I know, I know…I am late to the party on this film. Still, a reminder that spoilers abound…
Lars von Trier has a complicated relationship with women. I think it is safe to say that, amid the cries of sexism and misogyny that have accompanied many of his films, von Trier has done himself no favors with his hilarious, deeply self-deprecating approach to his own work. Here is an artist who claims that each and every one of his characters is an empathetic part of himself, only to immediately remind the world of his own self-hatred in the next breath. On camera, von Trier has hung women by the neck (Dancer In The Dark), bound them to a millstone so that they may not escape sexual slavery (Dogville), had them suffer horrific sexual assaults and murder in the name of love (Breaking The Waves), turned their racial naivete into a brutally failed social experiment (Manderlay), turned them into child-murdering angels of death (Medea, although maybe a little slack on that one), represented them as sexually available lackeys (The Boss Of It All and The Idiots) and has made them give birth to monster children who wreak havoc on their society (The Kingdom, which, ok, again, a little slack). Over time, von Trier’s fascination with the social position of women, with the indignities they suffer and the pain they endure in a sexist society, has taken the shape of a near-obsession, the director constantly finding new and more sadistic ways to showcase their suffering. Finally, with Antichrist, he’s delivered his coup de grace, a film that further complicates von Trier’s position while throwing everything that has come before into stark relief.
The story that makes up the first two-thirds of Antichrist seems at first look a fairly standard set-up for von Trier’s typical groin kick of a finale; a married couple lose their child in a terrible accident that occurs while they are making love; He (Willem Dafoe) is a psychotherapist (naturally) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, in a brave and brilliant performance) is a scholar studying the history and origins of Western misogyny (naturally). As She suffers terribly during the stages of grief that accompany the loss of a child (“It’s completely normal,” He constantly reminds her), He denies his own grief a voice, instead focusing on trying to offer therapeutic help to his suffering wife. Pompous and detached from his own feelings, He is the perfect foil in von Trier’s premise; the depth and primacy of emotion She feels transcends his rational abilities, putting her more deeply in touch with the primeval, violent cycles of the natural world and sending him into the heart of the magic underbelly of rational experience where, in fact, chaos reigns.
Under the therapeutic guidance of her husband, She discovers her own suppressed terror at what the state of nature might hold for her; asked to name her greatest fear, She says “the woods.” Of course, the couple share a second home, a rustic cabin deep in the heart of a seemingly haunted forest and it isn’t long before He drags the pair of them for an extended stay in order that they might confront her “irrational” fear and overcome the cause of her grief. Once there, as her suffering carries forward and his therapeutic ideas grow further out of touch with her worsening emotional state, He discovers the subject of her research and condition; She has grown to hate the powerlessness she finds in women and seemingly has begun to embrace the misogyny she once abhorred. No longer able to internalize her pain (and with an assist from a forrest full of haunted cries, talking foxes, deer carrying stillborn fawns and a crow that won’t die), She, fearing that He will abandon her to her suffering, decides to make sure that He finally knows how her suffering feels. She undertakes a brutal assault that focuses on the pain and guilt of that most primal of human functions, the sexual pleasure of human reproduction (which is eternally linked to the moment of her child’s death). From here on in, bad things happen. I won’t spoil any more of the fun and you probably know it all anyway.
Antichrist
Despite von Trier’s intimations that Antichrist is intended as a horror movie and despite the overpowering images of genital mutilation which have been the focus of hot debate since the film debuted at Cannes, Antichrist is, for me, the director’s saddest (and that is saying something*), most moving film. I have to confess once again that the concept of a child dying in the family home is probably my absolute worst nightmare, and von Trier draws an incredible performance from Charlotte Gainsbourg to make it all feel true; she absolutely nails the emotional depths of a mother’s pain. However, once the film shifts into its final act and von Trier begins ascribing causes for the nature of her suffering, I could not divest myself from the reality of her situation enough to believe in her ultimate insanity; every parent has heard the phantom cries of his child, everyone has had moments of anger and doubt that, in the retrospective wake of a tragedy, would be unforgivable in one’s self. Most of all, if I was married to a pontificating asshole who never dealt with his own grief but instead coped with the death of his child by trying to analyze and cure me, you can be sure there would be hell to pay.
