Manderlay (2005)

Manderlay is a difficult film to understand - what is it trying to say, and more appropriately how do I interpret it?  The thing is I don’t know.  I can describe my impressions as I was watching the film, but because the film has such a unique premise, here’s a bit about it:

Grace, Lars von Trier’s lead character from Dogville, stumbles onto the Manderlay plantation.  Here, in 1933, slavery still exists.  Grace is shocked.  With the help of her father’s gangsters, she frees the slaves.  The Madame of the estate, played by the great Lauren Bacall, dies, and Wilhelm, the eldest slave, does not know what the slaves will do with their new freedom.  Grace decides to stay on at Manderlay and teach the former slaves self-worth and atone for the sins of white Americans.

Von Trier’s premises are always fascinating, if not a bit extreme and slanted.

At first von Trier seems kind of silly or at least simple minded.  Grace is a do-gooder liberal socialite, the slaves dimwitted and ready to follow orders.  The film, or at least Grace and the proudest of the freed slaves, Timothy, hammers home the fact that America had slavery, and that white Americans are to be held responsible.  While this is undeniably true, it seems that von Trier forgot that slavery originated in Europe.  It was the Europeans who took men and women from Africa and enslaved them.  And before that the Egyptians enslaved the Jews.  Slavery is not an American invention.

So at the start of the film I felt it lacked weight.  It seemed untidy and outrageously simple, perhaps because after Nicole Kidman’s brilliant performance as Grace in Dogville, it was difficult to adjust to Bryce Dallas Howard’s interpretation of the character.  But as Grace settles into her role as god of Manderlay and we get to discover the personalities of the former slaves, the film starts to pick up.

Grace, believing some order needs to motivate the bewildered slaves, introduces them to the idea of democracy, the system of America that, as Americans, they should already be well aware of.  She creates a system of voting where each person on the plantation can cast one vote.  That sounds like America, and for me the film became less about slavery and more a microcosm of American life using this extreme premise to prove its points.  The slaves collectively vote on who owns the rake, literally on what time of day it is, and when it is appropriate for people to laugh, late at night being most inconsiderate of others who sleep.  The film became interesting when it was asking serious questions: is democracy feasible?  I don’t think so.  America may be the longest surviving democracy, as a nation we’ve managed it better than other entities before us, but we are not a democracy.  We are a republic, where the majority of the vote passes.  People—some people—do not have individual freedoms.  Well, yes we do, but in our country certain people have less rights or different rights than the majority.  In a democracy this would not be an issue, but because individual rights are voted on by the majority these rights are subject.

This is not a political rant, but von Trier, an outsider, someone who has confessed his mistrust of the American government and American’s perceived (sometimes undeniable) prejudice against minorities is asking serious questions we in this country don’t often ask.  We prefer to see isolated cases or the big picture, saying that slowly things are getting better and we turn a blind eye to the difficult realities of those who have to fight for their freedom.  America is not at war with itself; there should be no causalities.  No one should not suffer in a democracy.

Von Trier should know better, though, that every nation has similar problems.  Perhaps it is America’s ideals that set us apart.  If we aspire to be better, no forgiveness is allotted to our failures, failures we have in abundance as the director points out in a horrifying and oddly beautiful photographic montage of American racism using actual photos.

A film might have the right side of an argument, or argue its misguided case well, but propaganda means nothing if the material is not engaging.  So how effective is Manderlay as a film?

One thing that puzzled me is Grace, her motivations and her ultimate failure (failure in ways that are unpredictable so I hope this sentence wasn’t too much of a spoiler).  As a liberal, I can’t help but be offended when generally liberal ideas are scrutinized, but I have to say in the context of the film the scrutiny is accurate.  Grace is simplistically idealistic and really doesn’t know how the world functions.  She puts too much faith in the concept of freedom and never asks if she should.  I won’t say anymore regarding the ending but I will ask the question: are black people offended by it?  If I were black I think it would raise my eyebrow.  Regardless, I found it fascinating, offensive, but still fascinating.

Manderlay is not 100% successful, but von Trier’s films are always rough around the edges.  The film succeeds in its own convictions.  The acting is exceptional, the casting, too.  Danny Glover has his best role in recent years.  I forgot just how powerful and commanding an actor he is.  He is very impressive, and seeing him together with Lauren Bacall was strange and wonderful.  Bacall is a legend, obviously, and such a claim does a disservice to just how powerful she is, but here her role is very small.  She appeared in Dogville as a different character but in both of her films with Lars von Trier she has not been given anything significant to do.  But her cache is enough.

Bryce Dallas Howard is not Nicole Kidman.  Kidman gave her best performance as Grace in Dogville; she was natural and frail and eager.  Howard’s performance feels like a period piece.  She seems out of it.  She’s trying too hard.  Her delivery is stagy and unconvincing, but as the film went on I accepted her.  She does, like all of von Trier’s leading ladies, some very brave things on screen.  Unlike, Björk or Kidman however, Howard’s raw presence isn’t too impressive.  She’s not bad but not on the level of a Lars von Trier film.  And I’d hate to blame an actor for the unevenness of a film but when the material is this outrageous, the right performance can cement the outrageous in a grounded world.  It doesn’t so much happen in Manderlay.

Manderlay (2005)

Writer / Director: Lars von Trier

Stars: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach De Bankole, Danny Glover, Lauren Bacall

Denmark

In English

139 minutes

IMDb link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342735

Inspector Bellamy (2009, Bellamy)

There’s a lot going on in Inspector Bellamy. What could have been a simple mystery instead layers multiple story threads, each working separately the way real life does, and in unison, creating a psychological portrait not just of its lead character but of the world he inhabits.

