Nocturnal Uproar (1979, Tapage nocturne)

Nocturnal Uproar was Catherine Breillat’s second film, released in 1979, and is one of her rarest movies.  It has finally found an American home video release, a DVD from Pathfinder Home Entertainment which, despite being released only last week, is already difficult to locate.  The film is about a filmmaker, Solange, played by the beautiful Dominique Laffin, who intellectualizes sex, who has lots of sex, and who seldom makes movies.  Maybe she’s too busy in the bedroom for such distractions.

Solange is a young writer / director whose sexual conquests are vast and legendary.  She is married to a rich moneyman, someone who lets her indulge in her appetites.  First is her lead actor, a handsome American played by Warhol and Paul Morrissey regular Joe Dallesandro, but Solange states that ‘she loves him and is sick of him.’  Solange is always hungry, and when she meets a fellow director she becomes infatuated with him, wants him, and his initial resistance only makes her steadfast to the point where she develops an unhealthy obsession that has her questioning her thoughts on desire and sex.

Descriptions of the film state that Solange as a filmmaker does what her male counterparts do—sleep with lots of people, including her lead performer.  My problem is that whenever a film is about a filmmaker I find the material is often too fake, and the profession is treated as something intangible and sacred or taken for granted and the process of filmmaking is never done justice.  With Nocturnal Uproar it’s simply not used at all.  Solange functions as a filmmaker for only the first act and only slightly.  Sessions in the editing room are used complaining about her sexual partners, and then we never see or hear anything about her work.  The film changes focus before the half-way point, signs of an unfocused screenplay, and perhaps the film is less about a filmmaker and more about a woman.  But why have her be a director?  It doesn’t enhance the mise en scène nor give depth to the character; film director is such a pronounced profession that to have it go unused I found a distraction.

Perhaps the film is more personal for Catherine Breillat.  Is it a record of her working methods during this period?  Her films have always dealt with sexuality and maybe the filmmaker was simply using the medium to express her own thoughts and experiences.  I love that; a great deal of why I love the cinema is the auteur theory which states the director is the author of a film; that links in an artist’s work can be found from work to work.  Breillat surely qualifies, and I can see how this film influenced her later work.  For example, it seems to be a precursor or even a veiled prequel to Sex Is Comedy, an infinitely more insightful look at the filmmaking process and sexual manipulation, and there’s a series of shots showing 2 characters descending a spiral staircase that she would repeat 30 years later in Bluebeard.  The problem with Nocturnal Uproar is that it isn’t insightful about the cinema, it isn’t insightful about relationships, and it isn’t even honest about sex.  I don’t want to sound perverted but the sex scenes in this film almost all look fake, though it is obvious that actress Laffin is being touched between her legs.  The film develops into a woman’s sexual obsession for a man who toys with her, someone who may or may not have alternate intentions with his amours.  This is a great subject for a film but it is arrived at a little too late.

Considering gender and sex; can a woman be as sexually free as a man?  Sure she can prey after the men who attract her like some men do for women or even other men, but because women have been brought up to be and perhaps instinctually are more in tuned with their emotions can they have indiscriminate sex and not, on some level, feel tied to the men they have?  Is the act of being penetrated, of having someone inside of you, too intimate a feeling to simply toss off sexual intercourse as a fling?  On some level I believe this.  The intimacy created by inviting someone inside physically is a more intense sensation, one that requires more trust and strength than being the more dominant sexual partner, and perhaps Breillat is arguing that women cannot be free sexually and perhaps more generally they lack freedom in Christian-dominated societies.

