One is a princess, one is a genius, both confined for being women.
They're going to have to make a mini-series about Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus, in order to explore all the stories and complexities of this ambiguous figure in music history. In Amadeus, he was the enabler, in Mozart's Sister (2010), the disabler of musical genius.
I presume you can guess at the story premise from the title. René
Féret, the film's writer-director, has imagined that Nannerl was not only a fine performing musician, but an incipient composer, an idea which can be neither proved nor disproved, since although we have no surviving compositions by her, Féret proposes that she burned all her manuscripts when her path to composing became impassable. But it feels plausible, especially given the very nice music composed for her by Marie-Jeanne Serero. (In time Nannerl is persuaded by her father Leopold to give up the man she loves and marry a nobleman of his choice, then to turn over her only son, named Leopold for her father to raise in case he was also a musical genius, which he was not. She died blind and impoverished, having turned almost everything she had, material and spiritual to her voracious father.)
Féret's screenplay makes Nannerl the confidant of princesses, most notably the youngest daughter of Louis XV, who had no contact with her parents after early childhood and eventually became an abbess, turning to the only people who had shown her love, the nuns of the abbey in which she was raised and lived. Louise and Nannerl (shown above) are played by daughters of Féret, which raises questions as to how much of a Leopold Mozart is the director of the very film we are watching, and is the whole thing just a hall of mirrors?
Two more observations and I'll go. First, this is a very difficult type of film to make without the audience getting lost in the elegant surfaces of late 17th century court life. It helps that the Mozarts are often living in shabby circumstances which diminish the glam factor. And starting the film with Nannerl peeing in the snow might help some people. But I suppose we can never resolve the tension as to whether people of previous epochs are just like us with fancy clothes, or utterly unlike us other than a superficial flesh resemblance, albeit the flesh factor is magnified by the film medium.
Second, it's odd to see Wolfgang Mozart relegated to a small supporting part as a bright-eyed, somewhat mischievous but still rather sweet child. Maybe Amadeus would have been easier to take if we had seen that he once had not been an insufferable pig.
Third (I know I said I'd confine myself to two, but I thought of another and if you really want to hold me to my word, you're going to have to stop reading because Lord knows, I can't control what you do with your free time), I don't know whether it's Féret or just being French or even being European, but the film is a little bit like that person you're trying to finish a conversation with and he makes his point and you acknowledge that you understand and accept that and now it is time for you to get in your car or the elevator or what-have-you but you can't because he is making that same point again, and you are politely nodding and trying to indicate with body language that you are ready to move on and that he should be, too, and yes, he nods his head suggesting that he has read your non-verbal message and you are about to turn away but still he takes on that pre-emptory inhale that warns that long-winded important things are to be said, and alas, they are the very things that have been said.
The point is, we know that it sucks to be a woman and that it really, really sucked 275 years ago and we never really believed that she was going to make a career as a composer because...guess what...we've never heard of her music. So, M. Féret, we're way ahead of you and we stay ahead of you for most of the two attenuated hours.
But there is no question, as far as performances by the daughter of the director go, Marie Féret has got Sofia Coppola beat six ways from Sunday.
Clothes make the woman. A servant dressed as a duchess.
There is one fascinating sequence in the unexpectedly mild Farewell My Queen (2012), the only film I've seen about the French Revolution which could be described as "understated." The Revolution has begun, everyone is fleeing Versailles and Sidonie, reader to Marie Antoinette and profoundly devoted to the queen, has been asked to assume the disguise of the queen's intimate friend, the Duchess of Polignac. (Everyone is all in a tizzy about the suggestion of homosexuality in this film, but it seems a rather tame escalation of the intimacy among women customary of the time. It was a way to experience tenderness unavailable in conventional marriage, and for the Queen it was a relationship which avoided the accusations of treason which would have followed any relationship with any male.) The Duchess will pose as her maid. It is simply a matter of exchanging clothes.
Tellingly, this exchange of identity begins with a ritual humiliation. One of the Queen's attendants insists on stripping Sidonie down to her skin. No man is present, but clearly Sidonie feels vulnerable and attempts at first to cover herself, but admonished to stop. The implication is that such modesty is presumptuous in the presence of her superiors, especially the Queen. And it works. The ordinarily feisty Sidonie is docile, accepting -- perhaps a little resentful -- but she patiently waits for the Duchesses's gown to arrive to be put on her.
What follows is equally instructive. As you can see by the illustration above with Lea Seydoux (whose performance has been woefully underappreciated), Sidonie's head is no longer bowed and subservient. Her head is up, her shoulders are back, she walks with command. Anyone who has worn formal clothing of a previous era may recognize how the structure of those clothes affect the way one holds one's body and, consequently,the physical attitude one presents to the world. Sidonie walks as a duchess, and even though the other staff knows who she is, they are confused as to how to acknowledge her, now neither wholly another domestic, but not wholly a duchess. (This is complicated by the fact that Polignac's elevation to the title was rather questionable to begin with.)
As the film ends, the charade is successful. Polignac is rather snippy and bitter for a maid, at least within the privacy of the coach, but upon presentation of the papers to the guard, Sidonie is appropriately both demure and haughty, and she and the Duchess and the Duchess's beard-husband are given safe passage. From then on, Sidonie literally disappears, vaporizes. We hear her, but we do not see her, as she mourns the fact that she shall now become no one. Because, after all, what dress is she to put on now?
