigation dawdles along with the corpulent frame of Gerard Depardieu’s titular ex-Inspector Bellamy, like a Gallic Inspector Wexford, with more sex(-ual references). Chabrol’s nods to the genre are light, winking at the audience when Depardieu talks to a Hardware Store attendant about wood for shelving, suggesting that he does not need a strong wood as the shelves are only for Crime Novels, which are not very weighty . Or, later, in bed with his wife, when he discusses how he is archaic like an Agatha Christie character. The genre tropes are inflated and float through the narrative, like cinematic muscle-flexing, as has been the case with the Nouvelle Vague boys since the late fifties.
The investigation itself is almost immaterial as the retired but still active Bellamy discovers more about himself and his marriage through his questions and clue-location than the murder at the peripheral centre of the tale. It plays like a lighter and looser ‘Lantana’ (Ray Lawrence, 2001), although the only positive in Bellamy is the performance of Depardieu. Which, of course, we have come to expect from him, and as such comes as no surprise, and less delectable for it.
The film ends with the words ‘There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.’ They are projected onto the final scenes, and almost made me think that I may have missed something. This was almost certainly Chabrol’s intention. But, I left indifferent.
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont; France; 2009)
Dumont could be seen as another of the filmmakers dubiously positioned under the moniker New French Extremity, along with peers such as Catherine Breillat, Michael Haneke or Gasper Noè. I would argue that except for Haneke, the others in this short-list, but not necessarily others associated with that style of cinema, are provocateurs first and artists second. It is likely they would agree, on a certain day, with the first part of that rather outrageous statement, after adding the caveat, that they ‘shock in order to make people think’, Dumont himself has a background in philosophy, a professional-thinker, no-less, but would certainly deny the latter half of the statement, for which I wouldn’t blame them. But, unlike Breillat, or Claire Denis, whose ‘Trouble Every Day’ (2001) is considered a New French Extremity film, neither Dumont or Noè have a particularly gendered agenda. ‘Hadewijch’, like Noè’s latest film (see earlier review) seem too simple in both their tactics of confrontation and their ultimate message.
At the beginning of ‘Hadewijch’ Celine is a nun-in-training, an apprentice to God, of you will but is asked to leave the Nunnery by the abbess, for being a “caricature of a nun”; not truly committed to her faith and trying to hard, something is missing in her conviction and she is sent back to Paris to find what it is. The subject and setting make this both an austere life, for which Celine shows too much vacant passion, and an austere film, Bressonian in tone, as one has come to expect from Dumont.
As noted, Dumont is certainly not a shy director and within the first five minutes or so, the nature of the film and Celine’s narrative furrow is described in succinct imagistic metaphors; Celine stomping through a barren wood, near the nunnery (which later in the film, now faith-filled, she wanders through in full bloom); a shot, camera fixed on the cloudy heavens at an industrial crane that is lowering what can only be described as crucifix-like metal object slowly into frame; and Celine’s barely perceptible, but near constant, tilt of her chin and eyes upwards, toward…you know who.
On leaving the monastery she passes a builder, David, who was working on site being arrested, on what charges we don’t know, and never actually find out. On being sentenced and placed in prison it is immediately apparent that he more than knows the ropes, but we are never sure exactly why Dumont keeps crosscutting between Celine’s story and his. Except, perhaps, that we can plot time against his sentence, so as, when he is released, we know three months has passed in Celine’s life too.
Back in Paris, we are introduced to Celine’s disgustingly rich parents, where she also then meets three chaps in a café with whom she, rather worryingly, especially if you have watched any Dumont previously, soon after being introduced, leaves. Instead of anything unpleasant, she turns up at the gig of some crazy accordion/sax-fronted punk combo on the bank of the Seine with one of the young chaps, Yassine. He tries his luck, she rejects him and he takes her number. The next day she sees a classical ensemble practising in a church. Obviously, we are meant to compare the two musical pieces and what they mean to Celine. One associated with pious tranquillity and the other with action, reaction and even violence. They meet again when Celine explains she is not looking for a lover, she is God’s woman or a woman of God, one of the two and Yassine invites her to come and meet his brother Nassir, who is rather a fundamental Muslim.