Inspector Bellamy is curious; about the machinations of life, the reasons why. He is on vacation with his beautiful, youthful wife Françoise, but cannot get away from what we assume is his passion: crime. A mysterious man shows up with a confession—he has killed someone. We know from the opening credits that a car has crashed off a cliff, killing—deforming—the driver. Television reports tell us the deceased man was not who everyone thought it would be. Instead of the insurance salesman who owned the car, the victim is an unknown, and the insurance salesman has attempted to defraud his company and is now in hiding. The man who visits Bellamy is in fact the missing man, at first under the thin alias of Noël Gentil but really Emile Leullet. Who is the dead man then, and why does Inspector Bellamy indulge Leullet in his late night confessions? Does he want to single-handedly solve a popular mystery for fame? For justice? His own curiosity? The answer comes after the climax which is less anti-climatic when viewing the film as a straight-forward mystery, but the reason for Bellamy’s indulgence allows us to understand his entire career as an inspector.

The story threads of Inspector Bellamy are slow in revealing themselves, but the film is more rewarding for it. In comes Bellamy’s brother, Jacques, handsome, young, a loser and a drunk. Bellamy and Jacques have a tense relationship, and Françoise is the mediator between them. But the more The Inspector discovers about the Leullet case the more he is convinced his life mirrors it, that his wife is having an affair.

I admit at first I was lost. That is to say so many small things were happening in short bursts that I did not know what the true story was. For example, characters are introduced who seemingly have no narrative purpose (they will not advance the mystery—this includes the brother character); there are too many convenient personal connections between unlikely characters, etc. It is lucky the film was directed by the seasoned professional Claude Chabrol and stars Gérard Depardieu. Depardieu especially leads an extraordinary cast through a series of twisting scenes with (at first) no purpose and succeeds in making them interesting, so even when I was lost I was not frustrated. Tensions are hinted at, maybe only suggested, by Chabrol, and little by little these present themselves as more menacing and complicated to the extreme.

Chabrol is known mostly as the French Master of Suspense, a moniker that does as much a disservice to him as it did to Hitchcock. Both filmmakers used a popular genre to convey personal interests and demons. Here Chabrol is concerned with being old and overweight, married to a beauty and feeling insecure. There is more, some of which I’m sure exist in my own reading of the film, but anything beyond a superficial telling of the plot is harmful. Things are more fun to discover on your own. But understand the thriller plot is merely the starting point for a personal film filled with character and insight and commentary. The final scene in court where Leullet’s lawyer defends him with a song is a kind of mocking sting at the absurdity of the judicial system which often feels as if it’s working for those who know how to circumvent it rather than for justice.

The film gives me renewed interest in Chabrol’s past films. I’ll admit to not being a fan. I’ve enjoyed his recent work and think Inspector Bellamy is his best effort since 2000, but his past masterpieces, laid during the infancy of the French New Wave, have always bored me. He seemed to me a pale imitator of Hitchcock’s, someone whose work felt more like cheap but brisk 70s American television. I noticed with Inspector Bellamy how this film, more than his other recent works, mirrors his earlier output, particularly Les biches. The machinations of the plot seem to service the dysfunction underneath, and with this renewed interest I may pick up again on Chabrol’s early career.

There isn’t much more for me to say. The film is entertaining and surprisingly subtle. I don’t want to talk about how the various subplots merge into the ultimate story being told, and beyond that the film can stand on its own. Being Chabrol’s final film and first collaboration with Depardieu, this is a film that doesn’t need my recommendation to endorse it.

Inspector Bellamy (2009)

(a.k.a. Bellamy)

Director: Claude Chabrol

Writers: Claude Chabrol and Odile Barski

Stars: Gerard Depardieu, Clovis Cornillac and Jacques Gamblin

France

In French

Runtime: 110 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188983/

Paranoid Park (2007)

Stream of consciousness filmmaking is closely linked to the written counterpart, but because words are intellectual this form of writing is literate, whereas in cinema it feels more like memory. Moving images have an instant validity, and when a story is not linear, when it depends on the mind of a teenage kid with a lot of time on his hands, the work is experimental and involves us despite the disjointed, often fractured and confusing storytelling. Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park is a great and rare example.

Other examples in contemporary American cinema are some of Van Sant’s other recent works. He is proving himself a remarkable talent, one that even his early successes could not have hinted at. Paranoid Park is about an incident and characters that live it, but there is no storyline. Alex is a skateboarding kid. He hangs around with his best friend Jared who convinces him to go to a place that Alex admits he is not ready for: Paranoid Park, a grungy skate park in Portland. One night when Jared goes away, Alex goes to the park, meets some older guys, runs away with one of them via spontaneous freight train, and an incident occurs. This is linear progression, but Paranoid Park exists in Alex’s writing. He’s constantly writing in what I at first thought was an extended journal. Only at the end of the film did I understand that Alex is writing over the course of one night, and the majority of the film’s final scenes actually take place—chronologically—somewhere in the middle of the film’s short 84 minute running time.

We often see the same scenes repeated. The shots of Alex in either his uncle or his mother’s house show him entering his bedroom from a room where we had seen him previously write. I believe every time we see this same setup we are seeing the exact same moment in this character’s life. Why would Van Sant construct his film like this? He does a similar thing in Elephant, but there because of the structure of the film we were seeing several different stories taking place congruently. Here we have one perspective, Alex’s, and the conceit doesn’t seem like it could fit but it works remarkably well.

Well, why does it, and why do we see these repetitive moments? This is not a question to be asked but merely a fact we must accept. I personally found the challenge of deciphering this movie a welcomed change of pace from most films that predictably proceed in a linear fashion. I often wonder why films need to tell a story. It takes a skilled hand to render 90 minutes or so of screen time without a clearly defined story, characters and conflict, but often times the results of these experiments is quite fascinating. They are not slice of life films, a term I despise because of the connotations the phrase conjures. Rather they are experiences, impressions of life, and Van Sant’s treatment here creates an impression of a character. I often say that this is the ultimate reach of the cinema, to create impressions. A movie is a work of art, not life, and often times, films of this kind contain a hyper-reality that gives us, the audience sitting in our seats looking at a 2-dimensional flat screen, a sense of how the director uses reality to create his vision.