Stripped of uniform, stripped of personhood.
Compliance (2012) seizes on the difference between being clothed and being naked and builds it into almost its entire narrative. Again, the agenda is humiliation, and again, that humiliation can lead to a loss of identity, of self-possession, of self itself. It is not necessary to recap the plot -- the internet is full of discussions of its veracity. I also recommend you check out the various videos on line on the Milgrim experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment about the way people will both comply with authority and assume dictated roles of power. [These ideas are also explored in the two films - German and English- of Funny Games directed by Michael Heneke and in Das Experiment and The Experiment, also German and English films, which restage the Stanford experiment.] At least Marie Antoinette had a benign intention -- to save two beloved companions. Here the sole item on this fastfood menu is cruelty.
And as if having to wear a fast food uniform wasn't humiliating enough by itself, now poor Becky is forced to take it -- and all her clothing off. A lot of other things happen, and the real central manipulation takes place between the prankster and the distressingly foolish store manager, a woman so unable to handle authority that it is a wonder she was not part of the last presidential administration. But it is Becky who is functionally naked for over and hour of this film's brief running time, and as it progresses we see how she loses the ability to object, to protest, to resist; the share fact of nakedness compels submission. A naked person is a weak person and that simple step virtually destroys the young woman's sense of herself as something worth attention, respect, simple decency.
Even the epilogue of the film virtually ignores her in favor of her confused manager. I suppose it makes sense -- the manager is our surrogate in the film, the one who is manipulated in a way we are seduced into saying could never happen to us. She makes the mistakes we would make. It's harder to identify with a victim as purely victim as Becky. Moreover, she becomes voiceless and almost numb somewhere after the half-hour mark of the film. And if Compliance is meant to be a cautionary tale, than the behavior to be cautioned against is that of the manager who truly had the power to put a stop to the whole thing, not the poor naked employee. Happily, director Craig Zobel manages to keep that going without having to humiliate the actress herself.
And most terrible for both characters in these two different films is that they are made to feel shame when it is those who put them in that position who should feel the shame. And a nod to both directors, (Benoit Jacquot and Craig Zobel, respectively) who made us witnesses to their degredation without creating a prurient or voyeuristic filip to the action, other than what is already embedded in these sorry events.
The title of the post is, of course, that great line Buck Henry wrote for himself to deliver in The Graduate. And of course, Benjamin IS there for an affair.
Mademoiselle Chambon (2009), on the other hand, demonstrates that when one is out to make a romantic film, it is all-or-nothing. Dithering one's way in and out of a relationship may be realistic, but it is hardly diverting or enlightening. Noel Coward's lovers in Brief Encounter may have been English and talkative diffident and shy, but they were clearly and demonstratively and knowingly in a relationship, conflicted as they may have been and uncertain as to how they should proceed. The lovers in Chambon don't seem to be able to figure out what they're doing at all.
It is possible to make films, even great films, driven by things other than classical dramatic narrative structure. There are character portraits, explorations of environments or communities. But you can't set a story on the knife edge of a binary choice--will-they-or-won't-they?--and leave it there for 100 minutes and engage an audience. Or at least you'd have to be a greater artist than writer-director Stephane Brize.
At least Lean and Coward knew how to sustain the tension. The affair remained unconsummated, although they did go to an apartment which Billy Wilder transmogrified into The Apartment. In Chambon, the lovers go to bed but it is the audience that his put to sleep. The encounter answers no questions, reveals no information, accomplishes nothing.
There is literally one interesting cinematic moment in Chambon, and you've seen it in other films, although actress Aure Autike as the wife in the middle, executes it perfectly. We are at a little garden party, Mlle Chambon has been invited to play her violin, and she plays a piece of particular significance to her and her lover, Jean. Jean, who has been established as a rather uncultured and inarticulate character (another problem with the film) is absolutely gobsmacked. His jaw goes slack and his eyes go all gooey like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. But the way the wife sees it and makes the connection is quite wonderful, silent-film-style storytelling, and represents the one interesting moment that is not a pale shadow of Brief Encounter.
As a film buff, I can't help feeling your time would be better spent renting or buying the Criterion edition of Brief Encounter, rather than bothering with Mlle Chambon or even continuing to read this blog. Go! Now!
The initial impulse of cinema verite as it was first defined in the sixties was to capture the world as it is, without artifice, virtually without a point of view. Frederick Wiseman is the filmmaker most often cited as coming closest to that ideal, but while Wiseman doesn't narrate his films or state a thesis or deliver a canned conclusion, but he frequently lets his subjects go on at such length as to expose themselves as foolish, vain, misinformed or incompetent. Wiseman seems to feel as though the purpose of documentary is to let the subject hang himself with his own words and acts.
Etre et avoir (2002) is not having any. [The title was translated as, literally, "To Be and To Have" but that means nothing in English, whereas the words are the basic building-block irregular verbs of French.] Interestingly, the film evidently began as a pedagogical exercise to document successful teaching techniques for the use of fellow professionals. But filmmaker Nicholas Philibert found that his first subject, Georges Lopez, teaching in a one-room school in rural agricultural France was not only a maitre (the common French idiom for teacher) but a master.
