That was 2012 in film – Des 1967′s lists

Happy New year to everyone and apologies for the delay in my contribution. Just recovering from chaos of Hogmanay.

I didn’t find 2012 as good as the previous few years but I managed to miss some films which I was very keen to see, including Holy Motors, The Master (I thought Anderson’s Magnolia one of the best films of the 1990s), About Elly, This is Not a Film, Berberian Sound Studio, Shadow Dancer. Some of these will no doubt appear on my 2013 DVD list.

I’ve chosen ten on the UK cinema release list because I can’t find an obvious five which are far better than the next five and these are not necessarily in any order:

Rust and Bone (France/Belgium)

I usually have to psyche myself up to watch films featuring severe physical injury but the performance of Cotillard in particular made me overcome my squeamishness. Also a fine performance by Matthias Schoenaerts whose character’s lack of emotion at the beginning helped Stephanie to get beyond self-pity and rebuild her life. Alain couldn’t stay frozen forever and his transformation was incredibly well done.

Le Havre (Finland/France/Germany)

A Chaplinesque good-hearted fairy-tale about a group of ‘small people’ in the port area of Le Havre conspiring to help an immigrant boy on his way to join his mother in London keep out of the hands of the police. A sort of Finnish hommage to French poetic realism.

Goodbye First Love (France/Germany)

I’ve never been a fan of Rohmer but this film has the qualities fans of Rohmer often describe.

Anna Karenina (UK)

Costume drama needs a rethink and this is one of the most radical.

The Hunt (Jagten, Denmark/Sweden 2012)

Seems to be a common denominator among contributors so it must have something special going for it.

Liberal Arts (USA)

34-year-old Nat visits his old university and falls for Zibby, the bright 19-year-old daughter of his former professor’s friends. Could be classed as a romcom but the term doesn’t quite catch the mood and tone of the film. Terrific performances, especially by minor characters and by Elizabeth Olsen who threatens to put in the shade  her more famous sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley. Something  endearingly old-fashioned about the contact of the two protagonists – by letter. Here’s a clip of the couple’s correspondence rendered by voice-over which catches the flavour of the film.:

Your Sister’s Sister (USA)

Another American indy production. Interesting relationship triangle between a man and two sisters, witty and engaging. A bit of a rough diamond of a romcom.

Untouchable (France)

An uplifting comedy about the friendship that develops between a wealthy quadriplegic and his carer, Driss, an ex-convict. Has become the most seen film in French history and already doing better abroad than The Artist.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (France 2012)

A union official made redundant and his wife struggle to apply their long-held socialist principles faced with adversity.

Monsieur  Lazhar (Canada)

There seems to be a real flourishing of film in Quebec in recent years and this is a fine example.

An honourable mention to The Angels Share and a dishonourable mention to two American comedies which were both immature and very funny: Ted and 21 Jump Street.

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DVD/TV/Festivals etc.

Once Upon a Time The Revolution/Duck You Sucker (Italy 1971)

Tends to be overlooked in comparison to the other two “Once Upon a Time” Leone films (The West and America) but still great, ebullient film making.

The Minister  (France/Belgium, 2011) (TOTAL French Film Festival)

Terrific performance by Olivier Gourmet (whom I’d only seen in Dardennes Brothers films such as The Son) in which he plays a government minister under pressure.

Sarah’s Key   (France, 2010)

Two time periods, Paris in 1942, during the notorious round-ups of the Jews by the Paris police, and present-day Paris and New York. A journalist (Kristin Scott-Thomas) suspects her in-laws may have benefitted from the Jews’ misfortune over 60 years before. In some way more effective in portraying these events than La Rafle.

The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (France, 2008)

Family melodrama which follows the story of a tumultuous family over five important days in their lives.

C.R.A.Z.Y. (Canada, 2005)

Another family melodrama, this time set in Canada. It tells the story of conservative father (a great country fan – which will explain the title) and his relationship with his five sons, in 1960s and 1970s Quebec and in particular Zac, a young gay man dealing with homophobia. 

Café de Flor (Canada/France, 2011)

Another Quebec film (also written and directed by Jean-Mark Vallé) which cuts between two seemingly unrelated stories. One set in Montréal dealing with the relationship between a successful DJ, his new, younger girlfriend and his still-complicated relationship with his ex-wife who can’t let go. The other, set in 1960s Paris, stars Vanessa Paradis as a fiercely protective single mother of a child with Down syndrome

Even the Rain  (Spain, 2010)

While a director and his crew shoot a controversial film about Christopher Columbus in Cochabamba, Bolivia, local people rise up against plans to privatize the water supply.

 

The final two are Spanish films directed by Fernando Trueba, a Christmas gift from Madrid. Probably on my list as seen most recently but they refuted the common claim that in Spain there is only Almodóvar.

Belle Époque (Spain/Portugal, 1992)

Set in Spain in 1931 Fernando, a young soldier, deserts from the army and is welcomed by the owner of a farm due to his libertarian political ideas. The man has four daughters, all of whom Fernando is attracted to and they to him , so he has to decide which one to love. Despite the subtext consisting of the issues that lead to the Civil War 5 years later, this is really a fairy-tale. I  think I would have hated it back in 1992 when it first came out, when Spanish film (and Spanish political culture generally) avoided any real issues to do with the Civil War (the so-called “pact of forgetting”). But seeing it now,  really enjoyed it and its utopian aspirations.

Chico and Rita (Spain/UK, 2010)

An animated feature-length film, the story of Chico, a pianist, and Rita, a singer, is set against backdrops of Havana, New York City, Las Vegas, Hollywood and Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Strange having such a sexy animated film (outside Japan!). I probably still associate, subconsciously, animation with kids’ films. Good story, excellent animation, wonderful music.

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What of 2013? Looking forward to seeing the films mentioned by other contributors, and want to fill a lacuna in my viewing experience by getting to grips with Kenji Mizoguchi. As for telly, looking forward to Season 4 of Engrenages/Spiral and the final half season of  Breaking Bad, one of the best US series but almost invisible in the UK.

And a New Year Resolution – not to go and see blockbusters because influential reviewers tell me how good and original they are – such as Skyfall, the latest Bond film, which bored me to tears after half an hour.

