Goodbye to Language 3D (*1/2)

Jean-Luc Goddard began pushing cinematic boundaries with his very first feature, Breathless. Even into his 80s, he’s keeping up with the times, using 3D to create arresting visuals, usually with at least one element seeming almost to touch the viewer. Whether abandoning any notion of traditional narrative can be considered boundary-pushing is another story. But “story” is not a word one would associate with this collection of philosophy, classical music, occasional screeching car noises, and ever-changing images. There are recurring characters, but they do not have anything resembling normal conversation. Or, not for more than a few lines, anyway. Most of the time they, or a narrator, are saying things like, “Animals are not naked, because they are naked.” In one of the more straightforward scenes, a man sitting on the toilet explains to his lover how everyone is equal when they poop. They are both naked. (Or, perhaps, not naked.) In another, the man says that zero and infinity are humankind’s greatest discoveries. No, she says, sex and death are. Hitler is discussed as well as the French Revolution. Several scenes feature a dog, hence the above quote. Others feature blood. Sometimes Godard is clearly being playful, as when he blends two shots so that by closing one or the other eye I saw a completely different image. In other shots he’s used filters to distort the image or the colors.

Beyond the lack of a plot, having all of the dialogue be quotes (from Satre, etc.) and non sequiturs, plus the car noises, made this a seriously annoying movie to watch. It’s slightly redeemed by some truly innovative 3D images and by not also being glacially paced. Quite possibly I am a philistine missing Godard’s genius. I definitely missed whatever he was trying to achieve.

IMDb link

viewed 10/22/14 6:45 p.m. at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Festival]

Bright Days Ahead (***)

It may occur to you that this French film’s take on infidelity is very French. Fanny Ardant, who reminded me of Rene Russo, plays Caroline, the adulterous one here, a prematurely retired dentist who takes up with a thirtysomething computer instructor (Laurent Lafitte) at Bright Days Ahead, a kind of activity center that gives seniors a chance to brush up on acting, pottery, and ping-pong. It seems that Julien, the instructor, is having trouble with his teeth, and before long they’ve filled each other’s cavities. Caroline’s husband (Patrick Chesnais) seems nice enough, but Caroline is in need of something new in her life.


Director Marion Vernoux casts no implied moral judgments on her characters, presenting Caroline’s infidelity, and Julien’s own casual attitude (he has other lovers; she accepts that, mostly), without elaborate justifications. Emphasizing temperament over dramatic tension, she deals with the emotional fallout from the affair in a rather tidy way, quite the opposite of, for example, the American thriller Unfaithful. The movie’s setting in the Calais area (northern France) sort of suits the film; the area lacks the ornate architecture of Paris or the lushness of the south. Its plainness matches these characters who, notwithstanding their deceptiveness, display a minimum of guile.

Most evidently, it’s a role Ardant can sink her teeth into, and she’s particularly effective in the film’s most flirtatious scenes. Surprises do not abound here, but that may be enough of a reason to watch.

IMDb link


viewed 4/23/12 7:30 pm at Gershman Y [PFS screening]

Dom Hemingway (***)

The title character is not, as one might imagine, a wayward Italian cousin of Ernest Hemingway, but a wayward Cockney ex-con with anger issues and an oozing id. Not content to hunt down the man who took up with his wife while he was in prison, he also mouths off, hilariously, to the Russian crime boss who has the money he’s been owed for a dozen years. In the opening scene, spittle flows from his mouth as he spews a profane ode to his own member, and that is not the only scene in which that organ enters the plot. It’s a rather different role for Jude Law, who is entirely convincing as someone who might beat you if crossed. And, although he has a way with words — he’ll “gut you with a dull cheese knife and sing Gilbert and Sullivan while I do it” — he’s not really charming. Not unless it’s charming to compare one’s one face to an abortion, as Dom does after one of the scrapes he gets into in the course of the several days the film covers.
 

