Russian Wives

Apologies to people who are searching for Russian brides and are misled by the title.

I haven’t done much of late except work so a brief post on two movies that I saw awhile back.

In Pedro Almovodar’s movie, Broken Embraces, a scriptwriter describes the kinds of movies that should be verboten and includes biopics. Of course to this list should be added overblown Almovodar melodramas like Broken Embraces but that is another story. I do concur on the biopics and Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky did nothing to dissuade me of this. It is not exactly a sweeping biopic and is possibly fictional being largely an account of a romance between Chanel and Stravinsky. It does end with the obligatory old people at the end of their lives shot though like all good biopics. Also tacked on is the obligatory “all that good sex inspired so much good art!” and a slightly misguided attempt to have the romance play out to the The Rite of Spring score (really). The filmmakers do their best to conjure up a passionate romance but sadly, in spite of all that heaving sex, it  remains flaccid and I use the pun intentionally. In fact, it is only the opening sequence which is based on the notorious staging of The Rite of Spring that is breathtaking; the insistent, jagged music and the atavistic  dance is startling, thrilling and beautiful even after a century of modern dance. It is a pity that the movie doesn’t follow the Russian troupe who staged The Rite of Spring and we are left with Coco and Igor.

While more or less a two hander, Stravinsky’s wife plays a small, important role in the film and it ended up being the kind of movie where she seemed far more interesting than the principals. She is consumptive, a foreigner, a mother and a neglected wife and the actress playing her provides her with a quiet dignity and restraint. There is a softness to her persona in her clothes, the things she brings, all of which has Russian folk elements. Chanel’s’ signature black and white simplicity fills up much of the screen so its punctuation with Mrs. Stravinsky's muted colours gives the movie an interesting palette. It is the one thing the filmmakers get right – the film is not stifled by its sheer beauty unlike say A Single Man. The red of a Russian rug that Stravinsky’s wife brings to this black and white abode is not just visually arresting but softens and brings life to the starkness of the house. I wish the movie had been on Mrs Stravinsky. Or at least the fictionalised version presented in the movie.

An example of The Rite of Spring staging here.

Seeing the movie reminded me of another movie of Russian artistes in exile, this one on Ivan Bunin. Though about the writer, his wife plays an important role in the film, in fact the movie is titled His Wife's Diary. Here too it’s the way the lives of émigrés who could never go home plays out in foreign locales that keeps the movie interesting and more than a roundelay of affairs. Bunin was quite the womaniser but the actress who plays the wronged wife gives it an added dimension, she still remains the concerned wife preoccupied with his literary affairs and is not in the least a martyr (the film if I remember correctly suggests that Vera Bunina had her own close relationships). It was an intriguing film and I wouldn’t mind a second viewing, sadly SBS screenings of foreign films are getting rarer by the year.

Axl & Vera do London - Unmade Beds

I seem to have completed an anniversary of some sort at my local video store so when they offered me a complimentary DVD, I decided on Unmade Beds. For no other reason than that it seemed to feature a girl wearing an animal head.

It turned out to be one of those happy choices for it's a charming film set in London's squats and music clubs. There is little plot - a Spanish boy searches for and engages with his father in London, a Belgian girl comes to London to get over heartbreak only to find her heart captured by yet another handsome lad. But that doesn't matter for the plot is simply an excuse to capture the feeling of being young and dislocated in a foreign place, all of it captured in delectable visuals and accompanied by an off beat, indie music score. The actors are sufficiently pretty and hip, the sex disarmingly and sweetly casual, the drinking sweet oblivion. There are film making nods here and there to the usual suspects, Godard most of all, but the film it put me most in mind of was Joachim Trier's Reprise. It turned out that they share a common cinematographer though Reprise has a Nordic coolness whereas Unmade Beds has a warm, autumnal palette. The actors are charming enough, Deborah Francois in particular being as good as she was in The Page Turner. The bands featured are not very well known which lends some authenticity to the night crawl of its young protagonists and the music is sort of naive/anti-folk (amongst the better known singers are Kimya Dawson and Jeffrey Lewis) peppered with swoony Italian songs. Despite it's slightness, it's the kind of movie so immersed in youth, its fleeting moments, its abandon, its hopeful uncertainties that you long to return to that time of your life again.

