Bachanales Sexuelles

Bachanales Sexuelles

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Bachanales Sexuelles, an early 1970s movie from Jean Rollin. He directed this one under his ‘Michel Gentil’ pseudonym that he used for a lot of his porn films.

And this is a soft-core porno. Story involves a secret sex-cult ruled over by the tyrannical Malvine in an 18th-century chateau. Somebody from the cult has stolen pictures from Malvine and is publishing stories revealing the cult’s activities, and Malvine is determined to uncover the traitor and punish him. All she can glean from his publisher, however, is his address.

What Malvine doesn’t know yet is that the apartment in question is now inhabited by the nameless man’s niece Valerie. She got a message from her uncle saying he’d gone to New York for 6 months and asking her to apartment sit for him. But in the huge apartment, adorned with posters for Rollin’s famous vampire movies (maybe it was shot in Rollin’s own apartment?) Valerie feels nervous, so she invites her best pal Sophie to come share the bed with her. Of course a sex scene ensues.

Later that night two women in ninja outfits (one blue, one white) break into the apartment and abduct Sophie. Valerie is so drunk she sleeps through it, but Sophie manages to call her friend Frederic before she is taken. So here comes Fred, who suspects Sophie was playing a trick on him, so he gets in bed with her – only to find out that ‘Sophie’ is actually Valerie. (Of course, a sex scene follows.)

Meanwhile Sophie is dragged before Malvine in the chateau. She tries to tell them she’s not Valerie, but no good; Malvine orders her tortured. Of course the torments get a couple of the cult members excited, so they have to have sex.

Since Sophie won’t talk, Malvine sends Jenny to the apartment disguised as a maid to search out the photos that the mysterious traitor has stolen. Jenny runs into the real Valerie and Fred – of course a sex scene follows. Then the uncle’s real maid appears, and a French maid catfight ensues! At least they get the truth out of Jenny, that she is there for the photos, and the truth is that these photos are blackmail pix that Malvine uses to enforce her wicked will over her acolytes. Fred, who has by accident found the stash where the photo negatives are hidden, lets Jenny burn her incriminating pictures, and in turn Jenny gives them the address of the chateau.

Fred and Valerie go to the chateau. Meanwhile in the picture’s one true Rollin-scene, Malvine is out on the grounds shooting a pistol at some mannequins dressed as women and men, and finally addresses one female mannequin dressed as a man, calling it traitor, telling it she will unmask it at tonight’s ceremony, then fuck him before she murders him. She proceeds to kiss the dummy on the lips and shoot it in the crotch. Truly a demented, surreal scene that lacks only some weird colored lighting to rank in the Rollin hall of fame.

Some more shenanigans follow, and at last at the big orgy-ceremony, Valerie recognizes her uncle, Fred burns all the negatives, and the cultists all flee like vampires at daybreak, leaving only the uncle, a couple of sadist acolytes the uncle guns down, Fred, the twin ninjas, and Valerie and Sophie along with the newest adept. These last three run for their lives and sanity; Fred hangs around to make out with the twins (who also appeared in one of Rollin’s vampire movies he shot under his own name) and the uncle proceeds to do Malvine before, presumably, killing her.

Rollin at his best shows a poetical, surreal appreciation of setting and landscapes. He can make a Paris street look like a rundown street in a forsaken city on an alien planet, without any sort of budget. He loves colored light, and weirdness. He is famous for his vampire films, but how he came to make them is significant: he wanted to make surreal poetry films, but nobody would give him money for them. He did happen to know a couple of theater-chain owners who showed sex films at their theaters, so they said, ‘Put in some naked girls so we can show them at our theaters, and we’ll give you money for production.’ So was born La Vampire Nue his first feature, which he calls ‘the first French lesbian vampire movie,’ even though Roger Vadim had made Blood and Roses some years before. So he went on to do a series of vampire and horror movies with generous nudity, and got a famous French comic strip artist (Drouillet, I think) to draw posters, and those posters are glorious – they’re the reason I first became interested in Rollin’s movies.

