In the House (Dans la maison, France 2012)

Claude (Ernst Umhauer) spies on Rapha’s mum, Esther (Emanuelle Seigner)

This film turned out rather differently than I expected from my brief glance at reviews. (The best are by Ginette Vincendeau in April’s Sight & Sound and Philip French in the Observer.) Many of them suggested that the film switched gear or ‘disappointed’ with its closing section, but for me it remained coherent all the way through and the ending fitted perfectly. I think I was expecting the kind of comedy offered in Potiche or 8 Women but this was more a witty satire than a broad comedy. I’ve read a number of reviews each of which seemed to make reasonable points but none of which matched by own response to the film. I think that this is partly explained by the fact that I haven’t attempted to map François Ozon’s filmography in auteurist terms and I’ve simply taken the films I have seen as superior entertainments. Further research reveals that indeed the handful of Ozon’s films that I’ve seen are the most popular and that in France he is situated somewhere between the mainstream and auteur cinema – 8 Women had over 7 million admissions in Europe.

In the House (a dreadful title in English with all kinds of unhelpful connotations – as the cashier on the ticket desk said, it sounds like Queen Latifah should be the star) is a kind of moral tale in the form of a satire on bourgeois conceptions of art and family relationships. (Philip French helpfully informs us that the title is a reference to Henry James’ preface to Portrait of a Lady in which he refers to a ‘house of fiction’.) M. Germain (at one point we do learn his name, but I won’t spoil the moment) and his wife Jeanne are a middle-aged couple in a small town in an unidentifiable part of France. She runs a small art gallery and he teaches French at a lycée. He despairs of his sixteeen year-old students and she struggles to find art to sell (the gallery is now owned via an inheritance by twin sisters with few ideas about art). M. Germain has two surprises. The school is to suffer the fate of too many English schools – a ‘back to the future’ change of direction with a return to uniforms and an emphasis on ‘standards’. But this is offset by a discovery that one of his students, Claude, is a promising writer. The problem is that what Claude writes is a provocative description of how he has explored a friend’s house and spied on the boy’s mother. Germain is caught in a dilemma – does he expose Claude or encourage him to develop his talent? The boy’s writing is compelling and Germain (and Jeanne) are soon hooked. Each writing assignment produces a new ‘instalment’ of Claude’s ‘infiltration’ of the household of Rapha and his parents and each ends with the classic come-on, ‘to be continued’.

Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Germain (Fabrice Luchini) are the couple seduced by Claude’s storytelling.

It all made me think of Buñuel. Claude, beautifully played by newcomer Ernst Umhauer, is the beautiful boy, seemingly charming but also sly and far too bright for everyone’s good. We are seduced by him just as much as Claude, Jeanne and Rafa and his family. The lycée is named after Gustave Flaubert and the key text here is Madame Bovary. At this point, my knowledge of literary theory and especially of French literature is certainly a bit shaky, but as I remember it, Madame Bovary indulges in adultery to generate some excitement in her tedious marriage. She has some fun, but it all goes wrong in the end. It’s not too difficult to see In the House as a play around the Madame Bovary figure. It works in a number of ways but the key line seems to be when M. Germain reads out Claude’s description of being aroused by the ‘scent of a middle-class woman’. This is shocking in several ways. Claude seems old beyond his years and the intimacy suggested by the phrase seems more in keeping with the later French realists like Zola rather than the Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Kafka, whose novels are lent to Claude by M. Germain. There is more to it than that though and if you know the works you will enjoy thinking about writing styles and about approaches to realism and to ‘moral tales’ – the ending curiously resembles Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari!

I’m not going to spoil the narrative any more – don’t read Philip French until after you’ve seen the film, he gives far too much away as usual. But you should expect the pleasures of a satire on both modern education practices and the ridiculousness of certain forms of avant-garde art. I’ve seen comments that the film is too clever, but I’ll happily watch films like this and I think it’s the most enjoyable film I’ve seen so far in 2013. All the performances are very good. Please go and see it. (A note for Des – in this film Ms Scott Thomas’ accent is explained by reference to her ‘Yorkshire relative’.)

Holy Motors (France-Germany, 2012)

Eva Mendes visits from Hollywood

I managed to miss all Leos Carax’s 90s films, not intentionally, so my bafflement with Holy Motors wasn’t surprising as it’s a personal reflection upon cinema. I didn’t even realise that Carax was playing the character in an early scene who opens a door, disguised as a hotel wall, with a finger that is part-key. On the other side there is a cinema packed with an audience. This audience is the first thing we see in the film; I think they all had their eyes closed (Philip French says they are dead). They appear to be (not) watching an early scientific film by Eitenne-Jules Marey.