The DVD extras featured an interview with the director. Normally these are dull affairs but Alexis dos Santos proved to be charming and articulate. The film arose out of his  experiences in London (he is Argentinian) and it appears his intention was to veer away from the immigrant film (e.g. Dirty Pretty Things) or the upper class English film and show a different kind of London.  European expats in London it appears make for sexier and cooler subject matter:-)

Vita et Laura

Vita Sackville West is better known as Virginia Woolf’s lover and the inspiration for Woolf’s playful novel on gender, Orlando. But she was a well known novelist in her time and the love of her life was not Woolf, but a volatile socialite, Violet Trefusis. Or was the love of her life really her husband, Harold? Portrait of a Marriage, based on her son’s book, essentially deals with the Vita-Violet-Harold triangle and comes to no conclusion. Or maybe I dozed off because it is one of those dull, stodgy British teleserials of which I have had my fill. But it did boast a very good performance from Janet McTeer as Vita which partially salvaged the film. Her portrayal is neither butch nor feminine (clearly Violet is the delicious feminine in their relationship). Instead it’s truly androgynous and suggestive of the sexual slipperiness of the Bloomsbury crowd, many of who were in heterosexual marriages while conducting a range of relationships. The androgynous quality of the performance is somewhat similar to that of Tilda Swinton’s portrayal of Orlando though McTeer is clearly portraying a real person while Swinton’s strangeness fits the mythical Orlando like the proverbial glove. Orlando itself is a singular visual concoction with terrific visuals in which Violet appears as the temperamental Russian princess, Sasha. The fictional tale, which is much more than the Vita-Violet/Orlando-Sasha tale, is far superior to the real one which is perhaps of moderate interest only to those who follow the private lives of writers. Maybe it could have been redeemed by Sackville-West’s travels to Persia, her novels, the literary milieu of the time and the like but as it stands, it wasn’t very interesting.

I haven’t seen too many films of late, perhaps that accounted for my finding Portrait of a Marriage uninteresting. But I did see Little Jerusalem on SBS yesterday and while I am still a little undecided on how I feel about it, it held my attention. Karin Albou, who also directed The Wedding Song, often focuses on the Jewish and Muslim communities of North Africa.  Little Jerusalem is largely concentrated on the Tunisian Orthodox Jewish community in France and the tugs and pulls of the larger world, in particular and surprisingly the philosophical world, on its heroine, Laura. But most of all, like The Wedding Song, it brings out the sensual and tactile elements of female life and the tender, prickly nature of feminine relationships. Albou’s films are not flawless but they do have a mesmerising quality about them.

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Nest week, I hope to be able to continue the granddad’s Savitri series.

Rohmer's Films

I recently indulged myself with a 25 DVD set of Eric Rohmer's (all his films bar Astree and Celadon). It was quite inexpensive so I couldn't resist - though I am sure you can download it for free off a few websites. I am slowly working my way through it, I have managed three so far. A Winter's Tale was very absorbing, confirming that Rohmer's Tales of the Seasons is the best of his work. Love in the Afternoon, though interesting, was also surprisingly slightly icky in its depiction of near infidelity. Maybe the 70s appear so when viewed with a sensibility not in tune with the times (I can never appreciate Last Tango in Paris, for e.g.). It is also one of Rohmer's few films where the seemingly bad girl is the bad girl. I had seen Suzanne's Career before, but it remained as charming on a second viewing. Specifically I think the way it is shot and its themes complement and contrast other New Wave directors of the time and along with these films it is also a record of Paris at a particular time. The latter films of the directors do not seem to have such a commonality. All Rohmer's movies are essentially variations on young love and yet each time it looks wondrously fresh.

Rohmer was the film maker whose work inspired the "like watching paint dry' criticism. Possibly the criticism is helped along by the fact that Rohmer's films have a lot of talk, hardly any music and are not overly concerned with cinematic flourishes a la Godard. Of course criticism of arthouse cinema is as pointless as that of commercial cinema. Both occupy very separate spaces and are ruled by different concerns.