All of which is to say that although von Trier’s attempts to situate Gainsbourg’s She on a dark, latent path to madness and violence, there wasn’t a frame of the film that did not honor her grief and grant the legitimacy of her actions, which is why, for all of the discussion of horror, fear and castration that will accompany the film, Antichrist is the movie that finally gets suffering right. It is not every “horror” film which allows for the violent images to actually serve the rational necessity of the film’s argument (and especially not images this powerful) From the film’s opening moments, von Trier equates sex and death, reproduction and pleasure, orgasm and loss; the writing is on the wall from the get go. But I’m certain that in this case, von Trier is indeed detailing an empathetic response to his character’s pain instead of exploiting it. Yes, there are lyrical, haunting images to contrast with the kinetic handheld violence (the forest coming alive with limbs and bodies, beautiful, misty slow motion, etc.), and yes, there is a bunch of biblical fluff and psychoanalytical nonsense** and ridiculous gender theory that cloud the film’s point of view, but it all ends up feeling reflexive in comparison with Gainsbourg’s aching soul. Of all of the director’s films, Antichrist feels the least like some sort of narrative straw man game and more, well, alive to the feeling and the legitimacy of the female protagonist’s experience.
One of the most upsetting developments in recent cinema is the rise of suffering as a form of titillation; a few espionage, comic book and war films aside, the horror genre has been the most guilty, forsaking the root of fear in the name of physical pain and torture. There is hope on the horizon, though; with films like Ti West’s genuinely creepy House Of The Devil serving to reassert the power of the viewer’s imagination as the locus of fright, perhaps it will be a movie like Antichrist that proves once and for all that internal pain, the very nature of human suffering, is far more frightening than the physicality of opening flesh and breaking bones; it is the knowledge of a broken heart that truly tears us apart.
Antichrist
*Dancer In The Dark and Breaking The Waves have the unfair advantage of genre on their side; it’s hard not to cry at a melodramatic musical or a melodramatic tragedy regardless, but those movie pushed every button in their genres. No fair; I have them in a tie for second place.
**The line that got the biggest laugh from me?
She: Freud is dead…
He: (pause…smile…nod…) Yeah!
”Some art aims directly at arousing the feelings; some art appeals to the feelings through the route of the intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection… In film, the master of the reflective mode is Robert Bresson. All of Bresson’s films have a common theme: the meaning of confinement and liberty. The imagery of the religious vocation and of crime are used jointly. Both lead to “the cell.”— Susan Sontag, Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson
Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch is certain to be one of the most misunderstood films of this or any year, a blistering counterpunch to the prevailing understanding of the influence of Robert Bresson in the cinema and in modern life. Dumont uses the language and tools of Bresson’s “spiritual style” in order to subvert spiritual literalism and its logical and extreme conclusion. By taking the tropes and redemptive themes of the master himself, Dumont engages in a battle for the Bressonian legacy, rejecting the easy moral uplift of so much of recent cinema in favor of a finale that brings grace not to the spiritually conflicted warrior, but to a secular bricklayer hovering around the fringes of the narrative.
Céline (Julie Sokolowski) is a young novice aspiring to become a nun; living in a convent and practicing devout asceticism, the young girl is deeply in love with God and religious discipline. Céline’s faith is so strong, she refuses to follow the rules of her novitiate and is asked to leave the abbey, that she may apply her faith in the real world and learn to humble herself to the wishes of God. Returning to the the opulent world of her parent’s palatial home (her father is a government minister), Céline takes the spiritual advice literally, opening herself to secular experience and befriending an Arab boy named Yassine (Yassine Salime), a little thief with a penchant for disobeying traffic rules who introduces her to his devoutly Muslim older brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis). Céline and Nassir share a depth of devotion but seem connected only by the diversity of faith until, in the film’s controversial final act, Nassir persuades Céline to join his cause, resulting in an unexpected act of violence and a subsequent (I believe, anyway) act of redemption.
Hadewijch
There seems to be a bit of a debate about the final three scenes of the film, and any discussion of Hadewijch would be superficial without looking at their meaning as they hold the key to understanding Dumont’s sly subversion of the now-standard Bressonian model. Needless to say (but here I am saying it anyway), spoilers abound from here on in.