Free Men (Les hommes libres, France 2011)

There have been a number of French films over the last few years about World War Two which, even if they are not particularly good examples of the cinematic art, at least draw attention to important aspects of history which would otherwise not be known or not known particularly well. Days of Glory (Indigènes, Rachid Bouchareb, 2006) deals with the treatment of African colonial troops fighting in the Free French forces in the Second World War. The Army of Crime (L’armée du crime, Robert Guédiguian, 2009) – perhaps one of the more successful – looks at the events of the” l’affiche rouge” (“red poster”) affair in which the Nazis sought to present prominent resistance fighters in Paris as foreign criminals. The title was taken from the caption on a Nazi propaganda poster, which reads “Liberators? Liberation by the army of crime”.

The Round-up (La rafle, Roselyne Bosch, 2010) is a faithful retelling of the 1942 “Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup” and the events surrounding it where the Vichy authorities in Paris, going beyond what their Nazi masters demanded, rounded up 13,000 French Jews, including 4,000 children, and kept them in the Vélodrome d’Hiver (winter cycling track) until they were transported to French concentration camps and thence to their death in the camps in the East. (Some of the publicity suggested that this film was the first to bring this knowledge to a wide audience. In fact there were at least two French films portraying this event: Les Guichets du Louvre (The Gateways to the Louvre) (Michel Mitrani, 1974), and Mr. Klein (David Losey, 1976).

Free Men (Les hommes libres, Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2011) joins this list. It is set in and around Paris’s Muslim community and in particular the city’s Central Mosque. Jews and resistance members were being hidden in the Mosque’s cellars while, up above, this place of worship was frequently visited by German occupiers.

There are two prominent real-life characters in this little-known story. Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit is Rector of the Mosque, (played by  Anglo-French veteran, Michael Lonsdale); and Salim Halali, the gifted Algerian Jewish singer, passing as an Arab to escape deportation and living under the protection of the Mosque, (played by Israeli Palestinian actor, Mahmoud Shalaby). Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit is played as a courageous man but also a subtle diplomat, leading on the Wehrmacht officers with promises of an alliance with the Moroccan monarchy.

At the centre of the film is Younes, played by Tahar Rahim (who starred in Un prophète (Jacques Audiard, 2009)), whose character is based on a composite of several real-life individuals. Younes is a young apolitical Algerian black-marketeer, concerned only with himself and his family back home. He is forced to become an informer for the collaborationist police but, under the influence of his politicised cousin, he is gradually drawn into taking sides against the Nazis.

Younes’s metamorphosis into a militant in the resistance is slow and gradual. His first act of resistance is to deliver false identity papers to Jews living in hiding. He is too late to help the parents but he leads the two young children to the Mosque where they are taken in and given papers saying they are Muslims. The Germans begin to suspect the Mosque of both harbouring Jews and Resistance members and providing Jews with false paperwork saying they are Muslims.

So does it work as a film? Unfortunately good intentions don’t always make good films. The weak script and mise en scène undermine the humanist project of the film. In terms of genre, Free Men is perhaps a thriller but the moments of suspense and intrigue are few and far between. It’s probably best to think of it as a psychological drama, but without the tension you would expect from that genre.

One of the problems with the film is that it frequently initiates potentially interesting plot strands only to seemingly leave those ideas as non-sequiturs, with the result that the film wastes several opportunities for emotional impact. For example, Younes sees a young man coming out of Salim’s room. He is shocked and reacts badly but when he sees Salim again he apologises for his reaction. But that is it. It was hardly worthwhile to raise the question of Younes’s gayness if nothing was going to be done with it in the film. Likewise, Younes is attracted to Leila, a young woman in the mosque. We discover that far from being the submissive Muslim female, she is a leading member of the Algerian Communist Party who sees the resistance against the Nazis as a stage in the liberation of Algeria. She is arrested and Younes witnesses her being taken away. It’s not as if we’re expecting an all-guns-blazing rescue à la John Wayne but it’s frustrating that this narrative strand, once raised, is frittered away.

The film also suffers from its low budget (around €8 million) for a period piece. For example, the liberation of Paris – which many cinemagoers will be familiar with both from documentary footage as well as a number of fiction films – is evoked as well as it could be with a few dozen extras, lots of flags and, I think, three vehicles, one of which looked vaguely military.

My overall impression of the film is that it felt like an earnest TV movie. It is bland and inoffensive, qualities you wouldn’t normally associate with Resistance films. Usually when I watch such films (and I’m thinking in particular of Jean-Pierre Melville’s marvellous Army of Shadows (L’armée de l’ombre, 1969)), I have a kind of trepidation at the likely scenes of torture and degradation. We were spared these on the whole but at the expense of involvement in the drama. The only real suspense I recall in the film is the scene of the evacuation of those in hiding being led down through the tunnels to a boat on the Seine which leads them to relative safety in Algeria.

One of the strong points of the film was performance. Lonsdale is as good as he was in Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux, Xavier Beauvois, 2010). And Tahir showed he is a subtle and intense actor who is capable of demonstrating a range of emotions. The progression he makes from barely literate factory worker to full-fledged revolutionary is by far the most captivating aspect in an otherwise plodding screenplay

I should add that, despite a good familiarity with the Occupation and Resistance in World War 2 France, I was completely unaware of the role of the Paris Central Mosque and I have the film to thank for that. And I liked the North African music a lot.

Argo (US 2012)

 
Argo is based on declassified information about a little-known episode during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980. A group of Islamist students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took its staff hostage for 444 days. The Iranians wanted the terminally ill Shah returned for trial from the US where he had been given asylum. US diplomats were ill-prepared for the waves of popular rage that crashed over the embassy walls, and which led to all US nationals inside being taken hostage. However, on the day of the occupation, six members of the staff managed to slip out unnoticed and found shelter in the Canadian ambassador’s residence. Argo tells the story of the CIA operation to smuggle these six diplomats out of Iran.

CIA ‘exfiltration’ expert Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) comes up with a plan for the group to pose as members of a Canadian film unit scouting locations for a science fiction film to be shot in Iran. In order to make the scheme convincing, it’s necessary to select an actual script (hence “Argo”), assemble a Hollywood production team and promote the planned film to the trade press. They generate documentation, storyboards and sundry media paraphernalia to convince the Iranian authorities that all is as it seems. Mendez enters Iran, posing as the film’s producer, and has to lead the group in their escape.

The film works fairly well as a thriller. One effective method of ratcheting up the tension was to have Iranian kids employed to sift through the paperwork the CIA had shredded before the embassy fell to see if they could find anything useful. We see at various stages the jigsaw coming together so that by the time the diplomats are heading to the airport, the authorities have a photograph of one of them. (I recall a similar technique used in an earlier political thriller from the 1980s – I can’t recall the name of the film but it may or may not have starred Robert Redford and if anyone is familiar with it please put me out of my misery! – which showed the a photograph of the hero, who was in danger, gradually crystallising from the pixels on the computer screen).

