Swimming Pool (2003)

François Ozon channels Alfred Hitchcock in his psychological thriller Swimming Pool.  Where Hitchcock only hinted Ozon marches fearlessly ahead in this surprisingly effective, sexually dynamic mystery that is more conventional then it ought to be.  Actors Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier as a would-be mother / daughter team break through the convention with fascinating performances, bringing out the rich nuance in Ozon’s macabre screenplay.

Rampling plays Sarah Morton, acclaimed author of the Inspector Dorwell series.  Sarah retreats to her publisher’s summer home in France to find inspiration for a new, watershed project.  When at first she begins writing the next in her Dorwell series, her tranquil visit is interrupted by Julie, her publisher / lover’s daughter.  Julie is a punk: brash, keeps odd hours, and is inconsiderate of the reserved English author’s peace of mind.  Julie brings different men home and has loud sexual trysts which agitate and seemingly arouse and fascinate Sarah.  The film doesn’t become a murder mystery until ¾ into it, and that section of the film is its weakest, but the set-up to the fatal accident gives us two very opposing rivals, one sexually liberated and one who, in Julie’s words, only writes about dirty things and never does them.  The dirtiest of things, the act which soils most, is done by the less likely of the women.

Ozon is unafraid to show Ludivine Sagnier’s beautiful body.  It’s hard to accept this is the same girl who played the impish Catherine in Ozon’s 8 Women.  I admit I didn’t want to see her naked having adored her in Love Songs.  I’ve associated a certain innocence with her.  Here her breasts are everywhere, and she touches herself more explicitly than a lot of actresses would on screen.  Some of her boy toys’ rear ends are seen, too, and these guys are not really the kind you might want to see naked.  This is something that bothered me about Julie.  She is so beautiful and sexy that you’d think she could attract hotter guys, at least guys her age.  And she probably could, but as we slowly learn this girl must be starving for attention, more so than we might thing even at the film’s climax.  The only nudity that embarrassed me was Rampling’s full frontal shots.  I felt that, while what the character was doing was interesting, it did not grow organically from the script and that Ozon was abusing his actress.  Then I realized that Rampling starred in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter in 1974, and then I understood that she is a fearless performer.

Her relationship with Sagnier’s Julie is really interesting.  Sarah, we sense, is an empty woman.  Her life is lived in her writing.  The only man at home is her invalid father; her lover—her publisher, Julie’s father—keeps big secrets from her, and she doesn’t have children.  I never sensed that Sarah wanted kids, but the twists she takes in her relationship with Julie really allow them to bond as mother and daughter.  I don’t want to give it away, but trust me, they do bond.  It could be that Sarah’s interest in Julie is solely as subject matter for a new book seemingly inspired by the writer’s experiences with the young girl.  In that case Sarah gets too intimately involved in the messes of her characters, but then again it is often said a writer’s characters become like their children.  Sarah’s efforts to protect Julie can be seen as motherly.

I can’t say, though, that I understood the ending.  To be honest, I guessed—and it will be fairly obvious to those familiar with the devices of thriller plots—the twist ending well before the finale, but the way the story unfolds is both unexpected and predictable.  So what does that ending do to Sarah and Julie’s relationship?  I honestly don’t know.  I can make assumptions, or at least explain it to myself, but my explanations alter or destroy the great material of the film, the relationship between Julie and Sarah.  But a twist ending in a thriller is often a letdown.  If the material is excellent, the bad ending can be overlooked, at least by me.  While the ending is not bad, it leaves a lot of questions at too late a point in the experience.  But I didn’t mind, just like I didn’t mind the some of the convention in the later part of the picture.  It is old-fashioned fun but with a sexually explicit twist to murder mysteries.

I’m really starting to like François Ozon’s work.  I’ve seen 4 films, and the first, Under the Sand, was very boring.  It also starred Charlotte Rampling, but it’s the kind of arty flick where the subtly was so subtle that any subtext was altogether lacking.  The other three have been terrific.  Swimming Pool isn’t unique or original, but I was not bored.  There were a few moments where I was nervously inching towards the screen, and if a thriller can do that, it’s won.