What are his brilliant techniques? What is the terminology for his instructional approach? I have no idea. We don't see any specific methods employed, other than the tried and true. There is nothing for what teachers call a Professional Learning Community to chew over here. The secret ingredient that makes Georges Lopez a great teacher?
Love.
This man loves his students like we're supposed to and often not permitted to. He pays deep attention to each one, knows their foibles and strengths, praises them and chastises them, a true in loco parentis. He is more than a master, he is a father, the father of our imaginations, almost endlessly patient, kind and firm. He settles disputes, makes students keep promises, checks their work, reviews their assessments, and lets them play, imagine, draw and dream.
Lopez and the film that contains him is so serene, poised, balanced and beautiful that it should be prescribed for any emotional upset or disturbance. A few minutes with M. Lopez, and no one could be distressed-- all is tranquility and peace.
The neutrality of the camera is a thing to behold. There is a beautiful stillness to the empty classroom, but even with the kids in action, the camera holds back, never intruding, letting them be themselves. There is a priceless bit of slapstick with two 6-year-olds trying to operate a large photocopy machine, as they go on and on trying to get the book set correctly on the glass, struggling to push the right button, keep the cover down, to little avail as they keep producing bungled copies, soldiering on nonetheless.
Philibert builds in no false drama. The children will move up to the next grade, the next school in the usual way. There are no confrontations with angry parents, no meetings with Lopez's superiors (spiritually, there are none), no extraordinary crisis. (One child is counseled as his father goes through a terrible illness, but still part of the ordinary fabric of life, a context into which Lopez attempts to put these events for his distraught student.)
Following its own quiet ways, the film's climax comes at the end of the film, the end of the school year. He and the children say their goodbyes, some for the summer holidays, some forever. He is all reassurance and warmth. And as the last one clears the threshold, Lopez suppresses the tiniest choking tear. It's more moving than all the agony of the throbbing orchestral tones of Titanic.
Etre et avoir is a reminder of just how powerfully less can be more, in life and on film.
...so celebrate by seeing Howl (2010) -- but NOT IN YOUR CLASSROOM. The movie, like the poem is most definitely NSFS or W, but it is the best film I've ever seen to enter into a poem and inhabit it. Frankly, I can't think of another that even tries.
This clip, which is from YouTube, and therefore IS safe for work (though probably blocked at school), is nicely representative of the film. It begins with James Franco as Ginsberg talking first about himself, and then about his creative process, admitting that the sense and meaning of a given verse is not readily apparent even to him at first, that the meanings and patterns emerge as the poem develops, or after it is finished, or maybe not even after that. Those are clearly for the audience, not for the artist, who, at his best, is in direct contact with his subconscious.
Then the clip moves to one of the wonderful animated segments which form a contrapuntal interpretation of the poem. As you see, they do not directly illustrate the words, but run in parallel with them, and frequently illuminate them. For me, the animation lends a cohesion that is difficult to find in the poem at first hearing. Some might argue that they are limiting, but it is not necessary to watch this animation to enjoy the poem "Howl." You can walk always walk away from the film and pick up a book and read the poem. Meanwhile this film is out there to entice skittish filmgoers into the strange and familiar universe of "Howl."
For the sake of the general audience, the film takes the form of a courtroom drama, based on a criminal charge of obscenity lodged against the poem. the filmmakers have promised that all the dialogue in the film is documented. In the court, they are taken from transcripts; otherwise they are taken from letters, memoirs and interviews. The conservative Republican judge evidently had no real difficulty in dismissing the charges, especially since the prosecutor seemed to want to turn the proceedings into a hearing on the literary merits of the poem, i.e., it should be banned because it is dirty AND bad.
But the movie is not meant to be biographical or even purely documentary in nature. Its principal thrust seems to be to convey the energy and excitement of "Howl" as a work. It is a bit like those symphonies that are based on a novel, or a painting of a mThe yth, or a song about a painting. It is art celebrating art, but that does not make it derivative, except in the most literal since. The film Howl might not be as original as its source poem, but it is an independent, original piece of art, and for me anyway, got me engaged about modern free verse poetry all over again.
It reminded me somewhat of Seraphine (2009), another story of an artist, this one a naive, outsider artist in France in the early 20th century, whose visions seemed to arrive directly from another planet without the artist's intercession.
The artist was an uneducated scrubwoman who, without any apparent outside stimulus or encouragement, began scrounging natural materials to make paint from and flat surfaces to paint on, to record the complex and baroque visions she had based on visual motifs taken from the natural world. She painted plants and flowers yes, but plants and flowers with an Escher-like paradoxically unnatural naturalness never seen in the real world. She ascribed the visions to the guiding hand of her guardian angel. She was discovered by a painter-collector-dealer, had a brief vogue, yet continued working and developing regardless of the size or prestige of her audience. She was as happy painting for her friends and neighbors as for the international art cognescenti.
In this clip, Seraphine reveals some of her larger, more complex canvases to trusted friends. At this point the film starts to climb inside her work, as though despairing of ever getting insider her head. (Please forgive the ad up front, the clip is worth it. And do yourself a favor and expand the video to the full screen.)
This film is far more of a character portrait thanHowl, which is perverse, given that Seraphine is far less articulate and far more unfathomable than Allen Ginsberg. But like Howl, the net result of the film is a view of the world as if from inside the art. It's worth the trip.
