One of the things that is most fascinating about Pialat as a director is that though completely devoid of sentimentality, his work also shows a perpetual awareness of the temptations that it offers. This lack of sentimentality applies abstractly to broad topics such as childhood but also, more concretely, to his own life. It is said that The Mouth Agape is one of Pialat’s most ‘autobiographical’ works but this is not a particularly useful distinction to make with regards to Pialat’s work as so many of his films – including Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble (1972) and Loulou (1980) – are effectively just dramatisations of real events from his own life. A better way of thinking about La Gueule Ouverte is that it is one of his more intrusive works. It shines a light into places where we would rather not look. An unflattering and unsentimental light right onto the death of Pialat’s mother and the lives of both himself and his womanising father. It is a film about death without being about loss and a film about grief without being about sadness. It is, in a word, pitiless.
Category / Directors
Passe Ton Bac D’Abord (1979) – The Ordered Nature of Chaotic Lives
For his fifth feature film, Maurice Pialat returned to northern France to take a second look at the disaffected youth that inspired him to make his first full-length film L’Enfance Nue (1968). A spiritual successor to that film, Graduate First initially comes across as a work that is almost free form. A work that takes its pseudo-documentary, cinema verite stylings to their logical conclusion by refusing to place a coherent narrative onto the lives of Pialat’s characters. However, as with Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble (1972), Passe Ton Bac D’Abord is a film that draws upon a deep, narrative structure that suggests that, while the lives of these young people may seem chaotic and random, these are the kinds of lives that people have always lived.
REVIEW – Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble (1972)
Videovista has my review of Maurice Pialat’s splendid We Won’t Grow Old Together.
I absolutely adored this film, so much so that I went out and purchased the rest of the Pialat films that Masters of Cinema/Eureka have released. Aside from the fantastic performances and the brutality of the relationship dynamic on display, I was also struck by how much Pialat’s style is reminiscent of that of Claude Chabrol. Keep an eye out for more Pialat pieces in the near future.
Public Enemies (2009) and Digital Projection
I will begin with a brief review : Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009) is a completely unexceptional crime thriller. Its characters are extremely simplistic, its engagement with historical or social context is minimal, its writing is functional, its performances are adequate (with the exception of Stephen Graham as Baby-Face Nelson) and its pacing slightly saggy but ultimately reasonable. Much like Mann’s Heat (1995), it is a film best remembered for one beautifully staged shoot-out. However, despite having nothing to say and failing for all of the thematic reasons that Richard Kovitch mentions in his review, the film does do one thing well : It provides a fantastic justification for the roll-out of digital projection.
Cinematic Vocabulary – Three Moments from Irma Vep (1996)
So far, Cinematic Vocabulary has focused upon isolated cinematic scenes. The reason for this is that, while matters of style and technique impact upon entire films, it is frequently easier to isolate these aspects of a film by filtering out issues of narrative and characterisation that tend to function more on the level of entire films than on that of individual scenes. However, as with atoms and tables, there is a point where the small things come together to form something recognisably large. This column is about how a series of scenes can link up in order to form a part of a wider thematic arc.
A few months back, I wrote about Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002). Intrigued by the cerebral and somewhat extreme piece of French film-making, I tracked down the best known of Assayas’ works, Irma Vep (1996). Set behind the scenes of a fictional remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent era crime pulp Les Vampires (1915), Irma Vep casts Hong Kong martial arts veteran Maggie Cheung as herself playing the titular Irma Vep character. Much like Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), Irma Vep uses its film-within-a-film structure to comment upon the nature of film production in general and the health of the French film industry in particular. The result is a hugely rewarding film filled both with touchingly funny moments of human frailty and insightful critiques of what French film has lost and where it should be heading.
REVIEW – 35 Shots of Rum (2008)
Recently, Ruthless Culture has become somewhat fixated with films that deal with alienation, death, misery, insanity and violence. Fixated enough that I think a bit of a change might be welcome and I can think of no better a vehicle for change than Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums (2008).
35 Shots of Rum is a warm-hearted but utterly uncompromising drama revolving around a somewhat extended family grouping. Lionel (Alex Descas) lives with his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop) in a block of flats that also serves as home to Lionel’s old partner Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and old friend of the family Noe (Gregoire Colin). If I use vague terminology such as ‘partner’ and ‘friend of the family’ it is because, initially at least, many of the relationships in 35 Shots of Rum are unclear. This lack of clarity is not only intensional, it is one that continues throughout the film as Denis tries to place us in the same position as her characters… we know how we feel but we do not know where everyone stands.