Swimming Pool (2003)

Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Francois Ozon and Emmanuele Bernheim

Stars: Charlotte Rampling, Charles Dance and Ludivine Sagnier

France / UK

In English and French

Runtime: 102 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324133/

400 Blows, The (1959, Quatre cent coups, Les)

Watching The 400 Blows for the second time I remembered things from my adolescence that I had long forgotten. These were not dramatic, life altering episodes but rather personal moments that add up to create an impression of life. This is what cinema can aspire to. Art is reproduction, it is not life. All it can hope to do is create impressions, and François Truffaut’s first and probably best feature film creates a terrain of childhood that we have all traveled, even if we’ve experienced it differently than young Antoine Doinel. After all, we are on some level lost children on a beach, returning to the elements in search of our freedom and place in the world.

I did not have the wild adolescence of Antoine Doinel. I never stole money from my parents, never skipped school. I was raised to be docile, to observe, and was made (either by my insecurities or by instruction) to please others when asked, and I could still relate to and sympathize with the misunderstood and grossly underappreciated Antoine, never believed by his parents, abused through indifference by them, a scapegoat for teachers, and even betrayed by in his friends in moments when the blame for a class prank falls directly on the boy’s shoulders. It is no wonder Antoine cannot conform to society. He’s a bright kid who remains loyal, who never rats out his friends or his cheating mother and who always is under pressure of being caught. For what? His lying of course—Doinel is not a perfect kid—but society has set it up so that he is always the villain. His is punished for his precocious nature; that he wants to understand and finds it difficult, that face-value is meaningless to him, that he has seen too much arguing between his parents and knows so much that someone so young, in their developmental stages, shouldn’t know will curtail his innocence.

But for all the ugliness and cruelty Antoine experiences there is always Truffaut. I often forget just how great a filmmaker he was. I’ve seen all of his movies, many of them have left indelible impressions on me, but for some reason I always recall many others directors as favorites before remembering Truffaut. His films contain a magic called joy. There is always a zeal for life, a craving never satiated though always pursued, that gives his work a momentum and passion that can only be truly appreciated when actively watching his films. They are hypnotic. They are experiences offering glimpses of life as it should be, as it should feel, and these impressions are among the greatest works of art of the latter half of the 20^th Century. The 400 Blows may be his masterpiece, but Small Change (or Pocket Money, its UK title) is the other work of his that I truly think is just great. In both films one can see a motif that permeates much of the director’s work: his love of children, their unbiased look at a world that has fashioned itself on antiquation. The 400 Blows is a more tragic film, made at a time in Truffaut’s life when one can argue that as an artist and as a human being he was coming into his own. Small Change was made many years later, when the director had children of his own and we can guess having gained insight into his parents, his teachers, his world that were before too close to be obtained.

An aspect of the film I loved so and was grateful to have experienced vicariously was the close friendship Antoine shared with his schoolmate René. I did not have friends as a child, never learned how to make them being the younger brother and youngest of all my cousins. I was always with them as a baby, and when they entered school and made their own friends I was lost. Here I could experience a close, apparently life-long friendship (René is based on Truffaut’s best friend) that is as strong as any emotional bond ever described in a movie. These kids, so small and so cute, are there for each other. When Antoine repeatedly runs away from home René at first sneaks him into his uncle’s abandoned factory then into an obscure room in his spacious and beautiful apartment. He brings Antoine food and travels by bike to pay a visit when Antoine is sent to reform school. They skip school together and stand up for each other. When Antoine is expelled, René gets himself suspended to stick it to the teacher. There are beautiful moments like this throughout the picture and for me to describe them here is a waste. My words could never do justice to the atmosphere of Truffaut’s moving images.

But one more point on a similar subject. I loved the sense of childhood Truffaut created in the film. There’s one shot filled with humor and honesty and brilliance as a gym teacher takes Antoine’s classroom on a jog through Paris. Little by little patches of children run off, and thanks to one continuous overhead shot we follow the aloof teacher as his line of children gets smaller and smaller. Such an energizing image is indicative of the playfulness and inventiveness of The 400 Blows.

This is a very important film. Its greatness aside, historically cinema after 1959 might have been entirely different if Truffaut and his New Wave colleagues had not tried new things with the medium. A movie like this, of its reach, would not have been possible in a more structured filmmaking environment like France in the 50s, or Hollywood throughout the Golden and Silver Ages. The 400 Blows derives its power from it spontaneous and crude cinematic qualities, the honesty of its writer’s story and Truffaut’s love of being alive, indulging in his passion for freedom and the movies. The dichotomy is that without the past The 400 Blows could not have been made. We see that in Doinel’s love of Balzac and his stealing of a still of Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika. How great must it have been to be young and in love with cinema in the 1960s. The passions involved in making movies, arguments even revolutions being made in defense of one’s heroes and the conviction that movie goers wanted something more than cheap entertainment is something that we likely will never have again. We do have though the physical films still, and these are enough to inspire us still, but I’m afraid something has been lost.