In terms of the drama, it would have been better had the film ended as the plane was leaving Iranian airspace and we would have been spared the sentimental backstory of the FBI agent and the commentaries at the end with the originals the characters are based on bringing us up to date with the characters’ stories – a dubious kind of plea for authenticity. (As often is the case in such films, there is a caption, “Based on a true story”, a special pleading that I find annoying). But as a genre piece, a hybrid of thriller, heist and caper movie, I found it quite successful. The cloak-and-dagger operation mounted by the CIA does make for an exciting film.

Another generic strand (or tone) in the film is comedy. Mendez recruits two Hollywood veterans, the affable makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), designer of Mr Spock’s ears for Star Trek, and the grizzled old-school producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin). Their cynical humour (“You could teach a rhesus monkey to direct a film in a day,” Siegel states – a line which reminds me of Orson Welles’ daft statement about Citizen Kane that anyone could learn how to direct a film in a week) lightens the tension. Another such put-down of the Hollywood system occurs when Chambers asks Mendez when he first explains his plan. “You want to come to Hollywood and act like a big shot without actually doing anything? You’ll fit right in.” The conspirators take to greeting each other with the catch-phrase, based on the title, “Argofuckyourself”

And so I found that the film worked fairly effectively on these levels. However, what I found somewhat far more problematic was the film’s overall portrayal of the hostage crisis. It fails to convey the idea that the USA in general and the CIA in particular were hated by wide layers of the population and for good reason. The success of the Shah’s brutal dictatorial regime depended upon its support by Washington. Now It’s true that the film opens with a brief summary of Britain and America’s role in overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Dr Mosaddeq whose policy was to nationalise the oil. We are also shown footage of the Shah in a TV interview denying knowledge of the torture carried out by Savak, his secret police. And a CIA operative tells Mendez that when they were evacuating the Shah, the plane struggled to take off, such was the volume of stolen gold the Shah had taken onto the plane.

These serve to provide a veneer of objectivity to the film but what dominates throughout the rest of the film is something quite different. While the film invites us to empathise with the CIA hero and the diplomats and laugh at Hollywood’s antics, it also urges us view Iranians as the enemy. What struck me in particular was how the Iranian characters are not individualised in the film: they are seen just as “the mob”. We hear none of the debates taking place between different factions (including the secular left) that were taking place throughout the hostage crisis. The Iranian characters lack any real subjectivity.  In a couple of key scenes where we see Iranians on screen, we are not given sub-titles. This first occurs in the market where Mendez takes the group to meet the Culture Ministry officials and they run into some local people who shout at them aggressively. We can probably guess what they’re on about but it would be useful to hear what they had to say. Another occasion was while the Americans were facing the final terrifying hurdle of  the airport guards. While their officer does not play the clown  à la Sacha Baron-Cohen like so many middle-eastern villains in Hollywood films, most of the little he has been given to say remains untranslated.

Coming out at a time when Israel is openly threatening to bomb Iran, and the American media have ramped up their campaign of fear-mongering, the film can’t help but seem to play into the hands of the most reactionary elements in the US ruling class. And given its box-office success, it has already had millions of viewers flocking to theatres to hear the story of how innocent Americans were victimized by the jihad-crazed Iranians and the CIA came in to save the day.

This despite the fact that Ben Affleck and, in particular, George Clooney, who initiated the project and is co-producer, have campaigned for liberal, even leftist causes. They supported radical historian Howard Zinn and before his death they campaigned to get a TV series adapted from his major work off the ground.  (In Affleck and Matt Damon’s script for Good Will Hunting, they have the arrogant young genius played by Damon sneer at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong fuckin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll fuckin’ knock you on your ass”). Clooney and Affleck seem oblivious to the fact that the film, whether they like it or not, has become part of the effort by the most reactionary elements in the American ruling class to drag the US into a war with Iran.

Is Affleck so desperate for a box office hit and a return to his star status which has been frittered away over the years in mediocre work that he blinds himself to the possible political effects of the film? Or is there something about the culture of Hollywood that makes so many artists vulnerable to pressures and moods and social forces that they may only be partially aware of?

The extract below takes place near the end of the film as the American diplomats have to negotiate the hurdle of the airport guards:

Les neiges du Kilimandjaro: A second opinion

The extended family of Michel and Marie-Claire

Des has had difficulty trying to post this comment on our initial review of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Since it is such a detailed response, we thought it merited a separate posting. (Roy Stafford)

I really enjoyed this film, as did the other ten or so people at the early-evening  screening in Aberdeen who burst into spontaneous applause at the end. And if you know Aberdeen audiences, this is not to be sniffed at. But this was the one and only screening which is a great pity. Since seeing the four late 90s/early 2000s films – Marius et Jeanette (1997), A la place du coeur /In place of the heart (1998), and La ville est tranquille/The town is quiet (2000) and A l’attaque/Attack (2000), I’ve managed to miss a few Guédiguian films, such as Marie Jo et ses deux amours (2002) and Lady Jane (2007). And his early films don’t seem to be available on DVD. I don’t quite understand how distribution of French films to the UK works. It’s partly star-driven (Depardieu, Binoche, Huppert, Tautou, Duris, Scott-Thomas etc) but many star-free French films manage to get a UK run. e.g. two films by Fred Cavayé: Pour elle (Anything for Her, 2008) and À bout portant (Point Blank, 2010)

These early films  seem to conform to Guédiguian’s stated attitude (in an interview I haven’t been able to find, but which he touches on in this Senses of Cinema interview), that he alternates ‘dark’ films with ‘light’ ones; dark to open people’s eyes to the real situation and light ones to give the audience some hope. Marius et Jeanette certainly has a knockabout comedy flavor. La ville est tranquille, however, is a very bleak (despite occasional touches of comedy) and A l’attaque was very light and (once the basic gimmick of the film was established – we see the scriptwriters writing the screenplay which is then dramatised including alternative lines of narrative which are then rejected, the screen crumpling like the sheet of the discarded paper of the script) not completely successful. But what I think is his best film, A la place du coeur, managed to keep the dark and the light in balance, as does Les neiges de Kilimanjaro which I think is Guéguidian’s best since then, at least of those I’ve managed to see.