REVIEW – High Art (1995)
A new month and a new batch of reviews from VideoVista. Here is my review of Lisa Cholodenko’s really rather spiffing High Art.
A comparison that occurs to me just now is that High Art is, in some ways, like an art house version of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) or How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008) except that rather than presenting the desire to prostitute oneself in order to get ahead in journalism as something a) natural and b) easily walked away from with few consequences, High Art presents it as profoundly soul destroying and incredibly costly.
I’m also pretty sure that a lot of other critics took this to be a fairly straight-forward tragic LGBT love story.
Cinematic Vocabulary – The Opening to This Man Must Die (1969)
As with most of the big names of the New Wave, Claude Chabrol began his cinematic career as a critic for the Cahiers du Cinema. This critical career culminated with the release in 1957 of a book about the films of Alfred Hitchcock. This attraction to Hitchcock’s style and subject matter followed Chabrol when he ‘crossed the aisle’ from criticism to film-making and his early output quickly earned him a reputation as the ‘French Hitchcock’ and the influences can also be seen in the film I am going to be writing about today.
Que La Bete Meure (1969) was adapted by a novel by the British poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. It is the story of a man who tries to avenge the death of his son by tracking down the man who ran him over. After seducing the man’s sister-in-law and infiltrating himself into the killer’s family, the grieving father discovers that the family have no more love for the thuggish monster than he does. The scene I want to talk about is the extraordinary opening sequence leading up to the death of the child and the father’s discovery of the body.
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – The Unwanted Guest
There is no greater testament to the evolving nature of genre than the Vampire. Once upon a time, the vampire was the poster boy of the gothic romance. He stood for the dark side of the Victorian heart; The swarthy foreigner whose powers of evil and sensuality lured upstanding Victorian women to their fall not through force but through mesmerising gazes and hushed words. The horrifying nature of the Vampire lay in his mastery over the very elements of human nature that Victorian society sought to deny. His was the worst kind of evil. The evil that one wanted to give in to. As society changed and cultural attitudes shifted, the Vampire’s evil seemed to dim. As Horror peeled away from the gothic and what remained sank back down into Romance, the Vampire changed from a dangerous sensual evil into the kind of sensual creature that you would love to date, even if your parents wouldn’t approve : Male Vampires became leather-trouser clad pretty boys with fashionable hair styles and either a fondness for violence or a deep and brooding sense of artistic self-loathing. Female Vampires became invariably bisexual and more or less freaky. The kind of freaky that would scare you but which would also allow you to indulge all of the stuff you see in porn films but would never dare to ask of a real sexual partner. In other words, good freaky.
In the space of a hundred years Vampires have moved from creatures of pure evil to pathetic sexual Mary Sues for frustrated and repressed Westerners. The Vampires themselves haven’t changed. What has changed is our attitude to what the Vampire represents. That which the Victorians feared and denied in themselves, the people of the 21st Century indulge to the point of solipsism.
However, some attempts have been made to keep Vampires true to their role as creatures of Horror. Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995) saw in Vampires creatures more in tune with the violent and self-destructive urges that animate humanity as a whole. Creatures for whom the rational mind serves as an organ or self-justification rather than control or repression. Alfredson’s Let The Right One In (2008) presented Vampires as users, creatures who adapt themselves to the demands of the marginalised in order to slowly suck the life out of them. This essay is about a film that returned to one of the first non-romantic presentations of Vampirism.
Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is a remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu : A Symphony of Terror (1922). But while the remake is, at times, almost shot-for-shot, Herzog’s version presents Vampires as creatures that are not only deeply lonely but whose power is entirely dependent upon the Humans whose blood it drinks.
REVIEW – Anything for Her (2008)
Falsely accused of murdering her boss, Lisa (Diane Kruger) is sent off to prison. As the appeals process dries up, Lisa drifts into a dark depression and attempts suicide. Realising that he is losing a wife and his son a mother, Julien (Vincent Lindon) realises that his current existence is untenable and devotes everything he has to planning and executing an escape attempt that will allow the family to be re-united, albeit for a life on the lamb. Framed initially as a family drama in which Julien has to deal with the repercussions of an imprisoned wife, Anything For Her then mutates into an introspective crime drama as a teacher decides to reinvent himself as a criminal mastermind. The critical reaction to the film has tended to snag upon how unbelievable it is that a man in such a position would decide to break his wife out of prison, but this is to miss the point. Anything For Her (Pour Elle) is an interstitial work that exists on the fringes of the traditional drama and the crime genre. If it fails as a film (and I think ultimately that it does) it is not because of its crime elements or its interstitiality, it is because of the fundamental weakness of its dramatic elements.
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