I hope I’ve done the film right by my words. I have related as best I can my immediate reaction to this marvelous picture, but I know I have not given a clear statement about what the movie is about. This is in part intentional. The 400 Blows and indeed many of the more adventurous New Wave films were radically different from traditional filmmaking, their storytelling raw and style crudely cool. The story is told through a series of events, one building upon another in a chapter-like way. There are no big story twists; a melodramatic event like Antoine seeing his mother kissing another man is treated as just a troubling fact of life that is best kept secret, partly to keep peace and also for leverage if the need would arise. These are the insights Truffaut has, and it is what makes all of his films and especially The 400 Blows so painfully beautiful.

Above all though, the film allows us to recall our own childhoods, and what can be more beautiful or painful than that?

400 Blows, The (1959)

(a.k.a. Quatre cent coups, Les)

Director: Francois Truffaut

Writers: Francois Truffaut and Marcel Moussy

Stars: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Remy and Patrick Auffay

France

In French

Runtime: 99 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053198/

L.A. Zombie: Hardcore (2010)

Can porn be art? Is porn ever entertaining? And for that matter, what qualifies edited pieces of film as pornography? What is pornography in general? Historically, I mean—how did we create this word and how do we define it in a contemporary world? It comes from the Greek porno, meaning harlot, and graphein, to write; a literal translation being the writings of prostitutes, a solicitation for sexual acts. A dictionary definition in America might be something like, ‘materials (film, video, photos) designed to stimulate sexual excitement.’ Maybe the definition of Justice Potter Stewart may be the most eloquent when deciding what it or isn’t porn: “I know it when I see it.”

I will define pornography for myself: sex scenes which cut to close-up shots of penetration, usually beneath and between the dominating sexual partner’s legs or just above his belly, looking down on the passive sexual partner’s lower back, or most boringly from a simple close-up profile shot of the two actors. It’s these close-ups that make sex scenes pornographic. Actual penetration might be erotic to see, but from a wide shot, showing both actors’ bodies and in particular letting us see their faces, actual sex in movies can be quite moving. Look at Catherine Breillat’s Brief Crossing or Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. Neither film is erotic, but one cannot deny the power that those images have in the context of their stories.

I think I’ve just thought more deeply about the subject than Bruce La Bruce, writer and director of L.A. Zombie. I don’t understand the purpose of the film, the reason for it being made, but the story revolves around a zombie, henceforth known as The Zombie, played by François Sagat, who emerges from the sea and has sex with the dead and brings them back to life. Sounds interesting, some of us more perverted might be thinking, but the execution and staging of L.A. Zombie is exactly like pornography. There might be parallels La Bruce is making with a certain kind of life style in excessive America, but the movie is quite frankly too depressing an exercise for me to care about. It is not well made—in fact in one shot a cameraman who’s going in for a close-up shot of sexual penetration actually pops into the master shot of The Zombie plowing a dead homeless man from behind—and it is not acted at all, except for the stereotypical loud moans and grunts of pornographic films.

It began well enough with some beautiful photography of the sea, a landscape similar to the beaches of Ingmar Bergman’s films, and a haunting all strings piece of music. The Zombie emerges from the water, much like the fragile characters of Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, a film about a young woman with mental illness. This connection may be important to understanding the true nature of The Zombie. He is shown in three forms throughout the picture: a gray, post-George Romero zombie, a more hideously deformed zombie with large canines protruding from his gums, and a human form, Sagat in living flesh as a homeless man wandering the streets of L.A. Is The Zombie a homeless man by way of mental illness? Are all of his experiences largely imagined, schizophrenic episodes that speak philosophically to a perversity in gay culture in America? I’ve read comments on the internet like this, but I think that’s only a way for people to praise a film that has hardcore sex scenes without them seeming to the public to be perverted.

I think the director might have been trying to express a viewpoint, but what he didn’t understand, something anyone could have seen in the very first sex scene, is that pornography is not very interesting.