Plenty of New Wave films, albeit very sophisticated and influential, have a handmade feel. You get the feeling that a lot is improvised and the actors are friends and acquaintances. The New Wave directors pretty much invented the auteur theory but in their movies it functions quite differently from a mere directorial stamp or a signature style. Rather the movies are a reflection of their political, moral and philosophical concerns. It feels more or less like a cinematic monograph or essay, which is seemingly impossible in that medium. So for all their indelible images and for all their influence on cinematic techniques (not Rohmer but certainly Godard), their movies above all are about ideas. This is also why the films lend themselves so well to film criticism, completing the circle in a way, given that many of the directors started out with Cahiers du Cinema. Even viewed today, it's remarkable that they pulled it off so well in their early body of work.

More French Film

Two French films that I saw last year are lovely, chaotic pieces that strongly tend towards verite. The Class, Cantet’s Cannes winner, is based on a semi-autobiographical book. And it’s quite unlike any classroom film, including French films like Etre et Avoir and It All Starts Here. Though the movie’s central figure is a white teacher in an inner city school full of immigrants, he is neither heroic or patient nor immediately inspiring. Instead, in Cantet’s film, the teacher is well intentioned but prickly. Further he is constantly challenged by his racially diverse unruly class and in the film’s pivotal scene the students end up hostile and the viewer remains unsure whether the teacher was well-intentioned. Cantet’s hand-held camera work also captures the classroom action very effectively. In short the film captures both the liveliness and potential of the classroom and the inherent tensions in the school experience where teachers remain authority figures. The film is morally ambiguous, it is hard for example to feel for a disruptive student, nevertheless you sense that the response of the school is only likely to push the boy into further bad behaviour. In fact so free is Cantet’s film of polemic that a moment when one of his students casually reveals herself to be a reader of Plato when the teacher assumes otherwise grates. Of course Cantet’s film is hardly a documentary, as this review (one I do not completely agree with) makes clear, but it is all the more interesting for pulling it off so well. Another review here.

Unlike The Class, Summer Hours did not make an immediate impression on me. Assayas' film is only nominally the story of siblings who come together after the death of their mother to settle her estate. Instead it is an exploration of the things we accumulate and what they mean to us, especially in a world where identity is increasingly fluid and a family may live on different continents. In the film, Binoche’s character is a high end designer in the US and Renier’s character makes mass produced goods in China and are therefore connected with the making of things. The eldest son (Berling) is an academic and the only sibling in France. More than his siblings, he wants to hold on to his mother’s estate and her possessions for the memories they hold. Because the film is funded by the Musee d’Orsay, there is a diversion into the process of how museums acquire estates. But Assayas’s film is not about things per se, in fact for a movie about objects it does not choose to showcase them attractively (which I must add helps the film as it does not take a detour into object porn). It is more about what objects mean in our lives, the memories they hold and how they touch people, be they children or domestic help (in one of the film’s slyly funny moments, the mother’s longtime help modestly takes what she thinks to be a lowly, simple piece which is in fact quite expensive). It is also about the idea of France/country itself. The eldest son wants to hold onto the house so they can “return at least for the holidays” but it is clear that these holidays and reunions can only be infrequent. It is also about inheritances and how siblings may view this in different ways. The film ends as it begins with a summer party with the granddaughter enjoying a brief idyll at her grandmother’s – savouring so to speak a little of what she has left behind. Perhaps I found myself thinking of this film more than The Class because at middle age I feel a sudden sadness at the loss of many of my mother’s things. And I have little idea of what will be the future of my grandparents house, for so long a central point of our nomadic lives. The realization that time is a straight arrow that will render all these concerns meaningless somehow makes these concerns all the more legitimate and poignant. It's probably why the film has grown on me.