The debt to David Lynch of ‘Carax’ ‘s hotel room is rooting us clearly in surreal cinema. We meet Alex (Denis Levant, who always plays an Alex in Carax’s films) who goes from appointment to appointment, in a limousine, playing different roles, which appear to be real. But we know they aren’t because we are watching a film…but are they meant to be real in the film? Maybe some of them are but probably not. Irritated by this? Don’t watch it!

I clued into Holy Motors being about cinema, as Alex finds himself in different genres, and the film certainly fulfills the surrealist imperative to annoy. It’s supremely arthouse, as your brain needs to be switched on, and includes visually dazzling sequences; particularly the green screen special effects scene when the characters are dressed for motion capture.

It doesn’t all work, the ‘merde’ character is particularly annoying, but there are more ‘hits’ than ‘misses’; Levant, however, is terrific throughout. I also enjoyed Kylie Minogue’s cameo as a gamine Jean Seberg figure shot in an abandoned apartment store the looked like it belonged in Blade Runner with its grandiose architecture and mannikin parts strewn around. Edith Scob, from Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), plays Alex’s impossibly slim and elegant chauffeur… The references go on… and on.

Postmodern fluff or more than the sum of its playful parts? The final scene is truly absurd (I thought wonderful) and I’m sure it enraged many who were annoyed by the film. I’m not sure whether this is a profound film, a silly film, or neither; I need to see it again but I think, if I had caught the film in the cinema, it would have gotten into my 2012 top ten. Sight & Sound‘s October issue has plenty of useful contextualisation.

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.

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

Leeds IFF 2012: Rust and Bone (De rouille et d’os, France-Belgium 2012)

This was the opening film at the 26th Leeds International Film Festival. A winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the screening was a late addition to the programme. This probably explains why the Town Hall venue was less than half-full for a new film by one of France’s most talented and interesting filmmakers. There was also a slight delay whilst the staff set up the digital projector and sound system – time well spent because I found the acoustics better that I remembered from previous years.

Essentially this is relatively typical Audiard fare (thoughtfully dedicated to another fine French filmmaker) – the lives of people set at the margins of society. However, it is rather unlike his recent successes such as The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s’est arrèté, 2005) and A Prophet (Un prophète, 2009). Whilst a damaged hero, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), is at the centre of the story, romance is a much more noticeable strand. Indeed the female protagonist Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) is arguably the emotional centre of the film. Both actors give fine, sensitive performances, which are among the most effective aspects of the film.

The production values are equally good. The anamorphic cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine is impressive, with some very fine montages of light on sea (as with the opening shot), foliage and even the less aesthetic facades of urban life. The film was shot on Red digital camera, presumably with 4k facility. As in earlier films the editing, down to Juliete Welfling, works both to position characters and events but also places them in a believable but also evocative enrolment. A good touch is the cut from Marineland where Stéphanie works to Ali jogging as ambulances race pass. Alexander Desplat’s score is sometimes very noticeable, but effective and there is a great mixture of popular songs on the soundtrack. Audiard’s direction of his talented team shows how the auteur depends on the creativity of a larger group.

However there is no doubt that his films do offer a ‘personal vision’. And what makes his films so interesting is his ability to fashion (partly as a co-scriptwriter) film stories that address personal and social issues in a very distinctive fashion. From this point of view Rust and Bone is his weakest film for some time. One is conscious of the contrivance of the plot for both melodramatic and emotional moments. Thus is a key relationship in the film between Ali and his son Sam (Armand Verdure). So at a climatic moment in the film there is a serious accident, which requires a frenzied almost masochistic rescue by the father. I was conscious at this point that there was a simpler method available, but one that was less dramatic.

Another development in the story is an accident that leads to an amputation and the later the fitting of artificial limbs. This is done fairly impressively in the film, including frequent shots of the amputated limbs. I am not sure how this was done technically, presumably through some digital technique? But it was so well done that I actually found the perfection distracting.

But the film is never less than absorbing, and at times powerfully emotional. It also includes scene of disturbing violence: another frequent strand in Audiard’s films. In this case it is bare-knuckle fighting: visiting the strata of the lumpen-proletariat, another frequent Audiard depiction. It is out the travails of the fight arena, and of the major accidents in the film, that the protagonist’s relationship develops. And it is in the developments within the central relationships, including with the son Sam, which the film works its way to a resolution and redemption.

The resolution does feel a little pat but it is worth noting that it includes a dry, detached voice-over that provides the sort of ambiguity to the resolution that is also present in earlier Audiard films.