Returning from a brief journey to an unnamed and devastated Arab community, the polar opposite of the cloistered luxury of Céline’s own experience (and the “real world” which galvanizes Céline’s belief in her return to the company of God), Céline and Nassir are shown on the platform of a subway station, nervously fidgeting and eagerly awaiting the train. The pair catch the train and ride, eyes darting and hands twitching until Dumont cuts to street level and a bomb detonates on the sidewalk. I have read it intimated that the pair committed a suicide attack on the subway and the film’s final scene is a flashback to a previous moment (and therefore ironic in its implied meaning) instead of a linear extension of the story, but the text of the film itself seems to indicate otherwise; the explosion is at street level and every sign points to the idea that the pair planted (or knew of the planting of) a bomb and made an escape. The subsequent and final sequence is linear and not elliptical.
Either way you slice it, turning a naive and devout Catholic into a bomber in the name of the fundamentalist Islam is a difficult narrative leap to pull off, and the emotional veracity of Céline’s transformation has been the subject of hot debate. But to focus on that transformation, to fixate on the act of violence, is to miss Dumont’s point and to take one’s eye off the ball completely. In the film’s final moments, Céline runs back to the convent and, as the police arrive (seemingly to question her), heads to a nearby pond where, in an act of emotional desperation straight out of Mouchette’s own devastating finale, she throws herself into the water in the hope of drowning. Suddenly, a hand reaches into the water and saves her; it is the convent’s handyman, an ex-convict who has appeared throughout the film in a few, seemingly unrelated scenes, who saves the girl’s life and, looking toward the heavens, redeems himself.*
In films like Procès de Jeanne d’Arc and Diary Of A Country Priest, Bresson addressed themes of anti-religious violence and the secular dismissal of the inner workings of religious faith, but what would he make of religious terror? Dumont’s slight of hand gives the film its true Bressonian link; instead of tracking the relationship between a pair of religious fundamentalists, we discover that the movie has really been tracking the intersection of a small-time criminal looking to get right with the world and a devout religious girl looking to re-establish what feels like a legitimate connection to the God she loves too well. And here we find Dumont back at the Sontag quote above; two characters, one looking to end his confinement and another looking for a clear space in which to worship God, each headed to and from “cells” of their own. More importantly, Sontag (who wrote her essay in 1964, before Bresson made Mouchette or Au hasard Balthazar), seems to nail the issue of psychology and motivation in Bresson’s films when she writes
”…the “interior drama” which Bresson seeks to depict does not mean psychology. In realistic terms, the motives of Bresson’s characters are often hidden, sometimes downright incredible…Psychological implausibility is scarcely a virtue…But what is central to Bresson and, I think, not to be caviled at, is his evident belief that psychological analysis is superficial. (Reason: it assigns to action a paraphrasable meaning that true art transcends.) He does not intend his characters to be implausible, I’m sure; but he does, I think, intend them to be opaque. Bresson is interested in the forms of spiritual action—in the physics, as it were, rather than in the psychology of souls. Why persons behave as they do is, ultimately, not to be understood. (Psychology, precisely, does claim to understand.) Above all, persuasion is inexplicable, unpredictable… Through the “project” (or “task” or “action”) —exactly contrary to “imagination”—one overcomes the gravity that weighs down the spirit…The spiritual style of Bresson’s heroes is one variety or other of unself-consciousness. (Hence the role of the project in Bresson’s films: it absorbs the energies that would otherwise be spent on the self. It effaces personality, in the sense of personality as what is idiosyncratic in each human being, the limit inside which we are locked.) Consciousness of self is the “gravity” that burdens the spirit; the surpassing of the consciousness of self is “grace,” or spiritual lightness.”
This, in a nutshell, is the perfect articulation of Dumont’s handling of Céline (and her conversion to terror and ultimate humiliation) and the handyman (and his salvation). But there is more than just spiritual philosophy; Dumont makes several direct references to Bresson’s films throughout Hadewijch. Céline seems to embody several Bressonian heros all at once; the wealthy, devout Anne-Marie and the young murderess Therese from Bresson’s debut film Les anges du péché (Hadewijch seems to echo its plot as well**), the ascetic, God-loving Priest from an immoral community in Diary Of A Country Preist, the naive victim of adult male brutality in Mouchette (let alone that ending!) and on and on. As such, it is Dumont’s particular brand of genius to look into the heart of a religious terrorist and find a direct, empathetic link to Bresson’s spiritual universe and then to re-direct the outcome to an almost forgotten character who subverts the narrative primacy of the heroine and relocates grace among the secular order of things. It is here that Dumont’s film stands in contrast to Bresson’s own works, subverting Sontag’s clear-eyed observation that
”...the form of Bresson’s films is designed…to discipline the emotions at the same time that it arouses them: to induce a certain tranquility in the spectator, a state of spiritual balance that is itself the subject of the film.”