Of the subsequent films I have seen, Le Promeneur du Champs de Mars /The Last Mitterand) is interesting mainly for Michel Bouuquet’s portrayal of the President but for me, Guéguidian really pulled his punches when dealing with the shady political past of the old fraud. The other is L’Armée du crime (The Army of Crime) about a group of foreign Resistance workers in Paris during the Occupation led by the Armenian poet, Missak Manouchian. Not a great film but a worthy (I hope this doesn’t sound too patronising) addition to those films that are important primarily for the story they tell, such as La Rafle (The Roundup, 2010) about the rounding up of Jews by the French police in 1942 to be sent to the death camps; La Nuit noire -17 Octobre 1961 (Alain Tasma, 2005), about the massacre and subsequent cover up of the death of over 200 North African demonstrators at the hands of the Paris police; and Indigènes (Days of Glory, Rachid Bouchareb 2006) which shows the role of French colonial troups in the liberation of Europe. (Le voyage en Arménie, 2006, which I saw in The Barbican followed by  a Q and A with Guédiguian and Ariane Ascaride, is perhaps best forgotten.)

I know what Roy means about the film’s politics and lack of analysis but I’ve never really felt that Guédiguian was a particularly political director – despite the film’s political concerns and the explicit political discussion among the characters. He is, ultimately, more interested in the bonds between people than their social or economic stations. In that respect he might be better considered a humanist director. He is frequently compared to Marcel Pagnol (eg The Marius/ Fanny/Cesar (1931–36)) but a better comparison might be with Jean Renoir, especially in Renoir’s Popular Front period. Though to focus most of his films on working class characters might be considered a political act. As for “Marseilles isn’t quite like a wet Wednesday in Greenock or Salford”, I felt exactly the same at the very tragic ending of La ville est tranquille  when there is a wide shot taking in the clear blue sky and the Mediterranean and the sun-drenched white buildings of Marseille.

Incidentally, when I visited Marseilles a few years ago, after seeking out the bar which is the main location for Pagnol’s Marius trilogy (and being surprised to find there wasn’t even a photo or a poster on the wall connecting it to the film), I took a bus out to the Estaque district where Guédiguan sets many of his films. It looked a totally gentrified district with house prices to match. I suspect that Michel and Marie-Claire’s flat with the terrace where film ends would cost a pretty penny or eurocent!

Useful discussion on Guédiguian at Senses of Cinema

También la Lluvia (Even the Rain, Spain/France/Mexico 2010)

También la Lluvia/Even the Rain didn’t get much of a UK release which is a pity because it is a very powerful and multi-faceted film. It is a highly political film which draws clear parallels between Spanish colonialism five centuries ago and modern globalised imperialism. It also raises questions about filming on location in poor countries, linking it to colonial exploitation. The film examines the contradictions encountered by even idealistic artists when forced to compromise with corporate sponsors in order to gain funding for their work and this limits their capacity to challenge the systems of power they attempt to portray.

The film portrays the efforts of a director and producer to make a historical film about Columbus, highlighting the genocidal rapaciousness involved in the conquest of the New World. It is dedicated to the memory of the late radical American historian Howard Zinn, which is fitting given the way the film sees history not simply as a reflection the past but also an attempt to better understand the present in order to influence the future.

It is set in 2000 in, and in the jungle around, Bolivia’s third largest city, Cochamba, and what makes this particular film different from other films with ‘Third World’ settings and low-cost local casts is the dramatic intrusion of external events. 2000 marks the high point of a massive protest in Cochabamba involving the local Quechua population struggling against the Bolivian government’s attempt to enforce water privatisation in which they sold the country’s water rights to a private multinational consortium. (The title, También la Lluvia/Even the Rain, refers to the notion that catching rainwater would be illegal). The film shows how the Bolivian state starts to enforce the company’s monopoly by getting the local police to padlock the people’s wells.

The film segues effectively between its two strands. The Columbus film is shown partly in rehearsal, partly in the viewing room and partly as viewers would see the finished film. The conflicting goals of the Columbus film and the revolt against water privatisation provide the film’s dramatic tension and one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way the characters express their emotions as ‘themselves’ and simultaneously as characters in the Columbus film.

The film references several other films and genres. As a film-within-a–film, it recalls Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine/Day for Night (1973) though it is less interested in the technical details of filmmaking, with few shots of cameras, lighting equipment etc. I also thought of Dennis Hopper’s crazy chaotic 1971 film, The Last Movie, shot in the nearby Peru. An early shot of a giant crucifix dangling from a helicopter seems like a hommage to Fellini’s 8½ while the attempts to put the crucifix in place in the middle of the jungle brings to mind Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) (though I’ve heard of no reports of the star attempting to shoot the director!) These references are perhaps misleading as it is very much in the realist tradition. The director, Icíar Bollaín, has written a book about Ken Loach; indeed, as an actor, she was in Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995) and the script is by Paul Laverty, Loach’s regular collaborator.

Iciar Bollain

The (main) film revolves around three central characters: Costa, the parsimonious producer (Luis Tosar), Sebastián, the director (Gael García Bernal) and Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), the leader of the anti-privatisation campaign who is taken on to play a leading role in the film. Costa has chosen the area as a cheap location standing for Hispaniola, not realising they would be in the middle of a populist uprising against the government’s betrayal.

Costa’s cynicism contrasted to director Sebastián’s apparent idealism is a rerun of the perennial ‘art-versus-commerce’ theme (the film flirts with but ultimately avoids cliché) but in the end the roles are to some extent reversed as Otero turns out to have more idealism than the “film-is- everything” attitude of the director. Bernal’s role is much smaller than Tosar’s, suggesting he was there to tentpole the modestly-budgeted project out of political sympathy (he is an anti-globalisation campaigner and was a Zapatista sympathiser in his youth) http://www.timeout.com/film/news/1097/gael-garc-a-bernal-interview.html

The opening scene foreshadows what is to come as local people respond to the director’s “open casting” invitation by arriving in their hundreds and queuing up, in some cases for hours. When the filmmakers, having selected the people they need, try and dismiss the rest of the crowd, trouble breaks out. One in particular, Daniel, who was there as his daughter Belén (Milena Soliz) is keen to get a tryout for the film, insists angrily that they all must get their chance. Despite the producer’s fears that they will have a troublemaker on their hands, Sebastian overcomes Costa’s objections because he feels Daniel is so right for the film and casts him as Atuey, a key leader in the failed Tainos revolt against Columbus and Spanish rule, and Belén as Atuey’s daughter Panuca.