Male orgasm is achieved through a repetitious motion; watching an erect penis penetrating any orifice gets old very quickly. It’s pretty much the same no matter how you do it, and L.A. Zombie lingers on the penetration in the same ways as pornography. Bruce La Bruce should have known that showing porno scenes in-full would distract the viewer. I’ll admit I found the bodies on display to be attractive, though the scenarios were kind of disgusting and over-the-top, but after the first few minutes I got sick of seeing the sex. It was like watching open heart surgery: technical and gross. My mind started to wander; I started to think of why I was watching this movie. This is where the film became depressing—it was boring and wasting 2 hours of my life. How could La Bruce credit himself as writer? There’s no characters here, no dialogue except for the occasional trifles before the characters are killed (immature arguing between violent criminals, for example), and the structure of the film is stolen from pornography—the Zombie wanders the streets of L.A. and episodically has sex with the men he meets. What La Bruce basically had was a concept, an experiment which may sound interesting—a series of hardcore scenes—but as cinema it is lifeless. Boring, and that is the biggest mistake any filmmaker, narrative, documentary or experimental, can make.

Some might question if instead La Bruce has made an anti-pornographic film. And I would say that is an interesting argument. The form and function of pornography with blood; penetrating fresh wounds rather than natural orifices; and a penis for The Zombie that looks like a goblin’s tool—long, unnaturally colored with a curved tipped head—spouting blood instead of semen. It is impossible to find this material erotic, and I found it to be disgusting but so what? Any hack can revolt an audience. The image I found most deplorable is Sagat’s Zombie’s penis. Its unnatural curvature and the blood in place of semen might have been too much to take if the material weren’t so overblown, but I found absolutely no point to any of this. And, if this was part of La Bruce’s experiment, then he failed because most of the scenes involve natural-looking penises that have normal orgasms, the men for the most part are handsome, and the sex scenes linger so that I at least started to view them abstractly. Instead of the whole film I saw Sagat sucking on a penis. These are two diametrically opposite images and that they exist in my perception in this case is not a plus for the film. I got tired of what I was seeing and was looking for something else.

But to give another point to this idea of anti-pornography let’s look at François Sagat. I find him very attractive: a great body, handsome face and a great scalp tattoo. In L.A. Zombie he always looks ugly. Obviously as a zombie, but even in his homeless human form I felt more... pity, I guess, though I didn’t care about the character. I cared about François Sagat the actor doing some outlandish and embarrassing things onscreen. There is one scene where The Zombie tries to drink a cup of coffee but he spits up, and Sagat is made to rub the spilled coffee on his chest in an erotic way. Why is this man, who seems to be an intelligent guy in real life and who is a good actor (if his performance in Man at Bath is any indication of his range) degrading himself in such a meaningless piece of garbage like L.A. Zombie?

Maybe on some level the film does work. Maybe it is only meant as a provocation. Is society so numbed that we need these kinds of films? Yes and no. We have numbed ourselves in various ways as a culture (a 24 hour media?) but 99% of us if not more will never see this movie. They’ll never hear of it. I certainly didn’t like it but I’m trying to engage it on some intellectual level but it might be futile.

The version I saw was called L.A. Zombie: Hardcore. It ran for 105 minutes. Strand Releasing is putting the film out in theaters in the US, presumable in an edited form. It will run 63 minutes. There must be alternate footage shot because 63 minutes is still too long for the hardcore version minus the hardcore. I’m actually interested in seeing the edited version. Could it be a successful exercise without the penetration shots and the shorter running time?

L.A. Zombie (2010)

(a.k.a. L.A. Zombie: Hardcore)

Director: Bruce La Bruce

Writer: Bruce La Bruce

Stars: Francois Sagat, Rocco Giovanni and Wolf Hudson

USA

In English

Runtime: 105 minutes

To purchase the hardcore version of L.A. Zombie, visit the film's official website:

http://lazombie.com/

Visit Strand Releasing's official page of the film to lean more about the US release:

http://strandreleasing.com/films/film_details.asp?BusinessUnitID={BFD06A96-7612-4F21-AEC0-3452C34902C4}&ProjectID={BC9E0DA3-37A3-4983-AA48-9EE900A0B189}

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1594921/

Breaking the Waves (1996)

Lars von Trier’s work is often very difficult to describe.  A plot summary would often make them sound silly, simple.  In reality his work is the opposite, and even if you disagree with what the director is saying, it is difficult to deny the power of his work.  Breaking the Waves may be in parts too simplistic, but the experience of watching it makes up for its weaker moments.