Shall We Kiss (2007) is to be applauded for rejecting a narrative bias that has become so deeply embedded in film as to go almost unnoticed. The implied answer to the title question is, of course, yes. Film and narrative prefer the road taken. And there is also an implicit assumption that new romances are preferable to old and perhaps troublesome marriages. Unless it is a film noir and a femme fatale, adultery is a good thing. Either you find a new, more suitable partner, or you return to your old partner renewed and refreshed. Perhaps filmmakers are trying to craft an argument to justify their own behavior to their spouses? Or is it that narrative wants to push characters to a place they haven't been before and where their behavior will be less predictable? (I will leave aside arguments that moral standards are breaking down because (a) this is not the blog for that sort of thing and (b) you'll find the same complaint in Plato and in Proverbs. Morals are Always Collapsing.)
Shall We Kiss bucks that inclination (pretty surprising for a French film), heading another direction by adding a layer of perspective, introduced by a storyteller and a listener. Unlike most storyteller frames, this one has something at stake -- the title question as applied to speaker and listener, and reflected in the tale being told.
This then, is a film that turns on its narrative as reflected in narration, a tool much underutilized in film today. There is a strong bias against narration in the American film industry. It is considered a crutch, a sign of weakness, of redundancy, of preference for word over picture. And used in a redundant or literary way, that position is quite right. But what such critics of narration ignore is the possibility of juxtaposing word AGAINST picture.
The narrator's voice actually precedes the introduction of synchronized sound. If one looks at the title cards of Biograph films around 1910-1911, one can read something like "Spurred by the treachery of the savage, the brave hunter exerts his utmost to preserve the sanctity of this flower of womanhood." That is, the cards often told the audience what was going to happen in the scene to follow, and is if concerned that the audience would not understand the implications thereof, would provide an overlay of both narrative and social interpretation. (Films of the era seem very anxious to assure the audience that social order, though perhaps temporarily disturbed, will be returned to its Right and Proper status. Or, as Louis Armstong replied when asked how things were, "Same as ever. White man still ahead.") From almost the inception, right through most of the Golden Era, American filmmakers did not trust the audience to get it right. If they understood the storyline, they might not understand what it MEANT. (That's why Dorothy has to tell you there's no place like home, or else you might think it's much cooler to stay in a place like Oz.)
Voice-over narration took a long time to arrive, and at first it was used to remind you that you were watching an Important Film Based on Great Literature. These kinds of films often started with a big book opening slowly, perhaps with tilt-down and dolly-in on the first page. "This is not the usual crap, folks, it's based on a real good book, and we can prove it. See, we're saying the first words of the book as you can see right here." Still, a mistrust of the audience.
But even that simple use of the voice-over opened the door to a more important idea -- the concept of distance and separation from the narrative that was about to unfold. Theater always takes place Right Now. Even if we are in ancient Athens, we are there Right Now because, see, there are the live actors right in front of us, talking right now. Film, by and large, apes that illusion. Even if the sequence of images and sounds is frozen, and we know it is, because there are films we watch over and over, the illusion is that this is all taking place in some sort of now. There is no past tense as the scenes unfold, which is probably why most synopses are written in a breathless present tense, like Damon Runyon without the baroque locutions.
Narration denies that. It says, "This is something that happened," not "this is something that is happening." At first that mode was only employed to say that this is set in the fabled past, or that this is a very important story you should know. Before long, Hollywood went Aesop and started turning stories into lessons, especially in What Not To Do. (This is always a good way to show depravity and immorality, by showing it in detail--fun, fun, fun--and then show people being punished for it. In fact, it's the basis of Cecil B. DeMille's entire career.) There was also the practical of covering time lapses and informing the audience of important changes and developments in a more efficient way than a title card (which suffers from differing reading speeds among the audience, leaving half frustrated at not being able to finish the card in time, and half bored waiting for the others to catch up.) I love the way Truffaut's unemphatic narration in Jules and Jim elides vast gaps in time, space and movements of the heart in a breathtakingly casual way, perfectly consistent with the tone and theme of the film. It's like a narrative torque wrench.
These uses of narration voice-over converged in the hard-boiled crime film (a genre that intersects with film noir), in which the detective shares his process and his outlook on the story as it unfolds. Of course, it is of the essence of the mystery story that facts and circumstances unfold in a non-chronological sequence. Thus there is the underlying narrative and the plot of the mystery laid on top -- that is, the story of how the crime is solved (and often, as in Chinatown, what the crime actually is.) The distancing effect of narration also provides room for humor, usually a wry irony only about a half-clik above sarcasm, but humor nonetheless.
This mode reaches its apogee with A Christmas Story, in which the narrator, author and screenwriter Jean Shepherd tells of epochal, earth-shattering events which are juxtaposed against scenes of an ordinary American childhood. The humor is not of mockery, but of gentle recognition that these little commonplaces feel enormous as we experience our own lives. The irony is one that we share as fellow humans, not one imposed by a sardonic author.
Emmanuel Mouret, writer-director-star of Shall We Kiss? has been compared to Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen, although neither his tone nor his visual style has much in common with either of those. Mouret sports neither nostalgia nor neuroses.* But there is the double vision of either the moralist or the humorist (natural enemies), which is the engine that makes this very slight film go. Indeed, I would argue that without the narration frame, one has little more than a minor variation of When Harry Met Sally, this one answering the central question: "can men and women be friends AND lovers?" in the negative.
