When Philippe Garrel’s most recent film premiered in competition at Cannes last year, it carried the French title La Frontière de l’aube; that was translated in English in the Cannes guide as Frontier of Dawn, but the subtitle at the beginning of the film read, The Dawn of the Shore. None of these titles give any indication of what this film is: a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge. I named it as the best undistributed film of 2008; now, IFC is screening it theatrically in series at BAM in Brooklyn (starting tonight) and at Cinefamily in Los Angeles (Saturday, March 14), before it premieres on VOD.
Because We Were Born’s co-director Jean-Pierre Duret began his career in the mid-80s as a boom operator and sound assistant on the films of Louis Malle and Jacques Doillon, and more recently, he’s led the sound work on the films of Francois Ozon, Agnes Jaoui and the Dardennes Brothers. This pedigree surely helped Born, Duret and Andrea Santana’s thrid nonfiction film set in Northeast Brazil, land a premiere slot last fall at the Venice Film Festival, a placement that even the Variety review admitted “may have minimized the attention it garnered as it may have gotten lost among the large number of films showing there.” After moving on to Rotterdam and opening theatrically in France, Born’s future festival schedule is currently somewhat up in the air. It’s hard to say what the ideal showcase for this game-changing work of neo-verite might be — it’s probably not the pizza-and-beer Alamo Drafthouse atmosphere of SXSW, nor the “issues only, please” doc programs of some, well, less fun festivals –– but if it ends up in your town, you’d be well served to run toward it as fast as you can.
The producers of Tokyo!, three short films by two Frenchmen and a South Korean, aim to do for Japan’s metropolis what New York Stories did for the Big Apple or Paris Je T’Aime for the City of Lights. That the two Frenchmen are indie darling Michel Gondry and former film critic/Pola X director Leos Carax, and the South Korean Bong Joon-Ho, who made an international splash with The Host, would seem to lend these three very different takes on a single subject some serious cache. Unfortunately, only two directors rise to the occasion, leaving a gaping hole in an otherwise thoughtful trilogy.
Arnaud Desplechin makes movies that play like epic novels built out into live-sized pop-up books. Virtually Cubist in their multi-faceted narrative complexity, they cast such a spell that they’re almost interactive. When you watch a Desplechin film, you can smell perfume and feel bass shaking a room, and you feel the burden of each character’s long-simmering loves and resentments as if they were your own. Beyond surround sound, it’s surround space, surround time, surround life.
A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel), Desplechin’s latest, is a darkly comic dysfunctional family fairy tale, more Meet Me In Saint Louis than The Royal Tenenbaums, with a healthy dose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream thrown in. With its whimsies and excesses playing out under the oddly liberating spectre of expected death, the whole thing is infused with a fin de siecle sensibility. While ailing matriarch is Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) infuriatingly matter-of-fact regarding what may be her own last holiday (she explains the seriousness of her condition to her husband in their warmly-lit budoir, backed by the strains of cafe jazz), her grown-up kids reflexively take the reminder of the ticking clock as an opportunity for boozy, reckless revelry, as an excuse to fight and to stop fighting repressed desires. Weird, warm, gleefully funny and unavoidably heartrending, this grand tale of a family reunited by mortality is, in it’s most impressive trick, not a bit morose. To borrow a line from Desplechin himself, speaking after a screening at the New York Film Festival, the Vuillards “don’t have time for melancholy”; to borrow a line from his script, “suffering is a painted backdrop” for the business of getting through the day.
Yes, there’s a new Eric Rohmer movie, and yes, it’s premiering in New York tonight. How come you didn’t know about it? I don’t know, but I barely knew about it (or at least, about its scheduled premiere), so don’t feel too bad. The Romance of Astree and Celadonscreened last year at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and then sat on the shelf for awhile until Koch Lorber picked it up; its one-week run at Anthology Film Archives is probably a run up to an impending release on DVD. But as all signs point to this being the 88 year-old French master’s final film, you’ll probably want to take your final chance to see a new Rohmer film on a big screen.
“Sexuality is one of the great mysteries of humanity.” Or so declares famous, 50-something novelist Charles Saint-Denis, near the beginning of Claude Chabrol’s latest film, A Girl Cut in Two. A bit too much of an on-the-nose of a thesis statement for a film about various crimes of passion? It might have been, if not for the portentousness with which actor Francois Berleand delivers the line, and the distance at which Chabrol places the camera in order to shoot it. Even if Charles’ young, vivacious but sexually naive weather girl mistress Gabrielle (a just-barely grown-up Ludivine Sagnier) accepts each of her lovers words of supposed wisdom at face value, Chabrol doesn’t exactly give the impression that we should.
