Eve’s Bayou (US 1997)

Southern (and Sirkian?) Melodrama

Watching Eve’s Bayou is to experience something that is strangely familiar whilst it is set in such an exotic landscape. A tale set in the bayou country of Louisiana, it is soaked in the idea of history and memory. The setting for Lemmons film evokes an emotional response in us – a place we feel we know even if we have not visited it. And as, for example, the mountains and coastline for Ireland carries with it universal stories and a particular connection with myths and legends that constantly interject into the present, so this landscape, as it is so unchanging, carries its past into its present. What Kasi Lemmons has achieved is to evoke the mythological and the ethereal so vividly within the setting of the film, but used it as a context for a family melodrama that is both modern and ancient because it is a story that can and is told time and again. And, therefore, we respond to the characters and are engaged in their story from a very human point of view. In addition, whilst we might not share that exact-same history of those characters, we can empathise with that feeling of being part of a family and a place and a set of cultural superstitions that form our home.

The film is narrated by the older Eve as she looks back at a particular devastating event in her childhood. Eve is a classic character – a young girl aged 10 – sitting on threshold between childhood and adulthood. As such, she instinctively responds to and takes part in those traditions of her world whilst being on the cusp of moving against them. She is her Aunt Mozelle’s tender and faithful acolyte as she receives suffering people to give them the gift of seeing where their loved ones have got to. No-one in the story doubts Mozelle’s second sight and vision, but the children rebel against their beleaguered mother’s reaction to these warnings. What performs so dramatically in this film is the juxtaposition of the ancient culture and (relatively) modern family existing there – with the incendiary tensions of an unhappy marriage and teenage children who are beginning to see what is really happening. The events of the film are pure melodrama in both senses – the extremes of violent action and the claustrophobic (and so easily dysfunctional) life of the family. We could equate it (narratively) to some of Douglas Sirk’s dramas of the 1950s, with the internal struggles of the family and the absolutely, immovably central figure of the woman within that family. Lynn Whitfield’s matriarch (Roz) is a Sirkian concoction of breathtaking beauty, rustling silk (the credits note that her costumes were ‘built’ by Patty Spinale) and sculptured eyebrows. Samuel L. Jackson perfectly encapsulates the persuasive charm of the patriarch, Louis, who is, ultimately, more callow and confused than impressive. Unlike Sirk, it is not Roz’s story throughout the film and it is only by the end that we truly appreciate her strength and her power. When Roz (mother) embraces her youngest (male) child, Poe, so intensely at the beginning of the film, she seems a little mean to her second daughter, Eve. The moment is quickly passed into a light-hearted chase – but later we can reflect that that embrace was for the only child that was hers entirely – Louis has stolen the two elder daughters entirely for himself. By the end, she has become a powerful centre who has truly learned how to ‘look to her children’ as Diahann Carroll’s soothsayer has warned her to do.

The frustrations of the marriage are the central focus of this film, with a representation of an African-American family who are affluent and well-regarded in their community – occupying the space that is generally reserved for WASPish families in American cinema. The ‘issue’ for these characters is (unusually) not race and its struggles – but their internal desires. Just as in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (the Sirkian-influenced exploration of repression in marriage) we are focussed on the women’s response. In Eve’s Bayou, however, it’s not the mother but the child who is our centre of consciousness as we watch. Eve also actively drives the narrative. Eve hates with the passion of a ten-year-old towards someone who has harmed the person she most loves and believes in and, as a result, she is the instigator of particular events in the action. The story constantly juxtaposes the feeling of events that are fated (Mozelle’s foreseeing of a child’s accident) and events that are effected by the deliberate (if unknowing) action of people. Eve is responsible for these events if not to blame for them – and the narrative manages to walk this incredibly tight balance without losing sympathy or empathy for any of the characters involved.

It’s interesting that Louis is the doctor – when the film is dense with references to others forms of superstitious healing. These are so often related to the female rather than the male sensibility – the man being related to science (knowing). The film clearly sides with the power of superstition and female ‘knowing’ – the person that can look into your eyes or hold your hands – and just know what you are thinking, is the powerful force within this film.

Which brings me back to Mozelle. Whilst Roz is the desperate housewife, Mozelle is the repository of power in the family. Her voodoo heals where Louis’ medicine is ineffective. Lemmons has written some tour-de-force female protagonists and has decided to shoot them in the style of a costume drama to ensure that, visually on screen, they have maximum impact. Their vibrant costumes are not modern but belong to a different world which enhances our impression that this film is from a different place. Both women are completely desirable and like ‘candy’ on the screen – vivid, strong and ultra-feminine. However, this is not a costume drama staged rigidly in one era of American life – the 50s or 60s, that we can recognise and immediately to give us a context for behaviour and morals. Instead, Lemmons appears to be seeking after a much more ambiguous feeling – a time outside of any era and linking to the ancient landscape it sits in. It has been termed Southern Gothic and to draw on a comment for a very different film (Sling Blade): “As in most Southern gothic fiction, the past weights heavily on the present and it gives Sling Blade an ominous feel.” (Greg Meritt: Celluloid Mavericks). The same is true of Eve’s Bayou which is steeped in a feeling of a world living in both past and present, and evoking the mythical resonance of something like Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (a graduate of the same film school as Charles Burnett) is resonant here – about the families of the Gullah community – reiterating ancient customs through their poetic language. In Daughters they are reiterating them just at the point they know they are about to lose them – as the community moves from the islands onto the mainstream. In Eve’s Bayou there is no sense of a threat of change impinging on the lives of those – the final shot shows the sisters watching a sunset with every possibility of life remaining the same, the ebb of loss and tragedy an accepted part of that experience.