Dumont, on the other hand, is interested in Hadewijch as a provocation, especially for the Western audiences who can find little of their own tradition in the rise of fundamentalist Islam. There is an attempt to create a direct and emotional relationship between the spectator and Céline (which is why I believe so many people are outraged by the film’s final act)—there is even a beautiful musical interlude in a church that attempts to bring us directly into the sublime aspect of Céline’s idea of faith. But Céline is both naive and confused, and Dumont’s style is always hinting at the disconnect instead of the harmony. Céline consistently mistakes her deep affinity for the trappings of religious faith with their meaning in world. In other words, like many of Bresson’s heroines, she is a teenager, a young girl institutionally alienated from her God crush, disgusted by the politics of her parents, acting on her feelings and looking to connect. Céline’s flaws, her teenage literalism and confused, manipulable feelings, are applied against Bresson’s “spiritual style” in a modern world where that style has itself been improperly literalized in the political manifestations of religious fundamentalism. Sontag again:
“Bresson’s Catholicism is a language for rendering a certain vision of human action, rather than a ‘position’ that is stated.”
Again, Dumont understands. The film is not so much an excoritaion of literal religious fundamentalism as it is a reclamation of a vision of meaningful human action in a world seemingly gone fucking crazy. I can’t tell you how many films I’ve seen over the past few years that miss this crucial point while attempting to genuflect toward Bresson’s indisputable mastery, but Dumont’s Hadewijch stands above and alone. It is brilliant, recognition enough that grace doesn’t exist among the trappings of a politicized, exploitative faith, but is instead harbored in the earthbound action and heavenward eyes of a simple handyman.
Hadewijch
*If this scene is indeed an ellipsis, occurring prior to the bombing, the meaning is implied that the handyman saves the girl and thinks himself redeemed, only to have saved the life of a woman who will go on to murder in the name of God. As juicy as that idea is, I just can’t see how the text of the film supports it.
**…which further undermines the idea of the elliptical ending.
While the 2009 New York Film Festival opened last night with Alain Resnais’ comic charmer Wild Grass, press screenings have been under way for more than a week and I’ve been spending my days as the Walter Reade Theater taking in as much as I can. It is one of the true privileges of my life, to sit among friends and colleagues and engage with the films at The NYFF. I could go on all night; the amazing projection set-up at the Walter Reade, the way in which the slow changing of the season is completed in small increments, each change attached to a day of films, of ideas and images. It really is one of the things in life that never fails to bring me joy. And while I was not among either the hoity or the toity invited to the Opening Night Film and Party (hey, what do you know, another party I’m not invited to attend… *gasp* and *shock*), I did get a chance to see Wild Grass yesterday and to spend a few, exquisitely rare minutes listening to Alain Resnais and Mathieu Amalric talk about the film. A special moment occurred when Resnais, when asked about his role as an innovator in cinema, took a typically humble approach to the question, modestly deflecting the praise before saying
“No… the only one who has a new way of expressing himself in cinema is Arnuad Desplechin.”
...at which point everyone turned to Mathieu Amalric, who smiled and gave a little shrug as if to say “what can I say?”
Who am I to argue with THAT? Resnais is as generous an artist as you could ask for…
The highlight of the festival so far came Thursday, when I had a chance to see Maren Ade’s Everyone Else and Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch back to back. They couldn’t be more different, nor could they be better. I will be writing about both of them in coming days, as well as a toss of the hat into the ring regarding Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, so be sure to check in for that. It is a very busy time, but I have cleared time this weekend to focus on my writing, so I hope to get some work done to roll out next week.
In the meantime, I took some pictures (see below) and will continue to do so throughout the festival. If you’re interested in following along at home, just visit my 2009 NYFF Flickr page (or even the modest 2008 edition). I’ll do my best to keep it current and will certainly post a “best of” at the end of the festival. Enjoy a few pictures from the festival so far and get over to Alice Tully Hall for the films.