Rollin had a gift for the striking image, the disturbing scene. His best films are like fairy tales from Jung. He likes things like circuses and the monsters of his infancy – the ghouls, werewolves, vampires, and so forth. His weakest point is always pace, which is always slow as grass growing. But part of the effect his films have lies in this slow, slow pace – it drives the audience to think deeply on what they see, and start creating scenarios on their own. You always see more in a Rollin film than he puts on the screen, in part because, bored to death, you are mentally trying to make a better story out of what he gives you. How can a man waste such great images on non-stories and nothing?

When Rollin lingers on an image, it does something to me. I find I have to ‘make sense’ of it somehow; I have to conjure up a reason why the image is onscreen so long. In part this comes from an assumption that the filmmaker is rational and does nothing without a valid artistic reason (as opposed to a practical or commercial reason – for example, a low-budget filmmaker might need to stretch every scene so as to meet acceptable feature length).

But it also comes from a phenomenon like the one we experience when we speak a word over and over again. The word loses its meaning and becomes a sound; the sound begins to strike us as strange, weird; eventually the sound itself suggests some other meaning.

Say a movie has a quick shot of a clock on the wall. Then it cuts back to the main action. OK, the cutaway tells us what time it is, and that’s the ‘reason why’ they put in the shot of the clock. But what if the shot of the clock stays onscreen for a long time? Well, it can’t be just to tell us what time it is, we figured that out already. So we start to look at the clock, what make it is, its details. We start to hear the ticking, if the clock ticks. We start to wonder about time itself. We watch the pendulum swing, or the second hand turn around.

Rollin didn’t just give us shots of clocks, he charged his images with religious and other iconography. There seems to be intrinsic meaning in those shots.

Here’s another reason why Rollin gave us so many lingering shots of things, and shots of landscapes. Rollin was dealing with taboo subject matter in most of his movies, and he had to be careful of the censors. If he couldn’t show directly what he wanted, he could show other parts of a scene (like the clock on the wall, an example I’m just making up here) while the soundtrack carries on. And if he gives us enough time on these innocuous, censor-save shots, he encourages us to imagine what is happening. So whether it’s sex, or sadism, or some violent act of a ghoul werewolf or vampire, the setting as mute witness to it all inspires us to create what could not be directly filmed. (This approach is doubly valuable in an age when different countries have different levels of tolerance and artistic liberty; it allows the local versions to be more or less coherent and of feature length.)

And yet one more reason Rollin would have liked these shots. Generally Rollin cast his female leads strictly by their looks. Did their look arouse, interest, intrigue Rollin? As a result, he hired a lot of women who couldn’t act; Rollin wasn’t much of an actors’ director in any event, and the low budget shooting he was condemned to obey meant quick setups and very few takes – if a shot was technically OK (and sometimes even if it wasn’t) then no retake was called for.

This means that the performances in Rollin’s movies were pretty much all dreadful. The best he could get out of his performers was a certain look, and to dress them in a certain way, and more or less ask them to move in a certain way. So in a Rollin movie, you don’t get a good conventional, classical drama ‘scene’ with lines of dialogue, speeches, and emotions. When he tries for such things, Rollin finds his cast just isn’t up to it, and there isn’t time to coach them and do retakes and full coverage.

Later on he drifted into softcore, then hardcore sex films, which are maybe a bit more honest, but in Bachanales Sexuelles at least, the lighting is not up to his usual standard. On the other hand the pace is somewhat better, as the sex scene gives him something to cover and cut, and us something to watch, and it’s a lot more detailed than he gets with his vampires.

It’s interesting to compare this sex film to his vampire films in other ways. The sex cult could easily be a vampire clutch, and Malvine rather than it’s ‘high priestess,’ might as well be the Vampire Queen of La Vampire Nue or his other vampire films. Fucking, or drinking blood, what’s the difference here?