Gabrielle’s last name translates to “snow”, and the obvious joke seems to be that Charles seems to believe she’s pure as an un-mussed embankment until he starts driving her. But as Charles vacillates between the poles holding up his romantically mopey middle-age––Gabrielle, his work, and a long-standing wife who choses to deny rather than suffer over her “perfect man”’s indiscretions––his young love interest is also being courted by Paul Gaudens, a spoiled scion who won’t take her coy nos for an answer. Gabrielle bounces between the two, always with a wider eye for Charles who, paradoxically but inevitably, only wants her after he’s pushed her away.
The script is transposed from the story of Evelyn Nesbit, the early-20th century it girl whose teenage relationship with an older sexual mentor led to tragedy once she settled with someone more age-appropriate but far crazier. A cursory familiarity with how that real-life story turned out will spoil a few of Girl’s beats, but the constellation of plot points isn’t what’s important here. Though Girl does eventually build up to a murder, there’s no mystery concerning how or why––that crime happens out in the open, while the events that animate it are largely kept discreet. At 78, the living master of the French thriller is less interested in forensics than in the perplexities of violent acts a bit outside the jurisdiction of the French police––those that happen behind closed doors, inspired by the insanity of desire. The joke’s on Charles if he thinks that he, as one who strip-mines human behavior for a living, is closer to cracking the case than anyone else.
A click on the image above will take you to an exclusive clip from A Girl Cut in Two. The movie opens this Friday, August 15 in New York at the IFC Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and will also be available On Demand via IFC in Theaters. It’ll roll out to further cities in the coming weeks.
Serge Bozon’s La France is a generic clusterfuck, but in the best way––a stunningly confident, category-defying, broken-down dream piece about loss and being lost. It’s a film about war in which soldiers are not only never seen actually fighting for their land, but in fact seem to have lost their way in vague and vain pursuit of a lost land to reclaim as their own. It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis. After a 14 month festival run (including stops at Cannes, New Directors/New Films and LAFF), it opens for a week in New York at Anthology Film Archives on Friday.
Above: a video for Sonic Youth’s “Jams Run Free”, from their Rather Ripped album, shot by French cinema bad girl Claire Denis. Daniel Stuyck writes about this, and the four other videos Denis has made for the band, in the new issue of Film Comment:
The antecedent to these pieces is not so much Denis’s previous films as Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray. Conner’s 1961 short, an essential demonstration of the maxim that pop songs are teenage symphonies to God, reads like a list of chemical ingredients for any of these videos: rock and roll; erotic tension (as P. Adams Sitney is at pains to point out, Cosmic Ray predominantly features the “irreverent dance of a naked woman, which he [Conner] photographed himself”); bland images of daily life and consumer culture (Mickey Mouse, hitchhiking Indians, neon signs, the H-bomb) transformed into something surreal. In other words, a strange alchemy—an area where science and religion meet, not unlike drugs. And that ultimate drug state—ecstasy—is what Conner and Denis are ultimately fixed on: Denis’s unfocused whip pans as Sonic Youth slams into its chorus create the same sensation as Conner’s image of skulls birthing from crotches in an instant between two shots, a revelation of new meanings created by a strange combination of elements.
Day 3 of NYFF 2007 brought surprisingly strong late-career efforts from two esteemed filmmakers previously thought to be several decades past their prime. To my mind, Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon is a greater creative success than Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, although I suppose there’s no doubt as to which film will manage the greater commercial success (it’s not even a contest, really–the Rohmer has no U.S. distributor). Lumet’s film is a proper comeback, the work of a filmmaker returning to familiar themes and, if not exactly reinventing them, then certainly doing his most solid and engaging work in some time. But the Rohmer picture feels like a true farewell, and as final films go, I can’t imagine a more poignant send off.
Céladon won quite a few hearts in Toronto, but it didn’t seem to go over so well here in New York. I know more than a few members of the press corps didn’t make it to the final frame, and after the screening, I heard a lot of “awful”s and “interminable”s. I’ll admit that it may not be Rohmer’s finest hour in terms of filmmaking craft; when Alison Willmore compares the film to a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s not entirely wrong. But I would argue that the plotting needs to be as deliberate as it is, and the overall technique as rudimentary, in order for the film to work as a romantic fable.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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