(Side note - has anyone attempted a gay When Harry Met Sally? It would seem that the line between friend and lover would be even slippier when both parties share gender. Mine is an outsider's perspective, but it seems as though there might be some comic changes to be rung there. And no, I don't mean when the gay character is pathetically crushing on the straight character. That is a ridiculous straight fantasy, and in a lifetime spent in proximity with gay people, I've never known it to be happen. Being an oppressed minority makes most people pretty practical, and unlikely to waste their time chasing those who are not only unavailable, but likely to hurt you.)
The concept that the entire inner story of the film, which consumes at least 80% of its running time is told in order to explain a simple "no" offered in reply to the title question creates an unexpected suspense, i.e., will the answer change, as the telling of the story winds deep into the night, into the storyteller's hotel room, and as she assumes a semi-erotic pose while she tells the story. The fact that the listener is utterly satisfied by the story and a kiss which carries the implicit agreement to part forever -- that is, the kiss is meant as a simple pleasure sufficient unto itself, without the promise of future delights -- is a more impressive bit of legerdemain. Those who know French better than I claim that the French title, Un baiser, s'il vous plait ("A kiss, please) bears the implication of a kiss upon parting, which, if true, throws a lovely melancholy frame over the whole thing. And oddly, the melancholy of the outher story is much more satisfying than the fumbling consummation of the inner story.
All thanks to narration! ______ * I suppose playing the lead male role invites the Allen comparison and the preoccupation with the tiny physical details of a sexual encounter the Rohmer.
This scene can serve as illustration of the ethos, though perhaps not the look (which is mostly darker), of Army of Shadows (1969), an eyewitness account of the French resistance, and an inspiration and source for Flame and Citron. Hannah Erendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" with reference to the bureaucratic and mundane way in which the Final Solution was carried out. Army of Darkness might be said to be about the banality of the resistance of evil.
There are no fabulous daring raids, no destruction of huge ball-bearing plants, no mass assassination of Nazi bigwigs, no examples of individual heroism really at all. This is a movement whose energies are almost entirely engaged in survival. Like Washington's army (and that of Ho-Chi-Minh), all it has to do is stay intact through the end of the war in order to win. But that is no simple task, and as the clip above illustrates, it requires a frigid and efficient cruelty which hardly exists in peacetime.
Director Melville was best known for his laconic noir gangster films. Army of Darkness is to war films as Goodfellas is to gangster films. Both are about grubby, workaday violence, the glamor and romance fairly well stripped from them, in constant fear and danger of discovery to the point where fending off discovery overtakes the original object. Lino Ventura, so brilliant as the cornered yet cool criminal of Melville's Classes tous risques and Le deuxieme souffle, is similarly cool and virtually with affect in this film, merely exchanging one state of violent criminality for another, i.e., one is "bad" and the other is "good," so long as the ends justify the means.
Back in the 60s, all the talk was about "anti-heros." This was meant to refer to actors like Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, who didn't look like Clark Gable or Gary Cooper and didn't have morally unambiguous triumphs. But in fact most "anti-heroes" didn't accomplish anything. Sure, Ben married the girl in The Graduate, but that marriage didn't appear to promise salvation or even success beyond a few months. The bad guys beat the cops, the investigative reporter got killed by the conspirators, the cops shot the hero, all the 70s heroes lost.
The heroes of Army of Shadows win without triumphant, without victory. To persist is to win. This is true anti-heroism.
The film also marks the beginning of the de-glamorization of Simone Signoret, who plays a brave and skillful but not alluring resistance member, so worried about maintaining her connection with her daughter, that she dies for the sin of carrying the child's photograph. In order to fight inhumanity, one must shed one's own humanity.
This sounds like a dark, brittle, cold film. Maybe it is. But it is exhilarating in its capacity to embrace good and evil together and trust the audience to sort it all out. See it and be surprised you hadn't heard of it before.
A Prophet (2009) takes a mere 135 minutes to cover the story material found in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the average James Cagney movie in the 1930s; namely, the rise of a young, tough but naive outsider to become the top of a dangerous gang. At least with Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, it was fun. A Prophet is just slow and weary and heavy and self-aware.
So what's new? The story takes place mainly in prison. While that seems novel at first, in the long run it doesn't change anything about the dynamic of the story. The young gangster waxes, the old gangster wanes, and it is Little Caesar all over again.
The main character is Muslim, which turns out to make no real difference. Sure, he's part of an emerging minority, but so were the Irish and Italian characters of the films of 70 and 80 years ago. There is nothing unique about his religious affiliation--no objection to alcohol or drugs, no special provision for prayer, no specifically Muslim worldview.
The whole movie is French. Well, that just means that there's a lot of chatter, the actual events in the story are spaced far apart, and the "run and gun" method of filming becomes numbing rather than exciting.
Cineastes around the world are raving about this film. It has won many awards and high ratings from critics. I'll confess: I don't get it.
It only took 40 years, but finally there is a truly great parody of James Bond, and surprisingly it's from the French, many of whom think Jerry Lewis is funny. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) is an amalgam of wit, buffoonery, satire, slapstick, social comment and silliness that would probably be impossible for an American filmmaker outside of perhaps Christopher Guest.
