Category / French Film

by Jonathan M

Three Colours: Blue (1993) – Tightrope Walker

We are, according to existentialism, hopelessly free. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that, in the absence of God and the sort of meaningful meta-narratives that give life an objective meaning and purpose, we are free to define our own natures:  ‘To Do is To Be’ because ‘Existence Precedes Essence’. The problem is that freedom is a double-edged sword and while the death of God may well have done away with all limitations on our freedom, it has also served to render all of our choices meaningless.  Indeed, if all paths are open to us and equally inviting then there is no correct path to take and so every decision we do make is tainted by the knowledge that all of our choices are effectively meaningless and arbitrary.

Freedom’s double edge so concerned Sartre that he wrote a short pamphlet entitled Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) addressing the charge that existentialism is a gloomy credo.  The pamphlet ends with a barnstorming rant against Christianity:

 This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realisation, that man can realise himself as truly human (…) In this sense, existentialism is optimistic, it is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confusing their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.

Barnstorming though it may be, this rant is hardly convincing as the vision of human nature that Sartre describes is one of perpetual vertigo and while ridding ourselves of the tyrannical sky-pixie is no bad thing, Sartre seems to have saddled us with another form of tyranny: The tyranny of responsibility for ourselves and the tyranny of endless choice.

This tension within the concept of freedom is beautifully demonstrated by Krzysztof Kieslowski in Three Colours: Blue, the first of a trilogy of films interrogating the values of the French Revolution (Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite).

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Point Blank (2010) – The Love… The Love…

From Plato to Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad to William Golding, one of the most enduring leitmotifs in the history of Western Culture has been the duality of man and how, beneath a civilised and housebroken exterior, lurks a creature with a truly terrifying capacity for debasement, savagery and chaos. One of the reasons for the popularity of this dualistic conception of human nature is that the idea of humanity being suspended between two points allows different cultures to position the points wherever they choose. For example, for the Platonists, these points were positioned in intellectual real of the Forms and the sensual world of the flesh allowing Platonists to talk about the need for humanity to aspire to the examined life of the mind. This denigration of the body proved convenient when Plato entered the Christian bloodstream through thr works of Plotinus and Augustine allowing the life of the mind to be replaced with the life of the spirit and the pursuit of Salvation. One of the peculiarities of dualism as a cultural trope is the tendency for people to present man’s duality as an essentially moral problem with one pole representing moral rectitude and the other pole representing all that is base and horrid about human nature.  It is telling that, when Golding’s schoolboys are freed from the fetters of civilisation, they immediately turn to killing each other and not to making great art, thinking great thoughts or just fucking the living shit out of each other.  The tension between the fundamental amorality of the dualist conception of human nature and our tendency to see this duality in strictly moral terms is one that is present in many adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) as for every adaptation that has presented Hyde as an evil psychopath there is an adaptation that presents him as a free spirit to whom the laws of society (for good or ill) simply do not apply. This notion that man’s inner savage need not necessarily be evil is one that is emerging as absolutely central to the films of Fred Cavaye.

Cavaye’s First film Anything for Her (2008) (a.k.a. Tout Pour Elle) tells the story of a man whose wife is sent to prison for a crime she did not commit.  Rendered incapable of functioning by the loss of his wife, the film’s mild-mannered protagonist sets about reinventing a new identity for himself that will allow him to break his wife out of prison. Events rip away the character’s veneer of bourgeois rectitude, but while the inner savage allows the character to do some genuinely terrible things, the film never passes judgement on him because what he does he does out of love and because he is ultimately in the right.

Cavaye’s second film as writer/director Point Blank (a.k.a. A Bout Portant) sees him return to this same moral hypothesis: Men and women are born divided. On the one hand, we are civilised beings who love each other, hate violence and generally follow the rules.  On the other hand, we are uncivilised beings who will stop at nothing in order to defend what we have and get what we want. Because we live in a society that protects us and enforces ‘civilised’ values, we tend to keep our uncivilised natures in check: We do not murder, we do not steal and we do not fuck the living shit out of each other at the drop of a hat. However, should civilisation fail us then our animalistic character will come to the fore.  What makes animalistic actions morally reprehensible is not their violence, their destructiveness or their anti-social character but their motivation.  In Point Blank as in Anything for Her, Cavaye believes that there is nothing that is not permissible as long as it is done out of love.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Love Like Poison (2010) – No Escaping Christ’s Lustful Gaze

Perhaps the most depressing things about the financial crisis is that as banks collapsed, governments groaned and the wheels of global capitalism ground momentarily to a halt, nobody stepped forward with an alternative to the current system. For a moment there, the world might have changed and a new system might have been built but instead of forging a new world, governments took money away from poor people and threw it at the rich in the hope that they would return to doing whatever it is that they were doing before the global economy went tits up. This was a failure of the imagination not only on the part of governments but also on the part of political activists and theorists the world over. As global capitalism teetered, stumbled and nearly fell, Margaret Thatcher was proved right: There Is No Alternative.

