by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

VideoVista have my review of Pawel Pawlikovski’s The Woman in the Fifth. Based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, the film is a meditation on the costs and benefits of artistic creativity. Grounded firmly in the old trope of a sensitive and broken man who is only saved by the love of a good woman, the film presents its central character with a choice between a woman who makes him creative but also insane and a woman who makes him happy but only at the expense of his capacity to write.

I have two main problems with this film. The first is that the vision of creativity the film proposes is based entirely upon an almost ludicrously self-indulgent and melodramatic vision of the creative process. Many gifted artists produce great work without lapsing into either madness, violence or depression. Frankly, seeing these psychological problems as an inevitable by-product of the creative process is nothing more than palliative bullshit put about by people who really need to start taking responsibility for their own mental health. Being an artist does not make it okay for you to be a complete prick.  The second problem is that while Pawlikovski’s direction is entirely watchable, it is also desperately boring. Seriously… what is going on in art house filmmaking? when did it all become so fucking boring?

We are currently undergoing the greatest economic and social crisis since the Great Depression and the political decisions made today will shape the future of entire continents for generations to come. Given that the world is now continuously shifting beneath our feet and that our democratic institutions are positively crying out for an intelligent electorate that can understand and engage with the issues confronting them, do we really need another film about a novelist who is struggling with writer’s block? Do we really need another French film in which a bunch of listless Parisians tumble in and out of bed with one another? Do we really need another film in which a terminally passive and unattractive male protagonist somehow finds himself at the centre of a vortex of redemptive totty? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding ‘No!’

As I said in my piece about this year’s Cannes film festival, European art house cinema is rapidly becoming stale. A decaying boy’s club dominated by a shrinking clade of middle-aged white guys, both its ideas and its language are in desperate need of renewal and The Woman in the Fifth is yet further proof of the scene’s increasing creative sterility. Did we need another film about a novelist with writer’s block? FUCK NO! Nor do we need another polite little film directed by a middle-aged European white guy. Pawel Pawlikovski is not a bad director by any stretch of the imagination but he is a director who is part of the problem. Pawlikovski’s early works including Dostoevsky’s Travels and Tripping with Zhirinovsky were deeply personal reflections of a youth lived under Communist rule. However, as Pawlikovski freely admits in the Blu-ray’s extras, he has decided to set aside the things that made him unique as a director in order to churn out the same old derivative francophilic shit as every other art house director. Clearly… this shit needs to stop.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Total Recall (1990)

FilmJuice have my review of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. The review is of the freshly released and genuinely fantastic Blu-ray release of the film and it ties in quite nicely with this recent piece I also wrote for FilmJuice about the films of Paul Verhoeven.

The first thing that struck me about this film was how violent and sexually explicit it is by the standards of contemporary big budget filmmaking. Indeed, the likes of Michael Bay will frequently include women draped decoratively across motorbikes or ascending stairs but the actual sexual content of their films is practically non-existent. The reason for this is two-fold: A) These big budget films have absolutely immense budgets and in order to maximise their profitability, they need to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Hence the death of the ’18’ rated action film that dominated much of my childhood. B) The target demographic for most contemporary action films is teenaged boys whose sexual experience is usually limited to ogling and giggling… so whenever Bay has an actress bend over but not actually have sex with anyone, he is attempting to position his film in the sexual universe of horny teenaged boys. Compared to contemporary action films, Total Recall comes across as not only quite explicit but also quite surprisingly adult… particularly strange is the weird sexual energy that fizzes between the characters of Schwarzenegger and Stone as they beat each other up and pretend to be married:

One particularly wonderful element of the film is the relationship between Schwarzenegger’s violently bulging everyman and Sharon Stone’s pouting secret agent. Indeed, Stone plays the roll of a woman who is either a loving wife to Schwarzenegger or deep-cover operative assigned to keep him under surveillance lest his secret identity as a Martian freedom fighter begin to reassert itself. Rather than pitting these two personae against each other and musing as to which is the ‘real’ one, Verhoeven simply runs them together meaning that Stone’s character comes across as a lovingly traitorous wife who wants to kill her husband and have sex with him, quite possibly at the same time. Victims of actual domestic abuse might squirm as Schwarzenegger and Stone flit between flirting and kicking each other across the room but Verhoeven fully embraces the tension and presents it almost as a form of sadomasochistic play. Tellingly, when Schwarzenegger decides that he can no longer trust his wife, Stone’s character makes one last attempt to win him over by offering to let him tie her up. Verhoeven’s bizarre sexualisation of domestic abuse is both intensely unsettling and utterly compelling.

