Category / French Film

by Jonathan M

Heartbeat Detector (2007) – Re-Engineering Ethical Process Outcomes

A little while ago, I reprinted my Vector piece on cinematic adaptations of the works of J. G. Ballard.  One of the themes of Ballard’s work I used to pull together the different films was the concept of a benign psychopathology.  This concept serves to unite the different works from the various stages of Ballard’s writing career and also forms the heart of his development of an old surrealist saw into a form of proto-postmodernism.  The idea, at its simplest, is that Humanity has become detached from the environment in which its emotional hardwiring evolved.  From a world of mountains, deserts, forests, swamps and plains we have moved into a world of cities, motorways, cars and conference centres.  A world constructed largely by us, for us.  However, despite this world being supposedly designed to suit our needs, we find ourselves paradoxically distant from it : Either the architecture surrounding us reflects our position and role in society thereby dehumanising us, Or it is an abstract expression of some impractical aesthetic ideal and it alienates us.  Our reliance upon the car and the city is physically and psychologically toxic and yet we cannot return to the state of nature we once lived in.  We die in car accidents by the hundreds of thousand and yet we still drive to work.  We self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, losing ourselves in the pleasures of consumerism and empty sensuality and yet we do not seek to change the world.  The co-dependent and unhealthy relationship we have with our environment is a benign psychopathology, a form of madness created by an attempt to adapt to an unnatural environment.  A form of controlled and evolutionarily beneficial madness.  A form of high-functioning dementia this benign psychopathology is an attempt to reformat our emotional hardwiring and set up a new set of stimulus-responses that are better suited to our new world.

In Ballard’s early Science Fiction novel The Drowned World (1962), the character Dr Robert Kerans is horrified when Captain Strangman drains the lagoon and makes it possible for humanity to resettle the ruins of a drowned city.  In Crash (1973), the character of Ballard develops an attraction for people maimed in car crashes as automobile accidents become fetishised.  In Cocaine Nights (1996), Charles Prentice comes to realise that rape, arson, theft and murder are not anti-social activities but rather necessary tools for the creation of social cohesion.  Throughout Ballard’s work, the severing of Humanity’s emotional connection to the environment allowing the development of benign psychopathologies invariably results from some terrible event.  An event which Ballard scholars have come to refer to as The Death of Affect, drawing upon a chapter in Ballard’s central work The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) in which a couple visit the scene of a car crash only to find that the site has been drained of all emotional content :

“These infrequent visits, dictated by whatever private logic, now seemed to provide nothing.  An immense internal silence presided over this area of cement and pines, a terminal moraine of the emotions that held its debris of memory and regret, like the rubbish in the pockets of a dead schoolboy he had examined” [Page 108]

Of course, benign psychopathologies do not have to take the form of a sexual predilection for car accidents.  They can be much more mundane.  Much more common.  Much more familiar.  Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector — based upon the French novel  La Question Humaine by Francois Emmanuel — is an exploration of the idea that certain psychopathologies can survive the death of their host organism, living on in the cultural aether to rewire whole new generations to fit with new and emerging forms of environmental unpleasantness.  A process of adaptation that is noticeable in certain chilling linguistic similarities.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

The Father Of My Children (2009) – Shoulda Used A Montage…

If you were to cast your eyes over some of the writings of Stephen Jay Gould you would find him picking a fight with the concept of Phyletic Gradualism.  Gradualism is the idea that species adapt gradually to their environment and that this rate of change is so slow and even that it does not really make sense to speak of there being real differences between ancestral species and descendent species.  Under Phyletic Gradualism, different species reflect our knowledge of the fossil record and not the realities of evolutionary history.  Gould argues instead for a model known as Punctuated Equilibrium.  A theory that posits that most species do not change at all and that when evolution does occur, it occurs rapidly and locally.  Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins have responded to Gould’s arguments by pointing out that nobody, not even Darwin, has ever subscribed to the model of Phyletic Gradualism Gould attacks in his popular writings.

As we see from Dawkins’ memes, the process of evolution is a neat metaphor for other forms of change.  Indeed, some thinkers have used the theory of punctuated equilibrium to explain how institutions react to change.  But the model could also be applied to individuals as a means of understanding the process of psychological change : People develop understandings of themselves and their surroundings and, over time, these understandings cease to apply.  So people allow their ideas to evolve.  They adapt their images of themselves and their ideas about the world to suit the new environment.  They adapt.  They evolve.