Winning an Independent Spirit Award for this film in 1998, Kasi Lemmons has continued to act and direct. She is currently in pre-production with a gospel musical version of the nativity story (co-written) called Black Nativity. Roy tells me the (very good) print of Eve’s Bayou arrived recently at Bradford covered in dust – what a shame it’s seemingly become a hidden visual and thematic jewel.

Ramchand Pakistani (Pakistan, 2008)

Nandita Das as Champa

I very much enjoyed this film showing at Bradford’s Bite the Mango festival. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting and it raised questions about how it might be categorised. It’s officially a Pakistani film. Director Mehreen Jabbar left Pakistan for UCLA and returned to work in Pakistani television. This was her first feature with a story based on a real incident that was taken up by Mehreen’s father Javed who sold the idea to his daughter. The eventual screenplay was written  by Mohammad Ahmed, a well-known writer in Pakistani television.

The story focus on a Hindu family living in the Pakistani province of Sind close to the border with India. They are low-caste villagers attempting to scratch a living from the soil in a semi arid region. Ramchand, the 8 year-old boy in the family, accidentally crosses the border during a period of tension between India and Pakistan. He is held by two Indian border guards and when his father Shankar also crosses the border looking for him, he too is arrested. Father and son are then taken to a prison housing other Pakistanis similarly arrested and Champa, wife and mother, is left bewildered at home when the two don’t return. The story then follows what happens to Ramchand and Shankar in prison with inserts of life for Champa who is forced to work for the local landlord when she cannot pay her debts.

A parallel film?

If this was an Indian film, I would be tempted to call it a parallel film. I’m not sure if that is appropriate for a Pakistani production. In any case, this is not a Lollywood or Bollywood film, although the relatively simple story and the handling of scenes could I think appeal to a mainstream audience. As I watched the film, my first thoughts were how similar it seemed to much of the Iranian Cinema seen in the West (without perhaps the political and artistic sophistication of work by Kiarostami, Panahi or Makhmalbaf – though this is not to suggest that the film does not have great artistic merit) and also to aspects of Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988). According to the Press Pack available for download from the official website these were indeed the influences that Mehreen Jabbar has cited.

In some ways. Jabbar has acted like diaspora filmmakers such as Nair and Deepa Mehta. Wary of the pitfalls facing a first-time feature filmmaker in Pakistan (with the local industry largely in decline in Lahore, as far as I can tell) she drew on her American contacts to provide Key Heads of Department on the shoot and cobbled together the funding for the film from individuals and independent companies in Pakistan and the US. She also approached both Pakistani and Indian government agencies because of the delicacy of the subject matter and travelled to India to ensure authenticity in the large sets that were eventually built in Pakistan to represent the Indian prison.

As with most films from the sub-continent, whether popular or parallel, the music in the film is important. This included adaptations of several Pakistani folk songs and a score involving Indian composers and playback singers with post-production in Mumbai. The songs are used as accompaniment to the visual narrative rather than as performance numbers. With an American cinematographer and a general realist approach (apart from a couple of dream sequences) the film fits the parallel category.

Genre

In one sense, the film fits the cycle of ‘line of control’ films set on the border. However, unlike the Indian films that I have seen, the political aspect of the situation is not exploited and there is no propagandist intent in the film. The Indians in the film are generally represented fairly  and it is the ’situation’ and its impact on civil and military administrations that is the villain.

More emphasis is placed on the story of Ramchand’s development through puberty. Over the course of the narrative he ages from 8 to 13 (and is (very well) played by two different young actors.

There is, of course, a ‘prison movie’ genre to consider and this is utilised in scenes dealing with the tedium of prison routines. These generic traits mean that the narrative seems familiar to the Western viewer. It also makes it more difficult to deal with the scenes back in Pakistan which seem to belong to another film. I wouldn’t agree, however, with reviewers who found that these dragged. The scenes are necessary for the realism of the story and I think that Nandita Das does an excellent job in conveying what poor Champa must have suffered.

Reception

The film seems to have been very well-received. The official website offers many reviews. Obviously these have been selected but the coverage on IMDB is also positive. The only real criticisms have come from Indians and Pakistanis complaining about the accents used by Pakistani actors playing Indians. But these seem to be contradictory in some cases. Not understanding Urdu or Hindi, I found the subtitles to be unhelpful sometimes when they weren’t held on screen long enough (and I’m a fast reader). I also missed the significance of most of the songs which weren’t translated. There were also some contrasting views on how Nandita Das handled her role. Most reviews were positive, but she has now played similar roles several times – in several languages. Her presence undoubtedly helped the film get screenings internationally. The rest of the cast were mainly experienced Pakistani TV actors.

