Love Songs (2007, Chansons d'amour, Les)

Why is sadness and humor so closely related?  Christophe Honoré’s musical Love Songs is a bittersweet film that remains one of the great pleasures from this productive auteur.  He takes a revisionist approach to the movie musical, telling a contemporary story with contemporary music by the French songwriter Alex Beaupain, and the result is a joyous and very sad story of love, loss, and life redeemed with new love.

Three people, Ismaël, Julie, and Alice, share a life together in Paris.  Alice is into non-sex, and Julie is desperate to keep Ismaël but unhappy with their current life.  She confides to her sister Jeanne that Ismaël is forcing her to break up for him.  Julie dies almost literally of a broken heart and Ismaël becomes an emotional wreck.  He dodges Julie’s loving family, tries to build on his friendship with Alice, but to spare himself pain he distances himself from emotion.  Until Erwann.  Erwann is a young kid determined to have Ismaël love him.

Louis Garrel is my favorite actor.  He embodies cinematic spirit better than any performer today, and he reminds me a lot of Jean-Pierre Léaud.  Léaud was a very divisive actor from the New Wave and is Garrel’s godfather, so the parallel is fair to draw.  But Garrel is more accessible than Léaud maybe because he’s more handsome and his personality more playful and innocent.  Even when he’s in bed with two women he retains his innocence.  The secret might be that he’s a terrific actor.  He has become a muse for Honoré, but the director’s true muse is Chiara Mastroianni.  Love Songs was her first film for Honoré and she has since appeared in every one of his films, including a single shot in La belle personne.  She is very good as Julie’s sister, and like her mother she can handle a musical.  The dynamic between these three characters is the saddest thing about Love Songs.  It is clear that Julie loves Ismaël because she gets so easily upset at him for disappointing her.  For possibly many reasons, Ismaël is constantly keeping her away.  We see him more than once avoiding true physical emotion with her, which only aids Julie’s worsening emotional health.  When she dies, Ismaël is destroyed.  Her family is destroyed, and Jeanne tries to get Ismaël to remain close to them.  I think it quite clear that she is in love with him.  And he constantly disappoints her, too.  She finds a woman in his bed that isn’t Alice and Jeanne is hurt.  She finds someone else in his bed and things become clearer for her, but not easier.

The obstacle the film might have with mainstream audiences is that it believes in pansexuality, the idea that sexual pleasure is not be limited by gender.  I think that is a very unrealistic argument.  Most people know which sexual partners appeal to them.  But because Love Songs is a musical, I was swept away.  That Erwann could get through to Ismaël is a satisfying finale but wholly unrealistic.

So a good question to ask: in a musical, is the story more important or the music?  Can we forgive a fantasy if the music is so infectious?  To each his own, but I certainly could.  Love Songs has an implausible story.  I don’t believe that Ismaël, who we’ve seen sexually linked with three different women, would fall for Erwann, a boy, no matter how adorable he is.  Yet, this is a fantasy and I wanted to believe that Erwann’s potent amours would break Ismaël down and rebuild him.  I’m probably using the wrong words to describe the situation.  The film really isn’t sentimental or sappy.

Honoré’s greatest strength is the energy he brings to his films, an energy and rhythm always supported by the grittiness of real life.  He is a cinefile two generations removed from the New Wave, and this connection is important to follow a lineage through the great history of French cinema.  Honoré is the finest director of his generation, the thematic and stylistic heir of Godard and Truffaut.  He doesn’t believe in simple emotions, at least as a filmmaker.  That’s why parts of this film are heartbreaking.  I haven’t seen my share of musicals, but what I understand is that they are happy, with happy endings.  The ending of Love Songs is hopeful but the tragedy of loss always hangs over.  Take the song “Au parc,” sung by Jeanne.  She describes the renewing seasons and the ever-present playful children at the park she and her sister grew up in, but she always remembers, “It will all be there, except for you.”  Or the unusual love song Ismaël sings to Erwann when they first make love.  He asks Erwann to find Julie inside of him and kill her a second time so that Ismaël can move on.  Their love is built on need more than sexual attraction.  Erwann, a virgin, desires Ismaël and Ismaël needs a body to cling to.

The real revelation in the cast was of course Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet as Erwann.  He’s since become a regular in French films.  I like him a lot in this film.  He has a terrific voice.  If I had to name the scene-stealing performance though, I would signal out Clotilde Hesme.  She plays Alice, the third party in the ménage-a-trois.  I felt her role was not as substantial as Garrel’s or Ludivine Sagnier’s as Julie but Hesme has a quality about her that is charming and a regal look that I found stunning.