Emmanuelle Devos is the most graceful and subtle of actresses. It is therefore not surprising that her almost wordless performance is up close and centre in Gilles' Wife (which I saw again on SBS - and long may it live!). The tale of a mid 20th century worker’s wife who faces a double betrayal in her husband’s affair with her sister, the effectiveness of the film rests on the inherent goodness of Devos’s wife and the extent she will go to restore the love of her husband. It’s a simple albeit beautifully shot film. There has been plenty of criticism of its slightly shocking ending but Devos’ face, so suffused with feeling and pain, is so riveting that you can forgive the film almost anything.

Another face riveting in its innocence and suffering can be found in Bresson’s classic, The Diary of a Country Priest which I had been wanting to see for a long time. I had mixed feelings about the film itself finally, though it is undoubtedly something of a masterpiece and I simply couldn’t stop watching it. Bresson’s film touches on the nature of faith and perhaps it’s such an unfashionable thing these days that you cannot engage completely with the central conversion of the film. The voiceover necessitated by the diary entries can be distracting, although this is balanced by the purity of Bresson’s camera work. In the film, Bresson’s naïve priest find himself in an unfriendly parish and from thereon he is subject to suffering of both mind and body. It’s quite difficult to quantify what is so riveting in this tale of an ordinary priest tossed into a world which offers neither the redemption or grace he is searching for, but riveting it is. But at least in part the film’s success is because everything it has to say is concentrated in Claude Laydu’s face – and like with Devos in Gilles's Wife, it is a face of such intense purity that you cannot look away.

Four Films

A few weeks ago I happened to see The Dreamlife of Angels which follows two girls in a small town in France. Both girls are drifters in different ways. Ill-paid jobs at a clothing factory bring them together and soon they are living temporarily in the house of a girl in a coma. One of the girls, Marie, has a mother who is a victim of domestic violence and is rather fearful and closed in nature. Inevitably her barriers fall and she falls in love with an unsuitable man which results in her descent into paranoia and the break-up of the friendship. The other, Isa, discovers the diary of the coma girl and begins to visit her and read to her from her diaries. In the interlude before all this, the girls also flirt and establish a friendship with the bouncers at a club who are sweet on them. Things escalate, Marie dies and Isa returns home. The ending of the film is in yet another factory as Isa starts a new job and the last lingering shots are of each of the women around Isa working (if one observes a pattern in my random posts it may be that many touch on women working at what are seen to be menial or tedious jobs!). The movie’s exploration of young working class women is very effective and it has generally good performances. But at least part of the movie’s success rests on Elodie Bouchez’s gamine Isa, her performance is very tender and warm-hearted. As an aside, doing the inevitable google search, I found the inevitable way out article :-) This one is on Gregoire Colin, who plays the cad. More than Mr. Colin, I am in total agreement with her views on Mr. Pitt!

The reason I saw Dreamlife was because I had seen Bouchez in a movie that is probably my favourite coming of age film, Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds. Techine’s film, set during the Algerian War, has four young actors who sort of represent different aspects of the country. Standing in for Techine himself (the film feels autobiographical) is Francois who is sensitive and well-read and just coming to terms with his homosexuality. Bouchez, plays Maite, young and earnest and a girl who has absorbed her mother’s communist principles and is a little in love with Francois and later with Henri. Serge is the rustic who has his way with Francois and would like his way with Marie and also has a brother who is killed in the war. Lastly, Henri is the new boy and a pied-noir, full of resentment at being forced to return to France and at the abandonment of French-Algerians. Techine’s film essentially follows the usual coming of age set-up i.e. the experiences of the group over a summer and how they are changed by it. But unlike many other films it also grounds its characters in an adult world and explores the different ways in which they themselves move towards adulthood. Plus it is subtle, warm and rich with details. Bouchez is the only woman and all three boys are a little in love with her or admire her. And she is entirely admirable in the role bringing both strength and vulnerability to her character. Trailer here.