I have seen reviews which suggest that the film is a difficult sell to popular audiences. This may well be true, but I can’t agree that it is a film filled with despair. Certainly there is a sense of despair in several scenes, but there is also plenty of fun, moments of joy and overall real hope and faith in the human spirit. I left the screening with a tear in my eye having become engaged with several ‘real’ characters. One of the highlights for me was the introduction of an intriguing character, an upper-caste young woman who is a senior officer in the prison. At first she treats Ramchand quite coldly as an ‘untouchable’, but he charms her and the two end up watching movies together on her TV set. I don’t want to give any other spoilers, so I’ll just recommend the film highly. It is available on a Region 0 DVD from various Indian suppliers.

Here’s the Urdu trailer for the film:

Chocolat (Fra/WGer/Cameroon 1988)

The family, France, her mother Aimée and father Marc. Does the composition suggest that Aimée and Marc are not necessarily that close?

Everyone I have spoken too since the release of 35 Rhums has said what a fine piece of filmmaking it is and for me it is the best film I’ve seen this year. It has made me more determined to see the rest of Claire Denis’ work.

I remember when Chocolat was released, but not why I didn’t see it at the time. I was surprised to see on IMDB that it made over $2 million at the box office in North America. But then I think there was a vogue around that time for films set in Africa (Out of Africa was a big hit in 1985). The responses suggest that people who did see Chocolat were often disappointed or confused. That doesn’t surprise me, but it is also good to see that there are several perceptive and fascinating reviews of the film (see below). Having watched the whole film now on DVD (having seen only extracts before) it strikes me that Claire Denis arrived as a filmmaker ‘fully formed’ with her first feature at age 40. Chocolat was quite clearly made by the same filmmaker who directed L’intrus and 35 Rhums. Of course, Denis was not a neophyte – she had served a long apprenticeship to directors such as Costa-Gavras and Wim Wenders (whose company helped produce Chocolat).

I can tell you about the content of the film since there is little in the way of plot or narrative in the conventional mainstream sense. As in the other films by Denis that I have seen, things happen, some of them surprising or shocking but they don’t occur in a classic cause-effect structure with a clear narrative resolution. Chocolat begins with a young, white woman on a remote tropical beach as she watches a black man and his small son splashing through the shallows. As she is walking away from the beach, the man drives up and offers her a lift. The main part of the film is then constructed as a single long flashback in which the woman, named ‘France’ remembers her childhood as the daughter of a French colonial official administering a remote region of Northern Cameroon. The little girl spends much of her time with the ‘houseboy’ Protée, a tall, strong and very beautiful young man in his twenties who is caught in a kind of no-man’s land between the house and the servant’s quarters, being neither fully ‘French’ or fully ‘African’. He is representative of the impact of colonialism and the crisis of identity. France’s father Marc is often away from the big house and an uneasy relationship exists between France’s mother Aimée (also young and beautiful) and Protée (and the other servants).

The ‘external incident’ that stirs up the household in the second half of the film is a forced landing by a French plane carrying a colonial official from another district and his new (French) wife, a planter and his female (African) servant. The plane needs a spare part in order to continue its journey and this will take several weeks to deliver. It is also necessary to prepare a runway for take-off and there is the problem that any runway will not be usable if the rains come, so there is a time pressure. The disruption also attracts another French couple and a team of African labourers amongst whom is Luc, a ‘rogue’ Frenchman who seems to be travelling across the territory and whose function in the narrative appears to be to challenge the sense of ‘order’ in the community. With all these new arrivals, there is bound to be conflict in the household. There is also a short coda in which the grown-up France has another brief exchange with the man from the beach.

If the above sounds like the plot of a colonial melodrama, it is and it isn’t. These are the elements of the colonial melodrama (which usually explores a charged emotional relationship across the taboo boundary line of coloniser/colonised) but here Denis uses the possibilities of combining the elements in a different way. The theme of the film is still sexual desire and the consequences of colonial power relationships, but not expressed through melodramatic excess. (I have commented on an extract from Chocolat used by Rona on our evening class in an earlier post.)

I’ve left out some of the narrative information from the outline above because if you do decide to see the film (Artificial Eye released the Region 2 DVD in 2005) you may want to keep some element of surprise. But I will refer to some of the background to the film. Claire Denis grew up in similar circumstances to little France, although I haven’t determined exactly where in French Africa her family was stationed in the 1950s. It may have been Cameroon or possibly Niger. The choice of Northern Cameroon for Chocolat is interesting for several reasons. Its remoteness helps the narrative in terms of isolation. It also allows Denis to make references to the ‘European’ rather than specifically French nature of colonialism in Africa. Cameroon was first colonised by the Germans and after 1918 was split into two mandated territories governed by France and Britain. The two separate colonies were reunited after independence. In Chocolat, France and Aimée are seen in a small cemetery where the German colonisers are buried. They have an English-speaking cook and they are visited by an Englishman who comes to dinner. I don’t think these are simply realist touches. Denis is not too concerned about ‘authenticity’ as such since the timescales are wrong – the older France looks to be in her late twenties in what appears to be contemporary Cameroon (i.e. the late 1980s), but the colonial narrative, in which France is seven or eight, must be at least 30 years earlier as independence in French Cameroon came in 1960.