The film, however, though essentially about a death, is not a mystery nor is it suspenseful. Van Sant doesn’t show us the character most duplicitous in the crime or event as receiving punishment. He suggests it is coming and indeed creates a great deal of fear and paranoia and the utter indifference one so young, of a sort or type typical in youth culture for the past decades, but the film is never “about” the crime. It is about a kid dealing with the fact that he, directly or indirectly, is responsible and now has to deal with it. The film, however, is more definitive than I am suggesting, but because the narrative material is comparatively slight I will remain vague so as to not spoil for you the mood and anticipation I certainly got watching it.

One thing I greatly appreciated was Van Sant’s use of aspect ratio. Most films are in a wide-screen format, some 1.85:1 or even worse they’re in scope, something narrower like 2.35:1. This basically means the screen is rectangular. I don’t like looking at movies this way. In a sense the aspect ratio renders everything as a landscape, at least in terms of framing a painting; there’s either portrait or landscape. The landscape composition is meant to show beauty, and in cinema I find a square ratio, 1.37:1, is more fitting in capturing reality. It cuts off our peripheral vision and focuses in on what the director wants.

I love Gus Van Sant’s modern, experimental work. I love that it’s done by an American filmmaker. It shows us that American cinema isn’t dead yet. Paranoid Park is intelligent, thought-provoking movie making, about characters of a certain age, and still refreshingly original.

Paranoid Park (2007)
Director: Gus Van Sant

Writer: Gus Van Sant

Stars: Gabe Nevins, Daniel Liu and Taylor Momsen

USA / France

In English

Runtime: 84 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0842929/

Flight of the Red Balloon (2007, Voyage du ballon rouge, Le)

It’s almost impossible to describe how joyous it is to watch a film like The Flight of the Red Balloon.  It’s a masterpiece, the best film I’ve seen in the last 10 and more, and its power comes from the simplicity and beauty of its story, its images, and from the lives portrayed.  I used to think that for a film to be powerful and profound it must be dark or ugly, downright depressing so it can easily move its audience, but that is an immature thought.  The Flight of the Red Balloon is about the peaceful and hectic qualities of life that make existence such a magical thing.

I can’t give a plot summary.  It would sound boring, banal even, and may discourage potential viewers. Things happen in the film but they are elliptical, and a linear description would not serve the film well.  It is told from the view point of a red balloon, and we are dropped into the story looking in on three very special figures.  Fang Song, the Chinese film student studying in Paris; her new employer, Suzanne, a free-spirited mom; and Simon, her son, the child Song is now nanny to.  I could describe the events overseen by the balloon but the film would seem insignificant.  This is a film that has to be seen.  It needs to act on our senses.  Only then we can appreciate the experience.

Suzanne is a performer.  Her grandfather was a puppeteer and she now does the narration and voice work for puppet shows.  She is a mess, a ball of energy with weird fashion and a wonderful personality.  She is always losing things or forgetting appointments—she has so much to do, and yet the people around her she never forgets.  She has an instant rapport with Fang Song.  Immediately she trusts her son with the girl, has her make a key to their apartment.  The film might exist in a hyper reality where things are far from perfect but they are still slightly untouchable.  This might be what I loved about the film more than anything.  It is liberating to sit back and have such a soothing, happy experience without guns, violence, cussing, and all the ugly things that most movies rely on for entertainment.  The Flight of the Red Balloon is as aimless as a free-wielding balloon.  Conventional screenwriting techniques would proclaim this structure a failure, and indeed if the screenplay read verbatim like the final cut of the film it would probably not be a good read.  But this is a movie.  It exists in sounds and images that create a great impression of life as I certainly would like to live it.  Director Hsiao-hsien Hou has the eye and temperament of a master.  He does not rely on typical, beautiful compositions or clean kept streets for beauty.  Life in Paris is beautiful, or can be, just as it can be anywhere, and any pretense of creating artificial beauty is not needed.  Life is beautiful as it is.

This is not a film about nothing, or a slice of life.  I think we have certain impressions of such phrases.  I would say The Flight of the Red Balloon is a film about living.  Think of how many people we pass each day, how many names we’ll never know.  We will hear snippets of conversation or create scenarios based on what we can see, but for all of it we are no better off than a shiny red balloon.

The great surprise in this film is the character of Simon.  It’s very tricky to create honest child characters.  I think so many of us are disillusioned with life that we cannot recall what existing as a child was like.  In American movies, young kids, ages 4-8, are blank-eyed, silent and morose things that are more creepy than enduring.  Simon Iteanu is everything I would hope a little boy could be in real life: bright, inquisitive, interested in creativity, in cinema, painting, puppets; he sleeps with a stuffed bear and exists enough in the modern world to use a digital camera and play Playstation video games.  He has answers to questions, insights and observations, like when Suzanne is arguing with a man on the phone who may or may not have been her lover or his father—we’re not privy to such information.  Suzanne screams, “I need a man beside me and there is no one beside me.”  Simon in the back seat says, “I am a man.”  The delivery is much more charming than the words, and the little Simon Iteanu is superb.  Juliette Binoche we expect a perfect performance from, Iteanu is a revelation.

One of the greatest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie is Suzanne’s final scene.  She has just argued heatedly with a neighbor, slammed the door in his face and now sits teary-eyed before her son, Fang Song, and a piano tuner.  The camera stays on Binoche’s face.  She calls her son over to her, asks what he did in school.  They hug and she smiles.  Simon goes off to play his Playstation.  Suzanne smiles serenely, still fighting back tears, shaken with anger as she asks the piano tuner if he’ll retune the piano okay.  Binoche does something magical.  Her expression, her attitude, her talent—I don’t know the right word, but this is a true moment of tranquility and it always makes the hairs on my arm stand.

