French romantic comedies are the art-house import equivalent of pimped-out Hollywood blockbusters. Both appeal to a wide and diffuse target audience — moderately cultured bourgeois and pop thrill seekers — and both are basically critic-proof. Where Michael Bay obliterates scrutiny with fireballs and shiny screeching machinery, French comedies gently neutralize through learned banter, exotic settings, and scantily clad gamines. The machine works something like this: an older gentleman clicks into place across from a fresh face, situational laughter is achieved while clothes teasingly peel away, a titillating trailer cuts itself, Denby reviews for the New Yorker, and decent money is made. Though Anne Fontaine follows the formula with The Girl from Monaco, she also tweaks it a bit, and her modifications make the film at least formally intriguing.
Pie-faced comedian Fabrice Luchini plays Bertrand, a veteran high-powered defense attorney relocated to Monaco for a notorious murder case. For protection a bodyguard, Christophe (Roschdy Zem), is hired to shadow Bertrand throughout the long trial, and his vocational intensity at first unnerves his mild, measured charge. But slowly a codependence develops, and the proverbial odd couple forms an unlikely friendship. Bertrand is fascinated by, and comes to rely on Christophe’s bold, no-nonsense problem solving, and Christophe feeds off of Bertrand’s reliance. Things get complicated, as they are wont, when a saucy TV weathergirl, Audrey (Louise Bourgoin, a version of perfection poised between cartoon and robot) becomes improbably enamored of Bertrand. Is she a social climber, a femme fatale, a schemer out to make former flame Christophe jealous, or actually in love?
On the occasion of her 80th birthday, Agnès Varda, the woman sometimes referred to as the “grandmother of the French New Wave,” decided to turn the camera back on herself. The Beaches of Agnès was the result: sprawling, spry, and ever curious, like the filmmaker herself, it revisits a life that, for over 50 years, has been inextricably linked to the cinema that shaped it. In addition to making groundbreaking films like Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) and Vagabond (1985), Varda has also sustained an impressive career as a photographer and more recently as an installation artist. In 1962 she married the filmmaker Jacques Demy, with whom she stayed until his death in 1990. I met with Varda at the Santa Monica home of Patricia Knop and Zalman King, just steps away from one of her beloved beaches, where she observed matter-of-factly, and with a touch of merry nonchalance, “I was lucky enough in my life to be at the right time in many places.” Here among the sun-dappled collection of 19th-century carousel animals and thick-bodied angels, this grand dame of cinema with the impish grin looked perfectly at ease, equally at home as both jester and queen.
The Beaches of Agnès, appropriately, occasions retrospectives. Los Angeles’s American Cinematheque has been screening a number of Varda’s films in anticipation of the Beaches release, from Jacquot (1990), a moving reconstruction of Demy’s childhood made in the late stages of his illness, to the elegantly observed essay film The Gleaners and I (2000). The program also included several films that Varda made during her various residencies in California, including the “hippie love” film Lions Love (and Lies) (1969), starring Warhol superstar Viva, the documentary Mur Murs (1980), a kind of Gleaners precursor in search of the unnamed creators of Los Angeles’s street murals, and the rare gem Uncle Janco (1965), a short and colorful portrait of Varda’s long-lost relative drifting in the bays of Sausalito. In Beaches, Varda is chastised by Chris Marker (disguised as his trademark cartoon cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte) for having spent the summer of 1968 not on the streets of Paris but in Hollywood. To me she explained: “France was dull, really, and when we came here it was, oh my God, like a shower of freedom, counterculture, the way people would dress, would speak, would have all these love-ins, all these happenings, all these meetings.” Varda’s bright enthusiasm for California was rivaled only by the audience at the Aero Theater, which gave her a standing ovation before the first screening of the series had even begun. Slightly embarrassed, she urged everyone to sit down. “Maybe after,” she quipped.