Alain Resnais, Director, Wild Grass
Mathieu Amalric, Wild Grass
Corneliu Porumboiu, Director, Police, Adjective
Alain Resnais, Director, Wild Grass
NYFF Selection Committee Member Dennis Lim and Lars Von Trier, Director, Antichrist
Film Society Of Lincoln Center’s Richard Peña and Alain Resnais, Director, Wild Grass
Rambling thoughts from the other side of the 2009 Toronto Film Festival… Did I mention rambling?... OK, good…
Home from Toronto for a little less than a week now and finally, a moment to sit and think about this year’s festival. One of the wonderful things that keeps me coming back to Toronto year after year is that, despite the festival’s broad, inclusive and dramatic scale, I always feel able to piece together a great experience. I find that, by setting limitations for myself, I end up in the films that will resonate for me, as well as those that will be professionally relevant. As a programmer, I am less inclined to hit the big premieres or titles with distribution scheduled ahead of my own needs (although I certainly make time now and again to treat myself to the bigger films), and instead I like to spend most of my time among films that I will likely not have a chance to see again. So, while the Tweets fly, debates rage and the blogs go haywire with instantaneous reactions to the highest profile work, I am finding more and more that I feel less and less kinship with the new, fast criticism. I am guilty of it myself; I feel like, if I want to get out and talk about a movie, I have to write about films on a single screening and get the post up quickly. Under the weight of 5-6 films a day, the task becomes ridiculous. I am not some old-media type who longs for the days of the quarterly film magazine, but I’ll be damned if the thinking on display in most print publications is not far more engaging to me than the off-the-cuff, award viability, commercial prognostication that dominates on-line film writing these days. Like I said, I guess I fall into that trap more often than not, but here I am posting a wrap-up only a few days after the end of the festival and it already feels dated, which is, I think, crazy. I’m just beginning to know what I think of so many of the films I saw and, well, thinking faster just isn’t a way to live a happy life.
All of this guilt hit me during Toronto, the realization that I gave myself no time or permission to enjoy myself, to watch the films and generate an emotional response over time. I think the hustle of the festival, so many people scrambling to so many simultaneous screenings for so many hours over so many days, left me feeling a little cold in the end. Not about the movies, but about the “community,” about my own purpose and role in the frantic crush to pack in as much as I could. I fell in love with movies on my own terms, renting hundreds of VHS tapes and charting my own course through film history; like everyone else, my experience of cinema is personal and unique (which always was the point for me) despite the beautiful collective experience created in the dark of a theater. What I longed for in my work, and continue to long for, is the passionate conversation, the dialogue, that occurs when personal histories converge at the locus of a single film. It could be over a cup of coffee or in the comments section of a blog, it doesn’t really matter, but I feel more and more distant from the satisfaction of that initial longing, settling for consuming hasty proclamations instead of working toward an engaging way to get involved. I know, I know. Wah and boo-hoo.
The films? Nothing I saw surpassed the deep feeling inspired by Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophète. That is some movie and I won’t even bother trying to write about it until I have seen it again, but one viewing in? I was knocked cold. Another film I loved very much was Waking Sleeping Beauty which somehow unintentionally validated my conviction that the cult of the executive (and the cult of business) in America is on par with religion in terms of its power to create delusional worship. What can I say, it was moving to me to watch the creative work of so many animators and visual artists being used to measure the acumen and success of two or three executives who couldn’t get out of their own way (or in front of a camera) fast enough. It is a huge pet peeve of mine when companies spend tons of money to market themselves only to have the fucking C.E.O. step in front of the lens to pitch the product. Who’s the C.E.O. of Geico? A caveman? A google-eyed pile of money? A gecko? The fact that you probably don’t know tells me they are running a great ad campaign. But man, try telling that to Hollywood; people who need their names on everything have mistaken themselves for the brand.
The plight of the animators was second only to the plight of American garment workers on display in Schmatta: Rags To Riches To Rags which hit home for me on many levels. The film outlines the history of the clothing trade and the garment district in New York City, placing the rapid decline of clothing manufacturing in this country squarely at the feet of Ronald Regan’s union breaking agenda and Bill Clinton’s NAFTA obsession. The film is most effective and most moving when it showcases the history of organized labor and the impact of labor on the texture and reality of the city itself. A little bit of full disclosure: I spent a summer working as an intern for the corporate campagns office of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU, now called UNITE! after merging with the Intenational Ladies Garment Workers Union, or ILGWU) in Washington, D.C. and I’ll be honest, while grunt work was not my forté, the campaigns ACTWU undertook on behalf of workers fit squarely at the tail end of this film’s narrative, so the movie hit home for me in ways I am sure are unique to my own experience.