Total Recall is an excellent film and this Blu-ray edition does it proud.  Definitely worth revisiting and re-appraising.

by Jonathan M

The Films of Paul Verhoeven

FilmJuice have just uploaded a piece I wrote for them about the films of Paul Verhoeven, director of Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls and Basic Instinct.

Regular readers of this site will know that I have a marked fondness for unpopular blockbuster directors like Neveldine/Taylor, Michael Bay and Zac Snyder. Part of what drives my fondness for these directors is their willingness to set aside human values in pursuit of absolute spectacle. All of these directors use violence and action to entertain their audiences but they also use sexuality and fascistic imagery in a way that many directors are reluctant to do. My view on these directors is that one cannot defend Big Dumb Blockbusters like Avengers or Spiderman whilst turning one’s nose up at films like Transformers 3. Summer blockbusters are in the business of pushing buttons and to have your buttons pushed is an inherently dehumanising process. The difference between directors like Bay and directors like Spielberg is that Bay is completely unapologetic about what it is that he does. He makes films for the sweaty masturbating homunculus in all of us:

When people talk about blockbuster action movies, their minds naturally gravitate to the works of sexless man-children such as Peter Jackson, Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas. The reason for this strange cognitive bias is that most people feel ashamed about watching big dumb action movies and so they need their violence to be not only bloodless but also presented in terms of absolute moral simplicity. Spielberg always cuts to the heroic working-class dad because cinema audiences need to know that their yearning for cinematic carnage does not make them a bad person. Similarly, George Lucas can neither shoot nor write a love scene because you can’t have people falling in love and then shooting each other in the face. That simply would not do.

My take on Paul Verhoeven is that he is a transitional figure in the history of blockbuster filmmaking as he spent the late 80s and early 90s building up mainstream audiences’ tolerance for sex. Without Verhoeven, people would never have gone to see Snyder’s Watchmen or Bay’s Transformers.

by Jonathan M

Calvinball Mythology: The Inevitable Follow-up Post

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus that allowed me to voice some ideas about the role of escapist media in contemporary spiritual life.  Evidently this post struck a chord with a good deal of people as I have been receiving a lot of traffic from people kind enough to link to me. While I cannot address all of the points raised by people, I can address a few of the comments that caught my eye.  Thank you all for your attention and I am delighted that you enjoyed the read!

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

FilmJuice have my review of Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Re-watching the film for the first time since it first appeared in a UK cinema, I was struck by the extent to which it is a microcosm for all the strengths and weaknesses of Miyazaki’s direction:  On the plus side, the animation is spectacular, the mood is uplifting without ever seeming false and the design is a profound expression of nostalgia for a sophisticated, metropolitan Europe that may never have existed in the first place. On the down side, the plotting is frequently nonsensical and the characters have so little depth that they struggle to command our interest, let alone our sympathies. As I put it in the review:

If you are one of those upper middle-class parents that have latched onto Miyazaki as a reliable source of non-violent and morally uplifting children’s entertainment then Howl’s Moving Castle is definitely the film for you. The animation, artwork and pacing are more than enough to keep the little ones amused while their parents sit in open-plan kitchens drawing up plans to take over a Tuscan bean farm or a gite in the Dordogne. However, if you are a grown-up looking for grown-up ideas and characters then Howl’s Moving Castle is a touch more problematic.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about Miyazaki’s Ponyo (2008) in which I suggested that Miyazaki’s attitudes towards humanity moved back and forth between flesh-rending misanthropy and warm-hearted sentimentality. In that piece, I concluded that Miyazaki tended to ‘do’ warm-hearted sentimentality a lot better than he did complex adult morality. Having recently re-watched both Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle, I now realise that my earlier diagnosis was entirely off base. The problem is not that Miyazaki struggles with adult morality, it is that he struggles with human psychology but that these struggles are less evident when they are presented as part of a film aimed directly at children. Indeed, both Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle suffer from the fact that they are films that revolve around entirely unconvincing love stories but because Ponyo presents itself as child-friendly, we are more inclined to forgive its lack of psychological foundation while Howl’s Moving Castle seems much more grown-up and so the lack of real characterisation is both obvious and grating.