Bess McNeill is a good Scottish girl marrying an outsider in her community, Jan.  He works the oil rigs, and after their wedding which is as beautiful for Jan as it is for Bess, her husband goes off to work.  Bess is raised in a religious community that seems centuries away from our time.  Women are not allowed to speak aloud in church, cannot attend funerals, and must obey their husbands and the Lord.  Bess spends much of her time talking to God, asking for favors, and she answers herself in God’s words.  I found these moments a bit awkward and very unoriginal, but this has to be accepted as part of Bess’ character.  Is she really hearing the voice of God?  Well, yes.  As long as Bess believes, she does hear.  God promises to send her husband home early, and Jan is in a terrible accident when renders him paralyzed.

I was not as absorbed into Breaking the Waves as I have been with other of von Trier’s films.  The big problem is that the opening scenes or chapters are much too long.  They linger, and while as episodes they are not bad, the plot as I’ve described isn’t really what the film ultimately becomes.  About one hour into the film Jan, now a quadriplegic, asks his loving, devoted wife to sleep with other men.  He himself cannot experience love and if only Bess could tell her about her sexual encounters Jan will feel close to her again.  This is very interesting, at first naughty and in a dark way kinky.  But Bess is not all together.  She struggles with pleasing her husband, torn between his words and the word of her religion.  She asks God and he replies through her she must obey her husband.

She attempts to sleep with her husband’s doctor, a decent and very handsome man, but Bess cannot command her sexuality with intimacy.  She is on a bus, makes eye contact with a dirty old man, and masturbates him.  She tells Jan about it and he seems to get better.  Bess starts to believe in her ability to save her husband.

Von Trier is always asking profound questions, but with Breaking the Waves he is asking more about human beings than God.  Except for the ending, which I will admit to finding farfetched, this is not a religious film.  It is a film about faith; as all good religious films are—they do not presume too much—and it questions what most believe about God.  What is sin?  Can one be a sinner and still be loved by Him?  As God points out through Bess, Mary Magdalene is one of His most beloved creatures.  It is the harsh faith of the village elders, who have the power to banish people from the community, who decide what sin is.  In a way, the film questions whose faith is stronger.  Bess, a simple minded girl, the first heroine in von Trier’s trilogy of naïve and brutalized women, is like a loyal dog.  She does not matter; only the health and life of her husband counts.  The others with this stone and wood building and their bible do not understand what Bess has turned to, and for that they banish her.

Her family cannot understand her either.  Her mother is the first to warn her about banishment.  Her grandfather, a village elder, is non-vocal but his glances and presence impose much.  It is Bess’ sister-in-law, Dodo, who both knows what Bess is doing and why she is doing it.  They are best friends, have been since Dodo’s wedding to Bess’ brother, but his death brought them even closer.  Dodo cannot believe in Bess’ reasons for sleeping with other men.  She is concerned for Bess’ mental health and also for the sick control Jan is having over her.  She is a nurse, is treating Jan, and knows what the drugs and constant surgery is doing to his mind.  For Bess it doesn’t matter; as long as Jan’s condition improves, she will continue to be promiscuous.

Von Trier always gets great performances from his actors.  Emily Watson is probably the most substantial she has ever been on screen.  She has a pixy-like sweetness that really makes Bess a 3-dimensional character when she could have easily been a cartoon.  It’s surprising to discover that this was her first film.  She is intense, too, and very brave.  Often in this director’s movies actresses have to do things ordinary actresses would never be expected of, typically scenes of sexual explicitness, especially when portrayed so honestly.  It is however not the explicitness that makes these performances brilliant but the intensity and commitment by these actresses.  After all they agreed on the roles.  It makes me hopeful for Kristen Dunst’s upcoming turn in von Trier’s Melancholia.

Breaking the Waves seems so alien to most modern people: firstly the idea that the church can play such a significant role in life, and secondly because of the cruelty of being someone of faith.  Though Bess accepts her duty with relative ease, what Jan or God or she herself asks of her is too cruel.  The northern Scottish environment, the lack of technology—the reliance on public phone booths, for example, to receive a call—is so backwards.  So is the idea that a person can be banished from society for actions that others disprove of.  In their eyes Bess is a prostitute.  She dresses like one to attract men, but I never viewed her actions as perverted.  Bizarre, yes, but perhaps because I have walked with her I could understand.  The coldness with which friends and family, in the sake of tradition, greet each other is equally bizarre.  I was wondering if von Trier might have been exaggerating his story to be more effective.  That could be true, but then I remembered that in the Amish community one could be thusly banished, so this extremely religious mentality does exist today.  Most of us, including myself, simply do not experience it.