Finally, the movie that has stayed with me and which I am completely unable to write about, despite many, many attempts to get going, is Jessica Hausner’s terrific Lourdes, a dark comedy about religious exploitation, disability, sex and the power of belief. Sylvie Testud, whom I haven’t seen since Michelange Quay’s Eat, For This Is My Body and who once again turns in a nearly-wordless performance of amazing grace (*zing!*), is Christine, a young woman suffering from Multiple Sclerosis who heads to the holy shrine of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in the Pyrenees Mountains to find healing. The experience, completely sanitized to the point that it resembles a theme park, is full of small miracles, mischief, sex, romance and hilarious stridency, all of it circling the grief and suffering of the desperate pilgrims looking for relief for their suffering. Hausner, who made a moody, creepy movie called Hotel a few years back (which I liked very much), has an interesting touch as a filmmaker and her isolated female protagonists, always standing (or sitting) on the outside of antiquated institutions and their traditions, are always game for whatever life throws their way, be it the threat lurking in the woods behind Hausner’s titular hotel or the expectations of a small gossipy cadre of the faithful at a resort near the site of many Marian apparitions. All of these days later, timliness be damned, I can’t help but wonder at the look on Sylvie Testud’s face when, finally, she descends into her wheelchair in the film’s final frames. Loss? Regret? Resignation? Me too.
Better late than never… a few spoilers in here, so be warned. Toronto wrap up coming next and NYFF starting soon…
One of the “surprise screenings” at this year’s Toronto Film Festival was Christophe Honoré‘s latest, Making Plans For Lena. How much of a surprise? So much so that a colleague told me about the press screening just before the lights went down at a film starting almost simultaneously, so I broke the hell out like I had the chicken pox, ran to the subway and made it in time to discover an almost empty theater; there were maybe 12 people there? No one seemed to know the screening was happening. Surprise! C’est la vie, more for me.
Making Plans For Lena is the story of a mother, ex-wife, sister and daughter named Lena (Chiara Mastroianni, who turns in the best performance of her career), a woman who seems as confused by her own needs and desires as her family and friends seem certain of their own. And why not? Complications abound; on a visit to her parents’ country home with children in tow, Lena is confronted by the judgements and expectations of her mother Annie (played by Marie-Christine Barrault, as luminous here as she was in Stardust Memories all those years ago), the drippy romance of her brother Gulvan (Julian Honoré) and his girlfriend Elise (Honoré regular Alice Butaud), the emotional roller-coaster of her smoking, drinking pregnant sister Frédérique (an hilariously edgy Marina Foïs) and the unexpected appearance of her ex-husband Nigel (Jean-Marc Barr). Outside of the discomforts of family life, Lena is facing a timely predicament; unemployed and looking for work, Lena left Nigel without a word, loading her belongings into her father’s car and setting herself and the children up with her parents, a newly single mother. Suddenly alone, and open to the possibility of a relationship with a new lover (Louis Garrell, naturellement), Lena makes a major life decision that throws her character into stark relief against the backdrop of otherwise reasonable expectations.
Making Plans For Lena
Making Plans For Lena seems, upon a single, rather unexpected viewing, to be a film that finally addresses the enigma of French womanhood and, in particular, the director’s attitude toward the feminine hemisphere of love. Despite the gravity of Lena’s situation, Honoré remains playful and somewhat cryptic about his character’s motivations, instead focusing on the impact of their actions on those around them. Instead of a psychological, character-driven approach to all of his dilemmas, Honoré does what he does best—he turns to the mythology of cinema to draw subtle connections between his characters. In Dans Paris, there was Roman Duris breaking into sad songs when he discussed his feelings while his brother, played by Louis Garrell, hopped from bed to bed like some enchanting nouvelle vague lothario. In Love Songs, the characters again broke into song to express their true feelings, but there the musical numbers flowered into muted versions of old Hollywood glamour. In Lena, Honoré instead chooses to insert a long, strange period fable set in the middle ages, that seems to presage a curse upon Lena’s own heart; a princess only wants to dance with a true partner, but she is so desired by men she cannot find happiness. Instead, each of her suitors falls dead after betraying her pure intentions only to be replaced by another man who doesn’t understand, who in turn falls dead. This passage in the film seems to describe Lena’s feelings about how she is seen and understood by those who love her, and as self-images go, it betrays the sad “otherness” that Lena feels in her own skin; she exists outside the realm of female expectation and, exhausted by suppressing her desire, can’t help but feel the sting of judgement.