I can only describe moments in the film.  There is not a thing wrong with it.  I could detail every scene but a masterpiece like this is better off discovered fresh.  I had such a profound reaction to this picture that I hope I am not overselling it.  Subtle movies affect everyone differently and it simply moved me like few films have.  I like to think the red balloon is watching all of Paris.  Only occasionally does it appear at the window.  Often it is floating in the sky.  Think of the stories that exist in the film that we do not see.  What does the red balloon know, and what other magic has it seen?

Flight of the Red Balloon (2007)

(a.k.a. Voyage du ballon rouge, Le)

Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou

Writers: Hsiao-hsien Hou and Francois Margolin

Stars: Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu and Fang Song

France

In French

Runtime: 115 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0826711/

Certified Copy (2010, Copie conforme)

2 people explore the treasures of Tuscany on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  They are at first strangers, but the things they say to each other leave us questioning the nature of their relationship.  I didn’t have to make up my mind as to Juliette Binoche and William Shimell’s relationship.  It is obvious to me what is happening in Certified Copy, but whether or not we believe Binoche and Shimell are married is not the focus of the film. The film works as a puzzle.   It remains mysterious and objective, asking us to consider where the true worth of human experience exists: in a happy past or a less romantic present.

Shimell, an English opera singer, plays James Miller, an art expert who has written a book called Certified Copy, about the worth and unique authenticity of art forgeries.  He argues that a reproduction is just as valuable as the original, partly because the original is itself a copy of a real event.  Binoche plays an unnamed woman, a fan with a teenage son who waits impatiently while James is giving a lecture.  Her son teases her, insinuating his mom has a crush on the author.  And, she seems to.  Binoche leaves her number with his Italian translator and she and James meet on a Sunday.  He signs multiple copies of his book for her, one made out to her sister, Marie, who with her simple love for her husband is in sympathy with James’ philosophy of art forgeries: it is not the work itself that has value; it is our appreciation of it that gives it its value.

Their dialogue is imprecise and mawkish when James first meets her.  Binoche is self-conscious and excited to be in the author’s presence.  They take a drive.  “I can’t believe you’re sitting in my car.”  This shot is amazing.  For several minutes, Binoche and Shimell are in a two-shot, photographed from outside the car, and the reflection of the buildings on both sides of the street obscure, in flashes, both actors.  Their dialogue is innocuous but the scene is riveting.  We’re really seeing two images; a visual clue to the idea of the film.  There are overlaid images in many moments in Certified Copy.  Director Abbas Kiarostami’s directorial approach at first seems breezy and loose, but in Shimell’s and Binoche’s first scene together as they wander about her shop, precise choreography between the two leaves Shimell alone among many art forgeries, and Binoche reflected in a small mirror in the background.  They face each other even when they are separated in the filmed frame.  A similar image happens later, when Shimell stands alone near a motorbike and in the side mirror Binoche is reflected off screen.  I can’t say I’m familiar with Kiarostami’s work; I don’t know if his double images are unique to this film or important in his overall body of work but they support the material, which is not so much about doubles but the multiple interpretations of what two people say.

We are like the tourists on Binoche and Shimell’s vacation.  We hear what they say and yet lack the greater context of their lives to truly understand.  The advantage we as an audience have is that unlike these tourists who exist as extras in the film, we get to follow these two people and hear the whole of what they say.  It is still not a fault of the picture that we are not given a blunt truth.  The film is a puzzle which cannot be solved, and when I saw the film for the first time I was so overjoyed to be actively participating in the story.  Depending on how I viewed the material, the story would change and satisfy me.  It also is very mysterious and good at dropping clues through dialogue and facial expression.  The flipside is that when we solve this puzzle, the second time around Certified Copy isn’t as absorbing.  We can view the early scenes and notice the subtle clues that support our theories.  I, for example, found great meaning in a quick line of dialogue by Binoche’s son which suggests much of the complicated dynamic between these three people.  To be honest the line is so quickly delivered and I don’t speak French and I missed it the first time.  But if films are meant to be viewed more than once then the lasting impact of Certified Copy will not live up to its reputation.  If I had written this right after I saw the film once, I would have talked only positively about it.  I didn’t know what to say then other than, ‘see it and interpret it for yourselves,’ and I hoped that I could elaborate on my own opinions about the movie itself with a second viewing.  Truth is I found it difficult to get into it in the same way.  Like a mystery film I kept examining the film for evidence and found the situation betrays itself.

I still admire it a great deal.  The digital photography is sublime, and Binoche is terrific.  I think many years down the line historians will make her out to be the greatest performer to ever appear in front of the camera.  It may sound like hyperbole but I really believe it.  The things this woman can do with her face are amazing.  She would have been fabulous in silent movies.  She’s also great at delivering lines, and without giving away my interpretation of the film the great material is the quarrels that this couple shares.   This is a terrific script.  It balances three different languages—English, French, and Italian—which Binoche can speak perfectly.  There is a great exchange between Binoche and the proprietress of a small café.  The proprietress assumes James is her husband, and the woman gives Binoche a reasonable speech about what husbands, even bad ones, give their wives.

I feel I must say a bit about how I saw the picture.  I sensed a great deal of hostility in Binoche’s voice early on towards James.  This is when I began to suspect things aren’t as they appear.  At first I was made uncomfortable by her forward, angry speech.  It is not at all how people behave to strangers and I felt embarrassed for her.  But James seems a willing listener.  Neither backs down on their beliefs and yet they never once put an end to their union.  I think something more is going on, something more complex than are they strangers or are they married, but a saving grace of the picture is its ambiguity.  It also makes it more of a puzzle, and it distracts somewhat from the generally brilliant experience it is to watch Binoche’s and Shimell’s performances.

Certified Copy (2010)

(a.k.a. Copie conforme)

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Writer: Abbas Kiarostami

Stars: Juliette Binoche and William Shimell

France

In French, English and Italian

Runtime: 106 minutes

Certified Copy is currently available On Demand from Comcast and other service providers.  It should be released on DVD by IFC in the near future.