The region used as a location is in the far North of the country, a wedge driven between Nigeria in the West and Chad in the East – land that is usually hot and dry with distinctive landscapes. It reminded me of films from Chad, but also from Mali and the rest of the Sahel further North (it’s actually not that far from the Northern tip of Cameroon to the Sahel region). I was reminded of incidents in Sembène Ousmane’s films such as in Aimée’s dismissal of a local Christian missionary in the predominantly Muslim local community and also of the visual similarities in some of Agnès Godard’s beautiful compositions, using the light against the compound walls, the long shots of the house and its inhabitants and the way characters disappeared into the dark of the surrounding night. It is the closest that I have seen a European filmmaker get to making an ‘African’ film. It is also a forerunner for the breathtaking imagery of Beau Travail (1999) located on the other side of Africa, but with similar landscapes. Landscape is an important element in the film, not least when France is told about what the horizon means by her father.

I’m not going to undertake a detailed reading of the film here, since there are already several very good reviews listed below. What I will say is that Claire Denis has become a kind of critics’ darling – both those critics who write in the specialist film magazines (she is one of the ‘visionary filmmakers’ in Sight and Sound, September 2009) and in the academy where she is a focus for both the application of contemporary theoretical writing to a body of work (such as the ideas of Gilles Deleuze) and also as a key figure in film studies within French language and cultural studies. This is great, but it would be a shame if Denis was thought of as somehow ‘difficult’ or impenetrable as a filmmaker. As long as audiences can get past their own attachment to Hollywood conventions about storytelling, Denis’ films are quite accessible on several levels with engaging and interesting situations and characters. So in Chocolat it is possible to use the film to explore how individuals and their desires are caught within the systems of taboos and restrictions of colonialism and post-colonialism. They react as functioning human beings, not as characters in a fiction, in what is a very clear-sighted representation of the worlds we all inhabit. I can’t wait to review some of the other films and find the ones I’ve missed.

There are several reviews and articles about the film and about the work of Claire Denis in general. The following are worth a look (along with the other entries tagged Claire Denis on this site):

The usually reliable Roger Ebert provides a useful way into the film without the need for a strong theoretical background.

An essay on the early work of the director from the ‘Reverseshot’ website

Detailed review of Chocolat from KinoEye

KinoEye issue focusing on the work of Claire Denis

Senses of Cinema review by Diana Sandars

Translation of an interview with Denis from French magazine, Sofa, posted on Senses of Cinema

A Guardian interview with Denis by Jonathan Romney

Interview by Darren Hughes posted on Senses of Cinema

Review of Martine Beugnet’s book on Claire Denis by John Orr on Senses of Cinema

In the course of compiling this list I came across the ultimate Claire Denis resource collection compiled by Catherine Grant at Film Studies for Free. If you are serious about accessing all the critical work, this is undoubtedly where to go.

Frozen River (US 2008)

Misty Upham and Melissa Leo in Frozen River.

This was a riveting movie to watch, well-written and directed by Courtney Hunt (a first time feature filmmaker at 44). I found it also to be disturbing in several different ways.

Frozen River is a genuinely independent film made for less than a million dollars (raised from business acquaintances). Developed from an earlier short film, it was sold to Sony Classics before Sundance – where it won a major prize. The central character is Ray (Melissa Leo), a working-class woman living with her 5 and 15 year-old sons in a decrepit trailer. Her husband, a compulsive gambler, has just absconded with the money saved up for an upgrade to a superior home. Ray sets off to find him between shifts at the local discount store. The trail leads to a Bingo Hall on the Mohawk territory that spans the US-Canadian border. When she sees her husband’s car being driven away by a young Mohawk woman, she gives chase. The upshot is that Ray is sucked into the ‘people trafficking’ across the border which has replaced cigarette smuggling as an earner for some members of the Mohawk community.

As well as gambling and people trafficking, the narrative takes on issues of parental control and the deprivations of trailer park life. It certainly isn’t Hollywood, but still there is a kind of happy ending. In a way this was a relief after a couple of harrowing incidents in the story when I could hardly bear to look at the screen since tragedy seemed inevitable. I’m still trying to work out if this was a cop-out or whether I have read aspects of the film wrongly. As we’ve noted in other posts, it is rare to get contemporary American films that deal with working-class life. It’s even rarer to get films like this written and directed by a woman and with a central focus on two women from outside the norm of Hollywood leads. There has been lots of (justifiable) praise for Melissa Leo, but I would want to also praise Misty Upham as the Mohawk woman. I’m very supportive of the film in lots of ways, but . . .

The problem I have with the film and especially with the happy ending is really to do with the politics of American working class culture. I confess that as a middle-class European it’s sometimes hard to fathom. Let’s begin with the central family in the film. There is some interesting discussion on IMDB as to whether this is a middle-class family brought down in the world by the husband’s gambling. There is generally a view that a ‘poor’ family shouldn’t be watching a large rented TV and eating junk food. Against this, Ray is shown to be a mother who wants her children to go to school and do well (i.e. she isn’t ‘irresponsible’). I wasn’t sure about the actors (real cousins) who played the two sons – they seemed very articulate and ‘well-educated’. So, am I falling into a trap in expecting a stereotypical portrayal of kids who live in a trailer park? To be fair, the film offers believable, non-stereotypical police officers and other characters, so perhaps I ought to read the children as they are written. I can’t say too much about my major concern with the film without giving away the plot, so, SPOILERS ahead, I’m afraid.