Now, the thrust of the tale begins and Dumont starts to rub his clammy provocateurial hands together with glee. Celine appears at a talk that Nassir is giving on the Invisibility of God, specifically in regard to the Qur’an, but he thinks she may be interested. Instead some dirty great oaf goes and ogles her and she runs to a garden set down in a courtyard amongst the high-story, monolithic spires of the Projects. Here she goes through the same stuff about being a virgin and only wanting God to look on her and that she thinks he is not there for her, which creates their relationship, transcending their differing faiths.
She shares the second forage through the woods with Nassir, where the trees are no longer bare like her belief but covered with foliage, and the moment when she returns to the hill atop which the monastery stands and a bright light is seen to project onto her glowing face. She searches for the something she is lacking to truly believe with Yassine and especially Nassir; you can almost sense the glee with which Dumont shots Celine in close-up obviously in prayer, only to pan backwards to reveal the two Muslim brothers on their knees doing the same. A convergence of the Christian and Islamic faiths, the juxtaposition of and conflicts between Western and Arab worlds. The latter is a tried and tested apparatus of impact for Dumont, from his first feature ‘La vie de Jésus’ (1997) through his last ‘Flandres’ (2006) and onto here.
The obvious baiting of some of the images, dressed in Bressonian veils of spirituality are designed to provoke and nothing else. Dumont is at work to shock and always has been, from the sequence revealing the body of the murdered and raped child near the outset of ‘L’humanite’ (1999), with its perverse echoes of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés. Or, the girl martyr from ‘Flandres’ who gives herself to the men around her in order to save them, to protect them, like Kornél Mundruczó‘s ‘Johanna’ (2005) does, or the vicious gang-rape in that film of an Arab woman by French combatants (which is actually to be commended given the timing). Or, worse still, if only because it is the worst of his films, the sheer bizarre and brutal physical horror and pornography of ‘Twentynine Palms’ (2003).
Here though in ‘Hadewijch’, Dumont takes a step further, which any worthy shocker needs to do, and Celine and Nassir travel to an unspecified Arab country and meet friends of Nassirs, and we are not party to most of the dialogue as there are few subtitles. The very next shot travels up a busy Parisian street and suddenly a smoky (shonky CGI) explosion scares and deafens as it rips through the scene. Of course, Dumont is attempting to make his audience, one would assume the festival-circuit, educated, middle-class Westerners think, as von Trier attempted in ‘AntiChrist’ (2009) and Haneke in, say, ‘Funny Games’ (1997). Only one of them did it with any panache, and his name is Michael. That Celine, or even Nassir, was involved in the attack can only be implied, we see nothing to suggest that it was even a bomb, a terrorist attack, but of course, as scared bourgeoisie fools, we know it was a fundamentalist Islamist attack, no?
After the explosion, we return to the nunnery with Celine, where the camera follows her to the garden, where we also see that David has returned and both of them seek shelter in a greenhouse when the heavens open and threaten to drench them. Here Dumont focuses a shot of a rather ominous crow in a barren bush, sheltering from the rain. Celine walks around the fields of the grounds, via the woods and to a small pond, which she submerges herself in an attempt to drown. After a couple of seconds we hear and then see the David wade in and save her. This is Dumont’s ode to Bresson’s ‘Mouchette’ (1967), in which the eponymous girl, after generally being abused by life and its uncaring inhabitants, walks herself into a small pond, from which she has no David or anyone else to climb in and save her.
If you feel that you are a bourgeoisie fool who needs a slap in the face or a kick in the proverbials to realise what a staid, barren existence you lead, watch some Haneke instead, he hates you.
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke; Austria; 2009)
Haneke’s new film is worth a separate review and more time.
They All Lie (Matías Piñeiro; Argentina; 2009)
The simple plot of this Argentinean film is that of eight youths, four boys and four girls, in a house outside Buenos Aires. The more entangles one is a web of intricate conceits, sexual, political and historical. Director Matías Piñeiro even grants us convenient inter-titled chapters to aid with the disentanglement, such as Tale of the Eight, All’s Well That Ends Well and Three Kisses. The latter refers to three of the male characters kissing Helena, the owner of the house, or is she kissing them? And, I think, the other three girls share a boy or two too.
The script summons the spirit of the liberal politician and author Domingo Sarmiento and his political nemesis, the dictator Juan Martin de Rosas. Neither of whom I know, which probably means I was only privy to limited certain plains of meaning.