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020773/

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/

Cold Weather (2010)

Cris Lankenau has a funny way of walking.  He seems to be dragging his body, his floppy arms falling where they may, and he is uncomfortable and unsure with every step.  His character Doug in Aaron Katz’s newest masterpiece Cold Weather is perfect casting.  Lankenau has made only two feature films.  His previous film was Katz’s Quiet City, a beautiful and quirky love story between strangers.  Cold Weather is a beautiful story of friends and the mumblings of everyday life.

Doug is a college dropout now living with his sister, Gail.  He studied forensic science but has taken a job at an ice factory.  He makes best friends with Carlos, a part-time DJ and Trekkie and fellow factory worker.  Doug wants to be like Sherlock Holmes, and when his ex-girlfriend Rachel mysteriously goes missing, Doug and everybody he knows turns amateur sleuth.  Part of what is so great about Cold Weather is that the director is able to take these aimless figures and infuse their lives with so much meaning.  Doug is a loser.  Let’s face it.  His parents seem quietly disappointed in him; Doug knows it but remains steadfast in all his uncertain decisions.   But never once is he pathetic.  He’s absolutely loveable.  He is so focused and quirky and real that he is immediately enduring.  Some might be put off with Lankenau, though both times I saw the film there was plenty of laughter so this might be an incorrect guess.  Lankenau appears so mawkish and wimpy.  He is incredibly soft spoken and not a typical leading man.  He’s not even an everyman like Jimmy Stewart.  Cris Lankenau is this generation’s cinematic hero—awkward good looks, even temperament, an all around decent guy who never gets upset.  Perhaps he is the embodiment of mumblecore.

Every character in this film is as real as the person sitting next to you on the train and this is a terrific ensemble cast.  Raúl Castillo as Carlos has some great interplay with Lankenau’s character.  Carols isn’t a mindless worker shucking ice.  He’s a DJ who develops an interest in Sherlock Holmes.  A Latino character in the movies wouldn’t normally be a Star Trek fan, but Carlos can name every member of the show’s space crew and the respective actors.  He gushes as he admits that he got a signed 8x10 glossy at a convention.  It was absolutely charming to see his performance.  He disappears about ¾ into the picture unfortunately and I would have liked more of his character.  Gail, Doug’s sister, is terrific, and in fact this sibling relationship is the best thing about the movie.  They are not adversaries.  These are aging 20-somethings who understand that life is what you make of it.  They have conversations that do not advance the plot.  We get hints of history but the film never stops dead in its tracks so brother and sister can recall hackneyed stories of the past.  Trieste Kelly Dunn is brilliant as Gail.  She and Lankenau are superb together.

Above all Doug and Gail interact.  We see them on the roof splattering grapes on the ground below.  Doug pulls Gail out of work to watch the whales by bribing her with sandwiches.  They hang out together, play cards with Carols and Rachel, go dancing.  I hate to use this phrase again but they are real.  The mumblecore movement is built partially on improvisational dialogue that exists to show existence or experience between its characters.  Very little of the dialogue advances the story.  For example, when Doug and Gail are on a stakeout, he asks her a very personal question.  Does she have friends?  Since they’ve been living together he has never seen her hang out with anyone.  The film could have survived without this exchange.  It goes nowhere, and yet it is captivating.  A lesser film would have curtailed the static stakeout and picked up with the next bit of action, but Cold Weather is less concerned with telling a plot.  Katz knows enough to let his characters carry the picture without focus and he’s talented enough to make it interesting always.

He’s also something of a visual master.  As with his previous films and sort of against the mumblecore style, Katz knows how to compose shots to suggest inner emotion with the man-made landscape of Portland, Oregon.  Similar to John Ford’s westerns, Katz uses setting suns and telephone wires to aid his storytelling.  He gets some heart-wrenching imagery that really supports his character’s personalities and place in life.  He’s also not afraid to hold shots.  Early on there’s a scene of Doug and Gail eating sandwiches on the beach.  Nothing happens here; it’s a long shot, they’re in the foreground, the water behind them.  A gull circles around, and I was consciously thinking, ‘how great to be able to contemplate on what I am seeing.’  The purpose of art is to engage its audience, and to see an American film made in 2010 that gives its audience time to think is very promising.  Movies like this are proof that the cinema is not dead.

The music is terrific.  Composer Keegan DeWitt deserves an Academy Award nomination for his fun and brilliantly used music.  Film music needs to service the images more than it needs to be listenable.  While the music is fantastic on its own, it really creates a sweet and quirky mood that ties this material together.  There is not a fault with the picture.  The acting is terrific, so is the direction, and the story is rightly focused on its characters rather than the mystery that turns out to be not that big a deal.

That’s what’s so surprising about Cold Weather.  I keep forgetting about the mystery.  Even when Doug and Carlos search Rachel’s abandoned hotel room, the film is focused on the interplay of its characters.  Perhaps this is the case with every thriller, but in Cold Weather everything is natural and nothing artificial.  I said the mystery is not that big a deal and it really may not be.  Doug figures out his clues and is able to help his ex-girlfriend, but these scenes again are about the experience of being these people.  I don’t want to turn potential viewers off.  That the mystery is less important is why the film works so well.  There is suspense in the film, and the odd characters who conduct themselves as Holmes bring a twist to the material that only heightens the tension of some of the “chases”.  I actually cared about these characters, but never once did I expect them to get killed for their efforts.  In normal thrillers death is always a possibility, but Cold Weather knows that murder is an uncommon occurrence.  For every person that is killed, millions more go on living.  I was concerned that Doug would be caught snooping and be forced to give up his adventure.

I keep suggesting Cold Weather is a small film about character but the more I think of it, the film is aiming high.  Instead of artifice, Aaron Katz and his wonderful actors are more concerned with naturalism, and that they succeed makes it one of the more memorable independent films in recent years.  These characters may as well be our best friends, we know them so intimately.  The film gives us moments in their lives, moments a bad movie would dismiss because they lack vitriol and violence.  I sat through every scene in this film with a large grin across my face!  Great movies make me happy, and I was delirious at Cold Weather.