In an interview in Sight & Sound (November 2012) Audiard referred to his pleasure in older Hollywood films by Tod Browning, including The Unknown, 1927) starring Lon Chaney. “They made a sort of expressionist cinema that speaks about the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s (and the films often featured physical disabilities). I wanted to try and find a form of melodrama that could talk about today’s economic crisis, in which the setting of a Marineland (where Stéphanie works in the film) would be like a circus.”

This is a revealing comment on the film, and is interesting when one reflects on his other recent films. In fact my memory of The Unknown is that it was implausible but packed an immense emotional kick. I think Audiard’s new film achieves something similar.

I should finally note that the screening was followed by the Gala Opening of the Festival: the film, the USA feature Argo. This apparently sees Ben Affleck rescuing ‘stranded Americans in Iran’. Whilst I was happy to see Audiard symbolically revisit the 1920s, the prospect of Yanks revisiting and rewriting the 1980s was a little too much.

Les neiges du Kilimandjaro (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, France 2011)

The opening shot of Snows of Kilimanjaro – the union meeting in which the 20 men to be made redundant are chosen.

I’d almost forgotten about Robert Guédiguian – which is a terrible admission since I like his films very much. This one left me in tears and emotionally drained with just a small nagging doubt about the politics. My emotional response suggests that this is a very effective family melodrama and I do think that it is a perceptive and intelligent film about contemporary political ideas. The whole enterprise has been undertaken with love and a clear principled stand.

The basic premise is not unlike the beginning of Couscous (La graine et le mulet, 2007) with an older worker made redundant in a dockyard and the consequent issues around marriage/partners and family conflicts. In this case however, Michel is also a union steward faced with redundancies that the union can’t (or possibly won’t) fight. He puts his own name into the lottery to decide which twenty men will go and duly picks himself as one of those to go. We learn that Michel is a lifelong socialist whose hero is Jean Léon Jaurès (the great French socialist leader from the turn of the century who was assassinated in 1914) but now he is contemplating retirement in his late 50s.

At first everything is fine and Michel and his wife Marie-Claire are given a wedding anniversary present of a safari holiday in Tanzania including a trip to Kilimanjaro by their children. But then something very disturbing happens that shakes up the couple and their closest friends, Raoul (Michel’s closest workmate) and his wife Denise, who is also Marie-Claire’s sister. I won’t spoil the narrative, but what happens certainly puts Michel and Marie-Claire into a difficult position and forces Michel in particular to question his own actions. Did he really fight for the jobs of the younger workers who were made redundant. Has he become old and complacent, just another passive member of the bourgeoisie? What he and Marie-Claire do then (she has her own concerns and takes her own line) causes a rift with their grown-up children, both of whom have families, in a scene that has echoes of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. At the same time, a potential rift between Michel and Raoul also hinges on what we might see as traditional working-class politics and the response to moments of crisis.

Robert Guédiguian is perhaps the nearest French equivalent of the Ken Loach-Paul Laverty school of filmmaking. He has made several films set in the working-class districts of Marseilles. All of these films feature Ariane Ascaride (Guédiguian’s wife) and often Jean-Pierre Darroussin – and here the two play Marie-Claire and Michel. Like Loach, he also has a regular script collaborator, Jean-Louis Milesi. Guédiguian also sometimes makes specific use of his own Armenian ancestry, here represented by the references to Jaurès who was also part Armenian. The other inspiration for the film was a poem by Victor Hugo. The poem and a speech by Jaurès can be found in the Press Pack from Mongrel Films.

The political observation at the centre of the film is that in Guédiguian’s view there is no more a ‘working class’, at least as a coherent entity. Employment has changed in France as in most of Western Europe so that unionisation has been weakened by the loss of large-scale employment in factories, shipyards, mines etc. Younger workers especially have only experienced the individualist ideologies of the modern workplace. Subjected to consumerism, de-regulation and all the other soul-destroying aspects of modern capitalist culture, they have never experienced the solidarity of the unionised workforce, nor realised what those working-class movements won in terms of employment rights. It isn’t their fault and in many ways they do face a tougher world.

Milesi’s script and Guédiguian’s direction produce a film narrative that manages to be both provocative in terms of asking difficult political questions and also warm-hearted and celebratory of the central loving relationship between Michel and Marie-Claire. I think that you could argue that the ending is still in some ways ‘open’ and that not all issues are tidied up, but certainly on a sunny day, eating outside on a terrace overlooking the port, Marseilles isn’t quite like a wet Wednesday in Greenock or Salford which might be the location in a British social realist equivalent.