As it happened, last week SBS also saw it fit to screen two movies that dealt with colonialism in Africa. The Wedding Song is set in Tunisia but it is not particularly about Europeans in Africa. Instead it explores the friendship between a Tunisian Jew and a Muslim and the strains put on their friendship in the wake of the French capitulation to the Nazis. It is distinctly feminist in tone; in fact it creates a luxuriating and intimate feminine world - with more than a tinge of lesbianism - which is under strain from masculine influences. Unsurprisingly it is directed by a woman and like many other movies directed by women, it is lensed in a rather sensual and tactile manner. I don’t think it quite gets where it wants to but it was still an interesting piece of cinema. The Murmuring Coast, also directed by a woman, is set in Mozambique and deals directly with the effects of colonialism on both parties. At it’s centre is a Portuguese woman who comes out to Mozambique to marry and is repelled both by the change in her husband and the brutality and indifference of her fellow countrymen. It too draws a distinction between the feminine and masculine worlds of the colonisers, but it is also more political in tone dealing as it does with the last years of the Portuguese colonial experience (the movie is set in the 60s and of course Portugal was in India too until that decade). This movie too is beautifully lensed and evokes the period with its mix of idealism and despair very well. Plus it is one of those films that have a pervasive sense of atmospheric melancholy and decay.

An Old Mistress

I am not a fan of Catherine Breillat’s work though the ending of Romance, with a filmed childbirth, has a sly sense of wit about it. For the most part, her idiosyncratic, feminist and sexually explicit oeuvre has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. An Old Mistress, not as controversial and more accessible than her previous films, received much praise and may I add my own hosannas for this film. It is adapted from a French novel (written by Barbey d'Aurevilly according to wiki) and from the movie it largely appears that the story is set in a post Choderlos de Laclos era (de Laclos wrote Dangerous Liaisons, of which the best filmed version must be the Korean one). Here Breillat has the basic story to work off and does it justice. Briefly, an impoverished roué and dandy, Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Aït Aattou), decides to marry a wealthy aristocrat Hermangarde (Breillat regular Roxane Mesquida) but before he does so he must break off with his older mistress of ten years, La Vellini (Asia Argento). He has broken off the affair in the past but always returned. The marriage has the approval of the girl’s grandmother in spite of advice to the contrary. She appears to have known more hell raising times than the life of the 1830s crowd and besides seems to like the boy. The core of the story is the re-telling of the ten year affair by de Marigny to the grandmother so she “knows the man her grand daughter intends to marry”. Central to this is how de Marigny woos La Vellini and the loss of their child post which their love becomes a “barbarous love”, an addiction neither can successfully quit. The marriage does take place but La Vellini is not so easy to quit. No points for guessing the ending, this is after all a French novel and a French film. Suffice it to say that though de Marigny tries to escape a mistress who becomes “so totally organized for pleasure she always needed it”, he remains both a prioner and slave to his passion for La Vellini.

Like most of Breillat’s works, there is a certain kind of “flat” look to the scenes. There is no background music and before you get into the pace of the film, there is a stilted theatricality to the scenes (which eventually works in its favour). In setting up what is in some ways a triangle between de Marigny’s mistress, proposed bride and her grandmother, Briellat is able to explore many facets. For awhile de Marigny is deeply in love with his innocent, young wife and enough so to believe he can walk away from his mistress forever. Vellini is not a whore but she is simply too outré for polite society. The actress who plays her has a tendency to schlock, there are a few scenes where she draws and licks blood, this she does with such relish that you expect the movie to suddenly take a diversion into vampire territory. Nevertheless through her feral performance, her exotic persona you can see why de Marigny would be compelled to return. Though Breillat gets a lot out of her cast, it’s the grandmother (Claude Sarraute in a tender, intelligent performance) who is the standout. The film is also not as sexually explicit as the regular Breillat film; it's more your standard European art house fare. The only explicit scenes draw blood - the removal of a bullet and a chicken being drained of blood.
I don’t normally watch DVD extras but I did with this film because I was a little curious about Breillat’s methods. Breillat appears to have been ostracized by her country to some extent (though this film seems to have rehabilitated her with a Cannes nod) hence her identification with an author she says was strictly Catholic and yet battled the hypocrisy of society at large, the novel itself was scandalous in its time. Breillat also talked about the costumes – the look of the film is sumptuous due to its period setting – her selection of fabrics current in the 1830s, her attention to how these would look in close ups, her attempts to meld paintings and to borrow some of Dietrich’s outré look a century later for La Vellini. It all makes for a movie that is definitely a period film but has Breillat's stamp all over it and is a small triumph. Plus Breillat seems to have had a lot of fun making it.

