While it’s an unlikely venue, Tokyo! offers an addendum to the story of Leos Carax, if not (yet) a resurrection. Reteaming with longtime collaborator Denis Lavant for the first time in fifteen years, Carax has contributed a new short called “Merde” to an omnibus film that also features entries by Bong Joon-ho and Michel Gondry. The names of these two directors are perhaps rather sexier than Carax’s these days— Bong delivers his first work since 2006’s The Host; Gondry his first major short film after making the jump from music videos to features (the next of which is purported to be The Green Hornet, written by and starring Seth Rogen). Tokyo! is nonetheless the rare anthology film that satisfies in each of its three parts, allowing each director to put forth his own idiosyncratic take on the city of the film’s title—from playful to corrosive to romantic.
Bong, hard at work on his next feature, was not available for interviews, but Carax and Gondry were, and I sat down with the two Frenchmen—and with comic book author Gabrielle Bell, Gondry’s collaborator on his film (and ex-girlfriend)—to discuss the pleasures and perils of collaboration, working in Tokyo, and why Americans are harder to hate than Japanese.
Click here to read the rest of Leo Goldsmith’s conversation with Carax, Gondry, and Bell.
And earlier:
Eric Hynes’s terrific Leos Carax profile.
Jeff Reichert’s review.
Leo Goldsmith’s review.
I can’t pretend to be a disinterested observer of the career of James Gray. After writing a long and laudatory article on his 2000 film The Yards in Cinema Scope, Gray contacted me to say thanks, and we’ve since struck up a friendly correspondence that noticeably increases in anxiety (mine) whenever a new film of his is about to open. Critics who become acquainted with filmmakers are put in a naturally difficult position, seeking to avoid special pleading while simultaneously trying not to offend by saying anything too harsh. This writer has been fortunate, so far at least, in that Gray’s subsequent films—2007’s We Own the Night and the newly released Two Lovers—have been blessed with the same virtues as The Yards: a darkly exquisite visual palette; a distinctively hushed, delicate dramatic atmosphere; deeply felt performances whose restraint only heightens their moving affect; and a pervasive feeling of tenderness and sadness that undercuts the frequent, and bewildering, charges that Gray is a macho poseur, spinning out copycat Scorsese genre riffs.
It should be stressed here that this is almost exclusively a phenomenon of American criticism—Gray’s films have been famously well-received overseas, particularly in France. Nevertheless, the marked hostility to Gray in the US ever since The Yards remains one of the most curious cases of critical perversity in a field littered with them. It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to dislike a filmmaker’s work, but the sneering condescension and wholesale dismissal directed towards Gray is both unwarranted by the films themselves and quite beyond the pale of civilized argument. In the case of Two Lovers, at least one prominent critic has even gone to the trouble of fabricating scenes whole the better to mock the film . . .
Continue to read Andrew Tracy’s interview with Two Lovers director James Gray.
Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, one of the year’s best, opens this Friday in limited release. While Desplechin was in town on the occasion of the film’s U.S. debut at the New York Film Festival, Reverse Shot’s Eric Hynes had a chance to sit down and talk with the filmmaker.
Reverse Shot: The first line of A Christmas Tale is “My son is dead.” Did you always know you were going to start that way, and with that tone?
Arnaud Desplechin: Yes. Actually, that was the beginning of the writing process for this film. Usually what happens when I begin to make a film is I have all these bits of text and dialogue that I’ve been collecting. And I usually try to begin the film with something that I don’t understand. And here I had a lot of bits of text by Ralph Waldo Emerson and many of them came from the diary that he wrote when his own son died and then also something that he wrote 20 years after the death of his son. It had a real poetic power to it. Yet because it was philosophy I didn’t understand it. But I wondered what an actor could make of it. He has this very strange line where he says, “My son detached himself from me the way a leaf detaches itself from a tree,” and I wanted to know the story that would make a father say something like that. What is behind it? And what story can I invent? So when you see the opening scene with the father you’ll want to know what it was that caused him to say this. See, I’m not able to understand it. The only gift that perhaps I could have is to sense that it’s good material for an actor. I’m able to play it—I’m not able to understand it. That’s my way of understanding—to play.
Click here to read the rest.
And earlier, Michael Koresky’s review:
Everything’s at the threshold in A Christmas Tale. Holiday time, transition, reunion, naturally, but also disease and surgery, grudge and reconciliation, degeneration and regeneration. It’s all come to a head, and Arnaud Desplechin’s certainly proven himself in recent years the director to handle such an overflow—of information and joy and panic. Of course this isn’t The Family Stone territory: added to this heady stew is a surfeit of Desplechin’s jingle-jangles—jazz segueing to hip-hop and classical music; Funny Face and The Ten Commandments; personal letters read aloud directly to the camera; superimpositions and dissolving collages; decidedly French political incorrectness and vulgarities; intimations of noir, of melodrama, of mystery. In other words, this is Desplechin’s Christmas family album, and you’re free to exit through the front door if you’re not feeling the spirit. Click here to read the rest.
UPDATE: Leo Goldsmith’s review of A Christmas Tale on indieWIRE:
Though it often seems the nadir of schmaltz and sentimentality, the Hollywood Christmas movie has always been a bit bipolar. From A Christmas Story to Gremlins, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to (undoubtedly) the forthcoming Four Christmases, the subgenre requires a course of dysfunction and chaos before the dessert of earnest holiday cheer is served. Mom and Dad’s best-laid plans go awry, Santa Claus gets trapped in the chimney and asphyxiates, and Arnold and Sinbad vie for the last available Turbo Man action figure—but in the end, families are reconciled and the true, noncommercial meaning of Christmas is reified.
In this way, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is very much of a piece with this largely American subgenre, though its Gallic accent is unmistakable. Desplechin’s film begins with a funeral and ends with major oncological surgery, but its large down payments of nastiness are put toward well-earned, heartwarming reconciliations.
Mercurial, multifarious, and burgeoning with detail, A Christmas Tale builds upon the manic catharses of Desplechin’s last feature, Kings and Queen, to create a holiday movie in extremis, in which death, disease, and mental illness cozily share the table with music, religious pageantry, and romantic and familial love. Click here to read the rest.
A few minutes into The Headless Woman, Veronica (Maria Onetto)—the titular headless woman—hits something with her car as she searches for her ringing cell phone. From a rear view, we see, in a briefly held long shot, what appears to be a dead dog in the middle of the road; she drives on. Soon, it becomes clear that the accident has affected Vero’s mental state. She is confused and disoriented. Over time, she starts to return to normal. But as Vero pieces things together, we are left doubting what we’ve seen. Vero realizes she may—or may not—have killed a child with that thud, and we start to wonder if we can really trust that shot of the dog, or even if it was a dog we were looking at in the first place.
Lucrecia Martel, the ferociously talented Argentinean director whose previous films are La Cienaga and The Holy Girl, does not shoot establishing or transition shots. Instead, her images are mostly shallow focus close-ups. As a result, she demands that her viewers work to make sense of them, to follow character relationships that are established with fleeting lines of dialogue, to infer offscreen space through sound, to question the limits of their own perception. Click here to read Chris Wisniewski’s interview with Lucrecia Martel, director of The Headless Woman.
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