One difference involves tension. In the vampire film, while the not-so-innocent heroines sit around waiting for … we know what: the vampires to drink their blood … we can feel tension. Nothing is happening, but we know what’s going to happen, and we know the girls won’t like it. In the sex film the not-so-innocent heroines sit around waiting for … we know what: the next sex scene with the next person to enter the apartment. But here we know the girls will like it, and so there is not a story-based tension. Instead the tension is more based in the audience, as we fret and wish for the film to get on with it and show us some goodies.

I’ve never seen any of Rollin’s hardcore that he did later in the 70s and into the 80s. I wonder if they are any better.

(21 March 2009)

The Diary of a Chambermaid

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Hi Aki,

We watched The Diary of a Chambermaid tonight. Another Buñuel, from early in his second French period.

Story has Celestine, a Paris chambermaid, accept employment in a house in the country. There’s nothing to do there, everyone is provincial, the servants are nincompoops or brutes, the old master is a dotty shoe fetishist, the mistress, his daughter, is a stickler, uptight, who can’t stomach sex with her husband, her husband as a result is condemned to long walks in the woods hunting, or trying to seduce the chambermaid as he has every chambermaid before her. Celestine, however, will have nothing to do with him. Though the mistress at first doesn’t like Celestine at all (possibly because Celestine is pretty, and the mistress fears her husband will take up with Celestine) later on she warms to her (maybe because Celestine doesn’t sleep with husband). Celestine manages to get pretty much what she wants from all of them.

The first half plays out as a sly satire on the upper class, though the servants are no saints. The second half turns into a bit of a murder mystery or suspense film: A young girl whom Celestine was especially fond of, is found raped and butcherd in the woods, on the very night the old gentleman is found dead with Celestine’s boot in his mouth! Celestine is sure that Joseph, another servant, is responsible, because he is a sadist and a brute and a fascist as well. We are sure it’s Joseph as well, since we see him meet the girl in the woods, then run after her, and then a shot of the girl’s legs emerging bare from behind a bush, with two great snails crawling on them (probably the most unforgettable image of the film – in fact this whole sequence is strong, playing like something out of a folktale, Little Red Riding Hood gone dark).

Celestine proceeds to snoop on the man, goes into his rooms, even pretends to love him and sleeps with him, all the while trying to get him to confess to the murder. At last she frames him, and this has him arrested and charged. But since the only bit of evidence is the toe of one of his shoes that Celestine has put at the scene of the murder, the charges are dropped.

Celestine goes on to marry the retired army captain next door, and rescues the girl who’s bound to be the next victim of her former master. And Joseph goes on to have his café in Cherbourg, cheering the fascists as they march through the city.

There’s something that struck me as odd about the structure of the household, and looking up the plot of the 1891 novel from which it’s adapted, I see that there Celestine first had the old shoe fetishist as master, then when he died she moved on to serve the couple. The novel is a non-linear, more episolary novel, presented as though it is the actual diary of the girl Celestine R., filled with condemnations of French society in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, dirty with money, the rich the worst, the poor helplessly in the thrall of the rich, and yet little better morally. Octave Mirbeau, the author, seems to have been fulminating, but Buñuel and co-screenwriter Jean Carrière were lighter in tone, perhaps, more amused and bemused by the ridiculous spectacle we all make of ourselves. The feud between the household’s master and the neighboring army captain is pretty funny.

The film is shot in black and white, and well lighted; a handsome production in all, with an excellent cast, lots of period 1920s costumes, carts and horses and antique cars, and so on. One annoying thing is it is shot in widescreen anamorphic ‘Franscope’ and the lenses are not well shaped; figures at the edges of the screen are stretched quite thin, and wide angle lenses distort the middle of the shot during pans; a closeup on a snail in the little girl’s hand is quite disturbing – I’m not sure just what happened in the shot, as the camera booms back and the frame widens out, something happens – is it a quick change of lenses in the middle of the shot, or a change in lighting, or the breathing of the lens as a slight zoom is snuck in?