However, the characters discuss, early on, that they feel like they have been in the house before, “climbing trees” which would evoke the spectre, at least, of Alain Resnais’ ‘Last Year I Marienbad’ (1961), and, via it, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ‘scenario and dialogue’. But, given the nationality and the politics, it is more likely that Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novel ‘The Invention of Morel’, on whose phantom foundations Marienbad’s hotel is built, is the source here. A number of scenario’s inform this supposition; that they invent a character, JMR who is referred to separately as Joaquin, Martin and Rossas, who maybe is or was a painter and ex-boyfriend of two of the girls; that at one point all eight of them appear to disappear; one of the girls, Emilia, is frequently found, by the audience only, to be concealed somewhere (in wardrobes, behind doors) hidden from the others having overheard secrets, who “never speaks to anyone”, in parallel to the protagonist from Casares’ novel.
That the characters frequently talk of leaving the country house, ‘later’, ‘tomorrow’ or even at set times, but appear unable, also hints to Bunuel’s ‘The Exterminating Angel’ (1962), another surreal, satirical tale with the threads of incongruity and, possibly, the supernatural running through it.
They are devising a scam of sorts, faking ‘real paintings’ of ‘JMR’, and this, the lines between fakes and truths is of high import in a film which never really allows you to settle into any assumptions as to who each character really is, who they represent and, even, if they actually exist.
This deliberate shrouding of characters behind meshes of uncertainty is subtly carried out. Often, we are introduced to tableaus, scenes, partway through, often after ‘events’ have taken place, or doors are closed to hide them from us before they have developed fully, concluded. These are, to be fair, mostly scenes of more kissing. Also, details are only fed to us gradually. Like, when, about half an hour into the film, certain characters start to say that they have heard a telephone ringing, whilst others are adamant that there is no telephone in the house. Only after another half an hour and further references to its presence are we offered aural confirmation of its existence, confirmed later on by a firm sighting of one.
The sense of being in a Cesaresian/Resnaisian world is further compounded by the conspiracy and double-plotting between all the characters, the girls using the many kisses to transfer faith and doubt between the boys.
The subtitles spoilt it slightly.
This is also a film with some wonderfully inventive compositions. Enhancing the idea that Emilia may well be a descendent of Casares’ protagonist, she is framed in the garden of the house (toiling a garden of sorts like her literary ancestor) through the missing segment of a broken window; she is surrounding by a clarity, whilst other characters in the foreground of the garden are seen through the glass itself, blurred by the dirt, ghostly.
Nearing the end of the film, after a lengthy sub-title which mirrors the subsequent dialogue, Maria and Cillero sing a song that would suggest a superficial summary of the girl’s actions at least, but which, although repeated for the gathered audiences, us and the other characters, only seems to undermine further the notion of a certainty, a reality at the centre of this film through its over-simplicity.
The film ends with the introduction of a ninth character, inter-titled Rossa Returns; the character they seem to have invented who wanders around the empty house, throwing smoke-bombs into seemingly uninhabited rooms, before certain of the characters re-appear one by one and Helena leaves with Rossa/JMG/Morel.
This is not a huge film, and there are, of course, imperfections, although the worst was the sometimes devilishlly non-sensical sub-titles, which added to the aura of ambiguity, and not Piñeiro’s fault, one assumes. However, this is a subtle, sensitive, thoughtful and intelligent piece that intersects with an amorphous point of political and cinematic/literary history. I think.
Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira; Portugal; 2009)
The Portuguese centenarian’s new film opens on the carriage of a train trundling along, a conductor punching tickets. The camera just sits, watching as the train progresses and the inspector inspects, a long take for a feature film that is little over an hour long. However, one can forgive Manoel de Oliveira the time as it is soon apparent that this is the setting from which the entire film will be propelled, projected from a character’s memory, as we focus in on a man and a woman sat in adjoining seats. A voiceover, obviously the man who we have sat in front of us, tells us that he would find it easier to make a confession to a stranger than someone he knows and he turns to the woman and makes conversation.
The tale the train-passenger weaves is one of an older man’s obsession for a younger girl, flashbacks take over and occasionally we return to the middle-aged man and the lady, who dutifully entreats him to continue the story, or asks for further details.
The similarities to Luis Buñuel’s ‘Cet obscur objet du désir’ (1977) are impossible to ignore; the confession to strangers on a train by an older man of his infatuation with a young woman, told in flashback. There are, though, many differences, the primary one being that Brunel’s film is a work of genius, Oliviera’s is far from it.