by Jonathan M

Prometheus (2012) – Calvinball Mythology and the Void of Meaning

0. We Crave Mythologies, Not Stories

Humanity has always told and listened to stories. Given that these stories sometimes provide the backbone for an entire culture or mode of being, it is only natural that stories should evolve to suit the needs of the cultures that tell them. Western culture has changed a lot over the last fifty years and one of the ways in which our culture has changed is that we have acquired a taste for longer and longer stories. Once upon a time, we watched films, read novels and enjoyed TV shows that could be watched in almost any order. Now, we read series of novels, watch trilogies of films and feel cheated if our TV series do not end by paying off storylines that span multiple seasons and dozens of episodes. As a culture, Westerners no longer crave stories… they crave mythologies.

While explanations for this trend towards narrative expansiveness may lie beyond the scope of a single blog post, I would suggest that we crave fictional mythologies because the religious mythologies we inherited have lost all credibility and the market has stepped in to fill the gap. Though we may not believe in the mythologies of Marvel comics in the same way that our parents believed in God, the experience of engaging with escapist literature is very similar to that of engaging with religious text.  As J.R.R. Tolkien once put it:

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having peculiar quality.

This ‘turn’ comes in the form of the moment when we suddenly lose ourselves in a fictional world and cheer inwardly when the narrative logic of that world asserts itself upon the events of the plot. When a hero finally wins the day or the tragic queen finally dies, we feel a sense of consolation that is entirely lacking from the ‘real world’ we inhabit for much of our waking lives. This desire to feel that the world abides by the rules of a story and that everything in the world happens for a reason is central to the religious impulse. Even a staunch Catholic like Tolkien recognised that the sense of fulfilment we gain from a good piece of escapist literature offers a faint echo of the sense of fulfilment that can be gained from having Faith in the Christian story.

As Westerners have come to demand more and more from their escapist media, creators have responded by not only satisfying those desires but by encouraging them whenever possible. These days, one cannot have a successful film without a franchise and one cannot have a franchise without a suite of media tie-ins including novels, games, TV series and comics. Each of these spin-offs adds complexity to the franchise and allows for the creation of yet more products whose worlds intersect that of the core franchise. The talent, manpower and money poured into the construction of these trans-media megatexts would be horrifying were it not so historically familiar… The truth is that our culture builds media franchises for the same reason that the Ancient Egyptians built pyramids and Medieval Christians built cathedrals: We are taking the fantastical and making it concrete so as to make the fantasy feel more like reality.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Shame (2011)

Back in 2008, I struggled with the religious imagery of Steve McQueen’s debut feature Hunger (2008). I struggled with it because it seemed too obvious and because the troubles had been cast in that particular light altogether too many times.  I have since rewatched Hunger and I now realise that I was wrong. I was wrong to read the film as being Catholic in sentiment and I was wrong to argue that it was simply retreading old ground. When I said that Hunger “cannot get out from under the weight of cinematic history”, I might as well have been writing about my own review. Given that my fondness for Hunger has grown over the years, I was somewhat reluctant to go and see his second feature Shame at the cinema. Aware of my history of not ‘getting’ McQueen’s films and concerned that the film’s subject matter struck me as over-exposed and boring, I waited for the DVD release… and then waited some more. In truth, I was happy to let this film slip away from me until I was offered a review copy. Just When I Thought I Was Out… As a result, Videovista have my review of Steve McQueen’s Shame and it is full of ambivalence.