This not-so-charming personality and his well-crafted dialogue — courtesy of director Richard Shepherd (The Matador) — are the primary appeal of the film, which cannot quite be called a thriller. Dom’s attempts to reconcile with his understandably estranged daughter (Emilia Clarke) do not measurably humanize the character, and the plot overly relies on coincidence and, I think, one big plot hole, namely why Dom is not re-arrested for severely beating a man before numerous witnesses within half a day of being released. 

IMDb link

viewed 4/8/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 4/10/14

In Secret (**3/4)

The corrosive effect of guilt and deceit is the eventual theme of this drama that takes half the film’s length to ripen. Based on Émile Zola’s frequently adapted 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, it’s more specifically adapted from Neal Bell’s English-language play by that title. It nonetheless retains the French setting (and some of the play-like feel). It mostly dispenses with the part of the story in which Thérèse (Elizabeth Olsen), deposited with her aunt (Jessica Lange) by her widowed father, grows up with her country cousin Camille (Tom Felton). Instead, it skips right ahead to where Thérèse, under pressure from her aunt, agrees to marry Camille and move to Paris, which is made to seem dank rather than glamourous.

While chugging through a lot of story, director Charlie Stratton establishes the characters  by reducing them to their main traits: controlling (Mrs. Raquin), sickly (Camille, coughing a lot), lusty (Thérèse, moaning a lot). The minimal back story hurts; one understands rather than truly feels Thérèse’s discontent with her harmless-seeming spouse. Even before Camille’s virile, artistic friend Laurent (Oscar Isaac) shows up, it’s clear the marriage will not be joyous, and the early Paris scenes are most noteworthy for the opportunity to watch Inside Llewyn Davis’s Isaac with large sideburns and an English accent. (Except for Felton, the main characters are played by Americans, but all employ English accents to portray French people) There are some love scenes, but they’re pretty standard “torrid affair” stuff.

All of the above seems like a wind-up to the far darker second half. Here especially, Lange, as a manipulative woman who suffers perhaps too much for her faults, shines in a supporting role. Or perhaps she just has the most complex character.

IMDB link

viewed 2/26/14 7:10 pm and posted 3/4/14

The Past (****)

The famous William Faulkner quote (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) applies here. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), an Iranian, has returned to France to finalize his divorce from Marie (Bérénice Bejo), a French woman with two daughters from an earlier relationship. Without wanting to, he inevitably becomes involved with the troubles Marie is having with the older daughter, who seems hostile to her mother’s new boyfriend for reasons that aren’t clear, and that prove not to be what they seem.

Most remarkable is the construction of the plot; its cleverness won’t surprise anyone who’s seen writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s previous film, the Oscar-winning A Separation. This French-language film was not nominated for the foreign-language film Oscar, but is equally rewarding. (Given its theme of impending divorce, it’s a thematic sequel, though the story is completely different.) Farhadi lets the truth come out like pieces in a puzzle, revealed in a series of confessions until what remains is the unknowable future. At first showing us the story through Ahmad’s eyes, Farhadi also shifts viewpoints, to the mother, to the daughters, and ultimately to the boyfriend.

This drama constructed like a thriller ends with an emotional question that a plot twist cannot answer but is nonetheless haunting.

IMDb link

viewed 1/30/14 7:00 at Ritz 5 and posted 2/26/14

Blue Is the Warmest Color (***)

This film caused a sensation at Cannes, where it won the Palm D’Or, both for its storytelling and for the lengthy sex scenes featuring the two female leads, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. Also reported was the grueling shooting schedule to which director Abdellatif Kechiche subjected them, but he certainly got results. Exarchopoulos plays Adèle, the a teenage girl who meets the older Emma (whose dyed hair presumably supplies the film’s American title) and is lured by her confident attitude. With a characteristic open-mouthed expression, Exarchopoulos projects an combination of innocence, curiosity, and nervousness. Kechiche favors an improvisatory style that comes across as much in the introductory high school scenes, where Adèle gossips with friends and, briefly, acquires a boyfriend, as in the later, more intimate, ones.