De Oliveira’s film is more celibate than Buñuel’s, unsurprisingly, as his protagonist Macário’s infatuation never reveals for Luísa Vilaça, the sexual desire which is at the heart of Buñuel’s film, and Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet’s Conchita’s power over Fernando Rey’s Mathieu. He wants to physically own Conchita and Buñuel milks much humour from his exasperation at not succeeding, especially when others seem to, whereas Macario wants to marry Luísa.
The moral setting of ‘Eccentricities’ is an anachronistic one, where Luísa is courted, not seduced, her mother is asked for Luísa’s hand in marriage and even, when Luísa and Macario kiss for the first and only time onscreen, the camera pans down to spare our blushes, concentrating on her legs and feet (a Buñuel-ian obsession of his own, feet and shoes) where she kicks back her heel, lifting her foot off of the ground.
Even when we first see Luísa in close-up, through Macario’s eyes, she is framed by her black cloak and the dark clothes of those around her, soft light flooding her face as if she were Marlene Dietrich in the ‘Blue Angel’ (von Strenberg 1930), but a romanticised vision of beauty. This notion of timelessness, or a world where time passes as well as being static, is condensed into a composition which echoes through the film; a medium, static shot of a town hall clock with its hands missing, the sky behind it turning from morning to night in time-lapse.
Apart from the chastity of the central idolatry, there are sparks of something like humour. Witness Macario’s awkward repetition of the same three questions, worded slightly differently each time, when he is first introduced to Luísa and his self-deprecating line “Commerce shuns a sentimental accountant.” It is just the humour, itself, is modest in comparison to Buñuel’s as well.
The only point on which de Oliveira excels is that his film is arguably more aesthetically poetic, the overall tone is something like José Luis Guerín’s ‘En la ciudad de Sylvia’ (2007), especially in the repetition of a shot above the city rooftops into a bay, alternately capturing dawns and dusks, which is, simply, beautiful.
Regardless of the differences the two directors have the same target/goal; mocking the self-congratulatory morality and stupidity of the bourgeoisie. Olivier sets his parable an echelon or two higher up the chain than Buñuel, the apartments his characters inhabit, are sets of lush decadence, decorated with the browns, oranges, golds and yellows of Kandinsky.
Of course, even de Oliveira could argue that any similarities of his film to Buñuel’s are coincidental, as they are both adaptations, his from a short story by Eça de Queirós, and Don Luis’ ‘inspired’ by Pierre Louÿs’ book “La femme et le pantin”.
However, it is clear that Macário is a distant nephew, or some-such, of Fernando Rey’s Mathieu, that ‘Eccentricities’ is more like a truncated remake of ‘Obscur’ whereas de Oliveira’s earlier ‘Belle Toujours’ (2006) (billed as an homage to Buñuel and (his collaborator/writer on his final six films) Jean-Pierre Carriere) was a sequel, of sorts, to Buñuel’s ‘Belle de jour’ (1967).
De Oliveira has done the same for ‘Obscur’ as he did for ‘Belle de Jour’; sanitised Buñuel. ‘Eccentricities’ is an aperitif to Buñuel’s far more potent and dangerous cocktail, a brief fling, at best. It misses the surrealism, wit and wickedness of ‘Obsur’, but maybe most importantly, it lacks the vitriol aimed at the establishment, which makes Buñuel so extraordinarily good, so anarchically funny.
Oh, in case you wanted to know, the ‘eccentricity’ of the blonde-haired girl is that she is a thief, for which Macário rejects her, unlike Mathieu who finds out his Conchita has been manipulating him, passionately beats and rejects her, but then, at the end of the film, takes her back…
Sweet Rush (Andrej Wajda; Poland; 2009)
Wajda’s latest does not have the classically linear narrative or epic pomposity of his last film, Katyn (http://alittlepoison.com/2009/09/14/katyn-andrzej-wajda-poland-2007/#at). Instead, it is the antithesis to that film; non-linear and firmly situated at the personal end of the scale of filmmaking. Self-referential and intimate, it is a philosophical and elegiac essay investigating the effects the inevitable intricacies of aging and death and the transitory nature of life has on its characters. Poignant, some would say. Bloody depressing, others would no doubt remark.
It opens with a blurry, sun-dappled, screen; grass swaying in silhouette (the Sweet Rush of the title), as if it had been shot through a fine gossamer veil, which fades into slow-moving sun-dappled water, each accompanied by faint, choral and piano music on the soundtrack. Both shots are repeated later, separately, emphasising the importance of these two metaphors.