It’s hard to say whether I liked the picture.  If I had to be honest I would say I didn’t think it was a masterpiece as many have said.  It is in parts too long and boring.  Some of the actions and thoughts the characters have make little sense.  Let me rephrase that—they come out of nowhere.  When the Doctor steps in to talk Bess out of her delusion, he confesses his love.  He speaks and reacts to her indifference the way a lover would, so this “love” isn’t just plutonic, it’s more sensual.  They had only a few scenes prior, and nothing hinted at the Doctor’s feelings.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter.  You should see this film if it sounds interesting to you, and my opinions and observations aside, I think I’ve done a fair job explaining the extensive setup of the story.  It is interesting and worth sitting through to the end.  Those who are religiously inclined might find more topical or at least theological discussions to engage in with the film, but as a movie it is far from perfect.  But von Trier’s films are never perfect.  He is more instinctual, and his films are crude but powerful works of art and his audacity is enough to check out every one of his films at least once.

A final note, two versions of the film exist: an American version and the European version.  It’s obvious which is “censored” and you should seek out the European version.  I cannot describe all the differences except for one, based on a screenshot comparison I found online: during their wedding night, Jan lets Bess explore his body.  Von Trier’s camera lingers on a shot showing actor Stellan Skarsgård’s penis.  In the American version, his hand cups his privates.  If seeing Skarsgård’s junk isn’t your thing, consider this: the character’s hand covering his genitals tells the audience they’re watching a movie.  The image takes us out of the experience, and this is a film where every single image needs to be experienced the way its director intended.

Breaking the Waves (1996)

Director: Lars von Trier

Writer: Lars von Trier, Peter Asmussen and David Pirie

Stars: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard and Katrin Cartlidge

Denmark

In English

Runtime: 159 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115751/

Wild Strawberries (1957, Smultronstället)

Wild Strawberries is about an aged doctor, Isak Borg, traveling to receive an honorary degree.  He is accompanied by his daughter-in-law, and during their car trip Isak recalls episodes from his past.  Convention would assume the Professor is experiencing his memory due to the acute awareness of his own death, but Ingmar Bergman’s film is more celebratory of life and its creatures’ follies.  Isak isn’t remembering because he is dying.  He remembers because he is alive, and self-doubt is not reserved for the young.

A lifetime achievement award seems to summon the end of one’s life, especially for those who have devoted all their passions to their work.  Alfred Hitchcock, when receiving the honor from the American Film Institute, thanked his audience and proclaimed, “I think I will go on.”  Sadly he didn’t, but Isak Borg will go as stubbornly as his still living elderly mother, going strong at 96.  To understand the deeper truth to Bergman’s film, it helps to have an understanding of the director through his film work to see how his perspective changed with age, and in particular the transition period Bergman found himself in during Wild Strawberries.  Bergman had made 16 movies before Wild Strawberries, and his cinematic counterpart had been actor Birger Malmsten, a handsome but gouache Swedish lead.  In their films together, Malmsten portrayed an insecure, repressed young man wandering to find his way.  His romances were messy and dangerous, and life was not kind.  If Bergman never intended to make Malmsten his alter ego, the scripts the director was writing were certainly self-possessed.  Isak Borg, in the context of Bergman’s heroes, is very telling of a director who for the first time was receiving great international praise for his work.  Gone is the stubbornness and childish defiance of Malmsten’s characters.  Isak has achieved something.  Bergman had too, and their fears are that their accomplishments are meaningless; that they were frauds fooling at times even themselves; and the fear of being exposed as empty.  Insecurities are not limited to the youth who are finding their way.  Bergman was growing as an artist, but the fears any professional has, at least in Bergman’s case, did haunt him well into middle age.  Lifetime recognition proclaims to others but most chillingly to the recipient that they’ve achieved all they can in their profession.