Whereas Austin Powers reverts to poo-poo jokes, Clouseau to pratfalls by stuntmen, Maxwell Smart to Yiddish verbal schtick, the Naked Gun to meta- joking, this parody of what was originally a serious spy series predating James Bond is willing to take on colonialism, racism, sexism and general white male narcissism in a way that is genuinely funny. The clip shown above is a fairly good example, and demonstrates the subtlety of Jean Dujardin's playing. It helps that the overall silhouette resembles that of the Neanderthal Sean Connery version of Bond. (The tilt of Dujardin's eyebrow as he says "Don't feel like it...It was the cow joke" in the clip above cracks me up each time.)
This is an idiot who thinks Islam has to be stupid to ban alcohol, who beats up a muezzin who wakes him up in the morning and likes to flick the lights off and on in the henhouse just to hear them start and stop cackling. More than that, one has to appreciate the precision of the parody--the sets, costumes, lighting, style of camera movement and editing all hark back precisely to the early 1960's, without self-reference or vaudeville self-mockery. Even the opening titles sequence can elicit a chuckle of recognition from anyone familiar with light thrillers of the era (not only the Bonds, but Charade and that ilk).
Most laugh-out-loud comedies have a streak of stupid. But for OSS 117: Cairo, the stupid belongs to the character and the society from which he has emerged, not to the film itself, which is very smart indeed. Put this one in your queue now.
For most of the history of dramatic storytelling, originality of the plot was not considered a primary virtue. The ancient Athenians expected to know the story of the play they were going to see in advance--in fact, most of them were traditional stories they had known from childhood, or perhaps soon after. The playwright's art was the expression of that story and the character's reaction the events through verse and dance. Making up a new story would have completely confused your average Athenian, sort of like those two old ladies who always sit behind you at the movies and try to figure out the story out loud while you're trying to hear the dialogue.
Shakespeare, as we all know, swiped his stories from legends, from from Hollinshed's Chronicles from Plutarch's Lives and Italian and other story collections. Nobody faulted him for that in his own era. It is only since short story writers such as O'Henry and Maugham popularized the twist ending that it became bad form to give away the story, culminating in the great story conspiracy of Hitchcock's Psycho.
So the idea of a remake is not inherently dishonorable, at least in historical perspective. So why retell an already told story?
1. We know everybody likes it. The trouble with this in the home video era, is that we can always go back to the source. Back in the day, when MGM remade Little Women in 1949, they knew that not many people would have a good memory of the 1933 RKO version, but just to make sure, they bought the earlier film and suppressed it. But nowadays, if we're jonesing to see Wuthering Heights, we have the choice of about eight different versions, including a number of television adaptations. But none of them have the heat of the Olivier-Oberon 1939 version, one of the sexiest movies ever made where people keep their clothes on. (Other contenders: Notorious and To Have and Have Not.)
Worst example of "we know everybody likes it:" Gus van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. Color film, lesser actors and nothing gained (and quite a bit lost).
2. Let's see how the story or the characters change when we bring them into a new era. So The Front Page, which has been filmed four times since 1929, was most recently set at a cable news network in 1988, to see how the story is different. Turns out, not much, but that was OK. In the case of The Women, the original 1940 characters lived in a world of severely limited possibilities for women, and competing for men was one of their few active options. Today's version makes those women seem even more petty and small, given all the other choices they could make with their lives. Body Heat is not a remake, but it frankly reworks themes and story tropes of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice with the sexual frankness of the 1980s, not available to filmmakers in the 1940s. This may sound like the basis of a Skinemax epic, but Kasdan uses the sexual heat to add a layer of tension and ambiguity to the already complex characterizations.
3. Let's see how the story or characters change with different actors. A hit-and-miss matter. For example, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr seem to click better in 1957's Affair to Remember than do Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in the 1939 original, Love Affair. On the other hand Audie Murphy in 1954's Destry can't hold a candle to Jimmy Stewart in 1939's Destry Rides Again. (Besides, we all know that 1939 was a phenomenal year in film.)
4. Let's take the story in a different direction. This is not attempted very often. For one thing, there is often common source material, such as a novel. (Sometimes a remake will be done in order to return to the original story, such as the various remakes of Wuthering Heights and Dracula which purport to return to the source works and discard the "improvements" of the original Hollywood films.) The dreadful remake of Sleuth and Planet of the Apes felt compelled to add a new twist, since the original twists were so well known--in neither case did that work out well.
This final tack is how the French sex melodrama Nathalie (2003) became the American stalker flick Chloe (2008). In both cases, a woman decides to test her husband's fidelity by hiring a woman to try and have an affair with him (when was this ever a good idea?) The first half-hour of each film is almost scene-for-scene identical. Then they begin to diverge, and the final half-hour of each is almost utterly and completely different. Interestingly, Anne Thompson, co-writer and director of Nathalie participated in the reworking and approved it, presumably because the result was a completely different (and inferior) movie.
The differences are also illustrative of the differences between American and French ideas about sex and adultery. In France, adultery seems to be an almost inevitable hazard of long-time marriage, something to be gotten through, but survived. In the States, when the adultery is long-standing and has an emotional content (not merely casual sex), most people believe the marriage is and should be over. (I have not desire to point out who is more correct--it is merely an observation about the two cultures.)