My nagging doubt is the omission of any analysis of the reasons for the collapse of unionised employment – or real engagement with what the union needs to do to support and educate younger workers. The film isn’t really interested in the work of the men – we never learn what exactly they do, whether they are dockers, ship-repairers or whatever. Perhaps I’m asking for too much. This is a romantic melodrama with a leavening of contemporary political concerns – and it is very enjoyable. The title has a double meaning referring to the dream of visiting the mountain, and a popular chanson which has memories for Michel and Marie-Claire.

 

Chris Marker 1921 – 2012

The new edition of Sight & Sound (October 2012) carries seven pages of tributes to this noted filmmaker. These include the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Gusmán for whom Marker was both a staunch and practical ally in the making of The Battle of Chile (1975, 76, 78): and Agnès Varda, who included Marker’s alternative screen persona ‘Guillaume-en-Egypte’ in her own Agnes de ci là Varda (2011). Marker was one of the most imaginative and stimulating filmmakers in the second half of Cinema’s Century. Another would be his friend and collaborator Alain Resnais: another would be Peter Watkins. I note that the Tate Modern is running a retrospective of the last-named’s work in September, hopefully the films of both directors will circulate in the North.

Marker’s La Jetée (1962) is a film that I have screened time and again for students: it is not only powerful and intriguing but it prompts thought about the very nature of cinema. Unfortunately it is now two decades since I was able to see The Grin Without a Cat (Le fond de l’air est rouge, 1977). But it is one of the most impressive documentaries that I have ever seen. Twenty plus years on there are sequences that I remember with greater clarity than in much more recent film works. And Sans soleil (1982) is a film that one can return to many times and find new stimulation.

So Chris Marker will be missed. Hopefully we will have the opportunity to enjoy his creative work from all of the six decades in which he was involved in filmmaking.

N.B. Some of the tributes in Sight and Sound are to be found at: www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound

Contre toi (In Your Hands, France 2010)

Kristin Scott Thomas as Anna Cooper in her classy apartment

This is an odd little film finally getting a release in the UK, presumably based on the central performance by Kristin Scott Thomas – a major attraction for UK arthouse audiences. However, I’m not sure that word-of-mouth will make this a hit. The English title doesn’t help the film. ‘In Your Hands’, I realise is possibly a play on the phrase describing the responsibilities of a surgeon – ‘Your life in their hands’? Scott-Thomas plays Anna Cooper, a surgeon specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology, who is abducted one evening and kept in a locked room by a rather wild but very pretty young man. My limited French doesn’t run to idioms, but I’m guessing that the French title might translate as something like ‘Against You’. This would be a better title since the main narrative question is “How much ‘against’ her captor will Anna be?” or perhaps how close, literally ‘against’ him, she might become? (I read afterwards that the director did want the English title but its French translation had already been used.)

Writer-director Lola Doillon sets up these questions from the beginning since she first shows a frightened and bewildered Anna escaping from the house where she has been held and a little later sat in a police interview room seemingly telling her story in flashback. So we lose the suspense of whether the captor will murder Anna and instead we wonder about what kind of relationship might develop between the two since we remember the so-called Stockholm syndrome. The narrative does have a twist which I won’t reveal but I suspect many audiences will guess correctly. (The captor’s name, I understand, is the same as the person who first described the Stockholm syndrome.)

The narrative didn’t really work for me. The characters aren’t particularly interesting but it’s possible that some (female?) audiences will identify with Anna. There is an emphasis on her loneliness as a divorcée without children and seemingly few close friends. In terms of the male gaze, this does feel like quite an intimate film with Scott Thomas almost never off the screen. There is something almost erotic about her careful dishevelment. Somehow she still looks elegant and poised even after she has supposedly not washed or changed her clothes for a couple of days. I think the problem is more with her captor played by Pio Marmaï – the narrative would have worked better for me if he had been older and/or less pretty.

I suspect that my main interest in the film was as an example of French cinema’s seeming ease of access to directing for women as writer-directors. I’m not sure that this qualifies as ‘auteur cinema’ but it is a second film by Ms Doillon, whose parents are in the industry – her father is a director and also a teacher at FEMIS. I also read that she is married to the high-profile director Cedric Klapisch (who is thanked in the credits). With those kind of connections perhaps it is not too difficult to put together a budget. There is nothing wrong with the direction of the actors but I don’t think the script offers enough. The film is only 81 minutes long but it felt longer. It did in some ways remind me of a far more interesting film, À la folie… pas du tout (France 2002) with Audrey Tautou, written and directed by Laetitia Colombani – a director of a similar age whose second feature didn’t make it to the UK.