Alex Beaupain has written the music for every one of Honoré’s films.  In what forms a trilogy, Dans Paris, Love Songs, and La belle personne are, in Beaupain’s words, ‘movies with songs’.  Love Songs is their only full length musical.  Beaupain is a great songwriter.  His lyrics are intelligent, ironic, and absolutely charming.  I listen to his two studio albums at the gym and I don’t even understand French.  They just sound great.  I won’t do a song by song breakdown, but “De bonnes raisons”, the opening number, is in many ways a call back to the 60s.  Towards the end of this upbeat swanky song there’s a guitar riff, nearly buried under the lyrics, that is so 1960s it just makes you smile.  “La Bastille” is one of the saddest songs in the film.  Julie sings about how the rain outside empties the square of the angel statue of the Bastille.  Each member of her family takes a section of the song, and we see that while they love and are happy, such happiness is joined with the sorrows of life.

But the storytelling remains simple.  If I have one negative criticism it would be that the film is rushed.  It’s almost 100 minutes but especially with my most recent viewing I felt the story was hurried through.  Often times the pace is too quick; we aren’t given the time in between story beats to contemplate or even orient ourselves.  Other times, especially in the latter half of the film, this rushed approach hinders the storytelling.  Some things feel washed over just to get to the next musical number.  For example, when Erwann gives Ismaël his keys, inviting him to stay, Ismaël not only has a change of heart by agreeing to go home with him, he seems excited by the idea.  This is contrary to what he has just said.  Such changes of mind are understandable, but the film doesn’t make his sudden change of mind clear.

The plot isn’t the thing.  All I can say to recommend Love Songs is that it makes me happy.  I can talk forever about these moments, like when Ismaël jokingly tries to cut off Alice’s tongue with a pair of scissors or when Alice kids him about not being circumcised when he’s Jewish; or when Alice, Julie and Ismaël dance on the streets of Paris; or the playful and dynamic song “Le distance” where Erwann tires to seduce Ismaël; and every scene with Julie’s family.  Come to think of it, Love Songs is one of my favorite films, imperfect as it is, sad as parts of it is, but its energy and mood make it a lot of fun to watch.

Love Songs (2007)

(a.k.a. Chansons d'amour, Les)

Director: Christophe Honoré

Writer: Christophe Honoré

Stars: Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, Clotilde Hesme, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet and Chiara Mastroianni

Music: Alex Beaupain

France

In French

Runtime: 95 minutes

Buy Love Songs at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Songs-Ludivine-Sagnier/dp/B001DJ7PUA/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302383159&sr=1-1

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0996605/

Man at Bath (2010, Homme au bain)

I feel sorry for François Sagat.  A prolific and somewhat mainstream gay porn star, his first two non-industry films—his first two legitimate films—have him nude, erect, and having lots of sex.  I expect more from the artists who choose to take a non-conventional casting choice like Sagat for a non-porno.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  Obviously we are dealing with a much sexualized, almost inhuman, figure given his physicality, but in the case of Man at Bath (I have not seen L.A. Zombie) he makes his looks and type-casting work in his favor.  He comes off as the most impressive, and the most sympathetic, character in a world filled with selfish, pretentious people.

Man at Bath is supposedly a very spontaneous film from writer / director Christophe Honoré, one of the most exciting contemporary French directors and one of my personal favorites.  Spontaneous might be another word for uneven.  I like the movie more than I expected to, in fact I adore this movie in spots, but a more assured approach by the director would have made his points more effective.  Sagat plays Emmanuel, a hustler who’s shacked up with Omar, a young filmmaker, a stand-in it seems for Honoré himself.  Omar is going to New York with real-life actress Chiara Mastroianni to promote their newest film.  Emmanuel, first seen toweling himself off after a shower, essentially rapes Omar before he leaves.  As an aside and I don’t mean to offend, I would not consider this a rape as we understand the word today.  Emmanuel and Omar are a couple, they live together.  If one partner wants sex and forces the other, it seems to me it’s not so much rape but a marital argument.  You’ve given yourself already to this person and in part it is selfish to deny someone you love (or at least care about) pleasure.  Omar tells Emmanuel to be gone when he returns home.  From here the film shifts between New York, with Omar and Mastroianni, playing herself, and Gennevilliers, France, where Emmanuel visits or runs into many people who seem to want or have had him.