The film works better as an intellectual exercise than it does a movie because frankly it isn’t visually interesting.  It’s all dialogue, and while the majority of Breillat’s work relies on dialogue here her characters have very little of interest to say.  They seem more to be parodying what a Breillat film will become rather than offering genuine insight into sexual or human relationships.  Catherine Breillat again gets a gutsy and rather brilliant performance from her lead, Dominique Laffin, whose innocent looks and beauty reminded me of Irene Jacob.  Laffin is nude a lot, mostly from the waist down, an interesting decision by the director, and she performs the part great as written.  I only wish it were written better.  She is however an actress I loved looking at, and I was shocked to read that she died at 33 of a heart attack.  Life is sometimes a bad joke.  Joe Dallesandro was a surprise to see.  He’s not a great actor but he has been great on screen, particularly in Flesh, the Warhol Factor’s best feature.  Here he is playing someone like himself, a handsome young actor who’s photographed more for his looks than talent.  It’s sad that while still young, the effects of drug use seemed already to be working against him in 1979.  The character of Bruno, Solange’s filmmaker lover, isn’t that impressive.  He has his games with Solange but I never believed that she would become so obsessed by this man.  Yes she is flirtatious but the parts are not well developed and we never see their intensity build.

Catherine Breillat may be a crude or uneven filmmaker—some of her movies are masterpieces, others insufferably slow and thoughtless—but that is the nature of her art.  She uses the cinema not to entertain or even to enlighten but to rummage through her own demons.  This explains the existence of Nocturnal Uproar.  It is an impulsive film, indecisive; maybe this is the film she should make now, with some 30 years distance, to truly make her intentions felt.  Maybe now after a life lived, a stoke which must be life changing, she can grasp at a more clear understanding of her younger self and write about a sexually desiring filmmaker who uses men until she tires of them.

Nocturnal Uproar (1979)

(a.k.a. Tapage nocturne)

* the DVD goes by the title "Night After Night" *

Director: Catherine Breillat

Writer: Catherine Breillat

Stars: Dominique Laffin, Bertrand Bonvoisin and Joe Dallesandro

France

In French

Runtime: 97 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134993/

A great resource for Breillat on DVD:
http://breillat.blogspot.com/

I have been in touch with Pathfinder Home Entertainment via email and they confirmed that Dirty Like An Angel, currently Breillat's only unreleased film in the US, will be released this fall.

Sleeping Beauty, The (2010, Belle endormie, La)

Catherine Breillat is the most provocative filmmaker alive.  Her work inspires shocks of admiration and disdain.  Fat Girl is the film that cemented Breillat’s reputation as a master.  That film dealt directly with the corruption of young girls facing their sexuality.  The Sleeping Beauty sleeps right through these experiences.  It is an adaptation of the famous fairytale that we know in one form or another: a new-born princess is cursed to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and sleep for a very long time.  In Breillat’s film, she will prick her finger at age 6 and sleep for 100 years.

The film unfolds in three sections, the first showing Anastasia at 6 before the prick.  She is in line with Breillat’s heroines: independent; rebelling against the role society has carved for women but incapable of igniting a revolution.  Instead of wearing pretty dresses, Anastasia wishes to be a boy and prefers climbing trees and skinning knees.  In perhaps a more contemporary scenario, she refuses to take part in a beauty pageant.  These scenes feel the most authentic.  Breillat seems to have a natural gift for period films, nothing excessive, but there is just enough dust on the edges of the frame.  The little girl playing Anastasia, the heir to the Russian throne, is bright and charming, inquisitive and beautiful.  She represents womanhood untouched by the deceit and bodily fluids of the adult world.  Yet her rebellion seals her fate; in refusing to be put on display, she pricks her finger—Breillat’s acceptance that women are fated to follow their pre-determined path.

This takes us into the second phase of the film, Anastasia’s slumber, told in an episodic way much like Alice in Wonderland, where Anastasia encounters one unusual situation after another.  It’s an interesting conceit to delve into Sleeping Beauty’s dreams.  I’ve certainly never considered what those fairytale princesses dream up during their inevitable slumber.  The problem is nothing interesting develops in these scenes.  No tension at all.  In her dreams, Anastasia encounters a young boy named Peter.  They have a very pure relationship until Peter is lured away by the Snow Queen, an oddly colored dominatrix in what is perhaps the film’s most embarrassing image.  Anastasia then searches for her friend and encounters a gypsy girl.  There is a real lack of imagination in these dreams.  Breillat takes neither a surrealist approach nor does anything special.  These scenes happen very matter-of-factly, and if one were paying only mild attention to the film (perhaps dozing off) it would be difficult to follow that Anastasia is now asleep.  Perhaps if Breillat had focused in on her material, given Anastasia some quest to accomplish that involved wonder and corrupted innocence, she could have made this structure work.  It’s a terrific idea after all but it is not exploited.  Still, up to now the film is not a total disaster.