We remember the past not as our former selves but as the people we are the moment we are remembering.  “Flashbacks” as narrative devices are actually active moments in a film, existing in the present.  This is one of Wild Strawberries’ biggest accomplishments.  Isak can remember the past, his eccentric extended family, the wild strawberry bushes on their property, with the insight of so many years’ experience.  We all would do things differently if we could.  Even without regrets; if we’re lucky, time gives us experience that allows us to become our selves.  There is no one age where we truly understand who we are and the story isn’t written until the later years.  That does not mean death.  There is a beautiful moment at the climax (though that word might be inaccurate given the unique qualities of Bergman’s narrative structures) when Isak is taken to see his parents during the film’s final fantasy flashback sequence.  He sees them from across a pond, and the expression on Victor Sjöström’s face is one of great serenity.  He is not crying or gushing of happiness.  What I’ve always been impressed with is Bergman’s lack of sentimentality; not because I dislike emotion.  On the contrary, Bergman’s approach allows him to be honest, and instead of tears Isak Borg looks at his parents with fondness and understanding.  Having lived a life of his own, sharing probably in similar emotional experiences as his parents, he can understand them and appreciate them as human beings.

Convention would, after the Professor’s final flashback, tucked in bed and ready for sleep, allow Isak to die.  In Hollywood storytelling that would tie things up, package the story, and give us a sense of resolution.  Such endings are so pessimistic because life goes on, even for the elderly.  Isak, I believe, undergoes some very profound and subtle changes that allow him to grow at his old age.  It’s great that Bergman will allow his character the dignity to experience at least one more day with this new perspective.

The youth in the film is very special.  They oddly are liberated from doubt.  They are carefree and hopeful.  Bibi Andersson, one of Bergman’s many brilliant leading ladies, plays a duel-role: Sara, Isak’s cousin in the flashbacks, the woman he loved and wanted to marry, and Sara, a hitchhiker going with two male friends to Italy.  Let’s talk about the modern-day Sara.  Her biggest woe is deciding which of her boyfriends she really likes.  There’s Viktor, a theologian, and Anders, a doctor.  Their fights over God give the film its biggest laugh.  They box over God’s existence, and when they return defeated to Sara, she asks, “Does God exist?”  Andersson is especially sweet, and her scenes give the film much of its beauty.  Sara of the past is theatrical, possessing the neurosis apt of a formal, hierarchal society.  In the modern world of the film, the elderly retreat into themselves: Isak, of course; his mother, and Miss Agda, Isak’s housekeeper and comic combatant.  Isak’s son and daughter-in-law are repeating the mistakes of the past, but the new youth is hope for the future.

Isak and Marianne, his daughter-in-law; their relationship I found intriguing.  Maybe because it is so unusual to see this family relation depicted in fiction, but it is poignant that Isak discovers much about his own son through the conversations with Marianne.  Evald, the son, is a stranger to Isak and yet he hates his elderly father.  Isak is surprised by this, but he accepts it.  Maybe his son’s feelings are understandable to him.  The two opposing characters, Isak and Marianne, traveling in a car, might make the film seem like a buddy picture, but Wild Strawberries lacks the required and implausible confessions and revelations seen in the genre.  Instead these characters experience growth unparalleled in most films.  By depicting moments—conversations, glances, experiences not directly related to plot (the visit to Isak’s mother, for example) Bergman, as he nearly always does, gives us people more than characters.

The film is a bridge between Bergman’s past and future work.  He has the formal structure and the theatrical rhythm typical of his early film.  Bergman came from the theatre, and he continued to write his films like plays, and many of his published screenplays are indeed in play form.  His cinematographer during the 1950s, Gunnar Fisher, achieves his most delicate work in Wild Strawberries, a more naturalistic view of the world that looks ahead to Bergman’s work with the masterful Sven Nykvist.  Bergman’s screenplay and scenario is more typical of the chamber dramas that define his 60s and 70s output.  Isak Borg will make way for the weak, mawkish male figures in films like Persona, Shame, and Scenes from a Marriage.  As Bergman’s success increased, his insecurities did too, but it is easy to imagine the director at peace towards the end of his own life—a journey we can imagine as frightful and full as Isak Borg’s.  His last films are proof of this; Fanny and Alexander and Saraband are rich in their human qualities.  Sorrow still exists but the director had realized that the poor parts of life are eclipsed by the joys, and he was talented enough to make these beautiful moments as profound and rich as the heavy drama.  These films show the great Bergman characters accepting peace where they find it, and where the past has made room for it.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

(a.k.a. Smultronstället)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Writer: Ingmar Bergman

Stars: Victor Sjostrom, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnar Bjornstrand

Sweden

In Swedish

Runtime: 91 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050986/

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.

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/