Set in an economically prosperous but emotionally barren New York City, Shame tells of a successful man who devotes his life to the pursuit of orgasms. Orgasms by hand, orgasms by mouth, orgasms by any means necessary and to the exclusion of all other avenues of pleasure and fulfillment. Moving from one nameless sexual partner to the next, the character leads an admirably simple life and appears to experience none of the downsides traditionally associated with a hedonistic lifestyle. However, this simple existence is thrown out of balance when the character’s emotionally incontinent sister comes to stay. Suddenly plagued by feelings of shame, the character attempts to re-invent himself as a normal person only to fall at pretty much the first hurdle. While much has been made of the film’s interest in the question of sex addiction, my view is that the film is attempting to do what it says on the tin, namely examine the role of shame in making us do the things we do:

 What distinguishes Shame from the likes of Lost In Translation and Up In The Air is that it pointedly refuses to use the same psychological model as most films and TV dramas. Most film and TV writers create their characters using a somewhat simplified version of Freudian psychodynamics. In particular, they tend to be very fond of the Freudian concept of displacement whereby an irrational over-reaction to one thing is actually the product of a rational but socially unacceptable reaction to something else. For example, in Up In The Air, George Clooney’s character comes across as excessively hostile to a co-worker who is attempting to force him off the road and into an office job. Initially, this reaction seems perfectly understandable but as the movie progresses and Clooney’s character becomes more and more unreasonable; we learn that the true source of his unease is the fact that he has no social bonds and hates the hugely successful career that he has built for himself. Some critics have sought to interpret Brendon’s sexual escapades in light of an unmentioned childhood trauma, but McQueen pointedly makes no reference at all either to Brendon’s inner life or to the emotional life of his childhood. The reason for this is that McQueen wants us to focus only upon that which we can see and what we see is a man who is forced out of his comfort zone because he feels ashamed.

While I think that McQueen’s attempt to break new psychological ground is nothing short of heroic, I am not convinced that the film ever gains any traction on the concept of shame. Add to this the lack of visual firepower and what you’re left with is a quite traditional arty drama held together by two decent performances. Which is a recipe for Oscar-bait, not thought-provoking cinematic art.

by Jonathan M

There is no such thing as a Reliable Narrator

A recent issue of the London Review of Books contained a fascinating review of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, sequel to her Man Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall. One of the questions addressed in Colin Burrow’s review (which can be read here if you’re a subscriber) is that of whether Mantel is overly charitable in her depiction of Thomas Cromwell as a man with thoroughly modern sensibilities:

The crude question ‘Does this mean that he could have felt as much and as finely as he does in this book?’ still needs to be asked. The novel’s present-tense mode of narrative, focalised through a single principal character, has an intrinsic problem. It would be almost impossible to write this kind of fiction and make the central character a brute, since so much depends upon what he or she notices and feels, on sensitivity. If a fiction represents the sensorium of one character’s feelings, then an inert or insensitive sensorium would probably generate inert fiction.

To my mind, this is pretty much spot on. While I have not read Bring Up the Bodies, I have read Wolfe Hall and Mantel’s depiction of Tudor England is so fragrant and atmospheric that it simply could not have been filtered through the mind of a character who saw the world purely in terms of fights, political conquests or scientific problems in need of a solution. In order for Mantel to portray Tudor England as a place full of colour and contrast, she needed a central character who would be alive to those elements of his world. Had Cromwell been a brute, then he would have attended to brutish things and our impression of the Tudor England would have been immeasurably more brutish as a result.

This got me thinking… people often talk about characters in very instrumental terms, portraying them either as psychological riddles in need of decoding or as means of capturing the reader’s empathy and using that connection to immerse them in the world of the novel.  Indeed, people often talk about the possibility of novels having ‘unreliable narrators’ in the sense that some fact about the narrator might shed some doubt on his or her version of the facts and thereby encourage readers to infer some previously hidden truth about the events described in the novel. The problem with the concept of the ‘unreliable narrator’ is that it assumes that there can be a ‘reliable’ narrator but I do not see how this could possibly be.