Thus, when Fanny Ardant hires Emmanuel Beart to have an affair with her husband (Gerard Depardieu--who else?) she did not expect them to consummate it at first, but when it happens, she is not repulsed but intrigued. She sees an opportunity to gain perspective on her husband in the bedroom through this other woman's eyes. Ardant demands that Beart describe their encounters in graphic detail, and apparently derives a sexual frisson from that language. Ardant and Beart have a more obvious chemistry between each other than either has with Depardieu, and their bond seems deeper. Consequently, when it is revealed that Beart has betrayed Ardant's trust for the sake of a few Euros, Ardant is hurt; nonetheless, she has learned and grown from the experience, and husband and wife return to each other with a renewed commitment. (SPOILER ALERT - It helps that the Beart-Depardieu affair never happened.)
Americans are not so natural about their sexuality, and so Julianne Moore in Chloe never really ceases to be uptight. It doesn't help that Amanda Seyfried still looks she just got her high school diploma, not at all the experienced sophisticated seductress of the French film. It looks as though Moore is inviting her husband to be a pederast, not a roue. Like the original, the hired girl has her own agenda, but in Chloe it's not money she's after, but love. SPOILER ALERT - In the remake, the hired girl is unhinged, and pursuing the wife, who succumbs. Then, given the American penchant for hyped melodrama and the legacy of Fatal Attraction, Chloe goes completely around the bend, violence ensues, and Chloe dies a violent death, ostensibly because she wanted to hurt Julianne Moore, but subliminally as a punishment for being bi-sexual. (That minx--she betrayed all her customers in the strip club by not desiring them!)
So points for not doing a cookie cutter remake, which never works anyway, because once you've changed the artists--the actors, designers, photographer, director--you have a different film; not to mention the different setting in time and place. But points off for taking the initial story premise and steering straight for the cheap, the obvious and the fake. There is nothing to take away from Chloe to reflect on--it says nothing about marriage, sex, love or life. The only takeaway is "watch out for crazy people," which is something that I personally figured out a while ago. (Although it's not always possible.) Still, there was some creativity involved, though the result be largely negative.
The 1945 musical State Fair was remade in 1962 for straight-up commercial reasons. Musicals were becoming popular again, the songwriters Rodger and Hammerstein were money in the bank, and had a relationship with 20th Century Fox, the studio that filmed all the adaptations of their plays except the somewhat neglected Flower Drum Song and Fox already owned the story and six songs from the earlier film.
There were some problems. The 1945 State Fair is short at 100 minutes and lacking lavish production values, given the standards of 1962. The cast, settings, score and length would all need to be inflated. Moreover, only one of the six songs, "It Might As Well Be Spring" is integrated into the action of the story in the manner developed and popularized by Rodgers and Hammerstein. 20th Century Fox studio chief Darryl Zanuck once sent out an edict that songs in a musical had to be justified. That makes sense--the song should fit the characters who sing it and the story situation they are in. But that's not what Zanuck meant. He meant that if there was instrumental accompaniment, you should at least show a guy with an accordion, or else the audience would wonder where the music was coming from. Which demonstrates that for all his story sense in other areas, in musicals Zanuck was an idiot. Yes, musicals use an artifice and convention that people sing to express their emotional states, and that to make it more pleasing we provide an accompaniment. But cowboy movies, monster pictures and war pictures have just as many artifices and conventions--don't get me started.
The next time somebody says, "Musicals are stupid because they start singing and you can't figure out where the music's coming from," tell them, "All movies are stupid because people do all kinds of stuff in front of a camera but they never notice there's a camera and a cameraman." So there. It's all artificial, so get over yourself.
Another problem with the 1945 State Fair is that there are not enough songs for the story and a lot of key character developments go by without being musicalized, especially in the second half of the film, which starts bursting with chatter and even sprouts a strange character, a song-plugger played by ever-reliable Frank McHugh who talks for pages and pages about the music business but is really just there to provide the information that the young hero's sweetheart is unhappily married. It's really very lumpily put together.
So in 1962, some things are smoother and more professional. Where "That's For Me" was sung by a chanteuse before she has even met her sweetheart, it becomes an explosion of emotion for Pat Boone's character just after he has met Ann-Margaret. (It's Ann-Margaret in 1962--you can forgive a guy for wanting to run around singing. Or doing something.)
(Sorry, the actual clip from the 1962 film is not available, so here is the soundtrack with a montage of photos of Ann-Margaret. You should get the idea that the second version was more explicitly passionate.
"Isn't It Kind of Fun" is a harmless ditty in 1945. In 1962, it's the ammunition for a sex bomb, that is Ann-Margret one year before she tormented American youth with "Bye Bye Birdie."
And I really wish I could show you Tom Ewell singing, "Sweet Hog of Mine" to an enormous boar he is showing at the fair. Or Alice Faye teaching her daughter to "Never Say No To A Man" (meaning you can tell them no without actually saying the word). Where Dana Andrews in 1945 plays a city guy enjoying the rural sights, Bobby Darin in 1962 looks like he's on his way to another, better movie and trying to get this part over quick.
Whereas the cast of 1945 is sincerely committed to this candy-coated view of American rural life (part of the American Way we were defending so hard in 1945, in 1962--except for Pat Boone and Pamela Tiffin who were trying to launch film careers--everyone else looks like they showed up to pick up a paycheck.