Ray is driven by the need to find the money for the new house – in the couple of days before Christmas Eve. Driving illegal workers over the frozen river and across Mohawk land evades the immigration controls. She’s seemingly unconcerned by the Chinese in her boot (trunk) but freaks out when a Pakistani couple turn up, yelling that she doesn’t know what a ‘Paki’ is (the term used by the Mohawk woman) and then saying that she doesn’t know where Pakistan is and losing it completely because the couple might be carrying bombs or something. Is this what American working mothers are like? A woman who seems rational at other times can’t distinguish between frightened illegal immigrants and an Al Quaeda cell? Or is this just my false perspective?

Following this, Ray acts quite callously and only seems to care about her kids’ Christmas presents. Not so terrible perhaps, but we now have her classed as suspicious of other cultures – which goes against the believable portrayal of the two women, white and Native American who are slowly drawing together after beginning on a level of mutual animosity. Lila, the Mohawk woman is an interesting character, streetwise but not as assertive as Ray at first. She also has a small child who she has ‘lost’ to her mother-in-law after her husband’s death. In a possibly metaphorical move, she eventually buys some glasses to improve her poor short-range vision. The ending of the film sees Ray make a sacrifice which effectively ’saves’ Lila and her child. It was this volte-face by the woman who could treat illegals as terrorists that I found a bit hard to take. I’m mindful of Nick Broomfield’s film Ghosts in which Chinese illegals drown in Morecambe Bay when their gangmaster allows them to work in unsafe conditions. People smuggling is often a dangerous business that ends in tears – see our discussion of Farewell China. The film seems to focus on the white-Native American relationship, but to ignore the illegals who somehow seem less than human (they have no dialogue as such). I’m interested to hear what Americans think about this aspect of the film – and Canadians, who are also ‘absent’ apart from the Quebecois who organises the smuggling. Wouldn’t all these illegals be better off taking their chance in Canada?

Info on Courtney Hunt was gleaned from an interview on the Huffington Post and the film’s press kit available here.

It’s great that Melissa Leo should get all this attention. I’ve been a fan since Homicide – Life on the Street. In this movie she looks like a real person and not a movie star. Writer-director Hunt is adamant about her commitment to showing a working-class woman on screen. According to an interview in New York magazine, Hunt herself was brought up by a single mother and took her early inspiration from Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

I hope the film does well – and creates discussion about race and class in contemporary America.

35 Rhums (35 Shots, France 2009)

Letting Go: Father and Daughter in 35 Rhums

Claire Denis delivers a nuanced portrayal of a relationship between a father and his grown-up daughter as their relationship reaches a defining moment moving from their symbiotic closeness to try to move beyond to start their own lives not without but beyond each other.

Denis uses many of her typical collaborators – Agnès Godard as cinematographer, Jean-Pol Fargeau on the script and ‘Tindersticks’ (lead singer, Stuart A Staples has written for Denis before on L’Intrus) for the scored parts of the film. It reminded me of Vendredi Soir where a chance meeting of a couple leads to a night of passion – but the film spends its time on the nuances of their mutual attraction as it builds. In Vendredi the Parisien buildings and skyline is the mesmeric presence throughout the film, shot by Godard so that the lights glimmer and create a beautiful cityscape to frame the stories within it. In that film, the city is thematically an ephemeral place where people have little contact, distracted and disconnected within their cars until they are forced to stop and made to touch. In 35 Rhums the city is there again but, even cinematically, plays a completely different role. It has been reconstituted because these are the lives of very different people and therefore seems to take on something of their perspective. Lionel is a train driver and the city is represented as a web of rails and moving trains through the high rises. Lionel and his daughter Josephine live in one such, near their neighbours including Gabrielle and Noé, pining for father and daughter respectively.

Godard, Denis and Fargeau are able to tell this story with great simplicity and yet embody the complexities that are present in relationships – the ebbs and flows of emotion between people as they seek to let each other go but can’t quite, or as they move in and out of desire or longing. Denis is unafraid to play the symbolic moments thrown up in these narratives (sometimes very literally) but they are blended so seamlessly into the narrative flow by the cinematography that there is no jarring or loss of dramatic impetus. (e.g. the death on the train rails). This moment of melodrama in 35 Shots almost jars because Denis is most powerful when she conveys the impact of an emotion and the state people are swept up into – visually and sonically – through moments of detail. Through Godard’s cinematography the visceral is conveyed through the visual. Early in the film, Lionel puts his foot into the slipper brought by his daughter – a resonating symbolic moment of their domestic symbiosis accentuated by the focus on that physical pleasure of slipping on our comfy shoes on getting home.