The idea that there is simply no viable alternative to market capitalism and (more or less) liberal democracy is the most potent defence of the status quo imaginable. Thanks to thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama arguing that we have reached the end of history, alternatives to neoliberalism are strangled at birth. As citizens of liberal democracies, we have certain political options open to us but none of these options are radical because radical options are not viable alternatives.  And thus we are free and yet everywhere in chains…

Un Poison Violent, the first feature film by Breton director Katell Quillévéré, is an exploration of the nature of female self-determination in a world where men impose their own limits on what is and is not an acceptable mode of being. Whether in Church or a teenaged bedroom, nowhere can women escape the merciless glare of the male gaze.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

White Material (2009) – deColonisation / reOccupation

One of the most troubling things about colonialism is its language. Colonisation implies a degree of tentativeness and impermanence as though colonies are fragile attempts to implant humans into a landscape that has yet to support them.  Colonisation assumes unoccupied space just as discovery assumes that the thing being discovered has never been found before. Jyotsna G. Singh addresses this semiotic baggage in the introduction to her book Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues (1996):

Since the early modern period, this discovery motif has frequently emerged in the language of colonization, enabling European travellers/writers to represent the newly “discovered” lands as an empty space, a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their linguistic, cultural, and later territorial claims. – Pp. 1

What is offensive about the notions of discovery and colonisation is the fact that most of the lands discovered and colonised by European settlers were actually inhabited.  How can one discover land that is already well known and colonise places that are already inhabited?  Easy… by making the people who were there first disappear. As a result, one should perhaps speak not of lands being ‘colonised’ but of their being ‘occupied’.

A different way of looking at this question is to point out that ‘colonisation’ remains a useful term precisely because of the moral and conceptual absurdity of its connotations.  If one speaks of lands being occupied rather than colonised by the British Empire then one allows for the fact that all human inhabitation is morally neutral because nobody has a natural right to the ownership of the land they inhabit.  We all occupy the land and time brings with it no legitimacy.  The crime of colonialism was not that the Europeans laid claim to land that was not theirs, it was that they laid claim to territory and then used those claims to justify the exploitation of the people who were occupying the land when they first got there.  Colonialism is not a crime against the land; it is a crime against people.  All land is occupied.  From the perspective of the land, we are all colonists.

Claire Denis’s White Material examines the process of decolonisation without the assumption that there is such a thing as legitimate ownership of the land.  Denis’s film presents Africa as both perpetual virgin territory and eternally dried-out, exploited and ancient wasteland.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Nenette (2010) – Behind Brown Eyes

We live the entirety of our lives entombed in our skulls.  Isolated from the world by a few inches of bone, we never experience what it is like to not be in our bodies and nor do we experience what it is like to be someone else.  Not even for a second.  Tragically detached from the world, we are forever looking out and speculating as to what it might be like out there, what might be happening inside other people’s heads.  Of course, evolution has equipped us to make these inferential leaps and studies suggest that within minutes of birth, babies have already acquired a preference for looking at human faces.  As a species of pattern-matchers, we seek out our fellow humans and we try to guess what it is that they are feeling.  We read emotions on faces and infer the emotional states that might be causing them.  As our understanding of both human psychology and ourselves expand, we build complex models that help us to make sense of other people by projecting our own emotions onto the facial expressions we see around us.  We assume that other people are like us because the alternative is unbearable.  It is one thing to be entombed in our heads, but it is quite another to be completely alone.

Our skill at pattern recognition is such that all too often we generate false positives.  We look at the weather and random happenstance and we infer a form of human agency that eventually becomes belief in a supreme divine intelligence.  We look at images beamed from the surface of Mars and we see faces in the rubble.  We look at animals and we think we recognise human emotions.  We project because that is what we do.  We project because we cannot stand the idea that we are the only people feeling what it is that we feel.  We do not want to be alone in our experiences.