Oh, and the setting of the Fair changed from Iowa (losing a charming song) to Texas. Blee-a-a-ah. Let's face it, the only good movies about Texas are the ones that show what narrow-minded hell it can be, like Giant, Hud and The Last Picture Show. Trying to make Texas lovable would be like making Kevin Spacey cute.
True, the Hollywood production system demonstrated that it was not always necessary to have passion to make a great film. Casablanca was churned out by the great production machinery like any other sausage, and it came out really tasty. But still, it helps if you have some else on your mind besides a meal ticket. That goes for remakes as much as any other kind of film.
Drama is character and character is choices, and hard choices make good drama. I can't get enough of European films about the Second World War, probably because there was little separation between scenes of armed conflict and the home front. It was All-War All-The-Time; a war fought every waking moment by every occupant of the continent. And the wide swath of Nazi occupation made for difficult, really impossible choices for nearly every adult, the kinds of choices Americans have rarely been confronted with, and which would paralyze many with a Manichean view of the world.
The title of Bertrand Tavernier's Safe Conduct (2002) is better in the original French: Laissez-Passer, "let pass." What will you let pass? Arguably a companion piece to Truffaut's Last Metro, its filmmaker-heros try to maintain personal and artistic integrity working for a German-owned film company operating in occupied France. Whereas in The Last Metro, all of the heroine's choices proceed from her fateful choice to marry a Jew, here our two heros, a screenwriter and an assistant director must constantly slalom through the obstacle course set by their German masters as they maintain their own integrity and loyalty.
From a film history perspective, these men and women are engaged in making the polite middle-brow "Cinema of Quality" against which the French New Wave violently rebelled in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For most Americans, the going will be a bit thick with names and film titles tossed around which will have little or no recognition. When they express regret for the death of Harry Baur, it means so much more if one has seen something of Baur's marvelous work. I would certainly recommend one see Le Corbusier either before or after seeing Safe Conduct in order to view the one certifiable masterpiece produced by Continental Films during the Occupation.
It is easy to condemn these men after the fact as collaborationists, but to do so you must honestly assess what you yourself would do under the circumstances. And they still take tremendous risks, in one case biking hundreds of miles and parachuting into Allied territory to deliver intelligence to the British, who throw their doubts about the informer's honesty in his face. They dodge long-term commitments, resist propaganda and try to live honestly and decently in a deceitful and indecent environment. Safe Passage is a demanding, but fast-moving and thoroughly absorbing and humane document.
The difficult family reunion has become such a staple of filmmaking in the last twenty years it may be worthy of consideration as a genre of its own. The American version is generally served up with either melodrama or slapstick or both, plus a heart-warming ending.
Arnuad Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (2008) offers little comfort and joy for the season, other than the exhilaration of seeing an artist at work. The film is most reminiscent of Rachel Getting Married, with a death-haunted family of eccentrics, a tolerant father and chilly mother. But where the Anne Hathaway character made you afraid for what gaffe she would commit, Henri, the analogous substance-abusing screw-up character in Christmas Tale is more likely to inspire laughter, if laced with a bit of pity.
It's dry, like a quality sparkling wine; if you're sick of the sweet stuff, try this next Christmas--but probably after the day itself, as it may be a bit of a buzzkill. In the French manner, use of the medium is limited to mise-en-scene and the incomparable faces of the actors. Not much montage, suspense, irony, etc.; rather like filmed theater. But there's no drama like family. And as with chocolate, I like my comedy bittersweet. Better for your heart, they say.
Let's try some titles: "Einstein: Patent Clerk of Destiny"; "Ulysses Grant: The Drygoods Store Years"; "Chuck Norris: Just Another Skinny Wimp." You want to see any of those? Me neither. Sure, those biopics in which we see the historic figure taking those steps which will prepare them for greatness are interesting, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a nonentity who later is known for some remarkable achievement, but during the course of the film itself is and remains a virtual non-entity.
In Coco Before Chanel (2009), Coco is not a complete non-entity, because she is, of course, Audrey Tautou, who cannot help being beguiling any more than Yao Ming can wake up tomorrow being short. But this film only gives us the Chanel to be sporadically. In those brief spurts when she is expressing her ideas of style, either in word or in actual dress, the film perks up and is exciting. The rest of the film reflects the French obsession about who is or is not going to bed with home, and it is all too dreary to describe. That Chanel was the long-time mistress of a boring man makes for a long time boring movie. Perversely, in the last few minutes we see the fully-formed Coco Chanel supervising an exciting fashion show, as if the filmmakers were saying, "Look we could have made an engaging, stimulating movie. But we are French and we do not do that sort of thing. We would rather have people sitting around being boring."
Perhaps the idea was that, as Chanel introduced the uncorseted woman, the woman without the strictly confined shape in favor of a looser, more shapeless design, they decided to make a shapeless movie.
The other annoying part of the movie is that for the first ten minutes there was scarcely any establishing, master shot. It is all in either medium close or close-up, as if they were expecting that no one would see this in the theater, and they just might as well shoot it for TV. I found myself physically moving my head from side to side looking at the screen, just trying to figure out what was going on. I have no idea of what the purpose of that was.
This is the film blog I began to provide a model for my Film Studies students and encourage them to maintain a blog of their own. I no longer write about every film I see, but I try to take note of the unusual, the remarkable, the strange or interesting connections.
Please comment copiously!Or write to me directly at my e-mail address.
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