I remember going to see Alex Proyas’ The Crow (1994) in the cinema. I remember the experience not because I have any particular affection for the film but because there were two of us in the cinema and the other guy was a Goth who would groan with outrage every time the little girl appeared on screen. I can empathise with the reflex. When I went to see Neill Blomkamp’s horrific District 9 (2009) I rolled my eyes and tutted when, after having spent half an hour making the Prawns look hostile and Other, the film wheels out a sympathetic Prawn. We know that he’s sympathetic because he has a child to look after. What annoyed me during the screening of District 9 is what annoyed the person I shared a cinema with back in 1994. In both cases, the director has decided to influence audience sympathies not through the careful use of characterisation or narrative structure, but through a direct appeal to certain emotional proclivities the audience brought with them into the cinema. Namely a desire to not see children needlessly harmed. To me, these kinds of appeals invariably feel lead-footed and lumpen. At best, they strike me as manipulative and rub me the wrong way. Other times they backfire and force my sympathies in the wrong direction out of spite (as with Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, which becomes ten times more fun once you start rooting for the creepy murderous child). But are these attempts at appealing to audience sentiment invariably a bad thing? Courtney Hunt’s thriller Frozen River suggests that they need not be.
Category / Crime
The Offence (1972) – I am not your Godhead, I am just a Paedophile
I get the impression that for many, a trip to the cinema is a religious experience. Note that I say ‘religious’ and not ‘mystical’. People commonly reach for transcendental terminology when groping for fresh panegyrics with which to adorn some film or another; said film is not merely good, watching it is comparable to what a medieval peasant might have experienced upon visiting a cathedral or what a fakir might experience after twenty years crouching upon nails in the sub-continental wilderness. This is not what I mean by religious experience. What I mean instead is that people go to the cinema (or read a book) in order to have their moral compasses reset. They go to see a romantic comedy in order to re-connect with what it is to be really in love. They go to see Pixar’s Up (2009) in order to know what it means to grow old with someone. They go to see a navel-gazing drama that deals in matters of identity and alienation in order to get some insight into who and what they are. People use films in the same way as they once used the Sunday sermon : As a form of guidance. Simple moral and psychological truths made accessible and easily digested along with pop-corn and diet Coke. Is it then any wonder that we treat successful actors as living gods? These people are not merely entertainers, they are the prophets of a secular age. Our need to constantly tell stories about ourselves drives our desire to consume the stories of others.
Most films are happy to play their role in this relationship. Modern romantic comedies have their relationship advice, Godard had his attempts at spreading Maoism and even nihilistic film-makers such as Noe are happy to sell their audiences on the horrors of existence, a belief which, in its own way, is no less consolatory than the more up-beat alternatives such as Sam Mendes’ bile-raising “sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it”. However, some film-makers seem instinctively aware of their positions as moral teachers and reject the role. Directors such as Hanneke and Von Trier assume accusatory and playfully obtuse attitudes towards their audience in order to avoid it. Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, based upon the play This Story of Yours by John Hopkins is a film that seems to deconstruct this relationship, turning it into something unhealthy and disturbing.
Police (1985) – Two Faces, Neither of Them Real
Can art ever articulate the truth? The films of Maurice Pialat display a grave ambivalence towards that question. With his first film, L’Enfance Nue (1968) Pialat showed a real animosity towards not only traditional forms of cinematic story-telling, but the very conceit and artificiality of fiction itself. Pialat is a director who wants to put the real world on the screen without the traditional intermediaries of editorial or narrative. However, despite this hostility to the artificiality of artistic representation, Pialat never returned to his roots as a documentary film-maker. Instead, he produced films such as Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble (1972) and La Gueule Ouverte (1974). Films that presented themselves as traditional dramas, but which were in fact elaborately dramatised autobiographical meditations upon his own life.
Police is a film that continues Pialat’s tradition of ontological uncertainty. It is a work of genre by a film-maker who loathed fiction and a character study by a man who seemed to believe that there was no such thing as the self. Unsurprisingly, Police is a film that exists under a permanent ontological fog.