They do not initially realise that Daniel is a prominent leader of the Cochabamba protests and his role in the struggle will interfere with the making of the film. Costa has to bribe the police chief to get him out of jail for a vital scene, keeping from Daniel the fact that he has to go back once the scene is shot. The dramatic highpoint occurs when, in the Columbus film, the Spanish soldiers burn Atuey and two other Tainos at the stake. Bartolomé de Las Casas(Carlos Santos), a 16th century Catholic Bishop and historian, tries to persuade them not to go through with it as it will make it more difficult to win the people to Christianity and make a martyr of Atuey. However, the limitations of pious appeals are shown in the modern story when the police arrive to re-arrest Daniel and the Quechu actors get down from the cross and take direct action to free Daniel from the police car. There is another important character, Anton (Karra Elejalde) who plays Columbus. He is an idealist led to cynicism and drink perhaps by his disappointment. He ridicules the idea that Las Casas should be the conscience of the Columbus film, pointing out that he had supported the idea of importing slaves from Africa to spare the indigenous population.

Daniel addresses the demonstrators

The two strands of the film – the film and the film-within-the-film – might have been difficult to integrate but También la Lluvia manages this successfully, the conflicting goals of the Columbus film and the revolt against water privatisation providing the film’ s dramatic tension, and one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way the characters express their emotions as ‘themselves’ and simultaneously as characters in the Columbus film.

The final sequence of the film shows the rise in tension as the dispute escalates, with fighting on the street, barricades and bullets, leading to the film crew having to abandon the film and head for the airport. It is at this point that the film develops into a political thriller as the producer Costa drives through the streets, with army check-points and protesters’ barricades, dodging army bullets on the way, to get the seriously-wounded Belén to hospital.

Costa’s personal transformation, under the influence of his friendship with Belén, could be seen as unconvincing and there only to set up an exciting climax in the form of a traditional chase scene. However, this view underestimates the capacity of individuals to reassess their actions as their own values are challenged and begin to change. Moreover, in his discussion with Sebastian, It is strongly hinted that Costa was not always interested only in the bottom line, that he has retained the core of idealism which brought him originally into filmmaking.

Costa and Sebastian – art or life

This is a very complex, intelligent and powerful film that works on several levels. As a piece of drama, with a compelling musical soundtrack, it captures and holds the audience’s attention and says something important about the inspiring challenges around the world to the global corporate order in South America.

Here is the trailer:

If you are of a cynical disposition and wonder if Tambien la Lluvia fell into the same situation with regard to exploitation of local labour, have a look at a long interview with Iciar Bollain on Youtube:

Animal Kingdom (Australia, 2010)

Usually when I go to see a film I have a good idea about what it’s going to be like from advanced publicity, reviews etc. All I knew about Animal Kingdom was that it was about a family of bank robbers in modern-day Melbourne (the exact period is a little vague), has an ensemble cast in which the only actor well-known outside Australia was Guy Pearce, had appeared to some acclaim at Sundance and received 8/10 in the Guardian’s summary of reviews. I expected a superior heist-action film and the opening credits, with a montage of unfocused security-camera stills of bank robberies in progress, reinforced this expectation. There was certainly some pretty violent action but, unlike, say, Goodfellas or Heat, it was in short sharp bursts. It turned out to be less a crime-action film, more a gripping psychological thriller. Despite the positive reviews, the early-evening screening I attended was almost empty which is a pity.

Outline – not too many spoilers

Joshua’s mother dies of a heroin overdose and the hapless 17-year-old contacts his grandmother to arrange the funeral. For years his mother had kept him away from her violent criminal brothers but the grandmother welcomes him into the home. The Cody brothers are considering getting out of the bank-robbing business as the police are all over them. The brothers are Darren, the youngest, who is making money in the drug trade in partnership with a crooked cop; Craig, the middle son, who is none too bright but highly excitable, no doubt because he frequently samples the merchandise from his trade; and the oldest, Andrew, who is nicknamed Pope, a psychopathic criminal who is being sought by the police. The brains behind the gang belong to Barry, a family associate who advises Pope to get out of bank-robbing. His preferred option is the stock market but even the grubbier drugs business seems a better bet than carrying on in the old way. Pope doesn’t own nor would he have a clue how to operate a computer to become a stock-broker and considers the drug business as being for sissies. (This exchange reminded me of the one between Stringer Bell in The Wire who wants to move more into ‘legitimate’ business while gang boss Avon Barksdale just wants to be a gangster). Heading the family is the clawingly sentimental but quite vicious mother, Janine Cody. Janine at first seems to be the family skivvy but when her sons are in danger she comes more and more to the fore and becomes a key player in the developing narrative.

The police execute Barry in cold blood and Pope decrees revenge. After more or less forcing Joshua (known as “J”) to go out and steal a car for the job, Pope and his brothers go out and kill two policemen at random. Local detective Leckie (Guy Pearce) enters the story at this point and realises that the way to pin the killing on the Codys is through J. The rest of the film is taken up with the psychological pressure that Pope, aided by a crooked lawyer, exerts on his siblings and nephew, paralleled with Leckie’s hope of bringing J over to his side.

Commentary

The opening of the film sets the tone. We see J sitting on the sofa watching a game show on television with his mother asleep by his side. She is not in fact sleeping but dead and he has already called the paramedics. The fact that he continues to watch TV could suggest callousness but I think that would be a misreading. He is, in a sense, the protagonist of the film but, at first, a fairly passive one. Director David Michôd gives him a voiceover in the early part of the film, seemingly for expositional reasons. Despite script-writing guru Robert Kee’s dictum that voiceovers are a contentious device for exposition, I find them quite useful when done effectively, for example in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Terence Malick’s Badlands. In fact I thought we might be in for the kind of naïve voiceover we find in that film from Sissy Spacek’s character. J’s is much more dispassionate, cool and calm despite the strange family environment he finds when he moves to his grandmother’s. The voiceover finishes (from memory) after about twenty minutes but it does frame the basic lesson – all criminals come apart – which is fleshed out over the next hour and a half.

Perhaps the best things about the film were the performances. Guy Pearce had a supporting role which he plays with quiet effectiveness but there were, arguably, three standout performances. The first was James Frecheville as J. It was a misleading performance, at first quiet and introverted, not quite allowing us to see where he stands with his family’s activities, first suggesting that nothing much was going on inside his head but later suggesting a sense of shock at the crazy world he has entered. When these activities start to infiltrate his life beyond the family he becomes a more active agent in the drama.