One of my favourite things to do when watching a drama is try to work out whether the writer is an emotional Phyletic Gradualist or a Punctuated Equilibrist : Does the drama present emotional change as a slow and gradual process or does it suggest that we exist in a state of emotional and psychological stasis until the levee breaks and we have to evolve in a hurry.  However, as with biologists, the best writers are those who do not allow themselves to be trapped by artificial dichotomies.  They allow for the idea that people change at different rates and in response to different forms of pressure.  They do not distort their characters’ psychologies in order to slot them neatly into a narrative.  Mia Hansen-Løve’s Le Pere De Mes Enfants is an example of this kind of drama.  It is a film that deals with drastic and sudden emotional change but rather than seeking to pin the process of evolution down to a question of Big Events or Epic Journeys, it contents itself with showing us a few moments along a path travelled at different rates by different people.  It also calls into question the vocabulary used by film-makers to communicate these rates of emotional change.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The First Day of the Rest of your Life (2008)

Videovista have my review of Remi Bezancon’s Le Premier Jour Du Reste De Ta Vie.

Well directed, the film also employs quite a neat structural trick of focusing only upon five key days in the lives of a middle-class French family.  However, despite the odd nice moment, The First Day of the Rest of your Life is an astoundingly unoriginal film dealing only in the boldest and most familiar of cinematic emotions.  Dreadful.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – La Grande Vadrouille (1966)

Videovista have my review of Gerard Oury’s seminal French Resistance comedy La Grande Vadrouille (also known as Don’t Look Now – We’re Being Shot At).

My review is as much an appraisal of the film as it is a discussion of the film’s place in French cultural history.  I remember growing up, my Swiss friends (who are at least partially French culturally speaking due to the presence of French TV channels in the French-speaking part of Switzerland) would speak warmly of this film and quote from it but, looking back at it now, I’m struck that it really isn’t anything more than a broad family action-comedy.  It’s certainly not the funniest thing that De Funes ever made.

by Jonathan M

Beau Travail (1999) – Neither Validation Nor Transgression

All drama is a process of digestion.  The peristaltic processing of information and emotional states resulting in change.  It is an on-going process.  It never stops.  The best dramas are those that choose their moment carefully, setting up the cameras or lighting the stage just as the emotional bowels twitch or the psychological constipation ends.  For all of her tendencies towards hard-hitting topics and enigmatic story-telling techniques, Claire Denis is a genuinely world-class dramatist.  Films such as 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and The Intruder (2004) are heady examinations of sudden changes that come after long periods of emotional constipation.

In The Intruder, we see an old man who has lived life entirely upon his own terms – his past a catalogue of burned bridges, old enmities and shady deals – suddenly realising that he has to reconnect with his estranged son.  In 35 Shots of Rum we are introduced to a family that exists in perfect emotional balance.  The son and the daughter live together while the father’s old girlfriend and the upstairs neighbour orbit round the household in enigmatic patterns, part of the family and yet denied any clear role in it.  Both films deal with the inevitable change that must afflict these delicate psychological ecosystems.  A process of change that is, according to Denis at least, a mixed-blessing.

The ending to 35 Shots of Rum can be read as either a wedding or a funeral.  The father’s announcement that the time has come for him to drink the 35 shots can be seen as either a capitulation to unwanted forces or as a moment of spiritual rebirth.  Like the Death tarot card, the film marks the end of a period of stasis, it does not explain whether this stasis is broken by an ending or a new beginning.  Similarly, the ambiguous moral character of The Intruder’s protagonist cloaks his eventual death in dramaturgical vagueness.  Is it sad that he never got to know his son?  Or was his death deserved for the crimes he committed in order to artificially extend his own life?  For Denis, this process of emotional change can also be terrifying, as demonstrated in her take on the vampire film Trouble Every Day (2001).  In that film a doctor nails his wife up in her bedroom because she has changed into something Other while an American who harbours terrible violent fantasies stalks the world desperately trying to find a cure.  When the pair come together it is erotic and terrifying, natural and unnatural, to be applauded and avoided.