We then cut to actress Krystyna Janda, waking from sleep, the action repeated, as if she is detached from her body, or, indeed, there are two of her. It is light out; bright even, as the sun leans into the dark of the room. Janda is. here, playing ‘herself’, or a variation of her persona, delivering painful monologues about her husband, the cinematographer Edward Klosinski to whom the film is dedicated, and his fight with and loss to lung cancer early in 2008. Janda reveals that this current film, or an earlier form of it, you assume, was postponed due to Edward’s illness and premature death. She also describes how she photographed him obsessively, to “capture his last moments”.
The room, which she roams, unable to sit still, dragging deeply on a cigarette, is more like its stage doppelganger; and she is an actress on it. (“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.”)
Yet, the set, a crumpled bed, a single chair on bared floorboards and two small windows, allowing variable amounts of light onto the darkness, is more akin to the staging of an Ibsen play, rather than Shakespeare, or, unsurprisingly, early-to-mid-sixties Bergman. Wajda is overlapping here with ground oft trodden by fellow octogenarian Jacques Rivette, with his near-obsessional investigation of the relationship between stage and screen from ‘Paris nous appartient’ (1960) to ‘Va savoir’ (2001).
This is the first of four scenes in this barren and bleak room, which interweave with two other ‘narratives’; Janda in a fiction, playing Marta, a doctor’s wife in Post-World War II Poland, and the infrequent, but anarchically present scenes of the actual film-crew, including Wajda, at work. However, this is not all as distinct as described: the levels run together at times, with Janda coming out of character as Marta and ‘playing’ ‘Janda’, and the themes evoked by the set of the monologues on death straddle both threads, as does the theatrical and the eponymous sweet rushes.
An example of this shared theme of ambivalence follows in the very next scene, Janda is reading from an encyclopedia of some sort about the rushes, and we learn how sweet they taste, but that if you smell them at their base, they smell of death. The combination of the two, sweet life and its sour end, is the central motif.
In the next scene we see a bristling film-crew setting up a shot, loading cameras; a clapperboard claps and the fictional film, the film ‘proper’, begins…
Marta is examined by her husband, as he X-rays her, he is noticeably nervous. He tells her that she is fine, has “a common cold”, but almost immediately reveals to a family friend that she will “likely not make it through the summer”. Marta and her friend leave the house together and the theme of the ‘theatre’ is openly remarked upon when Marta refers to gossip she has heard from the townsfolk that her household is “like an Ibsen play”.
Further still, the pair down to a stage built next to the town’s river where the youngsters, and the not-so-young, go to dance and drink (a juice made from sweet rushes, I think). Here, Marta literally bumps into a young man, Bogũs which is the initial spark for the platonic fancy at the heart of this layer of the film; the older woman flattered by the attention from the handsome young man and he, in his turn, interested in the experience, knowledge and education he associates with this doctor’s wife.
After this initial and brief contact, Marta returns home and bids goodnight to her husband, giving rise to the film’s most succinct and beautiful composition. Shot from inside the darkened, yellow-hued dining-room, beyond, and framed by, a door-jamb, the doctor sits, in relief, as he is drowned in blanched-blue lunar-light, crumpled against the balustrade of the stairwell with the twin burdens of grief and the secret he keeps from his wife, crushing him. Light and its opposite are given especial precedence in this film; its import evident in this fictional strand, but also in the scenes of Janda in her room.
Bogũs and Marta’s celibate relationship takes them to the countryside, by the riverside, where he talks of being born into a role, incapable of changing his age. His girlfriend talks of him being too young, but he cannot change it, she wants him to read, but he believes cannot change that either he is a river-man, not an intellectual. On one of their trips along the riverbank the shot from the beginning of the film, the slow-moving water is repeated, and can be read, if you so wish, as a metaphor for life’s transience.
During a moment of flashback; after Marta returns home from one of these sojourns, when she enters her sons’ room, which is kept locked, sun-drenched, the boys at play, a black ball can be seen rolling into room (one of few bum notes), before the memory is interrupted by the doctor’s words; “Life turns into death, so easily.”, This is the key phrase of the film. Life flows like a river, if you will, into death. Bogũs’ presence in Marta’s life may have tempered that ebbing decay, briefly, but he cannot cease it entirely. He is a temporary ‘real’, living substitute for her dead sons.
They meet again by the river, finally, where she speaks of the end of Spring, the beginning of Summer, as the start of life, the festival of life for which houses are adorned with sweet rush. It is, therefore, a sign of both life and death.
