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.

Foux da Fa Fa

I have been planning a review of some of the nouvelle vague movies I saw at GoMA, hopefully at least a few will get done this month.

In the meantime, beginners' French from Bret and Jemaine. With sub-saturated colours it could well have featured in a parody of Love Songs :-)

Theatre of the Street

Mumbai - February 2002

Dogs with sad faces
Idle conversations over tea
The Virgin Mary in a red sari,
a consecrated goddess

Rooms people write in

Writers' Rooms

Shibu's painting

Detail from Shibu's reproduction of a T. Vaikuntam painting.

Nostalgia 3

Given many house moves and a change of countries in the past ten odd years, its only now that I have got to looking at things packed and unpacked, an inventory of things so to speak. Some photographs are so old and faded that I am trying to digitise them before they crumble - hence the Nostalgia series. This is my mother circa 1988, about 5 years before her death. Its both adventurous and a little sad that even at this stage (my parents were in their mid 40s) we were living in a temporary accommodation and our curtains were little else than made over bed-sheets :-)

Jia Zhangke's Wuyong

More film festival updates – rather, just the two as I haven't had time to see anything else. Saw Jia Zhangke's Wuyong (Useless). I have the DVD of “Still Life” and then spotted a piece on Ma Ke in a recent issue of Selvedge. A lot of people may end up seeing the film because it seems to have been somewhat well publicized as a Ma Ke film (with a nod to China’s rapid industrialisation). It is not just this but more on that later.

The film has three segments, which segue into each other. The first follows the daily rituals of a factory churning out mass produced clothes, then we go on to Ma Ke’s house/studio which is restful and quiet as also to her appearance at Paris Fashion Week (rather ambiguous section, this). It ends in the director’s home town in Shanxi province. The film is rather weak and lazy in parts – reportedly the director shot 60 hours of footage, so its either fatigue or just an attempt to say as little as possible and let the viewer take home what he/she may that results in a movie where its at times difficult to connect the dots. It doesn’t even seem willfully ambiguous, just somewhat absent-minded in its execution.

Too much has been written about soulless mass produced clothes as well as the slow clothing movement where designers pronounce sagely on the making of things by hand, the environment, the connection between people and the like. I don’t have any quarrel with either even if I am not wholly in agreement. The first section follows textile workers at what appears to be a typical day at work. It’s a mélange of machinery noises, people at repetitive tasks and the things that may punctuate a day like lunch, a visit to the doctor and the like. Unlike in the last section, there is little enquiry into peoples lives in this section apart from an interlude with the doctor (is this a visual pun on industrialisation as malady?).

Then we go on to Ma Ke who appears to be an intense young woman interested in demonstrating that the Chinese are cutting-edge and creative (note that she does appear to be using the factory for her label “Mixmind” since the first section ends with a woman hanging a set of clothes with the Exception de Mixmind label). The house/workshop is organic and beautiful – the wood, the walls, the green outside all act as a exquisite counterpart to the grey industrial landscape of the previous section. Some of what Ma Ke thinks is poetic, some of it comes clothed in the jargon peculiar to the eco fashion industry. The hand made clothes for the Paris show are of course intended as statement (the label Mixmind seems more in the mould of “off the rack” designer clothing), they are voluminous and aged. The Paris section is surreal. There is a backstage interlude with the models, their boredom and bemusement are both captured but eventually they all do a good job of standing still in the clothes. I am not sure if the ambiguity is intended but it is inherent in the spectacle of Ma Ke’s old clothes left to age in the earth, intended to demonstrate both its connection to the earth and to its maker and wearer and the sophisticated bazaar of Fashion Week where this is just one of many shows to amuse viewers.

I can’t see mass produced clothes as fully soulless perhaps because I have a technical background and there is a linear development in textile technology. Certain fabrics, colours and cuts are made possible by new technologies and a wearer must feel as much pleasure as the wearer of handlooms. The connection between the wearer and the maker is often tenuous even when clothes are handmade, in India 20 years back, the weaver/seller would visit your house and I am not sure that knowing how it was made imbued the transaction with something more spiritual, so to speak. The pleasure of clothes after all lies in newness, the feel, the colours, the texture and above all the intoxicating vision of one’s self kitted out in it.

The third section, however, in my opinion made the film almost brilliant (had Jia spent some time on giving all three sections and the film more depth and clarity). Ma Ke visits Fenyang in Shaanxi (in a 4WD no less, which sweeps past a yokel whose progress we then follow) and we are casually plunged into its life. The effect of industrialisation, the abandonment of old professions and the uncertainty of social change are all implicit in this segment. In the mine scenes, as well as in those of miners lounging above ground, you can see the literal clothes of the earth as opposed to Ma Ke’s statement aged clothes. The small time tailor who has pragmatically abandoned the profession for mining in light of the new factories and those who get by mending and doing odd jobs are both present and Jia seems to make an emotional investment in these scenes. Both the factories and Ma Ke represent the new China. Shanxi is the new China too – especially the literal black scars on its green landscape - but its also a China that is disappearing. The film ends on this in-between state of things – the hole-in-the wall tailor uncertain if he can retain his present premises and the reality that he may well have to look for a different place to make place for the new.

Interview with the director here.

Even if not fully clear in the film, the director's sympathy seems to lie with Ma Ke. Review of film here.

A perceptive review here.

Being unIndian

Had a piece published in the SMH last week. I don't always feel this wave of sarcasm, I probably say the same dumb things at times. The English bit does get me though (as also well meaning souls who seem overcome by the "love and spirituality of India"). Here's the piece.

Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light

I had hoped to see more of the Sydney Film Festival (in particular Terence Davies films) but work took over this weekend. I did catch Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light. Reygadas’ influences have been documented by serious film reviewers (Dreyer, Dumont – though I must confess I preferred Silent Light to L'Humanite). It was all new to me though. It’s a very interesting film – full of philosophy and grace (I am not sure this is entirely due to its Mennonite setting though it helps, I think it’s the approach to the film-making more than the subject). The "non-actors" did a great job – putting on a show seems to be intrinsic to the human race. Its bookend shots of the sun rising as well as a final shot of stars are spectacular (again much commented on) and serve to set the tone of the film. I felt that the composition of the film was a bit too careful – Reygadas nearly pulls it off but you do not forget how carefully composed this film is. But it is a thoughtful and serene gem. The film was followed by a Q&A in which Reygadas illuminated the difference between Ordet and Silent Light (each ending is perhaps indicative of the time the film maker lives in/lived in, Reygadas said his ending is not about divine intervention but more organic and natural). It was a relaxed Q&A and Reygadas also has a sense of sly humor – apparently his lead actor signed on as he has an eye on Hollywood!

A detailed review and interview here.