The performances of both Jackie Weever (Janine) and Ben Mendelsohn (Pope) share, in their different ways, a certain kind of creepiness. The character of Janine (for which Jackie Weaver was nominated in the recent Oscars as the Best Supporting Actress) shares certain features with previous fictional criminal mothers such as Ma Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly) in Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) (whose son, played by James Cagney, was of course Cody Jarrett – any significance?); Billie Whitelaw as Violet, mother of the ultra-violent twins in The Krays (d. Peter Medak, 1990); and Livia Soprano  (Nancy Marchand). The latter prefigures Janine in the way Livia is happy to plot the death of her son as Janine is happy to sacrifice her grandson but unlike the latter she is passionately (almost oedipally – kissing them passionately on the lips) fond of her sons. When they go to jail she displays her ruthlessness and power. Her performance is at its most effective when she is silent, her eyes almost giving her entire performance. A mistress of manipulation, behind her benign smile there is coldness with which she sketches what must happen to J to save her sons, all the while keeping the grandmotherly expression on her face. A chilling performance.

Ben Mendelsohn’s tactile performance as Pope was unsettling from the start. He’s off his medication and is a figure of dangerous unpredictability and ominous impulse. It is not just in the way the character seems at any moment to hit out at whoever displeased him but the way, for example, that he pretends to be a sort of father figure, particularly to the youngest brother Darrell, encouraging him to come out as gay, telling he doesn’t mind but menacingly so as to increase his control over his weak younger brother. One unsettling moment foreshadows Pope’s later horrific treatment of Debbie, J’s 16-year-old-girlfriend. She falls asleep as J is out of the room and carries her into the bedroom, his hands lingering on her legs until J arrives.

One aspect of the film that was at one point causing me problems was the pacing of the narrative. At first, when J arrives at the Codys, I found it difficult to distinguish between the brothers and their associate Barry. Fairly quickly the character of Barry establishes itself, especially as Pope’s entrance is held back. It might have been more effective for Barry to be left a bit longer as a counterweight to Pope so that the death of a potential protector for Josh highlights his vulnerability more dramatically. Later, when the police seemed to be making headway in the case and the killers’ arrest and conviction seemed inevitable, I felt the narrative sagged a little. However, a final act opened up with Janine’s role becoming major and our sympathy for J and anxiety on his behalf (and on behalf of his girlfriend Debbie and her family) being ratcheted up. It slackened off after the trial to be revamped by a triumphant Janine confronting Detective Guy in the supermarket and an explosive ending (which, although I half-guessed was about to happen, nevertheless  was a shock.

Finally, much of the atmosphere in the film was conveyed by the music and cinematography. Antony Partos’s austere score was dark, melancholic, tense and menacing. I think I need a further viewing to absorb the mise en scene and cinematography but I was left with an impression of frequent (over-frequent?) slow motion sequences, slow zooms and noirish lighting which combined to create a mood of tragic inevitability.

Here’s the trailer:

Jacques Demy and Politics

When Venicelion’s blog on Jacques Demy appeared some time ago, I started to write a comment on the politics of Demy’s but I became ill and abandoned it. However, I was recently researching for an article on Demy for The Media Education Journal and, having had the opportunity to watch some of Demy’s lesser-known works, I thought it worth revisiting the question. The starting point was Roy’s suggestion that Demy “had little in common with the politics of Alain Resnais or Chris Marker” [leftist directors in a group known as The Left Bank Group which was part of the French New Wave in the late 1950s/early 1960s. The other group were known as the Cahiers group, being based around the journal, Les Cahiers du Cinéma]. This reflects a position among many commentators that Demy’s work was “fluffy”, “lightweight” and “whimsical”, an attitude echoed in that most clichéd of oxymorons frequently applied to Demy: bitter-sweet. Many of Demy’s biggest fans share this view of the director and recently in The Guardian, an article about the best 50 films for children suggested that Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was suitable for six-year olds! I feel that Demy reputation requires defending as much from his defenders as his detractors.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Although less overtly political than Resnais and Marker, in many of his films Demy shared the political leftism of the others in the Left Bank Group (including his wife Agnes Varda). In his most successful film, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), he implicitly criticises the Algerian War at a time when the heavy political censorship in operation made it very difficult to refer to the conflict at all. The war separates a young couple by conscripting Guy, a 20-year-old garage mechanic; he is wounded in an ambush and he returns, limping and embittered, to find his girlfriend who was carrying his baby, gone. His disillusion is shown in the sequence where he limps around the town revisiting places he had  visited with Genevieve before he left for Algeria.

The idea of social class permeates the film. Even in the “happy“ opening section, when working-class Guy suggests they get married and run a petrol station, Genevieve, daughter of the petite-bourgeoise proprietor of a chic umbrella shop, remarks, “What a strange idea”. When he is away in Algeria, she gives in to the subtle pressure of her mother and marries a rich jeweller. The American critic Jonathon Rosenbaum remarked about the ending:

The name of the Esso station is Escale Cherbourgeoise; this means literally “Cherbourgian Stopover,” but if we consider that escalader means “to scale or to climb” and escalier means “stairway,” we can read traces of a buried pun: “a bourgeois step up.” Guy has become comfortably middle-class, Geneviève has become upper-class, and the class difference between them seems even more unbridgeable than it was before.

The Pied Piper

Demy’s only US-based film, Model Shop (1968), flirts with the anti-Vietnam War counter-culture but his 1973 English language film, The Pied Piper, is essentially about class struggle. (The on-line journal Jump Cut referred it as a “Neo-Marxist fairy tale”). It is set in the middle ages in the town of Hamelin and the Baron, the Mayor and the Bishop – representatives of the ruling class – plot behind closed doors to increase their wealth and power while the people, kept in fear and ignorance, are outside. The main event in the film is the marriage of convenience between Franz, the Baron’s son, and Lisa, the Mayor’s daughter, a purely political and financial transaction: she hates him and he is interested only in the dowry. In this extract during the wedding ceremony the cake – ironically in the completed form of the unfinished cathedral that the church and civil authorities have been squeezing taxes from the population to build – is discovered to be full of rats. The cake falls apart and they are inside, thus linking Christianity – the ideological buttress of the ruling class -  to exploitation and the bubonic plague.

Lady Oscar

Even in some of Demy’s minor pieces, commissions rather self-generated projects, such as Lady Oscar, the class struggle makes itself felt. This is a 1979 Japanese film (made in English), based on the best-selling manga “The Rose of Versailles” by Riyoko Ikeda, about a woman raised to be a man and serving in the court of Marie Antoinette. She becomes torn between class loyalty and her desire to help the impoverished as revolution brews among the oppressed lower class and she eventually joins the ranks of the revolutionaries. While Demy is not attempting a realistic historical drama and there is a strong fairytale element to the film, he is at pains to show how the aristocrats treat the poor as an inconvenience, as vermin, or as sexual playthings.