Jeanne Moreau is Celestine, and she’s quite good. It’s interesting this came to us on the same day as Susana, which also deals with a young pretty servant girl entering the household, immediately desired by all the men. Susana encourages and enflames this lust, Celestine seems not particularly to want it, and easily fends off the attractions she doesn’t desire, deftly handling everybody. This was part of the novel, it seems, as well: How the lower class can if they are intelligent and skillful, maneuver their ‘masters’ into doing what the servants want. One servant in the movie who isn’t so intelligent is Celestine’s successor as chambermaid: We see the master try all his old lines on her, and she just doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how to say no, and yet she can’t imagine leaving and losing the employment. She is on the verge of tears, and a few minutes later she is ordered into the barn where she will be raped by the master.

There’s little surrealism here, and apart from the old man’s shoe fetishism (which is also in the novel, but apparently Buñuel also liked women’s feet more than usual) and the army captain throwing garbage over the hedge into the master’s yard, everything proceeds quite realistically.

There is no music in the movie. Susana on the other hand was pumping with melodramatic music like a Warners 1940 melodrama, practically wall to wall. Buñuel didn’t have much control over Susana, which was a for-hire job; Chambermaid is much more under his control, and yet is quite restrained and ‘French’ if you will, and if I saw it without the credits I doubt if Buñuel would occur to me as the likely director.

(19 March 2009)

The Watchmaker

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Watchmaker (L’Horloger de Lyons) a Bertrand Tavernier movie adapted from a Georges Simenon novel.

In this one simenon, instead of following the detective, focused on the father of the accused. Michel is just an ordinary watch repair sales guy with his own shop. One day the cops come tell him his car’s been found abandoned. Turns out his son took it, and with a girl murdered a man. The couple is now on the run.

The movie shows how the innocent father is caught up, manipulated by cops, journalists; how friends of the murdered man smash his shop, and friends of the girl come to give support; people whisper about him behind his back. And he doesn’t have any idea why his son did it. The defense attorney wants to build up a fake case, and the cops also want the other worker girls to testify.

The father gets increasingly annoyed by the circus, and though at first he finds he didn’t understand his son at all, by the end he comes to feel a closer bond to him than ever. His only testimony at the trial is that he stands by his son, in all solidarity.

The second to last scene shows the father visiting his son in prison. Son has been sentenced to 20 years, so he’ll be almost 40 when he gets out. The father and son have a nice talk. The father shares a story of when he was a young man, beginning of WW2, how he hit a general in defiance. He says he will take care of the girl and his son’s child, which will be his grandchild.

The film is shot very messy, hand held, natural light, ugly looking. Very low key performances, which accords well with the usual simenon approach to life and stories. Tavernier shot it all in lyons and at times he chooses locations and shots to kind of say, ‘Hey! We’re in lyons!’ – not really in a pushy way the James Bond way, but it gets borderline; this is the only real flaw I find in his approach. Phillippe Noiret is very good as the father. Noiret and Tavernier worked together a lot; this movie I think is their beginning together, and they were in Revenge of the Musketeers which I saw last night, which was 30 years after Watchmaker, which was 1974.

There is a sort of feeling of hope and happiness at the end, oddly enough. The irony of this was intentional. In one sense, at this point the circus has moved on to new scandals and cases, so the man and his son can go back to private lives.

At the same time, Simenon was interested in sociology more than psychology, and there are references here to the political scene in France that I don’t understand. No doubt if I knew better, I would appreciate more of what Tavernier was doing.

At first the movie seemed ugly and badly made. But seeing the Simenon source and how it played out, it was right, I thought.

Phillippe Sarde did the music. He did music for Revenge of the Musketeers too, and both film scores did little but annoy me. He was bad in 1974 and still bad in 2004.

Watchmaker is a movie that really calls for no score. It’s low key, and just wants to look at these characters almost in a documentary way. Music wants to tell us how to feel, and build our feelings. It just works wrong here. As for Musketeers, in the very first scene, he’s using a sort of music and instrumentation that seems avant-garde, modern – totally out of place for the 17th century.

