In one of the first scenes of Darezhan Omirbaev’s Chouga, an aspiring cinematographer named Tléguen meets the beautiful Altynaï after she gets out of class with a modest bouquet of flowers for her birthday. Just as she coldly accepts them, Ablaï, the son of a wealthy businessman arrives to take her to lunch. Tléguen, surprised and hurt, declines his invitation to join them. “It’s a shame,” Ablaï says to Tléguen with something like mock-regret, as he escorts Altynaï to his parked BMW. “We could have talked about real cinema.”
Cinema—its real and ersatz versions—is as much a subject of Chouga as are the tragedies and epiphanies of romantic love. Omirbaev’s film is ostensibly an adaptation of Anna Karenina, an efficient reduction of 800-plus pages of text into less than 90 minutes of film, comprising the basic structure and about a half dozen of the principal characters of Leo Tolstoy’s novel. But in this process of distillation, Omirbaev does more than simply transpose Tolstoy’s work from late 19th-century St. Petersburg to early 21st-century Kazakhstan. Like his forebear, he employs the tragic dalliance between Anna and Vronsky (in this case, Chouga and Ablaï) to look deeply at the shallowness of the upper classes. But he does so, as this early exchange between Tléguen and Ablaï hints, with an interest in modern Kazakhstan’s newly consumerist society and particularly the visual culture on which it feeds.
Agnès Jaoui’s Let It Rain begins with a sight gag worthy of Laurel and Hardy: a tall, balding Frenchman stands next to a short, thick-maned Algerian. The taller one, Michel (co-writer Jean-Pierre Bacri) offers his companion, Karim (Jamel Debbouze), a joint, which Karim declines. They start walking, Michel loping and lecturing, and Karim by turns hyperactive and self-conscious. Though a couple of decades younger, Karim’s the straight man to Michel’s slouching clown. Michel doesn’t think he’s a clown—and importantly neither does Karim—but his manner, all droopy eyes, furrowed brow, and mug mouth, tips off the audience. Michel recruits Karim to collaborate on a documentary, soaking up the younger man’s energy while disarming him with respect. From the outset they have an unlikely but pleasing rapport, setting a pattern in the film for various combinations of relationships—one more contrived than the next yet each, in the end, winning.
Navigating the rocky straits of the serious-minded comedy, Let It Rain maintains a breezy tone while hinting at deeper concerns. Such comedies are always tricky endeavors, as too much levity squanders efforts at gravitas, and self-importance stifles laughs. For every film that succeeds in mining comedy for serious Chekhovian pathos (Rules of the Game, Crimes and Misdemeanors), there are films like the contrived, schmaltzy Life is Beautiful, or the justly forgotten Mel Brooks goes homeless knee-slapper Life Stinks. On the whole Let It Rain manages just fine. If its balanced approach occasionally has the feel of compromise, of a middle course overly plotted to avert danger, the film nevertheless exudes a warm, world-weathered integrity. Click here to read the rest of Eric Hynes’s review of Let It Rain.
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.
The proper words to describe A Christmas Tale’s tone—regardless of its inability, or perhaps unwillingness to stick with just one for more than five minutes at a time—might be grim elation. And what better way to represent the holidays than with such conflicted emotions? That sense of excitement leading up to family gatherings is usually tempered, if not nullified, by the slight disappointment of the event itself. Our greatest works of secular Christmas art, from Dickens’s ghost stories to Norman Rockwell’s tattered illustrations, from Meet Me in St. Louis to Fanny and Alexander to Eyes Wide Shut, ground the merriment of the season in unwelcome reminders of mortality. A time of transition, Christmas is also a time of haunting: the specter of death hangs over even the most fleeting moment of laughter and love. The year is over; people have died, people will die, and we’re all one step closer to the end. Carols, hymns, and feasts devote themselves to birth and renewal, but snow, long nights, and the closing of the year speak to decay. Desplechin’s film, appropriately, begins at a gravesite, years earlier than the narrative proper and the entire film is informed by this funereal moment: Abel (Jean-Pierre Roussillon) speaking of the loss of his six-year-old son, Joseph, to lymphoma.
Though he’s not as sanctimonious a moralizer, Joseph might be this story’s Jacob Marley. He’s dead, to begin with, and without his death, nothing wondrous would come of the events to follow. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of A Christmas Tale.
At the beginning of what was to be his last film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), Guy Debord declares, “I have sometimes been reproached—wrongly, I believe—for making difficult films. Now I am actually going to make one.” “Difficult” in a film like Howls for Sade (1952), which prompted audiences not only to walk out of the theater but threaten to burn it down, might be an understatement. But with In girum, Debord means difficult in a different sense. The film is actually a lot more straightforward than his other work; unlike Society of the Spectacle (1973), which relies on the uncomfortable dissonance between a monotone Marxist critique of image consumption and the scintillating allure of ‘60s pinup models and pulpy films, In girum is more interested in bringing words and images together to tell a story—specifically, Debord’s own.
If it’s difficult, it might be because this is the one that was hardest for him to express. And while the film retains his characteristically dyspeptic view of late capitalist society, it also suggests a deeper, more complicated, more passionate involvement with its images, which are presented in an array of magazine ads, comics, film clips, and black-and-white photographs of Debord’s old comrades. For as much as he enjoyed rewriting the speech balloons of comic strips or grafting cutouts onto improper surfaces in a strategy he called détournement, In girum makes it clear that Debord loved the movies for their own sake. As writer Greil Marcus observed on the panel following the film’s screening at the 12th annual Views from the Avant-Garde series at the New York Film Festival, the oddly long eight-minute battle scene from The Charge of the Light Brigade was included in the film presumably because Debord loved it, that it stirred something within him beyond any didactic impulse or ironic detachment. He’s attracted to “rubbish,” the dusty fragments of popular culture, because that’s where he finds his story: a gang of artist-rebels known as the Situationist International, who, for a moment, found a way to live differently, undetected, as shadows and outlaws.
“You oughta see The Passion of the Christ,” says the burned-out fortysomething stripper to the fiftysomething broken-down professional wrestler, who agrees that maybe he should, noting that its subject “sounds like one tough dude.” Kinda sorta like him, right? Then she tells him that, with his long hair, he kinda sorta looks like Jesus himself.
This scene is one of several in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler—which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and has the prestigious closing-night slot at the New York Film Festival—in which screenwriter Robert D. Siegel feels compelled to lay his thematic cards on the table. See also the bit where Mickey Rourke’s character, a faded Hulk Hogan manqué named Randy “The Ram” Robinson, who supplements his stock job at a Jersey department store with increasingly grueling appearances on the independent grappling circuit (and who supplements his impressive daily training regimen with illegally procured pharmaceuticals), likens himself to a piece of meat.
The dialogue in these scenes is so blunt as to be almost laughable, and given that Siegel’s only previous writing credit is on The Onion Movie—which, if nothing else, gave us the enduring image of Steven Segal as “Cock Puncher”—one might suspect that The Wrestler’s inventory of sports-melodrama clichés isn’t entirely on the level. But even if this is the case, nobody told Darren Aronofsky, about whose filmography a lot could be said (or furiously scribbled) but in the interest of saving space and venom, let’s leave it at this: he’s not exactly known for his sense of humor.
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