Une Chambre en Ville/A Room in Town

This 1982 film is Demy’s most overtly political film, involving a confrontation between the notorious CRS riot police and the strikers in the 1955 naval shipyard workers strike in Nantes and in which, like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, the dialogue is completely sung. It is interesting to note that Demy frames the opening and closing confrontations in a very similar way  to the scenes in Lady Oscar when the people enter the scene after the fall of the Bastille as the revolution explodes onto the streets of Paris.

Here are clips from the two films:.

Incidentally, the very idea of a group of CRS policemen singing would have been a bit much for an audience aware of the CRS’s reputation during the events of May ’68 and subsequently. Demy solves the problem by having them chant rather than sing which makes it very Brechtian in style. The fact that it starts in black and white before segueing into colour is meant I think to reference to the contemporary black and white news footage.

Perhaps the most explicit statement of Demy’s political position is, ironically, given to a baroness, the widow of an army colonel, who has come down in the world due to her late son’s debts so that she has to rent out a room to Francois Guilbaud, a metal worker who later has a love affair with her daughter. At first she disapproves of Guilbaud since he is a striker and demonstrator and even more so because of his affair with her daughter, but gradually she mellows in her attitude. The following words are the baroness’s but they are perhaps an expression of Demy’s own political creed. (In most of the film, the words are a kind of recitativo and are therefore laid out as prose rather than verse):

Does it shock you when a bourgeoise lets her hair down? You know, Guilbaud, I don’t give a shit about the bourgeoisie. I’m not one of them. I’ll tell you something: I prefer you and your comrades to the bourgeois. You’re fighting for something, fighting to survive, just like me. The bourgeois are rotting in their material wealth. They wallow in the comfort of their complacency. But I swear they won’t have me as one of their own.

(The subtitles on the DVD are, necessarily, more compressed).

I don’t suggest for a moment that Demy was a political director in the way that, for example, Loach, Costa-Garvas and Godard etc are. In Une Chambre en Ville, the love affair is mostly in the foreground, the strike in the background. Despite the fact that the narrative is punctuated by announcements by the strike leader, Demy shows little interested in the tactics or strategy of winning the strike. However, several French critics have highlighted the political in Demy’ films and not just in Une Chambre en Ville. However, I think I would go along with Gerard Vaugeois‘ caveat that, while  Demy is one of the most political of French directors in French cinema, he is so “in his own way” .

The Left Bank Group and the Cahiers Group

On the whole question of the divisions in the New Wave, I wonder, from the vantage point of today, how useful it is to use Richard Roud’s distinction between the so-called Left Bank group (politically on the left) and the supposedly right wing Cahiers group (although there arguably broad stylistic differences between the groups). Some in the Cahiers group certainly adopted a right-wing stance (and continued to do till the end  – see Rohmer’s L’Anglaise et le Duc /The Lady and the Duke (2001), quite a different take on the French Revolution from Demy’s). But there were also Marxists such as Pierre Kast in the Cahiers camp. In other respects the delineation isn’t clear. Jacques Rivette is in some ways closer to Resnais than to the rest of the Cahiers group. Many of the accusations of being right wing were directed at the Cahiers group because of the New Wave’s championing of Hollywood cinema in the Cold War period when American cultural artefacts were viewed with suspicion by many on the left.

The issuing of the whole of Demy’s work on DVD will, hopefully, lead to debate and reconsideration of this and other aspects of Demy’ cinema.

Gainsbourg (France 2010)

Eric Elmosnino as Serge Gainsbourg

Gainsbourg is a biopic about Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991), born Lucien Ginsburg in 1928 into a family of Russian-Jewish émigrés. He was a major figure in his native France as a songwriter, singer, actor, novelist, and all-round provocateur, one of the most sacré of all the monstres sacrés in modern French culture. He might be seen a cross between John Lennon, Bob Dylan and, in the final stage of his life, the late Oliver Reid. Gainsbourg is generally little known in the English-speaking world – apart from the ‘succès de scandale‘ of the heavy-breathing number,  ‘Je t’aime moi non plus’ in 1969, banned by the BBC and incurring the wrath of the Vatican. Gainsbourg embraced the myth he had created too fully, and eventually drank and smoked his way into oblivion, dying of a heart attack aged 62 in 1991. On his death, President Mitterrand said Gainsbourg “elevated song to the level of art” and compared him to Baudelaire and Verlaine. His former home on the Left Bank has become a shrine even more popular than Oscar Wilde’s and Jim Morrison’s. I came to this film with mixed expectations.

As a fan of the both Gainsbourg and the French chanson tradition I was curious as to how Gainsbourg and his associates would be portrayed. On the negative side, however, the biopic is probably my least favourite genre. There is a something about its familiar tropes that can crate a dull and predictable viewing experience: the awkward  introduction of famous characters, (“Byron, meet Shelley. Keats is over there.”), the ponderous exposition, historical events being signalled by a newspaper headline or newsreel, the inevitable rise-and-fall trajectory, the childhood trauma or period of difficulty as an adult followed by affliction/addiction which is duly overcome, leading to triumph.

Part of the problem I find with the biopic is that the plot is usually structured in what are deemed to be important episodes in the lives of their subjects and the films often stagger from episode to episode like a filmed Wikipedia entry, frequently lacking in any real insight into what inspired the characters to achieve what they did. Another problem is that biopics tend to adhere the pretence that the screen can be an unmediated window onto the past which the biopic shares with its close relative, the historical film. For the historian and film scholar Robert Rosenstone, a better strategy than traditional realist film when portraying history (and by implication, biography) is an approach which in which the film foregrounds itself as a construction, playing with the past and creatively interacting with its traces – what he calls postmodernist history films which are fragmentary, partial, playful or incomplete.

Some biopics successfully adopt this approach, such as the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) which uses six actors of both sexes to portray the various ages and facets of Dylan (and in which, interestingly, the role of one of the wife of one of the Dylan’s wives is played by Gainsbourg’s daughter Charlotte). And Agnès Varda’s film on her late husband Jacques Demy, Jacquot de Nantes (1991), which mixes a ‘re-enacted’ narrative of Demy’s early years with actual footage from his childhood, punctuated with voiceovers and cuts across to clips from his films, as well as contemplative shots of the ailing Demy.

Gainsbourg is not entirely free of the pitfalls of the biopic but by employing a number of non-realist techniques Joann Sfar has  brought a refreshing originality to the genre and avoids the pretence that “this is how it was.” (Significantly, in the title sequence, the film is referred to as a conte, i.e. a tale, and the end credits quotes Sfaar’s disclaimer that “ I love Gainsbourg too much to hem him in with reality. It’s not the truth about Gainsbourg that interests me, but his lies.”) Sfar manages to liberate the story from the genre’s predictabilities by his fantastical artistry. Significantly he comes from the world not of film but of the bande dessinée (or ‘BD’) – i.e.  cartoons which are very popular in France and with adults as much as children.