The characters are stronger than the story, which simply carries the two women forward in time, skipping over some potentially dramatic turf, like anything much about the reaction of Adèle’s parents to either having a lesbian daughter or the older girlfriend. Mainly, the film is not about sexuality, but about the intensity of a first crush and the indelible stamp it tends to leave.

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viewed 12/18/13 7:35 at  posted 1/24/14

Populaire (***)

For those who thought that the erotic possibilities of the manual typewriter had not been sufficiently explored in Secretary comes this tamer French film, set in 1959. Defying her father’s wishes for her to marry the son of the local mechanic, small-town Rose (Déborah François) comes to the slightly bigger town not for love, but to be a secretary. She proves to be a kind of a savant with the typewriter, but not so savvy at other office skills. But instead of firing her, the boss (Romain Duris) presents her with a flyer for a typing competition. When her four-fingered technique proves an impediment to achieving her greatest potential, he becomes her personal trainer, coaching her on the techniques of touch typing. (She types, he touches. Or wants to, anyway.) And so Rose blooms.

Thus this is as much a sports film as a romantic comedy. Director Régis Roinsard swirls the camera around like Martin Scorcese filming a boxing match. The tone is earnest, not satirical. It’s more amusing than funny. I’d have thought that the plot and setting would lend itself to screwball comedy, perhaps something like Down with Love, the Renée Zellweger/Ewan McGregor comedy that tipped its hat to comedies like Pillow Talk, also set in 1959. But François, while very good in the role, is a little too much of a nice girl, though espousing modern feminist sensibilities. And Duris, whose name suggests a French Cary Grant, actually plays a someone brooding character whose reticence supplies the requisite, though not altogether convincing, plot that allows the romantic and competitive portions of the plot to come together at once. The novelty of a typewriting contest and a general likeability counter the lack of originality of the last half hour.

IMDb link

viewed 10/2/13 7:00 at Ritz Bourse and posted 10/2/13

Augustine (**3/4)

Perhaps a companion piece to A Dangerous Method, the 2011 drama about Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, this focuses on Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon), the French neurologist who was a mentor to Freud. But that was later on; this movie depicts his earlier work with female “hysterics.” Actually, it almost exclusively focuses on his work with one female patient. Augustine (Soko), a 19-year-old maid, is taken to Charcot’s clinic at the start of the film and quickly becomes a kind of star patient, suffering as she does from dramatic seizures that can be reproduced under hypnosis, as well as minor paralyses. the doctor pokes her, prods her, and uses her as the main attraction in his lectures.

The movie, a first feature by its writer-director, Alice Winocour, and Lindon do a good job portraying Charcot as an exemplar of the imperious doctor as authority figure a century before anyone spoke of “patient-centered” care. It does a decent job portraying his patient, who develops a symbiotic relationship with her doctor in which he is savior, denier, father figure, and perhaps more. It does hardly any job at all placing Charcot into the patheon of medical pioneers, not even bothering with the usual typed epilogue typically found at the end of biographical movies. Although making it clear that some thought Charcot to be a quack, on the strength of the movie it’s hard to tell whether he’s a good scientist, and impossible to tell whether he helps his patients. Besides Augustine, the others are portrayed only briefly, mostly in interview segments meant to illuminate the variety of mysterious ailments that fell under the “hysteria” rubric. The only other significant character in the movie is Charcot’s wife (and perhaps his pet monkey).

This movie generally held my interest, but Charcot was too aloof a character (and Augustine not complex enough) to have pulled me in emotionally, and the lack of a broader historical perspective on this medical pioneer, or on the hysteria phenomenon of the 1800s, was frustrating.

IMDb link

viewed 6/27/13 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/27/13

Renoir (***)

Not a biopic of Pierre Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), this is more like a family portrait set in the great impressionist’s late career. Like a painting, the film is still but nice to look at. It helps that Renoir lived on the French Riviera in a large home with a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. (The director, Gilles Bourdos, also lets the camera fall out of focus a few times, making the screen look something like an impressionist canvas.) In contrast to a movie such as The Last Station, which similarly follows Renoir’s contemporary Leo Tolstoy in his senescence, it is a movie of temperaments rather than beliefs. Where a Tolstoy evolved to the end and lived a personal life of some turmoil, Renoir liked to think of himself as a craftsman who liked to “go with the flow” and favored calmness. Though crippled by painful arthritis, he carries on as before, carried around on a chair by his female staff and working with the brush taped to his misshapen hand. Asked by his doctor what he’ll do if he cannot use his hand, he says, “I’ll paint with my dick.”