Bogũs is revealed as an innocent, a simpleton almost, unaware of the darker aspects of life, when he kisses her. She is shocked by his effervescence, his lack of social constraint, but we are all too aware that he is young and she is close to death. He swims out into the river to collect rushes with which to bedeck Marta’s house for a festival and begins to drown, significantly, while he is burdened with sweet rush.
All three narrative levels are weaved into the scene above, as, before we learn of Bogũs’ fate, we cut to the film-crew again, amongst the rushes, watching rushes, divers and cameramen in the water with the actors, Marta/Janda storms off, away from the set, and breaks the barrier between post-war Poland and the modern world. Arriving at a road with contemporary cars, she hails a lift, the chap driving recognising her and asking for an autograph. And, in the backseat of the car, Marta’s wig discarded, Jarda’s voiceover, only begins the monologue of her husband’s death again and we cut back to the film-crew putting away their gear, during a downpour.
This self-referentiallity is not only apparent in the scenes where the camera is turned 180 degrees onto the crew and Wajda, but flows into other scenes, such as that when Bogũs visits Marta to collect a book to read. He say that he wants ‘a novel with lots of dialogue and not too much description’, and of course, Marta offers him Jerzy Andrzejewski’s ‘Ashes and Diamonds’, the source novel for what is possibly Wajda’s most famous film of the same name. As a joke, Wajda has him forget to take it with him when he leaves. Or, the auto-allusion of the filmic spirit that is attached to the presence of Janda in her sixth film with Wajda.
It has taken this long to get back to where we started and the scenes of Janda discussing her husband. On the second occasion, the windows show it is grey outside, maybe dusk, and it is raining as Janda reveals that Klosinski was building a theatre (noted) when he died. She reminisces on how she talked on the ‘phone to Wajda about the film, and, possibly the most aching memory, remembers how her Klosinski died between one spoonful of soup she was feeding him and the next.
The third visit to the set of Janda’s room is all captured in a medium-close-up, from her torso to her head, whereas the former two shot in long shot, allowing her the space of the entire bedroom. She is now in silhouette, moonlight from the two windows struggling to illumine the room, all is in shadow. The fourth time is the briefest as we return the room is empty and in total darkness.
There are passing similarities to Jan Nemec’s ‘Ferrari Dino Girl’. Both directors are elder statesmen of the cinema, specifically of the Eastern Bloc output from the 50s onwards; they both rely on the layering of fact and fiction and the exposure of the authorial hand, the creative process, at work, and the non-linearity of their narratives. Yet, Wajda’s film is denser, more aesthetically delectable, even more metaphorical, and less prosaic than Nemec’s collection of images. This is, primarily, a film of layers; the layers of documentary and the imagined, the realities of Janda’s own loss and those same emotions projected into a character, and those of Wajda’s career as a director.
It is a sweet yet melancholy film from an artist who, one assumes, may be flowing rather too quickly towards the dark.
Regrets (Cédric Kahn; France; 2009)
The last screening I attended at this year’s festival, but not the least, just.
Cédric Kahn’s latest opens darkly with protagonist Mathieu’s mother dying in hospital; from ‘complications’ with the chemotherapy she has been receiving. However, any notion that the ‘mother’ may be anything more than a deathly, cadaverous vessel, just lying and dying, are dashed soon after Mathieu has rushed from Paris to be by her side. It quickly becomes apparent that the only reason the mother exists at all is, cynically, to draw her errant son, and our protagonist, back to his home-town and, whilst there, into contact with an old-flame, Maya. Oh, and to show what a devoted and doting son he really is, sat at her bedside and with her in her last moments, which is handily highlighted further when he is juxtaposed to his brother, briefly emerging for the funeral, and an utter sod, only interested in the money to be earned from the sale of the parental home. This is indicative of the lack of verisimilitude and anything more than the most dreary and tertiary of personality traits, history and emotion which are hung around the necks of any character outside the central pair, Maya and Mathieu.
After their providential sighting, the ex-lovers, Mathieu and Maya, arrange to meet at her home for dinner, which instigates the first Hitchcock allusion of many, when Mathieu scrawls a map of directions to the house, he scribbles a compass with North and West on it, but no South or East. Once there, and with little to-do they are soon, Maya’s husband handily absent, in a passionate clinch with him nasally thrusting his passion at her on a stairway. So begins the affair which is the heart (or some other throbbing muscle which governs man’s life) of the film.