When each of us walk into a room, our attentions are drawn to different things dependent upon our perceptual capacity, our life experience, our personality, our interests and our mood. Two people can walk into exactly the same room and their minds will turn to very different matters: One will notice a social rival and begin speculating about how they can confront and humiliate them while another will begin to internally enthuse about the style of dress and the quality of the food. In this case both narrators are, strictly speaking, unreliable as the picture they give of a particular situation is incomplete and slanted… but how else are we to perceive the world except through our eyes, our experiences and our personalities?

A little while ago, I wrote about Jo Walton’s Hugo Award-nominated novel Among Others (2011) and commented on how cold and emotionally detached the world of that novel felt to me. Given that, much like Wolf Hall, Among Others focuses upon the life and experiences of one particular character, I inferred that much of the coldness of the world came from the fact that the book’s narrator was some kind of psychopath:

The work whose tone and setting most closely match that of Among Others is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) as Mor is not only isolated and alienated but also intensely calculating in her relationships with other people. There are scenes where Mor discusses purchasing buns for other girls on the understanding that this will get them to buy her buns in return that echo with the same sociopathic lack of humanity as the scenes in which Ender ponders murdering or brutalising a bully in order to set an example.

Among Others and Ender’s Game are perfect examples of the kind of book that Burrow speculates must exist: They are emotionally inert because their central characters are themselves emotionally inert. The same can be said of Steve McQueen’s second film Shame (2011), which is cold, austere and minimalistic because its central character lives a life that is just as uncluttered as his elegantly-designed Manhattan apartment.

The ‘take home’ point from all of this is that characters are not solely defined by the things they think or the things they do, they are also defined by the things they pay attention to. Any novel that uses first-person narration or clings closely to a third-person viewpoint character must necessarily be read as that character’s subjective impression of the world they inhabit. While all of us share the same physical world, we live our lives in subjective universes built to suit our preferences. The art of great writing lies not just in making a character or a world that seems realistic, but in exploring the way in which the world makes the character and the character makes their own world.

by Jonathan M

I Saw the Devil and His Name Was Kim Jong-un – Vengeance and South Korean Cinema

Kim Ji-woon’s I Saw the Devil tells of a South Korean intelligence agent who responds to the death of his wife by tracking down the man who murdered her. However, instead of simply killing the man, the agent decides to install surveillance equipment that will allow him to continue punishing the murderer over an extended period of time. Initially, the killer is taken aback by the agent’s hatred but he soon comes to enjoy the confrontations and so lures the agent into an increasingly brutal contest of wills. Hideously violent, unflinchingly brutal and yet beguiling to watch, Kim’s film offers a traditionally Nietzschean warning to those who would consider embarking on a quest for revenge:

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

While Kim’s film is beautifully made and eminently entertaining, I cannot help but wonder why it is that he felt inspired to make a film with this particular message. Back in 2005, Kim directed the wonderful A Bittersweet Life in which the protagonist exacts a bloody revenge on his employers for the way in which they deprived him of a personal life and yet responded with furious anger the second he stepped out of line in an effort to grab some happiness for himself. Given that A Bittersweet Life convincingly communicates the idea that revenge is a necessary but ultimately self-defeating course of action, it is strange to see Kim making yet another film with this precise message. Especially when the message in question is so blindingly obvious that it scarcely merits a passing thought at all let alone enough thought to fill two entire films. Even more puzzling is the fact that Kim is not alone in his desire to brood over the morality of vengeance. In fact, South Korean cinema has produced so many revenge films in recent years that one can comfortably talk about them constituting a sub-genre in their own right.