Denis’ Beau Travail, an adaptation of Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd (1924) set against the backdrop of the modern-day French Foreign Legion, continues Denis’ interest in the complexities and ambiguities of emotional change and emotional constipation, demonstrating them with her characteristic grace and lack of pity.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

The Girl Cut In Two (2007) – False Dichotomies

Morality takes as many forms as there are cultures to manifest it.  For some people, it is a question of commandments.  For others it is a question of ideals.  For other groups it is a question of economics, minutely calibrated cost-benefit analyses.  But for all of these systems and all of these cultures, morality always boils down to a series of dichotomies : Should I do X or should I do Y?  Simple binaries that make the world.  Works such as Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) encourage us to see our relationships in similar terms.  Do we want a love filled with the peaks and valleys of passion,  or do we want a pleasingly mild existence, an emotional even keel?

Claude Chabrol’s 2007 film La Fille Coupee En Deux seems to attack this vision of human relations.  We expect to have to make a trade-off in our personal lives, but what happens if both of our options are bad ones?  Chabrol hints at an answer.  An answer which, like Chabrol’s great films of the late 60s and early 70s, depends upon a viciously cynical vision of the class system that continues to corrupt French life.  But is this vision perhaps too cynical for its own good?

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

La Rupture (1970) – The Tragic Demise of a Picaroon

Chabrol is a director whose best work is done in the margins of broad moral argument.  The films of his so-called ‘Golden Period’ from the late 60s to the early 70s are a series of incendiary attacks upon an upper middle class morally corrupt enough to murder for the sake of social standing.  In films such as Les Noces Rouges (1973), La Femme Infidele (1969), Que La  Bete Meure (1969) and Juste Avant La Nuit (1971) wealthy people murder their way out of bad relationships and awkward situations.  They do this, more often than not, because they simply lack the imagination to solve their problems any other way.  And therein lies the strength of Chabrol’s vision.

Chabrol presents the bourgeoisie as morally corrupt but also deeply tragic figures.  For all of their wealth and privilege, they are trapped inside a system that forces them to care about the wrong things.  For example, in Les Noces Rouges, a couple find illicit love but when they are uncovered by the woman’s husband, they are shocked to discover that he does not mind their affair.  If anything, he sees it as a positive development as it will keep his wife happy and ensure her lover’s loyalty to him.  Incapable of understanding his cunning rejection and manipulation of bourgeois moral codes, the lovers murder him thereby sealing their fates.  Similarly, in Que La Bete Meure, a man tracks down the killer of his child only to discover that the man’s entire family want him dead.  They want him dead but they lack the courage to simply leave him or to denounce his many cruelties.  As cowardly and morally corrupt these characters might appear, they are also the tragic victims of a twisted social order.  An order that uses money and privilege to trap them in a situation whereby the characters are forced to deny their own feelings of unhappiness and claustrophobia.

La Rupture (a.k.a. the Break-up, based upon Charlotte Armstrong’s 1968 novel The Balloon Man) is, at first glance, not Chabrol’s most subtle film.  It summons up Chabrol’s typically louche and corrupt bourgeoisie but makes it appear all the more monstrous and deranged for the fact that it is attacking an almost saintly working class woman.  As horrors and injustices are melodramatically heaped upon her, it seems as though there can be no excusing or forgiving such behaviour.  But, once the film ends, you realise that the character responsible for all of these terrible crimes might have been different.  He might have been free.  La Rupture is a film about the breaking of a picaroon upon the wheel of modern capitalism.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

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).

by Jonathan M

L’Enfance Nue (1968) – Truth beneath Theory

Back in the early 00s, I was studying the philosophy of science.  Studying philosophy is very similar to being one of the generals, comfy in a French chateau miles away from the front and seeing the world purely in terms of previous wars fought by previous generations.  I was taught the history of philosophy in terms of rationalism vs. empiricism rather than within a proper historical context (I did not truly understand the point of Leibniz’s philosophy until I read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle).  Sometimes we would hear news of young South American Logicians doing wonderful things with multi-variant logical systems and the smarter kids had sensed a shift in academia’s prevailing winds and hitched their philosophical wagon to actual scientific research rather than debates held by angry young graduate students who were now port-soaked emeritus professors.  However, one battle I was all too eager to fight was the one between science and continental philosophy, part of the wider academic clash of empires known as the Science Wars.  In all the books, all the arguments and all the pages of incommensurable bickering that went on, I still remember someone pointing out that, for all the political anger of critical theorists, no member of the working class had ever actually benefited from a piece of critical theory.  This is something of a cheap shot as the suggestion is that, as academic debate is an irredeemably bourgeois activity, leftist critical theorists are all hypocrites of the highest order.  One might well quibble with this rather haughty and dismissive comment but it does seem to be close to the opinions held by Maurice Pialat.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

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.

Continue reading →