Paris on Film

Paris Vu Par, six segments on the city, was made a few decades ago and mostly featured shorts from Nouvelle Vague directors. It is a slight, if interesting piece -Godard injected a bit of misogyny, Chabrol a hint of menace and Rohmer departed from his usual template of misguided youth in love.

Last year there was Paris Je T'aime, equally slight and impressionistic eighteen 5 minute segments set in different parts of the city. They all succeed to some degree. In keeping with the times, few of the directors are French. While each segment has its merits, four stood out for different reasons.

The only segment that bears a resemblance to the Nouvelle Vague is of a man trying to leave his wife only to find she is terminally ill (Bastille). The similarity lies in the story in voiceover, the motif of the red coat and a simultaneous slightness and depth.

Salles and Thomas bring an outsider's view to "Far from the 16th". Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace) is very effective as an immigrant babysitter who starts by singing a lullaby to her own child at a creche and ends with the same lullaby at her employer's flat on the 16th arrondisment. She should be in every movie that is made, if only to enhance it a little.

Conversely, if Christopher Doyle's segment of Hong Kong fantasia plonked on a Paris setting is any indication, he should never make a film and stick to lensing.

The last and most effective segment has Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) following a middle aged American tourist taking in the sights of the 14th arrondisment. Like Bastille, it uses a voiceover with the actress speaking heavily accented French. It is the most effective segment because it provides the sights of the arrondisment, links the protagonist's journey to the city and is poignant and hopeful. Most remarkably it is a contained, compact 5 minute film - it doesn't feel rushed yet there is no superfluous moment and nothing more to be said.

Depardon's Modern Life

Raymond Depardon, who made the excellent "Tenth District Court: Moments of Trial", has a film screening at the French Film Festival this March in Sydney. The film, "Modern Life", is part of a triptych, though the ending suggests that he will be back for another film. Depardon's film profiles peasants in what I think is the region of Occitan over a year (there are bits here and there which indicate that he has been following the families for awhile, though perhaps not with a precise time lag like the Seven Up! series). Occitan appears to be a hilly province - it is a difficult land and as one of the subjects says it requires passion to work it. Most of the peasants are in fact herdsmen or keep livestock. Most are also old and the few young people who appear struggle in different degrees to make a living off the land. The families vary, from uncles and a newly married nephew to families with sons to a young couple trying to acquire land and rear goats. Depardon observes and sometimes prods his reticent subjects, the film doesn't have any particular agenda except perhaps to record Depardon's love of the land and the peasants and the inevitable disappearance of a way of life. Depardon uses a number of "pillow shots" between his visits, usually following a road while seasons change. These shots are very effective in establishing the landscape. While Depardon states that he likes the autumn landscape, I liked the winter scenes (very evocative of Frost's Snowy Evening poem). Dogs also make their appearance at each stop - including one who only understands the Occitan language and one who proceeds to bite the farmer being interviewed. Like all French documentaries set in the countryside, there is something soothing and gentle in the film even as it records conflicts and failures. And also something universal, witness the sweetness of a 70 year old Germaine urging one more biscuit on the documentary makers or the 80+ year old Raymond (not the director) paying a tribute to his parents who "did more with less".

Clip of the film here.

The theatre was surprisingly crowded today, this was not a film I would have thought would be so popular. Partly, it maybe because this evening is the Mardi Gras. People were already taking their street-side seats when I left and Hyde Park was full of people in costume. Most of Japan also seemed to have descended to record the event, they seemed particularly excited to get themselves photographed with a dog collared group.

The Norwegians are Coming.....?