The performances are nicely underplayed, emotions seen passing through characters’ eyes in close-up. Gregoire Colin (a Denis regular) plays the courtly lover upstairs and the two central performances from Alex Descas and newcomer Mati Diop are absorbing in their simplicity – in keeping with the overall aesthetics of the film. Everything appears ordinary and flat on the surface (I’m reminded of the opening of L’Intrus with Colin’s character engaged in the domestics or Chocolat where Aimée sits idly on the back of the truck with Protée or where the legion soldiers in Beau Travail attend to their washing out in the desert); but in Denis’s films the flat surface is always slowly peeled away to reveal the depths of emotion that sit beneath – ordinary emotions create the dramatic tension in her films rather than melodrama.

Kirschblüten (Cherry Blossoms, Germany/France 2008)

Hokusai's 'Red Fuji'

I enjoyed this film that sneaked out in the UK on a single print from Dogwoof – who appear to have offered it no support at all. In Germany it was a significant hit (1.1 million admissions) and it seems to have had a reasonable distribution in North America. The reviews in the UK were generally OK I think, but in the US I’ve come across some real stinkers in which the filmmaker is accused of banality and ‘hippie fripperies’. It’s clearly a film that touches the ’superior art’ button in some critics. I know I’m prone to this kind of response, so I’ll tread carefully.

Doris Dörrie is a German filmmaker who I’ve tended to associate with comedies – often about gender relations. I’m not sure that I’ve seen any of her earlier films. If I have, I don’t remember. I watched this film without any other preconceptions and was quickly aware that the narrative in the first half closely follows that of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953). Perhaps more surprising, the second half of the film corresponds more closely to aspects of Zhang Yimou’s Riding Along for Thousands of Miles and also includes sequences that could remind audiences of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. In a way, none of this is surprising since the central narrative ideas are universal. However, any filmmaker foregrounding a debt to Ozu needs to tread carefully. I thought Dörrie’s script and direction, and especially the performances of her leads, kept the narrative simple and provided a moving experience for the audience. Others clearly don’t agree.

Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) und Rudi (Elmar Wepper) – the parents

If you don’t know Tokyo Story, it involves an older couple living in Osaka who decide at short notice to visit their grown-up children in Tokyo. Their son and daughter have busy lives with jobs and families and the parents feel as if they are imposing. They visit a spa to relieve the burden and the only real welcome they receive is from their dead son’s young widow. There is also another son who doesn’t live in Tokyo. Dörrie locates her parental couple in rural Bavaria and their children in Berlin and Tokyo. Ozu’s young widow becomes their daughter’s lesbian partner. Dörrie also utilises two other Ozu traits – trains and what has been termed the ‘pillow shot’. The film is a rail fetishist’s dream with numerous railway scenes in both Germany and Japan. The ‘pillow shot’ in Ozu’s mise en scène is a ‘cutaway’ to a shot of a deserted street or landscape placed between the shots of characters inside buildings and engaged in some form of discourse. Personally, I thought that Dörrie used this idea this very well and I didn’t find the images banal.

There are a number of specific Japanese elements in the German sequences that become of great significance when the story moves to Tokyo. The first is the work of the artist Hokusai and specifically his famous series of woodblock prints, 36 Views of Mount Fuji produced in the 1830s. Hokusai was very popular in Japan and woodblock prints were arguably the world’s first mass medium. Contrasted with this is a much more modern Japanese cultural form, butoh – a form of contemporary dance developed in the 1950s. Both the relatively old and the new japanese cultural forms have fans in the West and Dörrie  uses this as the basis for the trip to Japan. The Zhang Yimou film Riding Along For Thousands of Miles sees a father travelling to rural China to film the folk opera that was his dying son’s research objective. In Cherry Blossoms, the quest is to see one of Hokusai’s views  of Fuji, the ’shy mountain’. The quest means engagement with a totally different language and culture and finding a sympathetic local to act as a guide.

Japanese culture produces many festivals, often associated with seasonal phenomena and the spirits that inhabit places of natural beauty. The blooming of the cherry tree for a few weeks in Spring is the signal for ‘viewing parties’ – social gatherings beneath the trees. (The festival is known as hanami.) Dörrie  uses one of these in a Tokyo park as a central focus for her Japan-set narrative – one in which a bewildered German tries to find some form of spiritual connection. Unlike Coppola whose film controversially offers a postmodernist view of Tokyo, Dörrie just lets us struggle with her German character to comprehend another culture through mundane actions like buying a cabbage. If this is cinematic banality (“unoriginal and boring”) for some critics, I think that they must inhabit very different worlds to the one I experience. 

I think that most adults in their thirties with ageing parents or most couples in their sixties with grown-up children will find this film to be moving and gently provocative in thinking about how they feel as parents and children. If it also gets anyone interested in Ozu, Zhang, Hokusai or simply visiting Tokyo that would be a bonus. I’d certainly recommend it. The music is also terrific with some pieces by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Here is the trailer from the film. Spoiler – it rather gives away the plot twists, but apart from that gives a fair indication of the film.

Fifty Dead Men Walking (UK/Canada 2008)

This co-production has a Canadian director, Kari Skogland. It deals with what the British quaintly call ‘The Troubles’, the British occupation of northern Ireland. Unfortunately, distance does not lend detachment, and the film recycles the stereotypes of earlier British films that purport to deal with the conflict.