It is at best naïve, at worst wholly disingenuous, to evaluate the work of a commercial artist without weighing the commerce in equal proportion to the art. Thanks to the formalist bent in film criticism, the exemplary visual dexterity of certain mainstream-schooled American filmmakers has been oft highlighted, but frequently at the expense of acknowledging their films’ pecuniary provenance. Ironically, it is the nakedly cash-driven nature of so many of these enterprises that allows that divorce to be made, almost as if these directors have burrowed so deeply into their marketplace mentality that they have emerged, purified, on the other side. It’s thus that the flash-cut tilty-cam cinema nausée of late-period Tony Scott can rate a laudatory feature article in Cinema Scope, the gape-inducing hideousness of any-period Michael Bay can provoke a kind of stunned reverse admiration (or, in the always curious case of Armond White, comparisons to Fernand Léger), while Michael Mann, blue-tinted poet of beachfront property and immaculate tailoring, can be celebrated as some kind of multiplex Baudrillard for the deeply silly Miami Vice.
Mann, of course, was a pioneer of this brand of commercial canonization, praised for the value-added artistry he brought to his various genre concoctions. And an earned reputation it is: at his best, Mann has not only elevated his perennial (and perennially saleable) obsession with masculine romanticism into grand entertainment (Heat) and epically proportioned moral drama (The Insider) but also has worked towards a visual language that paradoxically exceeds the generic boundaries on which he, as a determinedly commercial artist, so crucially depends. The deep strangeness and inextricable essence of Mann is that he evidently continues to think that he is making films for an enthusiastic wide audience even as his progressively abstruse visual and narrative strategies decisively diverge from the comforting familiarity that mass entertainment relies upon.
This disconnect, unfortunately, is not Mann’s artistic salvation, but a damning problem. Stripping away mainstream content while still doggedly sticking to its familiar forms, working against genre expectations without any clear idea of what to replace them with, Mann’s three films after the fascinatingly difficult object that was Ali—Collateral, Miami Vice, and now Public Enemies—signify an undoubtedly talented filmmaker stuck between stations and perpetually unsure of which way to turn. Click here to read all of Andrew Tracy’s review of Public Enemies.
Is the 81-year-old Agnes Varda a tireless self-promoter or self-eulogizer? After watching her lyrical, free-associative autobiography “The Beaches of Agnes” it might seem silly to even bother creating a distinction. In the past decade or so, this oft-named “grandmother of the French New Wave,” who has been for over fifty years creating a diverse, challenging (and admittedly inconsistent) body of work, from narrative cinema to documentary to photography and installation pieces, has more often than not turned the camera on herself. Thus the septuagenarian incarnation of Varda, in such personal works as The Gleaners and I (2000) and Cinevardaphoto (2004), was all about foregrounding her voice and vision — if you had been wondering what to look at in her previous decades’ films, here was the key (life’s marginalia, France’s outskirts, aging, the process and texture of seeing and bearing witness).
Now, as an octogenarian, she’s taken her project of introspection even further, making a feature-length video about her own life, her own art, her outlook on the world as she’s grown older, her relationships, childhood, memories. It’s the kind of film a less charitable critic might call indulgent; yet why shouldn’t a filmmaker write her own life story on the screen rather than the page? As with any autobiography, the author’s passions and blind spots are all there for us to see, and despite the expected amount of immodesty coursing through it, The Beaches of Agnès is a mostly enchanting troll down memory lane. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of The Beaches of Agnès.
The trouble with Quiet Chaos is that there’s too much quiet and not enough chaos. The emotional turmoil spoken about by the film’s characters rarely punctures its tranquil, sleepy surface. Floating along with middle-aged businessman and recent widower Pietro (Nanni Moretti, who also co-adapted the screenplay from Sandro Veronesi’s novel) on his shambling journey of self-discovery and personal reconfiguration, we enjoy his company but rarely feel or understand his pain, leaving this slight, sentimental movie to coast on innocuous charm and little more.
Having saved two drowning women with brother Carlo (Alessandro Gassman) while at the ocean, Pietro returns to his beach house to find his wife lifeless on the grass. Riddled with regrets over how his career at an unnamed media corporation has distanced him from his family, he becomes the sole caregiver for their precocious ten-year-old daughter, Claudia (Blu Yoshimi). As stressful talks of a large merger heat up at the office, Pietro makes an impromptu promise to Claudia to wait for her in the leafy square outside her school until she returns from classes. He does so, and soon finds himself returning there day after day, striking up new acquaintances and counseling his business associates and pregnant sister-in-law, Marta (Valeria Golino), as they come to visit him. All the while, he wrestles with his own conflicted thoughts on his role as a husband and now-single father. Click here to read the rest of Matt Connolly’s review of Quiet Chaos.
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