Mathieu is, even as played by the charming Yvan Attal, just hard to like. His finer qualities include insolence, arrogance and levels of selfish disregard for others’ feelings that would shame a dead cat. He is cut from the same cloth as François Cluzet’s Alexandre Beck in Guillaume Canet’s inexplicably popular ‘Tell No One’ (2006), (or any number of thriller, everymen, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant spring to mind), but perhaps more from the swatches left over, discarded as too coarse by the others. The French, once more taking the American genre and, like Jean-Pierre Melville did frequently before them, underlying it with plenty of Gallic existential angst, and creating better films in doing so. Like Denis Dercourt’s disturbingly good ‘The Piano Tuner’ (2006).
What riles me is that we/I am being asked to like, and therefore care what happens to, these bourgeois fools and their families, which I cannot. What would Bunuel say? Apart from that, Khan does not even attempt to give reason for you to like Mathieu, relying solely, instead, on Attal’s abilities as a sympathetic actor. Maybe we are not meant to like him. But then why am I forced to spend the best part of an hour and a half with him?
It is apparent that, after his dalliance with the deeper, art-house even, side of the cinema of a decade or so ago, with ‘L’ennui’ (1998) and ‘Roberto Succo’ (2001), Kahn is now content to create enjoyable neo-Hitchcockian thriller fare. This is as generic as, although attempting to be funnier and certainly less gripping, Khan’s ‘Red Lights’ (2004) – a work which could be used in film school as a perfect example of Hitchcock-homage and lesson in how to construct tension.
In this current film too, the master’s influence can be felt; more broadly in the characters, the creatively-employed everyman, Mathieu is an architect with his wife and the blonde tempting him to (psychological) distraction, yet Hitchcock is also mirrored in specific scenes, the editing of a scene where the lovers have a text ‘conversation’, cutting back and forth between the two, a voiceover reading out each text, could have been lifted, were it not for the technological anachronisms, from a multitude of his films.
After another afternoon tryst in a seedy hotel room and more unsatisfying grunting from Mathieu, Maya asks why he left her 15 years before and momentarily we veer from Hitchcock to Adrian Lynne. This seems to be a deliberate ploy of Kahn’s, an allusion for effect, it makes you think that we are being driven to une femme dedaignee territory. But, being an imbecile with a short temper he tells her exactly why, the fool, and she storms away.
However, Kahn will not allow his lead to wander the film without some conscience searching, and where better to do it than in the cold empty house of his dead parents. He returns there to sort through some personal affects, and a memory of his father, evoked through a photograph, sat at his writing desk is projected into the present into which Mathieu walks, coexisting in past and present and hinting at the territory of the superior L’ennui, if only momentarily.
Suddenly he destroys all the children’s paintings and school reports and mother’s day cards, attempting to expunge the past, or his ties to it, in an obvious attempt to rid himself of the painful memories that fuel his grief, and also those newly rekindled ones of Maya. A struggle to break the fetters that bind him to her beyond the physical.
He books them a room in a decadent hotel. There is a plush red interior to the room; the colour of lust, passion and even danger. It is an affair and nothing more, he metaphorically screams. After some emotionally wrought to-ing and fro-ing they are again down to the physical kind. He once more jostles her as if he is trying to dislodge something from his nose and does not even have the common decency to wait for her to undress. For her it is the beginning of a new life, for him, an affair, and he wants to prove it.
However, his drunkenness, gloriously portrayed in an earlier scene when shots of a waiter topping up his wine glass form a montage of excess, soon betrays his sentiment.
Until this point, Kahn is leading his plough along an often-furrowed field, and scarring the dainty memory of Agnes Varda’s attempt to demonise the male fantasy of wife and mistress co-habiting in the husband’s rich and perfect life, ‘Le Bonheur’ (1965). There is even dialogue between Mathieu and Maya which reflects exactly that of Francoise the husband and Emilie the mistress’s, in Varda’s film, as if Kahn is acknowledging it. Unfortunately he does nothing more. Of course, he is not the first, Varda’s valiant proto-feminist attempt was dashed against the phallus of French cinema and male-female sexual relations, and specifically those of the perfect affair, were ripped from the hands of those silly girlies by Truffaut in ‘Bed and Board’ (1970) and…pick a film, any film.