Red-headed Christa Theret plays Andrée Heuschling, Renoir’s last model, though Bourdos has set the story in 1915, a couple of years before she actually posed for for the old man. This allows him to set her arrival in the midst of the first World War and proximate to both the recent death of Renoir’s wife and the arrival of his son Jean (Vincent Rottiers), who is convalescing after an injury. Another son, though also injured, is still on the front, and the third, too young to fight, is still at home.

It probably helps to know that Jean, the middle son, would become celebrated in his own right, though not for painting. Here he has principle but not ambition. Andrée, known as Dedée, inspires and challenges him in the manner of many young women in many movies about many sorts of young men. She brings out old desires but no new changes in the painter himself. Through her, we see his personality and the way he worked and the way the other members of the household regarded him.

Renoir the man was an innovator. Renoir is merely competent. Not a great love story, it is simply a drama centered around the great man, whom even his sons call “Renoir.” Bourdos and Bouquet, who gives a fine performance, give us a man who obviously inspired deep loyalty, but whose family relationships lacked intimacy. (The youngest son calls himself an orphan.)

IMDb link 

viewed 4/24/2013 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/24–25/13

The Well-Digger’s Daughter (***1/4)

This World War II melodrama comes by its old-fashioned quality in part because it’s a remake of a 1940 Marcel Pagnol film. Getting the period look isn’t so hard, but the movie’s strength is to remind us that it is values and culture, more than style and technology, that truly separates us from the past. The title character (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) is turning 18 as the story begins. She is “as kind as she is pretty” as her widower father and his younger friend agree. But, though she has spent time in Paris, unlike her four younger sisters, she is rather innocent. Her father (Daniel Auteuil) has only lived in the rural south and is rather traditional.

The story, which involves the debonair son of a prosperous shopkeeper, is not wildly original, but  the characters make a a strong impression. The showiest role is the well-digger himself, whose sudden changes of heart bring a measure of humor even as tragedy threatens. A lovely score by Alexandre Desplat captures the overall bittersweet tone. Auteuil, whose breakout role was as the star of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, adaptations of a Pagnol novel, here makes a strong directorial debut. With lush color missing from the original film, he brings out the bucolic qualities of the setting. Moreover, he allows the characters to emerge, especially in the crucial early scenes. Much of the tale hinges on the meaningfulness of two brief meetings of the girl and her young man. In lesser hands, this might seem corny. Mostly, it doesn’t.

IMDb link

viewed 8/5/12 4:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/9/12

The Fairy (***)

This bit of magical realism takes place in a universe that’s just a little more whimsical than ours, in a real city (Le Havre, on the French side of the English Channel) that somehow looks like a small town. One of the two main characters, Dom (Dominique Abel), is the middle-aged night man at a hotel that appears to be called…Hotel. He rides a broken down bicycle. As the film begins, a customer comes in with a dog and a French phrase book. No dogs allowed, he’s told, in English. Dom returns to the video he’d started to watch, only to have another customer ring. It is the same man, without the dog but with suitcase that seems to be moving around by itself. Again Dom returns to his movie, but another customer arrives, this time announcing that she’s a fairy and will grant him three wishes. She’s a little odd looking and rather lanky, like him, but basically ordinary, and with the ordinary name Fiona, not like a fairy. So he gives her a room too, and goes back to his movie, but the phone rings. It’s the fairy…. And so on. Fiona (Fiona Gordon) may have magical powers, or she may be only a thief. She may be crazy, or only crazy about Dom, who eventually wishes…for a scooter.