The concluding 20 minutes have Anastasia awaken at 16.  The great-grandson of Peter wanders into her bedroom from out of nowhere and proclaims his love, or at least his lust.  How did he know where to find her or that she exists at all?

The 6 year old Anastasia says to her three kind fairies, ‘It would be disappointing that in 100 years you do not wake me up.’  Is this indeed what happened?  Because Peter and the gypsy girl existed in Anastasia’s dreams, how do they exist in reality?  How too is the gypsy girl so young?  Shouldn’t she be dead at roughly 106 years old?  She certainly would not be beautiful, naked, and in bed with the 16 year old Anastasia.  But in this final part we get only the skeleton of a film.  The most interesting material in the story as told by Breillat seems to be left out.  This girl, who has slept through her period of sexual discovery, finally awakens as a woman, with breasts, capable of seducing men and finding pleasure in the modern world, and all she does is rebel against Peter and frolic in bed for the audience’s titillation.  The finale comes abruptly and unsatisfactorily.  Without giving away the ending, it presents the most interesting plot development in the entire film.  I feel that Breillat’s material really began with that ending and the film should have instead followed a fish out of water princess as she confronts the predicament she and Peter have put her in.  And the concluding passages contain enough pseudo-psycho-sexual babble to offend even the most ardent French film lover.

A problem typical of the entire film is the Carabosse character, the Maleficent of Breillat’s version.  Visually stunning, a sinister, a-sexual being, the very first shot of the film has her holding the infant Princess Anastasia in one hand, a pair of scissors in the other.  As the three kind fairies approach the child, Carabosse tells the carefree girls of her wicked spell.  Why exactly does Carabosse hate this family?  We see nothing of her magical powers, and I think Breillat takes for granted that we the audience will know the story and supply our own motivation.  But this “merciless” opening is noticeably awkward because the tragic news of Anastasia’s inevitable demise didn't resonate with me.  When Catherine Breillat made Anatomy of Hell after 3 particularly explicit films, it felt to me that she had grown so full of herself that she could risk delivering excessively more of what she was used to.  It was not the case; Anatomy of Hell was an artistic disaster made with relatively good intentions and it seems the director is again following the same path.  If for her next film she can deliver another surprising piece like The Last Mistress she can take herself in a whole new direction.

I still respect Catherine Breillat as a great auteur.  Even in The Sleeping Beauty there are the themes that dominate her work.  In fact, this film reminds me most of the director’s debut, A Real Young Girl, a surrealistic and gross gender-specific sexual awakening flick.  Unpleasant as parts of that film were, it was still terrific as a fan to find Breillat, like Hitchcock, rummaging over the same ideas in perpetuity.  The Sleeping Beauty just doesn’t offer anything new.  Bluebeard, her previous film, another fantasy adapted from the pages of Charles Perrault, was a terrific little film that tried to reconcile the fairytale with real young girls in a contemporary setting.  What we were seeing of Bluebeard was in fact not the story being told.  It seems Breillat doesn’t have the imagination (or funds—The Sleeping Beauty was a French television film, perhaps leading to the rough quality of the finished work) to pull off an epic fantasy.  How eager I was to see it though.

Sleeping Beauty, The (2010)

(a.k.a. Belle endormie, La)

Director: Catherine Breillat

Writer: Catherine Breillat (screenplay), Charles Perrault (story)

Stars: Clara Besnainou, Julia Artamonov, and Kerian Mayan

France

In French and Russian

Runtime: 82 minutes

The Sleeping Beauty is scheduled to be released theatrically in the US this Spring from Strand Releasing.  A DVD release should follow.

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1721683/