Nicolas Philibert’s Nenette is a documentary film that explores this desire to project ourselves out onto the world in order to make sense of it and concludes that these acts of projection say more about the person doing the projecting than the thing being projected upon.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Gainsbourg (2010)

While I do have my preferred themes and modes of expression (abandonment, despair, existential dread), I like to think that the range of culture covered by this blog is comparatively cosmopolitan.  I do films, I do novels, I do short stories, I do non-fiction, I do games and I’m going to start doing comics too.  However, there are two forms of culture that I hate and so will never cover.  The first is French song (la chanson francaise) and the other is musicals.  I hate both of them.  With a passion.  In fact, to borrow a turn of phrase from Alexei Sayle, I hate musical theatre more than I hate fascism.

And yet here is my review of Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg.  A musical all about French song.  And I don’t hate it.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Carlos The Jackal (2010)

As you may recall, I am quite a fan of the work of Olivier Assayas.  Once a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, Assayas has gone on to become one of the most under-rated directors working in France today.  His films generally fall into one of two streams — either they are mercilessly cold tales of espionage set against a corporate background (much like Demonlover) or they are much warmer mainstream dramas about the difficulties people face trying to connect with each other (much like Irma Vep).  As ostensibly different as these the two streams of his directorial career, both share the same unifying vision of human nature.  A vision that is painted in the brightest and most spectacular strokes in his latest film Carlos.

As my Videovista review suggests, Carlos is essentially a human tragedy about one man’s attempt to find a place for himself in a world full of principles and politics but very little human warmth.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The String (2009)

As someone who watches quite a bit of GLBT cinema – without actually being either G, L, B or T – I am often struck by the way in which gay indie film directors present coming out as a very simple moral question.  Most GLBT films frame coming out as a question of personal honesty and self-actualisation.  According to these films, people are in denial until they are not, at which point they come out and it is up to their friends and families to deal with it and by ‘deal with it’ I mean ‘accept it unconditionally’.  Indeed, GLBT cinema traditionally presents the ethics of coming out as purely a question of acceptance.  If you accept your friend/relative/former partner then you are morally good, if you do not then you are morally bad.  But what of the morality of living a lie?  what of the morality of turning people’s lives up-side down so that you can finally be honest with yourself?  Surely these are not simple questions.

Mehdi ben Attia’s film Le Fil addresses the social repercussions of coming out in a way that most Anglo-American GLBT films refuse to do.  A loving satire of upper-class Tunisian society, The String asks whether hypocrisy really is a worse option than social isolation.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

Enter the Void (2009) – A Void of Creativity

The French Nouvelle Vague stands as a blazing historical vindication of the critical vocation.  Every time an over-rated artist seeks to rebuff a negative review by calling into question the motives and talents of a critic, critics can respond simply by mentioning the names of great critics who became great film directors.  Directors like Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard, Rohmer and Rivette.  However, as brilliant as the Cahiers du Cinema directors undeniably were, there is an element of Year Zero about their fame.  Was French cinema really in crisis in the late 1950s?  Was Bazin correct to point to a tendency to the overly theatrical?  Quite possibly but the Nouvelle Vague’s desire to relaunch French film was not without its casualties.

One of the most note-worthy casualties of the French Nouvelle Vague was Henri-Georges Clouzot.  Clouzot was arguably the most talented of the French film directors who continued working throughout the German occupation.  To this day, no film so perfectly captures the France’s deep and loathesome ambivalence towards the Nazis as his story of poison pen letters Le Corbeau (1943).  Because of his association with the Nazi run film studio Continental Films, Clouzot was banned from directing by the French government and while he did return to direct such classics as Quai des Orfevres (1947), The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), his reputation among French critics never completely recovered.

It is in this context that Clouzot secured an unlimited budget with which to make his film Inferno.  Ostensibly a psychological thriller starring Romy Schneider, Inferno was a profoundly experimental film whose disastrously abandoned production process was littered with all kinds of new and experimental techniques designed to revitalise Clouzot’s reputation and place him at the very forefront of the newly revitalised French Cinema.   As Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea revealed in their documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009), Clouzot used strange lenses, dyed entire lakes and daubed actresses with strange make-up in order to create a myriad of weird and wonderful visual effects.  He also shot hour upon hour of bizarre objects and visual illusions dreamt up by a team of artists.  However, what is most fascinating about Medrea and Bromberg’s documentary itself is that, while we know that Clouzot had a script and that this script was later made into one of Claude Chabrol’s more successful later films (1994’s Hell), we really get very little information as to what it was that Inferno was supposed to be about.  Indeed, by focusing primarily upon the production process, Bromberg and Medrea manage to separate the technical aspects of Inferno from its more human and semantic aspects giving us images without context and effects without plot.