Cold Weather (2010)

Director: Aaron Katz

Writer: Aaron Katz

Stars: Cris Lankenau, Trieste Kelly Dunn and Raul Castillo

USA

In English

Runtime: 96 minutes

Cold Weather is currently playing in select theaters across the US.  It is currently available On Demand from Comcast and other service providers under "IFC In Theaters". The film should be released on DVD by IFC in the near future.

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1497874/

Disengagement (2007)

The problems of a nation are paralleled in one family.  Ana and Uli are step-siblings, reunited by the death of their father in France.  Ana has been raised as a Westerner by the New York born father, and Uli was adopted shortly after the father divorced his mother.  Uli was raised on the Gaza Strip.  In France, the siblings enjoy each other’s company.  We learn that, apparently, the father was not a very loving man.  He did not want Uli’s mother to move to Israel and had since lived his life apart from Uli.  Ana has no ties to her Jewish heritage.  Ana is a frivolous, flirtatious woman with no ties to anything, except an erotic, intense interest in her half-brother.  The death of their father reveals a secret long forgotten: Ana had a child at a Kibbutz many years ago and unbeknownst to all the father has spent a lot of time with the girl in Israel.  In order for Dana to receive her grandfather’s inheritance Ana must bring it to her herself.

For those unfamiliar with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Disengagement might be confusing.  I myself have only a superficial understanding of the conflict, but as I understand it after WWII when the allies were dividing up all of Nazi Germany’s conquered lands, it was seen fit to give the land of Israel to the Jewish people.  “A land without a people for a people without land” was the mission statement; only the Palestinians had been living in the Holy Land for centuries and were forced out in a global effort to atone for the misdeeds against all Jews in WWII.  It was an immoral decision, politics and religion aside, since millions of people who had committed no crimes were forced into an area at the edge of the country, and since then lives have been lost and hatred spews on the Gaza Strip.

One does not need an opinion as to which side is right.  In fact, neither and both are.  What Disengagement makes clear in scene after scene is that there are only losers in this conflict. 

When Ana arrives in Israel she is forbidden to enter the same Jeep as her brother.  This is the first in a small series of events that forces her to shed her thin skin.  Juliette Binoche, only the greatest living actress, plays Ana in a curious way.  The beginning scenes in France are too long.  Part of why they feel this way is that Binoche is almost unbearable to watch.  Her voice is so odd, shrill and high-pitched.  It’s clear her accent is more American that her normal speaking voice, but I think she and director Amos Gitaï made a very bad decision.  I said Ana is a frivolous woman but that is an understatement.  When we first meet her she is annoying, and Binoche is giving a bad performance.  I was shocked since she has been perfect in all the movies I’ve seen.  What Gitaï does is create a contrast, showing Ana before her introduction to the problems of the Middle East and after, having been involved in disengagement, the process of removing a group of people from their homes.  This contrast, however, is very short sighted.  Just because Ana is a Westerner doesn’t necessarily make her carefree and vapid.  Many Americans don’t have a clue as to the problems of Israel, but in all fairness the problems are too many to follow and people have lives and concerns of their own to deal with.  This character is more archetypal.  That doesn’t excuse the material.  It would have benefited from a more leveled depiction of a human being unfamiliar with these problems.

While I was disappointed in the first half hour of the film, once Ana and Uli, played by Liron Levo, arrive in Israel the film becomes terrific.  It is a political drama.  Not a thriller; director Gitaï carefully crafts an even playing field where every human being, Israeli and Palestinian, are decent, loving people.  Uli, we learn, is an officer for the Palestinian army, and Gaza is going through disengagement—all the Israelis are to be removed from their land.  No one can claim to hate the other side, and this is the stupidity Gitaï revels in pointing out.  The people respect each other.  The Palestinians soldiers are given sever orders to not injure the Israelis.  The Rabbi offers his love to Uli just before the gates are torn open and the soldiers perform their duties.  Stuck in the middle is Dana, Ana’s forgotten daughter.  An Israeli, everything she has in life, her garden, her students, will all be taken away from her.  Dana’s reunion with her mother is brilliantly staged.  Ana circles around the school playground.  She knows which teacher is her daughter, and Dana recognizes Ana from the photographs her grandfather showed her.  Dana touches her mother’s face and they hug.  Few words are shared, but because this situation is so understandable, the tears from both actresses are very well felt.

Unavoidable in any anti-war film is the view of the soldiers.  In a visual medium they suffer the most because we see them perform their duties even when, in the case of Disengagement, they hate what they have to do.  I wish there was a way to fix this problem.  There is a way, by depicting the ridiculous discussions of the politicians or rebels that decide the orders, but in an intimate film like this these scenes would distract from the material.  It’s a shame because Uli is a loveable person.  Liron Levo is a revelation here.  He is one of the few male actors alive that embodies humility and strength on the screen.  The finale reunites step brother and sister, just after Dana is lost in a van carrying out the Israeli civilians.  When once their friendship was so strong Ana detests the man in uniform before her.  He reassures her they will find Dana, but all Ana can scream is, “Leave me alone.”

One of the most heartbreaking images appears on the edges of the frame.  When a reading of the Torah is disrupted by Uli and the Palestinian soldiers, a Jewish worshiper, as he is being removed, hugs tightly the soldier forcing him out.  I was so struck by this image, so brilliantly on the fringes of the film, and it has so much meaning.