Sfar’s main departure from cinematic realism is to create an alter ego for Gainsbourg, a sort of animated manifestation of his psyche, a tall, rather elegant, chain-smoking caricature of Gainsbourg (or, rather, how Serge sees himself), sporting a ridiculously oversized nose, beady eyes. and prominent ears (one of the film’s major themes is the idea that Gainsbourg was chronically ill-at-ease with his appearance) who informs Serge that he is his guelle (‘gob’ or face in French slang). La Guelle is relentless in his efforts to advance Serge’s music (at the expense of his painting, his children and his character), encouraging him to abandon painting and burn his canvasses, to write bubblegum songs for teen pop singers (French rock was pretty poor and derivative then), to play a cruel trick on the naïve, eighteen-year-old singer France Gall, and so on. Some reviewers found this device to be intrusive and distracting. I found it an ingenious way of dealing with a complex life while avoiding some of the pitfalls of the traditional biopic.

Doug Jones as La Guelle de Gainsbourg

Another strong point of the film is its superb casting and performances. Gainsbourg is played by a theatre actor new to film, Eric Elmosnino who, with a little help from prosthetics, achieves a remarkable resemblance to the singer whose mannerisms he captured to an uncanny degree. Also notable is the performance of Kacey Mottet Klein as the young Lucien, portraying him as a smart-alec of a precocious child – perhaps a projection back from Gainsbourg’s adult persona, as biographical sources suggest a shy insecure child and adolescent. Another outstanding performance was by Lucy Gordon (who tragically committed suicide during post-production). She captures the young Jane Birkin’s gamine looks and breathy delivery to perfection.

These were supported by a number of excellent cameos of people involved in Gainsbourg’s life, both romantically and professionally. In her five minutes on screen, Anna Mouglalis perfectly conveyed the feline charms of Juliette Greco (and it was almost appropriate that her maid is a talking cat! – another of Sfar’s audacious challenges to realism).

Anna Mouglalis as Juliette Greco

Sarah Forrestier displayed the ingénue qualities of singer France Gall and Doug Jones deserves special mention for his performance as La Guelle which he carried out with the same aplomb as he did for the creepy faun in Del Torro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and as one of the Gentleman monsters in ‘Hush’, the ‘silent’ episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And the veteran new wave director Claude Chabrol puts in a brief comic shift as Gainsbourg’s music publisher for the scandalous recording, ‘Je t’aime, moi non plus’, playing with relish a combination of anxiety about the inevitable backlash when the song hit the airwaves and delight at the prospect of loads of money flowing in.  (see clip below)

Even more theatrical and explosive is Laetitia Casta’s performance as Brigitte Bardot  as she strides onto the screen in slow-motion down a long hallway, in leopard-skin coat and thigh-length boots, a performance marked by an uninhibited sensuality as she captured BB’s mannerism’s and voice (which seems to me to be modeled on Bardot’s performance in the opening scene of Godard’s Le Mépris /Contempt). This was one of the most memorable and enjoyable portions of the film and the standout among several tremendous cameos, all the more laudable since Casta is s known as a ‘supermodel’ rather than an actor. Here’s the opening of this sequence.

One problem the film poses for non-French/non-francophone audiences is the lack of familiarity with some of the characters and incidents in the film. (Perhaps when the UK version of the DVD comes out they should insert hyperlinks to the many YouTube clips which are bound to compete with any biopic about a modern subject!) Brigitte Bardot is well know in the UK, even to younger audiences, but probably not the singer Juliette Greco, muse of the post-war Left Bank existentialist movement. Boris Vian, who influenced Gainsbourg’s early career, was a novelist, trumpet player and singer-songwriter, again part of the Sartre-Beauvoir circle, who wrote one of the most powerful anti-war songs, ‘Le Déserteur’.

The ‘Sucette’ scandal is alluded to in the film but probably wouldn’t make much sense to those who aren’t familiar with story of how Gainsbourg writes a song ‘Les Sucettes’ (lollipops) for 18-year-old France Gall (for whom he had written a song which won the 1965 Eurovision Song Contest – for Luxembourg, not France) which is ostensibly about a girl’s love for lollipops but actually about the joys of oral sex. The film hints that she was aware of what Gainsbourg was up to although Gall later stated that she felt betrayed. However, she said it was impossible to be angry at  Gainsbourg and continued to work with him.

Overall, I was impressed by the film’s ambition (especially from a first time director) and if such ambition sometimes goes hand in hand with a certain clumsiness – it can be a bit incoherent and fragmented in places – I would rather have this film than a dozen safer approaches. Without  completely losing steam, it feels far heavier toward the end, perhaps because Gainsbourg himself grew increasingly dissolute towards the end of his life. The strength of the film was in its mise en scène (including performance) rather than the screenplay.

But that’s a relatively minor complaint and the film has a wonderful scene near the end celebrating Gainsbourg’s heroic defiance of French right-wing anti-Semitism with his  reggae recording of the national anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’, a recording that caused an even bigger furore in France than ‘Je t’aime, moi non plus’. He was accused in the right-wing press of provoking anti-semitism and there were calls for his French nationality to be revoked (despite the fact that he was born in France). In the film we see an angry ex-paratroopers demonstrating in Strasbourg. The Wailers, Bob Marley’s backing band, were due to be there but were told not to come for their own safety and we see Gainsbourg deciding to confront the demonstrators by declaring, clenched fist raised in the air, that it is a revolutionary song and inviting the audience to sing it with him in the original spirit, thereby discomfitting the rightists who didn’t know whether to boo or join in; after a moment’s hesitation they did the latter. (Incidentally, in the original French release, the scene ends with the young Lucien observing this scene and then going up on the stage  himself. This was omitted in the version I saw the other night and I can’t think why. An earlier omitted scene was of the young Lucien asking his mother for a toy revolver as he loves cowboy comics. This scene, although it doesn’t quite explain Gainsbourg’s obsession with hand-guns, does contextualise it. Since these cuts together last just over a minute they can’t be due to reducing running time and so it’s all the more annoying. I didn’t notice any other cuts).

Overall, Gainsbourg was a refreshingly ambitious take on the life of an artist, which I found poetic, elegant and touching. It must be in with a shout of Cesar Awards (probably too ‘French’ for the Oscars) in a whole number of categories.