This filleted version of Clouzot’s unfinished film is eerily similar to the latest film by Irreversible director Gaspar Noe.  Enter the Void is just as much a work of vulgar spectacle as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) or Avatar (2009).  At times technically stunning, the film shows the hallmarks of a profoundly experimental production process hindered by an equally profound disregard for the human and semantic elements of the artistic process.  Elements such as a compelling plot, believable characters, evocative themes and thought provoking sub-text.  Elements almost entirely absent from Enter the Void.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

La Moustache (2005) – L’Avventura Begins Again

When Michelangelo Antonioni premiered his film L’Avventura at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, it was met by a chorus of boos and cat-calls.  It is easy to see why – L’Avventura is nearly two and a half hours long and despite its backside-destroying length, it contains very little actual plot.  Instead of a narrative, Antonioni presents us with a series of frayed edges that he picks at in a rather half-hearted manner : A girl is in conflict with her father.  A girl disappears while exploring an island.  People attempt to organise search parties.  Couples bicker. Dramatic arcs are initiated but never resolved.  The film radiates a sense of lethargy and detachment echoed by that of its characters – Everything about it is seemingly laid-back, directionless, self-indulgent and spoiled.  Watching L’Avventura it is possible to picture Antonioni sitting in his director’s chair and sighing heavily before wearily dragging himself to his feet and issuing a few half-hearted and half-arsed instructions.  “I suppose we should get back to work” he says distractedly.  Of course, the exquisite shot composition, careful location selection, control of tone and fiercely intellectual engagement with the language of cinema itself make it abundantly clear that there is absolutely nothing half-arsed about L’Avventura.  Its refusal to be anything approaching dramatic is quite deliberate.  Its slow pace is quite intentional.  Its emphasis of tone and atmosphere over plot and characterisation quite carefully planned.  L’Avventura, along with Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), managed to set the thematic and stylistic agenda for the emerging tradition of art house cinema.  It started a conversation that continues to this day.

In his editorial to the April 2010 issue of Sight & Sound Magazine, Nick James addresses this conversation by pointing out that it may have run out of steam.  Art House keeps returning to the same topics in the same manner and, as a result, the techniques pioneered by the likes of Resnais and Antonioni are starting to grate :

“Watching a film like the Berlin Golden Bear-winner Honey (”Bal” Semih Kaplanoglu, 2010) – a beautifully crafted work that, for me suffers from dwelling too much on the visual and aural qualities of its landscape and milieu – there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine. Such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects: sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not. Slow Cinema has been the clear alternative to Hollywood for some time, but from now on, with Hollywood in trouble, I’ll be looking out for more active forms of rebellion.”

L’Avventura and Marienbad‘s rejection of the traditional language of film was not merely ground-breaking, it was culturally earth-shattering.  To this day, people think of art house cinema in terms of long takes and wordless shots of scenery designed to capture some fleeting emotional moment.  My girlfriend, for example, does not share my love of art house film, which she refers to as “Boring Films” as though they constituted some separate cinematic genre like a thriller or a horror film.  Which, of course, they absolutely do.

Another front of the battle waged against Hollywood by art house cinema is that fought by Michael Haneke.  As I pointed out in my review of The White Ribbon (2009) – Haneke’s career has been dominated by a deep ambivalence towards genre.  Haneke keeps making films that are ostensibly works of genre but every time he makes a genre film, he makes sure to deny us the kind of emotional closure that comes from conforming to familiar methods of genre story-telling.  He rewinds the tape when someone escapes in Funny Games and he never allows the mystery to even resemble anything that might make sense in Hidden.  If L’Avventura rejects many of the forms and methods of traditional cinematic story-telling, then Haneke’s films satirise and attack those very same forms.

However, as James’ editorial suggests, it is 50 years since art house cinema began to wage its war against the norms of Hollywood.  Hundreds and hundreds of films have been made in the mould cast by Antonioni.  Is the language of  art house cinema still dangerous or is it just another ossified set of genre conventions in desperate need of deconstruction?  The fact that films as empty as Carlos Raygadas’ Silent Light (2007) can compete at Cannes suggest that rebellion must take a different form and find a new angle of attack.  As my reviews of the films of the Cannes-winning Apichatpong Weerasethakul have suggested, I think that his recombination of genre tropes, art house techniques, mystical sensibilities and visual art aesthetics may prove fruitful going forward… but the battle needs a similar kind of second front as that provided by Haneke.  Enter the cruelly overlooked French drama La Moustache by Emmanuel Carrere, based on his novel of the same name.  It is a film that takes aim at many of the conventions of art house cinema and the crudely psychological register that so many of those films operate in.

Continue reading →