I know next to nothing about Norway, its literature or its films. But I am suddenly intrigued by the country. For one, I absolutely loved Get Ready to be Boyzvoiced, a boy band mockumentary. As a genre, a mockumentary is sort of adolesecent but I have to admit I can watch endless repeats of Boyzvoiced (happily a lot of it is on youtube!). And then there is Reprise, which I just finished watching and can't wait to watch again. There is a darkly delicious thread running beneath both these diverse offerings. No Oslo visit in the offing but I can always google all that Norway has to offer :-)

Rivetted

Long films are not my cup of tea. I like my films to clock in at the 90 minute mark which is perhaps unusual in someone brought up in a pre-Internet era and in a country where films are rarely less than 3 hours. So I approached Jacques Rivette's L'Amour Fou (Mad Love) with some trepidation. 252 minutes is of course not that much for Rivette given that the Out 1 screening seemed to stretch through the day. I did watch all 252 minutes but it was a very long film and not easy watching at all, even more so because the cinema it was held in was prone to amplify the simplest of noises like someone shifting in their chair. Rivette's work has been reviewed by every serious critic so the bare bones of the film - the length, the exploration of the creative process by way of theatre rehearsals of Racine's Andromache and its bleeding into personal life, the use of different film gauges for different sections of the film, the parallel story of the disintegrating relationship of the theatre director and his actress wife (and the rumour that the trashing the apartment scene was inspired by Godard and Anna Karina) and the excellent performances from Kalfon and Bulle Ogier are all well known. I can, many months later, still remember most of the movie which I don't think has very much to do with my own powers of concentration. Rivette's film is unusual in that it is cinema as an intellectual exploration which one usually finds only in literature. A book rarely translates well into film because it has an internal life, ideas and juxtapositions which cannot readily find its way into the film. Yet Rivette's work is the cinematic equivalent of a book - it isn't just visual story-telling or even a "pure cinema" of images but an exploration of an infinite number of ideas by way of a film. I mentioned in a previous post that watching a film at a cinematheque is infinitely better than a DVD viewing at home. But Rivette's work is an exception - like a book it must be an engagement between just the viewer and the work, you need to go back to certain sections to understand it better, you need to re-view sections to savour them, you need to revisit so you can derive fresh meaning from what you see. All of this is impossible if one is allowed only a single, sustained viewing. I would put Rivette's work in my top ten list any day and would have really liked to have seen the rest of his work. Till his work is on DVD, L'Amour Fou will have to suffice.

Happiness is a fruit that tastes of cruelty

Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur is a bit like nature itself and coincidentally it makes ample use of the natural element. By this I mean, that on the surface it looks like a gentle, warm film shot through with autumnal hues but beneath it is amoral, fierce and chilling in a manner I have not encountered before. I think it is perhaps wrong to read the film as simply feminist/anti-feminist though it appears to have been read both ways. In part, this may be its theme, though the central character, if at all, is the man. In Varda’s film the pleasant, humdrum rituals of lower middle class provincial life (I assume this to be the case, given the occupation of the husband and wife) are swiftly recorded in the initial scenes of a picnic, visits to relatives, the scenes of work followed by an excursion and the introduction of infidelity in this setting. The title tells us that this movie is about “happiness” and at one point in the movie the husband confesses that his happiness has increased not lessened as a result of the affair i.e. the crowded relationship is a happier one. But the movie is not a simple examination of happiness or anything along the lines of infidelity invigorates a marriage (though Varda does have a scene where the young husband is more passionate in his ardour post the beginning of the affair). The death of the wife in fact may well be a result of her unhappiness, alternately it could be a gift, and alternately it may be to induce a sense of guilt. If the last is the case, it fails because Varda’s film ends as it begins with the same colour codes as a family of four makes its way to a picnic. Only the wife this time is the lover setting in process another cycle. Varda’s end may be seen as chilling or anti-feminist but in a way it reinforces both the cyclicality of nature as well as its amorality. Life goes on in much the same way, the husband mourns for a period of time, perhaps the children miss their mother but in the end the normal patterns of life resume. Varda has a cool, impersonal touch in this film though she paradoxically brings a great deal of warmth to the images themselves; they radiate the cool heat of the sunflower motif of her film. I think her approach is enigmatic and extremely effective in muting the inherent painfulness and drama of the situation. We observe from a distance but sans sentimentality and morality. In the end the film is effective in tying the human self to nature and its implacable, unchanging rhythms. All of us are indeed replaceable and no one happiness seems greater than the other. Varda's editing, her framing of scenes, her use of music also add to the picture.