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by Jonathan M

The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn and NWR by Laurent Duroche

Long-time visitors to the site will know that I have something of a love-hate relationship with the films of Nicolas Winding Refn.The relationship began in 2008 when I went to see his singular and yet problematic biopic Bronson. Soon after that, I was completely blown away by the viciously gritty realism of Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy. A few years later, I was going through something of a ‘viking’ phase during which I read several books about the period. Upon hearing that Winding Refn’s next film Valhalla Rising was a Conradian take on vikings, I immediately dragged my partner to a film festival where it was screening. The result was something of a disappointment. Winding Refn had won my devotion by crushing the bones of modern life and sucking the marrow from them without using the increasingly hide-bound techniques of european art house film. Indeed, you are more likely to see someone get shot to death in a Winding Refn film than you are to see them staring meaningfully into the distance. When the time came for me to review the film, I voiced my extreme ambivalence and disappointment in a post over at Videovista:

This is art with the creative impulse kept in chains and passed back and forth between worn-out chieftains. This is the kind of film that makes you strain to remember the last time you were genuinely shocked or surprised at the cinema. This is art that leaves you yearning for a gust of fresh air that will blow away the cobwebs. This is the revolutionary corrupted into the familiar. The transgressive repackaged as the formulaic. This is what creative stagnation looks like and I find that almost unbearably depressing. As someone who is not only a huge fan of Conrad but also of Malick, existentialism and Vikings, Valhalla Rising should have been my ideal film but instead it left me feeling that I had seen it all before just one too many times.

This is basically the art house intellectual equivalent of nerd rage. My annoyance at the film was such that I even felt obliged to unpack my feelings even further in a piece inspired by James Woods’ extended critical essay How Fiction Works and Thomas Clay’s Soi Cowboy. Valhalla Rising left a deep wound in my appreciation of film, it marked the point where I stopped celebrating art house film and began questioning its methods and its metrics of success.  Valhalla Rising is not the work of a free spirit, it is the work of someone who is reaching out to the art house establishment in search of recognition and legitimacy. Valhalla Rising is the work of an outsider who wants to come in from the cold and the exact same thing can be said of Thomas Clay’s Soi Cowboy, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and Steve McQueen’s Shame. All of these films bend the knee to the European art house establishment and so come off looking like genre pieces. The problem is that the techniques that once revolutionised European filmmaking in the 1960s have become ossified and so European art house film is now little more than a genre that talented directors attempt to move beyond.  As Woods puts it:

When a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques

Winding Refn’s willingness to bend the knee was amply rewarded when his next film Drive became one of the most widely celebrated films of 2011.  Full of violence and exploitation film tropes, Drive seemed built for the US market and yet it managed to convince art house fans as well as critics. Had Winding Refn not made a film as conventionally arty as Valhalla Rising, I suspect that Drive would never have won over art house critics.  It is too American… too violent… too exciting… too plot driven. The Imp of the Perverse that sits on my shoulder decided that I should hate Drive on general principle and yet I did not. In fact, as I said when I reviewed the film, I consider it to be one of the greatest films of all time… if only for this scene:

I could watch it all day: The dimming of the light, the way he starts to pull away before she does and the way he steps back before exploding into action in a way that pleads ‘just give me one more second of this feeling… one more second before I have to do something horrible’. There is genius in that scene and there is genius in Drive as a work of cinematic art. It is a thousand miles from the sterile art house nonsense of Eugene Green’s Portuguese Nun and Carlos Reygadas’ Stellet Licht.

Given that I adore the work of Nicolas Winding Refn, I was delighted to discover a documentary about his work. Filmed as Winding Refn scouts out locations in Bancock, Laurent Duroche’s NWR is a wonderfully candid piece that reveals a lot about how Winding Refn works and how he thinks his way through particular projects. Particularly interesting is the fact that Winding Refn actually turned down the chance to go to a prominent Danish film school and chose instead to use the money to make Pusher. The film, and many other fantastic films like it, are made available for free online and are collected at the absolutely awesome Cinephilia&Beyond Archive.

I am particularly enamored with the film as it opens with some fantastic comments in French by the great surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. This opening section, sadly devoid of English subtitles, translates as:

You have to understand one thing. Cinema has arrived at a disappointing stage: Complete industial degeneration. With this pulp… this cancer that is American cinema has infected the entire planet. It has political power… it has economic power… it is a pile of spiritual excrement. Then, when we had lost absolutely all hope, when we saw that all films were lit in exactly the same way… with that degenerate Spielberg… When we find ONE artist who can survive (despite having to earn a living) and who BREATHES… it is a moment of supreme joy. The boy Nicolas saved me from my cinematic depression