(29 January 2009)

Au Revoir Les Enfants in Japanese - 「さよなら子供たち」

Here’s a treat: the review of Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants which Aki has graciously translated into Japanese:

今夜、見たのはルイ・マル監督の第二次大戦を素材にした「さよなら子供たち」だ。

ジュリアンは１３歳くらい。彼の両親は金持ちで、ジュリアンはカトリックの私立学校に通っている。１９４４年１月の話だ。

彼のクラスに新しい生徒が入ってくる。他の子供たちはこの新しい生徒につらくあたる。実際、生徒達は皆、小さな、ならず者っていう感じで描かれている。ジュリアンも彼に対して意地悪い態度をとるが、一緒にいろいろやっているうちに、ふたりはだんだん仲良くなって友情を育む。だがジュリアンは友人になった生徒の持ち物をこっそりチェックして、彼が本当は、牧師が隠しているユダヤ人の子供であることを発見する。

秘密を共有したことで、二人はもっと親密になる。が、そこでドイツ人がやってくる。ユダヤ人は、学校にかくまわれていたユダヤ人の生徒三人と、牧師を探し出し、彼らを逮捕する。そしてジュリアンは連れて行かれる友人に、さよならと手をふる。後日、ジュリアンは、彼の友人は、残りの二人とともにアウシュビッツの収容所で死んだこと、牧師は別の刑務所で死んだことを知ることになる。「４０年たった今でも、その日を忘れる事はない。」

技術的には、特にものすごく突出して素晴らしいってことはない。シナリオは特にストラクチャーがなく、シーンが積み重ねられているといった印象。ドラマの核をなしているのは、二人の少年が対立するライバルから友人になるという部分だ。幾つかのサブプロットもあるが、それは当時のフランスの事情だ。

子供の視点は素晴らしくよく描かれている。派手さのない、堅実な語り口。フォーリーとループとアンビアンスで再構築された音のつけられた場面のサウンドトラックも遜色ない。印象的なのは、子供たちが森で戦争ごっこをするシーンだ。ジュリアンと友人達が道に迷うが、宝物を見つける。でもあたりが暗くなってきて、森には狼がいるかもしれないという不安に皆がおそわれる。でも森は静かだ……。そのシーンは全部、フォーリーで音がつけられているが、ものすごくうまくできている。フォーリーとルーピングがちょっと過剰かもしれないが、映画関係者以外は気づかないだろう。

非常に人間的な映画。子供たちを裏切る男さえ、上手く描かれていて、彼がなぜ子供たちを裏切ったのかが理解できるよう描かれている。彼に同情してしまうくらいだ。ルノアールが言っているように「誰にでも理由はあるのだ。」

Lacombe Lucien

Hi Aki,

Tonight it was Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien. This was I think his most acclaimed film, though he had many such – heck, he was hired the day he graduated from film school to direct the film of a Jacques Cousteau expedition, and he and Cousteau won an Oscar for it!

So the story: it’s 1944 and we are in the southwest corner of France, in the countryside near the spanish border. Young Lucien is a janitor at a hospice. He doesn’t talk much. And he has a sort of callousness about him, established by his gratuitous slingshot killing of a small bird singing on a branch outside the hospice ward window.

He goes home to the family farm when he has a few days off, only to find a bunch of strangers staying there. His mother is sleeping with a guy while his father is off fighting with degaulle or in jail, I didn’t catch which. Lucien is only happy when he’s out in the fields shooting rabbits.

He goes to his old schoolteacher to join the resistance. But the schoolteacher tells him he’s too young, and they have too many young kids like him. Lucien says he doesn’t want to go back to cleaning bedpans, but it’s no good.

He bicycles back to town to the hospice, but gets a flat on the way. This brings him into town after curfew, and he’s dragged into the local hotel where the collaborators, the French ‘German police’ are headquartered. But they take a liking to him, get him drunk, get him talking, and he tells them all about his schoolteacher.

Next thing he knows the schoolteacher is brought in to be tortured, and Lucien is a member of the German police.

They lead a fine life. Lucien is just a punk really, a young thug with not much conscience, no principles, not a thought in his head.