I had seen The Gleaners (Varda and the film discussed here) prior to this movie which is what brought me to Varda. Judging by the movies I saw, there is something in her approach that greatly appeals to me. Unfortunately I couldn’t catch the rest of her screenings.

Le Bonheur also put me in mind of other French movies I had seen (all of which bar Gilles' Wife were made by women), especially in the way it approaches the depiction of ordinary work. The unhurried camera recording the minutiae of women's work seems to be something of a French specialty in movies like Gilles' Wife and Brodeuses. With Lady Chatterley, the movie also shares a minute recording of the elements of nature and the integration of people into it. It put me most in mind of Gilles' Wife because of the story – i.e. the effect of infidelity on a marriage. Otherwise the films are different with the second movie being mostly concerned with the burdens placed on a wife attempting to understand her husband's infidelity. Gilles' Wife (with an excellent performance from Emmanuelle Devos) is observed from the wife’s viewpoint and we can feel her suffer as she tries to save the marriage – the morality of the situation is all too clear, indeed the wife is the only “good soul” in the troika.

An interesting review of Le Bonheur here.

French New Wave@GoMA

Rather fortuitously, the Gallery of Modern Art, itself new to Brisbane, had a French New Wave retrospective when I lived there last year. There were the better known directors – Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer - but I also caught Varda, Malle and Rivette’s work as well as the new new wave, Dumont & Garrel. All in all, it was a fairly comprehensive retrospective (with the odd glitch which meant I missed Chabrol’s The Good Girls), even more so if you consider that most of the films are not available on DVD. Further, it was the first time I had indulged in serious film-viewing (bar when Akashvani screened a lot of arthouse cinema in Mumbai in the 80s) – it’s an entirely different experience to going to the cinemas or watching a film on DVD. So much so that I am still on the lookout for a film club or catch the odd feature at AGNSW – it’s the best way to view serious cinema. Also, one of the pleasures of the retrospective was how particularly successful the films as a whole were in evoking the Paris of the 50s (and most of the films were set in Paris).

The biggest disappointment for me was Godard's work, though I think this has to much to do with the fact that I am in my 40s. No doubt I would have adored it when I was younger – Godard is particularly successful in capturing the zeitgeist of youth, it was not surprising that the average age of viewers at the retrospective was consistently lower at a Godard screening. Godard is also the film-maker’s film-maker. His idiom is still fresh, one can sense its influence on much that is made today. However, whilst the more accessible films like Bande à Part were charming enough, more serious work like The Little Soldier was particularly adolescent in its political views (a viewpoint which might not be shared by all) and even Vivre Sa Vie left me a little cold bar the section on statistics on “fallen women” in Paris and the long philosophical discussion which Nana engages in. The endless referencing of popular culture also gets tiresome after awhile and not necessarily because its common these days. And of course there is the misogyny of the films. Similarly Truffaut is something of a one note film-maker and the high points remain 400 Blows and Jules et Jim, which I had seen earlier. Rohmer also makes similar films; nevertheless I quite liked his earlier shorts that were screened at the retrospective.

The most interesting films at the retrospective were Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and Jacques Rivette’s Mad Love, both of which I shall post on later.

Of the new new wave Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers, a bittersweet postcard to May 1968 although a bit tedious and self-indulgent had its moments, helped along by two attractive leads. Although I am no film student, I felt that Garrel’s film was an attempt at pure cinema and it does succeed quite well in that. For all its faults - its almost intolerably long length and the seeming inability of Garrel to edit as well as to bring to his subject matter an unsparing sentimentality - the movie is salvaged by being deeply personal and intensely poetic as well as having some of the most beautiful images that I have seen in recent cinema.