However, in the pivotal scene of ‘Regrets’, where the lovers bath together in the hotel, talking of the future and sharing a beer, the two of them emotionally pass each other, moving in different directions. This is the beginning of the kink, which becomes a twist. They make plans and spontaneously set out to drive to Barcelona, where they will settle into their new life.
Yet, they do not make it far. Mid-journey, when Mathieu stops at a petrol station and returns to the car, he finds Maya in tears and refusing to go further, wanting to be driven home. In the silence that colonises the car alongside the snuffling, red motorway lights flash over their faces, summoning thoughts of the director’s other film.
This has now become something a little more than the affair turned sour, cliché, and is one of those investigations of male-female relationships, ‘the battle of the sexes’, weaved into a noir thriller, though a little darker than, say, Chabrol’s ‘Bellamy’ (also reviewed here), which undertakes to do the same.
The twist Kahn devises is that it is Mathieu that becomes obsessed with and stalks Maya and she rejects him! Can you imagine? Didn’t see that coming did you? She is off to Chile with her husband and callously ignores him.
What starts for him as an affair, transgresses his self-imposed defences, and ends in fixation. He is finally driven to distraction, like François Cluzet, again, in Chabrol’s L’enfer (1994), and attacks her! Although attack is rather a strong word, he more accosts her and grabs at he arms a little whilst gutturally bleating about love. Just like when they have sex really.
Nearly twenty years after Paul Verhoeven’s silly ‘Basic Instinct’ (1992) and Adrian Lyne’s masterpiece of misogyny, ‘Fatal Attraction’ (1987) this is the twist that Kahn creates? This does so little to redress the carcinogenic cliché’s of those two films, that it almost confirms them with its apathy.
At this stage, in its confusion at its direction, ‘Regrets’ even finds time to turn into the backwoods of Tobe Hooper’s ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974), when Franck, Maya’s husband, chases Mathieu out of their house with a chainsaw. And we could momentarily believe that he may be as unhinged as Leatherface himself, so little characterisation is there of anyone else in the film. Mathieu’s wife Lisa, who is pretty much ignored apart form a couple of scenes of a sub-plot to do with entering a prestigious architecture competition, and Franck are just disappeared when their presences become cumbersome, dismissed with a sentence each when they get in the way of the lovers at the end of the film. Never do we learn of the spouses’ emotions, lives or anything at all about them, not even through the mouths of Maya and Mathieu. Maya’s part in the affair is seemingly justified because Franck drinks heavily, which is all we can assume as this is all we know of him. And that he has at least once carried a chainsaw with him whilst on the grounds of his country home. Mathieu’s actions are justified because he is a tosser. Or, possibly because he and Linda work together and he must therefore be bored, no? I mean, no wonder he is bored, huh? Come on guys, no wonder, huh? She is creative, intelligent, pretty, supportive, French, lovely and maybe more, but, come on!!
Years after the chainsaw incident, which ends in nothing more gruesome than a rather quick jog to a car and a wheel-spin, Mathieu has conformed, remarried and settled further having had a child, and is working for someone else’s architect’s firm, having divorced Linda. He receives a greeting card at work which it transpires is from Maya who is asking him to meet her in a café. After a brief summation of her return to France, his divorce and some hot looks there is an ambiguous end, from which of course, they could even start another affair?
The most important revelation, well, a revelation for those who have watched no continental thrillers in the past 50 years, is not that of a man’s ability to become obsessed with his mistress, but the ongoing fascination of the French with Hitchcock. From Truffaut’s printed infatuation in the Cahiers du Cinema of the 50s to this, Hitchcock’s shadow is cast over French cinema. See, for example Truffaut’s ‘The Bride Wore Black’ (1968) or Dominik Moll’s wickedly absurdist ‘Harry, He’s Here to Help’ (2000) or ‘Lemming’ (2006).
If Chabrol is regarded, and affectionately referred to, as ‘the French Hitchcock’, then Kahn could well be the French Brian De Palma. Although that is just plain rude. Kahn allows ‘Regrets’ to have Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ on the soundtrack, twice. Which he appears to be using on the first occasion as a joke or an aural admonishment of Mathieu, but, if so, it is, again, not enough to justify the narcissism of his character.
As the name suggests, this is a film all about regrets, or, more specifically, attempts to undo them, but it is also about timing, bad timing, that bane and frustration of life; how you miss opportunities and how maddening that can be. Yet, it also finds time, amongst the regression in sexual politics, to be about the whimsicality of humans, their nihilism and their desire to destroy happiness.
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