Disengagement (2007)

Director: Amos Gitaï

Writers: Amos Gitaï, Marie-Jose Sanselme

Stars: Juliette Binoche, Liron Levo and Jeanne Moreau

Israel / France

In Hebrew, English, French, Italian and Arabic

Runtime: 113 minutes

To purchase Disengagement visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Disengagement-liron-Levo/dp/B00455JE58/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1301206042&sr=1-1

IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0871512/

Kaboom (2010)

I am surprised at my reaction to the sci-fi comedy Kaboom.  The genre, the style, the personalities, the drugs, the frivolous sexual exploits; typically a film like this would leave me angry for wasting 80 minutes of my life but I’ve seen it twice now and it is fun.  Odd-ball nuts but a lot of fun.  It’s almost a waste to get into the plot.  It’s not brilliantly structured and part of me believes it’s a satirical piece of filmmaking. It’s too good to only be poorly written.

Smith is an 18 year old college freshman attracted to his hot straight roommate named Thor.  Smith’s best friend is Stella, and on the side Smith has terrific sex with a quirky girl named London.  All innocent fun… except for a reoccurring dream Smith has in which all the people he loves in life plus two girls he doesn’t even know invite him down a white corridor and through a door.  In life he meets one of the unknown girls and witnesses her death... but he was high at the time and doesn’t know what is real.  As his dream intensifies we arbitrarily gain new pieces of info in an effort to develop a nuclear holocaust plot that has deep roots in Smith’s past.  This is independent filmmaking at its most creative.  It crosses many genres and uses cheeky special effects simply to entertain its audience.  There’s nothing more to it.  This genre-hopping, eye-bugging exercise works exceptionally well because it focuses more on its characters’ sexual and carefree routines rather than the overarching story.  The filmmakers knew that character is where the fun is.

Kaboom is shot in vibrant color, so refreshingly stylish, and the human stereotypes are gleefully on display.  Smith is a cute twink who rebels against sexual labels.  He is “undeclared”, but his fashion sense is part emo and part young gay sheik so we know which team he plays for.  Thor, the straight guy, is a bronzed surfer who spouts out “dude” more than a bad 90s stereotype.  Satires are written with a high level of intelligence and know not to insult the stereotypes but really to expose them as falsehoods.  Case in point—Smith becomes the hero in an off-beat action flick where at best in standard Hollywood fare he would be the brunt of jokes.  Then there’s Stella, Smith’s pal, played by Haley Bennett.  I want to mention her by name because she is terrific.  Fresh, original, like no other movie lesbian I’ve seen in a teen comedy.  She has a quick delivery and an insightful pessimistic outlook with some great, funny dialogue.  The whole cast is good but Bennett is exceptional.  It’s the Thor’s of the film, the cool kids in high school who really can’t fit in outside their comfort zone, who get the ridicule.  Thor and his best friend Rex are portrayed as sexually unsophisticated misfits among the hip, multi-sexual experimentation.  This too may be a stereotype but they are redeemed because the film exists in a world where sexuality isn’t a weapon.  Thor is very friendly with Smith and is comfortable enough with him to try to perform auto fellatio in his presence.  I know how it sounds, but you have to see the movie.

However under all this is some truly frightening imagery, namely the black figures with animal heads who stalk Smith.  I had a very powerful reaction to seeing them, perhaps because they triggered a memory I had long forgotten.  At night as a kid, I would play a game with myself.  I would hide under the covers and imagine that there were dozens of people standing on the street outside my window.  I didn’t know who they were or why, but they were there.  Seeing these creatures in Kaboom I was reminded of how scared my game made me, and that fear heightened the impact of these scenes.  I think without this memory the images retain something of their ability to frighten.  Whether it was a direct influence, I think back to Kubrick’s The Shinning.  One of the most unsettling images in the entire film was a shot of a person in an animal costume performing oral sex on an ordinary-dressed man.  Perhaps it is a subconscious fear of bestiality that makes such images potent or perhaps this whole topic says more about me than Kaboom.

It may just be that I am the right audience for this film.  Older people will be less indulgent because the film’s sensibilities are aimed at my generation (maybe even a generation younger).  People who don’t believe in pansexuality might find the whole film absurd.  Which brings me to a contemporary movie trend I saw further exploited in Kaboom.  A lot of films by gay or questioning filmmakers have to detail the Kinsey scale.  Kinsey did his research in the 1940’s and though I’m sure it was accurate, it might be time for his surveys and research to be updated.  Nevertheless, I just find this revival of Kinsey interesting.  Whatever, I liked the movie.  Enough said.

Kaboom (2010)

Director: Gregg Araki

Writer: Gregg Araki

Stars: Haley Bennett, Thomas Dekker, Chris Zylka and Juno Temple

USA

In English

Runtime: 86 minutes

Kaboom will be released on DVD from IFC Films this May.  Pre-order now at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004OBQDCK/ref=s9_simh_gw_p74_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=06M0P0WXCM8SAEHEMJRP&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

If you prefer Blu-ray, visit Amazon (France):

http://www.amazon.fr/Kaboom-Blu-ray-Thomas-Dekkler/dp/B004FK2MRA/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1300685627&sr=1-2

(beware the Blu-ray is Region B locked and French language subtitles are forced by the player!)

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1523483/

Heartbeats (2010, Amours imaginaires, Les)

Two beautiful 20-something French Canadians, best friends Marie and Francis, meet a mysterious young man called Nicolas who woos them both into believing either one has a chance of loving him.  Nicholas makes remarks and gestures to both, but is Nicholas into boys or girls?  The more Marie and Francis vie for Nico’s affections the more strained their friendship grows in Heartbeats, a special film.  The story is right out of an episode of “Will & Grace” and yet it has a passion and honesty missing in Hollywood romantic comedies.  There is a necessity and earnestness in writer / director / actor Xavier Dolan’s storytelling that is quite refreshing.  He focuses on one narrative idea and lingers painfully and playfully over the possibilities.  But it is not so much the story being told that is fascinating, it is the director’s style.  Part Jean-Luc Godard, part Quentin Tarantino, derivative of a bygone era of moviemaking and still overwhelmingly hypnotic, Dolan is one of the most promising young directors at only 23 years old.  A triple threat, I personally cannot wait to see what he does next.