REVIEW – The Second Wind (2007)
Videovista has my review of the rather puzzling remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966). On paper, this is a bold and interesting production : it has big names, it has striking cinematography and it has a director who is experienced enough to remember the good old days of French crime films.
The result is a film that does not quite work but it is, at least, an ambitious failure (and the story and characters are pretty much idiot-proof anyway).
Nada (1974) – The Political is in fact The Personal
It was never going to be easy for Claude Chabrol to move on from his most productive period. Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Chabrol produced a series of films that would not only secure his reputation to the present day, but also leave an indelible mark upon what comes to mind when one thinks of French cinema. Les Biches (1968), La Femme Infidele (1969), Que La Bete Meure (1969), Le Boucher (1970), Juste Avant La Nuit (1971) and Les Noces Rouges (1973) were shot almost on top of each other with a similar cast of actors who almost came to resemble a repertory company performing only the works of Claude Chabrol. A company of actors who knew exactly what was expected of them in a series of films that positively simmered with anger and resentment at the provincial bourgeoisie who ran the country and defended the status quo while angry young men such as Chabrol climbed the barricades in the hope of creating a better world.
However, watching the films of this period, it strikes me that Chabrol and revolutionary politics were never going to be a perfect fit. Chabrol’s vision of the world is deeply morally complex. When he looks out the window he sees shades of grey rather than the stark black and white demanded by revolutionaries willing to use force to change the world. In fact, while films such as La Femme Infidele, Que La Bete Meure and Les Noces Rouges did a brilliant job of critiquing the middle classes by suggesting a world of sex, passion, drink and self-destruction beneath the mannered politeness and brass-buttons, these criticisms also humanised them. There is something almost comical and easy to empathise with about the husband in La Femme Infidele who kills his wife’s lover but never mentions it to her or the man in Que La Bete Meure who tracks down his son’s killer only to discover that the man’s entire family are hoping that someone will kill him for them. These are not the kinds of people you simply put up against a wall… these are weak, pitiful and ultimately on some level sympathetic creatures. They are victims of the system just like everyone else. Given the general timbre of Chabrol’s work during the late 60s and early 70s, Chabrol’s political history and the political climate of the French cinema scene at the time (Cahiers du Cinema was run by a Maoist collective during the mid-70s) it was clear that something had to give and the result was Nada, a satirical comedy-thriller based upon a noir novel by the influential French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, that sees Chabrol turning his ire from the bourgeoisie to the functionaries of the state and the radical Leftists who would overthrow them.
Juste Avant La Nuit (1971) – Yearning for Submission
When Hamlet says “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” he is not pre-empting the modern shift towards moral relativism. Instead he is reflecting on the capacity for human thought to render moral judgement almost completely inert. He is begging for ignorance. Cursing his intellectual nature. Wishing for simplicity. This anguished reaction against an intellectual temperament is central to Claude Chabrol’s Just Before Nightfall, a film that strives to answer the question ‘When is a murder not a murder?’.
Les Noces Rouges (1973) – Rumour and Calumny
It is surprising how much contemporary French cinema owes to Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (1944). One of Sartre’s more accessible pieces, No Exit is set in hell and features three utterly hateful and narcissistic characters slowly coming to realise that the ultimate torment is not only to be stuck in an unhappy relationship but to be stuck in that relationship because one lacks the ability to either leave it or change it for the better. The worst hells imaginable, suggests Sartre, are the ones that we create for ourselves out of our failings and cowardice. Since the New Wave, French cinema has been dominated by what is sometimes called the “film d’appartement”, a film that is character driven and relationship-focused and which draws its drama from putting a bunch of people into a closed space and allowing them to work out their problems. Claude Chabrol is no enemy to the ‘Film d’Appartement’ sub-genre. In fact, you could say that he is one of the masters of the form. His mastery comes from his willingness to not only put incredibly strange characters into his apartment, but also to allow his relationships to work themselves out naturally, regardless of how bizarre or brutal the eventual denouement. Wedding in Blood is an excellent example of Chabrol’s approach to script-writing as it is not only funny and fascinating, but also merciless in its desire to turn a cinematic social experiment into a work of satire.
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 – 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.
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.
Ruthless Culture 