The film’s title in French, Non ma fille tu n’iras pas danser, literally means “No, my daughter, you will not dance ” and it goes much further toward explaining Honoré‘s intentions with this beguiling film than the English title Making Plans For Lena (a pun on the great XTC song Making Plans For Nigel which is features in a key moment in the film). Honoré is interested in the social and familial pressures that keep Lena’s true self unknowable, both to her and to us, and tries to build a framework for her ultimate decision that makes it seem both tragic and inevitable. Everything and everyone is bearing down upon a woman who is trying her best to honor her own needs and feelings, and while such a dramatic scenario would be pure grist for someone like Fassbinder or, say, Douglas Sirk, Honoré is a far more elliptical filmmaker than they are; instead of explaining or even dramatizing the depth of Lena’s confusion, he lets Mastroianni carry the load, constantly moving her from room to room, situation to situation, feeling to feeling until the sting of it all pushes her away from the trappings of her life and into the unknown. The film quite literally ends with a beginning and obviously bears a repeat viewing, but it was affecting for me to try to connect with this story and to feel as if I was on the precipice of understanding only to have the rock tumble away from me, back down the hill. I’ll be happy to try and push it up again.
Why Not?: XTC, Making Plans For Nigel
Another moving and intimate film that confronts this same dilemma, this need for a woman to abdicate her sense of responsibility in the name of self-realization, is François Ozon’s tremendous La Refuge which sees the director return to the tonal mastery he displayed in Under The Sand. Isabelle Carré (who, let’s be honest, is the French Amy Adams… and I mean that in the best sense) plays Mousse, a drug addict who awakens to discover that she and her wealthy lover (and fellow junkie) Louis (Melvil Poupaud) have overdosed on some bad heroin. She has survived, he has not, which deeply complicates the fact that Mousse is pregnant with his child. Louis’ rich parents demand that Mousse end the pregnancy, but instead Mousse heads off to a friend’s oceanside home to ride out the pregnancy (and her methadone prescription) in solitude. Louis’ brother Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy) shows up one day, passing through on holiday and interested to see how Mousse is coping in the aftermath of their mutual loss. Something greater than a friendship forms between the two, something akin to family, and after Mousse returns to Paris to give birth, Paul arrives to greet his niece, setting up a wrenching finale that pays off beautifully.
I have long admired, defended and been moved by the dexterity of Ozon’s filmmaking, and while so many seem to struggle understanding the way in which he uses genre to outline his concerns, from the campy, kitschy tradition of a certain strain of gay culture that spans the ages to Fassbinderian melodrama to the psychological thriller straight through to the fairy tale, each of Ozon’s films bears the mark of a true auteur whose visual strategies, direction of actors and framing underscore a singular approach to cinematic storytelling. When you sit down to watch Ozon, you may not know which side of himself he will express, but each and every frame is of a piece with his unique voice. It seems to me that Ozon is deeply undervalued in both the queer community and the film community as a whole and I am not sure why that is. It may be that while many of his films don’t address the issues of queer politics and desire directly, each of them is steeped in the grand (and wonderful) tradition of queer filmmaking and each draws deeply from the well of a certain gay aesthetic, one that walks a tightrope between melodrama and drama, with a wink and a kiss on the cheek to what has come before.
Le Refuge
Which is not to say that a chubby breeder like me can’t find a way into Ozon’s work; I’ve seen almost every feature film he’s made and I am knocked out by almost all of them (I’ll admit I didn’t love Sitcom, although I certainly laughed through it). Is it that Ozon is so prolific in the age of fast fast fast mass media that no one can keep up with his work? Or does it say something unthinkable about the state of our cinema in general that a great director like Ozon would be as marginalized by American audiences as he seems to be? I know it is not a great time for foreign film in this country, but if movies like Under The Sand or Swimming Pool or 8 Women or 5x2 or A Time To Rest barely make a dent in the community of people who care about these films, I’m not sure there is much I can continue to hope for. Le Refuge is more than just a continuation of Ozon’s work and concerns—it is not just “The new Ozon”—it is a beautifully registered drama full of emotional conflict, each frame of which feels true to the heart of the matter at hand. Ozon’s work continues to be a rare accomplishment, a cinema I’d rather celebrate, debate and discuss today than look fondly upon tomorrow.
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