This is the third collaboration between the two stars and Bruno Romy, who plays a very nearly blind tavern owner. (All three are credited as writers and directors.) As with the recent film called Le Havre, it seems to be set in the present time, but with very few visual cues or plot points to indicate that. It’s more like the films of the silent era (think Charlie Chaplin), or of the French auteur Jacques Tati, or a lighter version of the American Jim Jarmusch. It’s the kind of movie some will find instantly annoying or silly, and the humor is not going to make you laugh out loud, but I like this kind of film, with recursive plotting and recurring characters and locations that make the city of 200,000+ seem so small, and the film theatrical. Granting that the charm for me wore off by the end—it’s hard to sustain such seemingly artless airiness for a whole feature length—I enjoyed it.

IMDb link

viewed 6/5/12 7:10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/5/12

The Intouchables (***)

Americans may see European films as rather arty by nature, but that’s probably because we don’t get to see many of the mainstream ones, and mainstream moviegoers wouldn’t watch them if we did. Which is too bad, in this case, because this is a pretty good mainstream film. Sure, any story about a poor black kid bonding with a rich white dude, a handicapped one yet, is already bordering on cliché, and is ripe for emotional manipulation, even if it’s set in Paris, and even, or especially, if it’s a true story. (Kind of—the actually poor kid was Algerian, although, in the context of France, it doesn’t matter that much.)

 

Driss (Omar Sy) is the poor kid, an ex-con who’s only applying for a job so he’ll be able to collect public assistance. Phillippe (François Cluzet) is the paralyzed aristocrat in need of someone to help dress and bath him. When Driss says his references are Kool and the Gang and Earth, Wind, and Fire, Phillippe misses the joke. When Phillippe refers to the composer Berlioz, Driss only knows it as the name of a housing project. But he likes that Driss won’t treat him like damaged goods. And so, Driss gets to stay, and slowly ingratiates himself into the household, though not into the undergarments of Phillipe’s redheaded assistant. And, of course, becomes a better person.

 

Was the real Driss hired without the barest of background checks or even discussion? I don’t know, but suspect not. Some of the other events seem telegraphed, but the characters seem genuine. The humor does too. It’s a formulaic picture (though not a tearjerker, as one might expect), but one well executed. At least, French audiences, who made it the second most popular domestic release of all time, thought so. Pity it will never play in the multiplexes where, were it in English, it might find a ready audience looking for a feel-good comedy-drama.

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viewed 4/26/12 7:30 at Rtiz east [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/27/12 and 6/3/12

Delicacy (***1/4)

It would be misleading to call this romantic comedy, because grief lies between the romantic segments, and about half the movie preceding anything significantly comic. Audrey Tautou, pixyish lead of Amélie, gets to demonstrate a wider range of temperaments as she reassesses her life and romantic possibilities following a tragedy. There is nothing unnatural about the transitions between these moods, or at least nothing more unnatural than it would be to anyone who has experienced such transitions. I didn’t care for the jarring music that marks some of them, but I did appreciate not knowing where the story would lead. In addition to Tautou’s very specific character, the film includes perhaps the best portrayal I’ve seen of someone (Francois Damiens, as the most awkward of her three suitors) who thinks that the woman he desires is out of his league.

IMDb link

viewed 3/25/2012 3:50 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/26/12–4/24/12

The Conquest (***1/4)

The rise of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and simultaneous estrangement from his wife Cécilia are the subjects of this drama. Sarkozy’s (Denis Podalydès) wily maneuvers to pressure the man he would replace, Jacques Chirac (Bernard Le Coq), and circumvent his rival, Dominique de Villepin, will appeal to those who see politics through a cynical eye. But a more nuanced conclusion from this character study is that policy cannot be achieved without politics.

Curiously, neither the woman he defeated to become president, Ségolène Royal, nor the one he would make his second wife, Carla Bruni, appear as characters. (Royal is, however, the subject of a humorous imitation by a Sarkozy aide helping to prepare him to debate her.) But in Cécilia (Florence Pernel), we see a character who is prepared to assist her husband in his ambitions but, unlike so many wives of prominent politicians, not to surrender to them.