When I first read of this film, I figured the scenes in New York with Mastroianni, a gifted actress, would be the more honest, impressive, etc, material in the film and the scenes with François Sagat would be boarder-line unwatchable given the stereotypical bad acting chops porn stars are graced with.  I was quite surprised to find the opposite.  Sagat is very good here.  At first he seems to be posing, from the very beginning, right out of the shower, even as he looks at Omar, someone we learn he did love in his own more violently masculine way.  Either Sagat grew on me or, the more I saw of him, the more I understood that this very sexy man with a god-like physique is still a man, someone who is constantly objectified and judged on his looks and the fact that he trades on his looks.  After Omar leaves, Emmanuel visits the apartment of an American art collector who up until now had been paying for Emmanuel’s services.  This man, a very pretentious prick, says some very honest and some very bullshit things as Emmanuel gets nude and poses.  Honoré makes a good decision here.  The only time we see Sagat full-on nude, everything hanging, he stands there facing the camera as this man degrades him, tells him he’s like a sculpture, he’s bad art, he’s kitsch.  Sagat stands there, fidgeting, and at one moment scratches at his thigh.  He becomes human in this moment and I felt very sorry for him.

The New York scenes amount to little more than hand-held material Honoré shot while promoting Making Plans for Lena.  Mastroianni’s presence is a mystery.  She has no purpose in the film and in fact has little screen time.  Omar, who operates the camera, is barely scene, and the story of these scenes encompasses an explicit relationship Omar finds with a young college student.  Here the explicitness is uncomfortable.  The actor playing the fling looks very awkward and embarrassed as he is seen sucking on Omar’s penis.  These scenes are darkly lit, look like amateur hand-held stuff found on YouTube, and in a way make the explicit shots even dirtier.  In hindsight my respect for François Sagat grows.  You need to be a certain kind of performer in order to have sex in front of a camera.  But in the grand scheme of things, Omar’s scenes, while not completely bad, distract from the real material, the humanizing of Sagat’s persona.

In one way Man at Bath might be a very important film.  Few porn stars have sustained a career in the movies.  In fact I can't think of a single one.  While Sagat thankfully hasn’t given up the trade, Man at Bath might give the actor much deserved attention in the mainstream media.  Both Man at Bath and L.A. Zombie played at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2010, making François Sagat the only actor with two films showing at the festival.  This could be a positive step for a male porn star, let alone a gay porn star, to be recognized as a serious talent.

Could this part have been played by another actor?  It would miss the point really.  Honoré has said that Sagat has redefined masculinity, and his presence in the film becomes the major reason for recommending it.  The director shows his talent for brining vibrant, authentic energy to his images, and if you’ve seen Honoré’s more recent films Man at Bath is a return to the more explicit, less whimsical material that has come to define a transgressive contemporary French cinema.  One thing to note is that none of the characters are really sympathetic, including Emmanuel.  Sagat’s character is the most developed and therefore relatable, but everyone here is unpleasant.  Any fiction writer will tell you that unlikeable characters are the hardest to write because the audience will not invest in the material.  I think the director / actor combination here makes the film work.  It’s relatively short running time only helps.  Honoré’s more improvisational style lets the material find its own way, and yes it dawdles some, but it’s impressive to simply observe movie characters for moments in their lives.  The film never tries to be more than observations, and perhaps subconsciously the hand-held camera was to aid in this tact.  A more clearly developed story, at least in the New York parts, would only have helped the film, but I’m glad I saw the picture, and happy too that Christophe Honoré remains one of the constant great filmmakers of his generation.

This film, however, may not be for everyone.  Most people won’t want to watch it.  This is not Brokeback Mountain.  These are honestly written gay characters.  None of them are saints, some are sinners; they fuck, they make a mess, and they bail.  Straight people, men in particular, probably won’t care for this film.  Gay people might also be offended because political correctness has homogenized the gay community in the United States.  The few published reviews for Man at Bath dwell on the sexual explicitness but there is a lot of honesty coming through the screen.  It’s an honesty that belongs to the cinema.

Man at Bath (2010)
(a.k.a. Homme au bain)
Director: Christophe Honoré
Writer: Christophe Honoré
Stars: François Sagat, Omar Ben Sellem and Chiara Mastroianni
France
In French and English
Runtime: 72 minutes

To purchase Man at Bath on DVD, visit Amazon (France):
http://www.amazon.fr/Lhomme-au-bain-Christophe-Honor%C3%A9/dp/B004DJPFPE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300089431&sr=1-1
(unfortunately, the DVD does not contain English subtitles)

IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1701995/