The film’s story is ‘inspired’ by a recounting by a republican informant (Martin McGartland) for the northern Ireland Special Branch. The ‘inspired’ indicates that the film deals fairly freely with the events recounted in the book. Certainly the film has a number of serious factual errors. Most bizarre, an end title claims that the British Army has now left northern Ireland. The director cum scriptwriter clearly has not been watching the news recently.

The film is engaging, mainly due to fine performances by Jim Sturgess as the informant Martin McGartland and Ben Kingsley as Fergus, his intelligence handler. However the style of the film rather gets in the way of their characters. The film opens in Canada in 1999 as McGartland is shot by a masked assassin, [this actually occurred in the UK]. There follows an extended flashback of his earlier activities. By the end of the film we discover that he actually survived the shooting. I was puzzled as to what an audience was meant to draw from the flashback structure. It does help provide a noir feel, but does not add to character or development. There seems contemporary tendency to use flashbacks without necessarily adding to the story experience. There are also frequent passages of rapid editing, presumably designed to give the feel of a thriller. However, much of the film is closer to a noir story and the changes give a discordant feel. This is accentuated by an amount of over-the-top music tracks.

But the serious problems with the film are political, or to be exact the absence of politics. Unfortunately this is the norm for this subject. Typically there is hardly any engagement with the actual political relations of the conflict. And the characterisation offers over familiar stereotypes. Martin and Fergus are fairly sympathetic, but this is mainly due to the negativity of the characters that surround them. Fergus’s Special Branch and British Intelligence are presented as manipulative and more concerned with intelligence turf wars than the enemy. But that is fairly positive compared with the republican characters, who are violent and tend to the psychotic. Martin’s IRA friend, Sean (Kevin Zegers), reminded me of Cal’s friend Crilly (Stevan Rimkus) in the earlier film (1984), both treating the violence as ‘fun’. The IRA organiser, Mickey Adams (Tom Collins), is reminiscent of Skeffington (John Kavanagh) the IRA leader in the same film. John Hill’s analysis of that and other films set in Northern Ireland (Cinema and Ireland, Routledge, 1987 Images of Violence) is applicable to this film. Hill comments on the sexuality and repression in the earlier films. In Fifty Dead Men Walking we also have a female IRA intelligence officer, Grace (Rose McGowan), who seems pre-occupied with both ‘guns and cocks’. Revealingly she is listed fifth among the cast, ahead of performers who appear more often on screen. This character is reminiscent of the psychotic Jude  [Miranda Richardson) in The Crying Game (1992). In what I take to be a sub-Freudian twist Martin plants her with an unloaded gun and she is seized by the British intelligence.

The film recycles noir style and northern Ireland stereotypes with depressing familiarity. I found it did not really maintain a strong interest, what kept me watching was checking out how it recycles the old and now tired representations.

Varda and the Nouvelle Vague

Lady in Waiting: Cléo de 5 à 7

All praise Godard and Truffaut, but let’s not forget another true auteur in Agnès Varda.  To name her position in this celebrated movement, Varda was associated with the (so-called) ‘Left Bank’ sub-group of the New Wave (with Alain Resnais).  However, she like the rest of them was an individual and independent filmmaker, who grasped the opportunities to make films as the money arose and imprinted them with her own particular vision and style. Therefore, they demonstrate the same ‘break’ with traditional forms of cinema that characterises the other French New Wave films – the engagement with a freshness both of theme and of cinematic style.  Different to the other leading directors, though, is her lack of agenda in her filmmaking – of a deliberate desire to break from the ‘cinéma du papa’. Godard and Truffaut’s work (critically and cinematically) is shot-through with this frustration and rejection of the outmoded style. Varda’s work was a more simple personal focus on telling the stories she wanted to tell, in the way she wanted to tell them.

Varda, therefore, developed her own framework and cinematic, developing her own concept of ‘cinécriture’ – “cinewriting” independently of Astruc’s more famous ‘caméra-stylo‘ to describe the artistic vision of a director. Both emphasised the construction of the film’s narrative during the process of filming and editing – arguing for the audio-visual as a writing medium itself, separate from the more literary form of the screenplay. Varda met the ‘right bank’ boys when she was editing her first film La Pointe-courte (1954) and wrote (in her book Varda par Agnès in 1994): “I was anomalous, I felt small and ignorant, and the only girls among the Cahiers boys.” She did not have the knowledge of the cinephiliacs – whose freshness was a reinvention based on their knowledge of the past. Hers was complete invention, based on blissful ignorance: “If I had seen at the time films made by masters, either male or female, and which I have discovered since, I would perhaps have been intimidated or even inhibited.”

The production context of La Pointe-courte is interesting because it embodies this innocent confidence, the ability to try because she was not constrained by over-knowledge of what was and wasn’t possible. Having trained in photography, she worked at the Théâtre national Populaire as the official stage photographer. Feeling constrained by the ‘silent’ limits of the photographic medium, she spread into filmmaking in order to develop her artistic ideas more fully – to explore ideas about the “passage of time” and “hiatus between subjective and objective description”. She returned to the area of her childhood (Sète in South France – although she was born in Brussels) to shoot the film, set in the small fishing village of La Pointe Courte. To do this, she used money she had inherited on her father’s death and other borrowings.  She established a production company (Ciné Tamaris) forming a cooperative with the cast and crew. There is a pioneering spirit about this that links her, spiritually, to someone like the French producer and filmmaker Alice Guy. If you do not know the constraints for filmmakers in general or for women in particular in film, then there are none – just as for Guy who was at the invention of cinema itself. Both women might rightly question their position in the histories of those institutions – another question for another time.

However, Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) has at least turned up in some of the celebrations of the anniversary of La Nouvelle Vague, particularly in Joe Queenan’s article (see as part of my list below). “Looking back on Varda’s jewel now, one can imagine that moment when releases like this seemed to provide a new baseline for cinema itself, ushering in an era when filmmakers would no longer simply make ‘product’ but would take a crack at producing great art.” Varda is equal in her ambition to Godard or Truffaut and the film itself qualifies as art on several levels. The film occupies the period between five and seven in the evening, when an actress and singing star, Cléo (real name Florence) waits until she can ring her specialist for her cancer test results. The sense of disassociation and isolation from those around her is incredibly tangible, captured by Varda’s expressionistic use of the camera. She is able to be ‘visually emotive’ to help us empathise with Cléo’s state of mind. The sensation is of a real time narrative, and the way Varda has captured Cléo’s reflections  (looking at and into herself) guides us to enter her internal world.

This accords with André Bazin’s idea of the ‘documentary’ element in cinema. Godard described À bout de souffle as a documentary on Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Cinematic language enables this realism to the action – that there is real action taking place between the two characters as well as the telling of the story. The production situation of these films aimed to play up to these possibilities of creating something that was truthful and Varda was no different here.

Cléo de 5 à 7 was shot in chronological order, and often at the time specified by the action. Using natural light to film (enabled by the availability of fast film stock – the film was shot in black and white 35 mm, for cost), shooting at the right time of day recreates the ambient mood of that light. The time of day is thematically relevant – 5 til 7 is the time when French monsieurs traditionally visited their mistresses; it is the hiatus between the two parts of the day when ordinary life is temporarily suspended. Cléo wanders through different ordinary settings, in suspension because her life literally hangs in the balance. The flexibility of using hand-held cameras is obvious on a low budget film, but it also contributes to an identified aesthetic value of Varda – to shoot ordinary subjects such that they appear different and aethereal. As Cléo stops to have a brandy in a bar, the camera, she is reproduced across a number of mirrors within the bar and the fractured sense of her own identity. This relates to Varda’s wish to create a “subjective documentary.”  Similarly, the sound recorded on the film could achieve a greater degree of realism because the crew were able to use portable sound recorders, as opposed to having to synchronise sound in post-production. Therefore, there is the documentary effect of the ambient sound recorded as Cléo steps through the streets;  where sound is emphasised is to create the character’s own heightened awareness and sensitivity. Hence, the idea of a subjective documentary. Whilst the presence of the diagnosis does create a linear narrative structure, the progress of the story is more in this impressionistic style – of dropping in and out of the different places and people, structured as a literary text with Cléo as its centre of consciousness.
 

Shooting on Parisian streets in Cléo 5 à 7

Cléo is a French New Wave film, in exactly the same way as Godard’s films, through its inclusion of a multiplicity of other references. Hers are less allusions to popular culture, but rather, as film analysts have commented, inspiration from literary sources. The poet Rilke and the painter Dürer are referred to by Varda – the latter painted a cycle of pictures depicting a young beautiful woman kissed by Death. The casting of Corinne Marchand in the lead role was a departure from new wave style though – her pneumatic beauty and particularly her blondness were against the ‘naturalness’ in appearance demanded by the other filmmakers. (Even Godard’s muse, Anna Karina, appears in the film – as does Jean-Luc – but Anna’s trademark dark bob is hidden under a blonde wig). Blondeness, for these new filmmakers, is associated with the outmoded, star-driven form of cinema. Without knowing Varda’s intention, there is something vulnerable and fragile about Cléo that her blondeness serves to emphasise. Together with her slim frame, there is a feeling of her being a slight presence – one which could easily disappear out of the frame – signifying visually the death sentence that hangs over this character in the narrative. Varda is not afraid of other non-naturalistic touches – such as the song performance in the middle of the film, dissolving the fourth wall of the cinema screen directly out to the audience in a more theatrical form of emotional engagement.

A final thought, mentioned in the Queenan article, is the prospect of Madonna in an American remake (to be directed by Varda herself). The project fell through (the funding never came through). Watching Marchand’s delicate and sensitive 60s waif-actress, the idea of Madonna suggests how this piece of casting might have unbalanced the indeterminate ambience of Varda’s story. Cléo is a star, but one who is caught, a wisp, between the more definite characters around her. Could Madonna have encapsulated that aethereal being and nothingness quite the same?

The articles I refer to: Joe Queenan: ‘We’ll always have Paris’: Guardian 27 March 2009; Adam Thirlwell: ‘Forever Young’: Guardian 18 April 2009. I also used: Cléo de 5 à 7 by Valerie Orpen (April 2007).

Some YouTube clips to enjoy, from Cléo de 5 à 7:

and the trailer for Le bonheur (1964):