Long passages are shot in crisp slow-motion, heightening the passions of this menage-a-trois.  Fashion is also on display.  Dolan and lead actress Monia Chokrin wear eye catching, vibrant clothes that seem fittingly anachronistic.  Dolan is credited with costumes as well.  This kid has a keen eye; every shot has meaning and intensity.  An angry wrestle on the forest leaves captures Francis and Marie’s flailing bodies; the tilt of a head or hand feels so punctuated as if made by gods on Mount Olympus.  Dolan lingers on these images that he deems worthy of scrutiny.  He is as assured as a filmmaker who has nothing to lose.  I saw Heartbeats during my first visit to New York City.  It was a Saturday night.  I will always associate the style, imagination, the unique qualities of this film with that great city with these same great qualities.  Classic orchestral music mixes with classic and contemporary pop songs furthering the feel of a modern vintage film.  Terrifically photographed post-coital scenes with Francis and Marie and their ever-changing men are bathed in one thick color.  Marie is red, Francis is green.  Already smitten with pretty boy Nico, both make embarrassing conversation with the men they’ve just shared their bodies with.  Marie sarcastically describes the act just finished as “engrossing” while Francis, when asked by his very handsome lover to describe his dream man, describes someone who looks nothing like the man in his bed.  Both scenes use music by Johann Sebastian Bach, pieces from the composer’s now-famous cello suites, some of the saddest, most profound music I’ve ever heard.  An Italian rendition of Cher’s 1966 song “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” performed by Dalida becomes the film’s anthem.  It is heard in moments when Marie and Francis make themselves beautiful for Nicholas.  Quite appropriate.

What I found most powerful in Dolan’s use of visuals and music is his confidence that the material will work.  And boy does it!  This is one of the most gleeful, self-indulgent exercises I have ever seen, and that is a great compliment.  No American filmmaker, certainly no one in Hollywood, would have the nerve to present a finished film like this to their public.  This may have contributed to the 8 minute standing ovation the film received at the Cannes Film Festival.

Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane, Dolan directs himself in a highly stylized movie.  The problem is that, like Welles, Dolan’s performance isn’t as nuanced as his co-star Monia Chokri.  Chokri portrays Marie as a woman on the verge, someone sexually and romantically dissatisfied.  Nicolas (Niels Schneider) represents for her an opportunity for fulfillment and naturally Marie embarrassingly overcompensates.  A nervous twitch is always on Chokri’s face, a bitterness towards her best friend for loving the man she loves, and the actress is intense and brilliant to watch.  Xavier Dolan either put too much pressure on himself as a performer or felt too comfortable with the material (having obviously developed a vision for the film).  Something about him is not entirely convincing but I need to mention that I am nitpicking.  He is very good in this film, but every now and then I caught him acting, as if he was aware of himself as the actor if that makes any sense.  Sometimes his gestures seem as if they were woven into the script rather than spontaneous as the character.  But he has great moments.  His monologue to Nicolas towards the end of the film, when he confesses his love and admits that he wants to kiss him, is a great moment.  Nicholas is playful, unconventionally handsome, and good at sending mixed signals to the feuding friends.  Niels Schneider is perfectly cast and performs the part well, but his character, the idolized object, isn’t given any true moment of honesty.

Throughout the film we are given excerpts of what appear to be interviews of unknown people sharing their breakup stories.  We hear accounts of men leaving women, women leaving men, and women who are crushed when men love other men.  These episodes act as a sort of veneer and prelude to the story of Francis, Marie and Nicholas.  It’s a storytelling device we can imagine Godard having used, a quasi-documentary style meant to cement the credulity of Dolan’s story.  These accounts are often funny, cathartic and performed with glee by the actors reciting the lines.  My favorite is “Cindy Rosenberg” who, in her own words, knows so much about the man she loved that if only he knew, “he would enter the witness protection program... for mafia stools”.  In these accounts and indeed in much of the characters’ dialogue throughout the film, we hear snippets of superficial honesty.  One man mentions that, though he is over his ex-girlfriend, whenever he sees her, he becomes so flustered that all he can do is sing.  Marie gives one of her “boyfriends” (more accurately fuck-buddies) a lengthy reason of why she smokes so much.  However, the real honesty of the story exists in our own understanding of the situation.  This is the one issue I take with the film.  Xavier Dolan is a young man.  His script, sophisticated as it is, reflects this fact.  It’s the angst of a young gay man who is in love with his male best friend.  It’s valid material but not that original, though undoubtedly important to the director.  It feels as if he’s felt this.  But how many times have we seen a lovelorn teen masturbating while holding an article of clothing belonging to his love?  I can’t wait for Dolan to develop into a more unique and mature storyteller.  With age and with his lingering attention to moments in his characters’ lives, this director can only grow stronger as an artist.

Both its English language and original French titles work.  “Les amours imaginaires” translates into “Imaginary Loves”, an appropriate summation of the story.  “Heartbeats” resonates more with the intensity of the passions at play.  Deceptively simple, Xavier Dolan’s second feature is about that dance with love that everybody has had—a passion for someone who may or may not love you back.  Told with such style, Heartbeats is the best film I’ve seen so far this year and likely to be one of the more original films of the decade.

Heartbeats (2010)

(a.k.a. Amours imaginaires, Les)

Director: Xavier Dolan

Writer: Xavier Dolan

Stars: Xavier Dolan, Monia Chokri, and Niels Schneider

Canada

In French and English

Runtime: 98 minutes

Heartbeats is currently playing in select theaters across the US, including the IFC Center in New York City.  It is currently available On Demand from Comcast and other service providers under "IFC In Theaters".  The film should be released on DVD by IFC in the near future.

Fans eager to purchase now can visit Amazon (Canada):

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B003Y8YB3M/ref=s9_simh_gw_p74_d1_i1?pf_rd_m=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=1N4N1N66W2VHF6Q8M3J4&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=463383531&pf_rd_i=915398

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1600524/