IMDb link

viewed 3/1/12 7:10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/10/12

Declaration of War (**3/4)

Misleading titled, this French import nearly begins misleadingly too, with a montage scene straight from a romantic comedy. Actually, though, we first see a boy of five or so in a MRI machine. And then we see his parents, who are named Roméo and Juliette, meet. They have a boy, Adam. Not yet two, Adam gets sick. (Rarely does a toddler get so much screen time.) Relatives are informed. There are tears, but this is less of a tearjerker, all things considered, that one might have expected. The most notable segments are not the obvious ones—the diagnosis, the treatment decisions, and so on—but the ones in between, where the couple must go on living their lives.

The drama, cowritten by the two leads, Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm, and directed by Donzelli, is at its best in these small moments. (Donzelli and Elkaïm have played romantic partners in other films and have some chemistry.) Roméo and Juliette try to make each other laugh about their worrying too much. They try to understand each other’s different reactions to their situation. They smoke a lot. (It was the degree of smoking that made me suspect, correctly, that the movie was based on a true story.) Except for the smoking, I’d have liked the movie to be even more about these small moments. I don’t really trust those montage scenes in romantic comedies because they seem to be a substitute for actually showing why a couple are together, and I felt like that was true here. Without giving away what happens to either Adam or his parents, it also seemed odd that the story simply skips ahead and dispenses with both questions in a quick epilogue that is not necessarily implied by what has happened before. Additionally, the soundtrack music, which ranges from Vivaldi to Laurie Anderson, is jarring when it should have been intimate.

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viewed 2/5/12 3:40 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/5/12  

Tomboy (***1/4)

Céline Sciamma’s second film as writer-director follows Water Lilies, an intriguing drama about the vagaries of teenage female sexuality. Moving from sexual identity to gender identity, this one focuses on Laure, a girl of ten or so who moves into a new apartment complex and becomes, at least to the new friends she meets that summer, Mikael. The story is very simple; what stands out is Sciamma’s very neutral way of telling it. By that I mean that one never gets the feeling that there is a message, despite the potentially fraught subject matter. Despite the presence of Laure’s parents, almost the entire film is from her point of view, which is that of a child.

I realized also, in watching this, how few films, even films about children, primarily show them interacting with other children rather than responding to adults. Both Laure’s interactions with her six-year-old sister (Malonn Lévana, who is both adorable and incredibly natural) and Mikael’s play with the new boys (and one girl) are likely to remind you of the sorts of things that mattered when you were a child.

If you have one of your own (well, one who knows French or will read subtitles), the story is so gently told that you could watch this together and have a very unusual conversation afterward.


IMDB link

viewed 12/21/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/21/11

Le Havre (**3/4)

I’d guess half of the French movies I’ve seen take place in Paris, and none in the port city whose very name means port. Technically, it may not be French, as its producer, director, and writer is the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past). The less-familiar setting would seem to suit Kaurismäki’s seemingly stylizing rendering of the place. Although the film provides just enough hints to give the setting away as present day, or close to it, everything about it seems designed to make the place seem frozen in some time where people still use rotary phones (or have none, in the case of the main character), smoke in hospital rooms, and have never heard of a chain restaurant, or any sort of chain. Here a man can still make a modest living shining shoes, then toddle off to the pub while his wife contentedly cooks dinner for him.

It’s all very quaint, and so it would be more accurate to call Kaurismäki’s style of storytelling simple rather than minimalist. Although the story has the aging shoe shiner (André Wilms) shelter a Gabonese boy trying to evade the authorities, this is no more a film about illegal immigration than, say, Taxi Driver, is about teen prostitution. It’s a decent story about decent people being decent. I would like it to have been a little more than that, but the film is never more, though never less, than pleasant. Perhaps the closest it comes is when the shoe shiner, short on cash to help the young man, enlists the aid of a local rocker called Little Bob, who plays himself. True to form, his music sounds up to the minute, if the minute is in 1977.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse 12/8/11 and reviewed 12/8/11

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (**1/2)

There are ordinary biopics, careful to identify places and persons and dates, often with on-screen titles. They’ll advance the story by showing the subject mentioned in newspaper headlines, or seen on a talk show, or performing. They’ll start with formative childhood incidents and end with the character’s death, or with an epilogue telling us in a conclusory paragraph. Sometimes, they win Oscars for the leads, as with Jamie Foxx in Ray or Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. This impressionistic take on another French icon is another sort of biopic, something like the take on Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would  inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.

Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point.  Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.

The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.

As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.

IMDB link

viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)

The Way (***1/4)

The title refers, literally, to El Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, a Christian pilgrimage route through Spain for the last dozen centuries. But Tom (Martin Sheen) is a widowed California ophthalmologist, not a seeker of spiritual truths. When his priest, offering comfort upon the unexpected death of his son, asks him if he’d like to pray, Tom answers simply “What for?” But he says it in the voice of one who has become embittered, rather than a skeptic.

 

Tom is not an expressive man, and he had a complicated relationship with the son. Perhaps it’s in a quest to understand his son’s refusal to settle down that Tom decides to complete the journey his son had begun before falling victim to a sudden storm. Or perhaps it’s simply to honor the dead. The son is played, in brief flashbacks that aren’t overdone, by Sheen’s son Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed.

 

The lightly plotted drama strikes the familiar notes you expect it to—the journey being more important than destination, the importance of human connection, the meaning of loss—but it does so subtly. Instead of epiphanies, the movie lets its characters, especially Tom, emerge along the way. I appreciated that Tom remain ornery through much of the movie and quite the opposite of the silver-tongued president he played in The West Wing. As the title suggests, religion and spirituality obviously play a role in the plot, but there is no obvious message. In one scene, Tom and his traveling companions witness a centuries-old ceremony in a famous church. Only the faces of the four—Tom, a burly Dutchman, a bitter Canadian divorcée, and a prolix Irish writer— betray what they might have made of the whole thing. They don't say anything afterward. Estevez does not, in other words, force a particular meaning on the scene. In the end, we don't know how the journey will change the characters; it is enough that they will always remember it.

 

IMDB link

viewed 10/3/11 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/09/11

The Hedgehog (***1/4)

When someone asked me, before I saw this, what it was about, I said something like that it was about a middle-aged woman who blossoms. To which the reply was, isn’t that what every independent movie is about. Actually, this is a French movie, and while I have definitely seen French variations on that theme, in no case was the story told from the point of a precocious eleven-year-old who plans to commit suicide on her twelfth birthday.

This suicide plot point is lifted right from the Muriel Barbery novel the film is based on, and of course gives the story some measure of suspense. It’s something about how the girl (who’s a year older in the book) is disgusted by the banality of the adult world around her, specifically that of her parents, and sees their elite lifestyle as a trap best avoided by dying. Still, her apparent contempt for the bourgeousie who inhabit her posh Paris apartment building is tempered by the fact that she also seems intensely curious about them.

The building’s newest resident is of the same class as the others, yet that is tempered either by the fact that he is Japanese, or cultured rather than crass. And somehow, the girl, the Japanese man, and the middle-aged woman, who is the building superintendent, form a mutual bond. This is the sort of movie in which the superintendent happens to have seen a 50-year-old Japanese film but never eaten Japanese food and the pre-teen happens to be a knowledgeable player of Go, the chess-like Japanese game that she insists is nothing like chess, nor Japanese.

Even so, the idea that the girl really plans to kill herself is easily the least believable aspect of the story. Insofar as the rest of the plot hinges in some way on the planned demise, the story suffers, but not so much as you’d think. As elegantly told by the director, Mona Achache, the story is almost a fairy tale Where in Barbery’s novel the youngest character can merely seem like a snob, Achache emphasizes the kindness behind the diffident exterior. In embodying both, actress Garance Le Guillermic is a real find.


IMDB link


viewed 9/14/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/15/11–10/11/11