One thing the film does very well is play off silences, pauses when people don’t say anything, and we have to fill in what’s going on in their heads ourselves.

Lucien along the way meets a jewish tailor in hiding in town, and his lovely daughter. Lucien wants this girl bad, but she’s cultured and refined from Paris, and he’s a country bumpkin and a punk. Nevertheless they become lovers, and she begs him to help her father get across the border to spain.

Finally the father, outraged at this punk fucking his daughter, acts foolishly and gets arrested. The daughter blames Lucien. The way Lucien understands it, it was the father’s own fault – but Lucien really doesn’t understand anything. This is a constant source of irritation in watching the movie, that we are so much smarter than Lucien, and wonder what the hell he is thinking, can he really be so dumb?

Later on the Germans come to arrest the daughter and her grandmother, and Lucien goes along to show the Germans where to find them. Lucien takes back a gold watch he had given the father, but the German soldier takes it from him. Lucien then shoots the German soldier and flees with his girl and her granny. And we can’t be sure if in the end he shot the German soldier to help his girl, or just to get the watch – which is the first thing he does after he shoots the soldier.

They drive into the mountains toward the border, but the car overheats. They they must go on foot, but granny is not going to be able to climb the mountains.

Finding an abandoned farmhouse along the way, they move in. Lucien is back in his true element. He catches birds and rabbits. Granny plays solitaire like always. The girl plays with Lucien, sleeps with him, thinks about killing him in his sleep. (She’s another one with long silences during which we wonder exactly what is going on in her mind).

The peaceful idyll ends abruptly – not with German soldiers like we all expect, but with the credits. As Lucien lies in the cool grass, dozing, and his girl watches him from the pool where she’s been bathing, titles appear on the screen telling us he was arrested on October 12 1944, sentenced to death, and executed.

We aren’t told anything about the girl or granny.

The end.

The story is told with fragments, scenes, gradually filling in the portrait of the young punk. Once he hooks up with the girl, most of the scenes are concerned with his relations to that family, his awkward wooing, alternating with threats against the father and attempts to make nice. These scenes have a ghastly hilarity – they might give rise to nervous laughter, and I think some are intended to be funny; my dad and I didn’t laugh, though I chuckled once.

The actor who plays the tailor father gives the best performance. it’s quite good. Lucien is played by a young actor who looks right, and almost looks young enough; but he’s not a subtle actor, so Malle can only have him look rather blankly on. I wonder if whether this actor had been more accomplished, we would not have had to be guessing so much at what’s on his mind. On the other hand Malle might have been frustrated himself with this character, and this type of character. Maybe in the end he doesn’t know why such a character joins the German police other than the obvious reasons.

The German police are typified as semi-losers, quite banal, ordinary. They act more like gangsters low-caliber gangsters, than representatives of any government. It’s an interesting glimpse into what society is like when it breaks down like that.

Did I like it? Parts of it. In the end I feel frustrated, and I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again.

(written around 10 March 2009)

Soufle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart)

Hi Aki,

Tonight it was another Louis Malle movie, Soufle au Coeur or Murmur of the Heart – the term for an arrhythmic heart condition which the boy seems to have.

Another coming of age film. Another look back, this time post-war, 1954 in Dijon, France. The French are fighting, and losing, in Vietnam. Young Laurent is a rich kid, spoiled, and the baby. He has two older brothers who are even bigger brats than he is. He is at least smart in school. At least with literature and philosophy. Like the kid in Au Revoir les Enfants he goes to private Catholic school.

Like the other Malle films, this one has a very loose structure, not Hollywood in any sense. A great many small scenes, fragmentary, add up to a portrait of this kid. There is no real structure, but the illusion of a structure is provided by the ‘climax scene.’ This is the scene that when you look back on it, the whole movie has been moving towards – it just didn’t move that way in the Hollywood sense.

In Hollywood all this movement would be on the surface. The hero would say, ‘I want this and I’m going to get it’ and they others would say, ‘You’ll never get it while we’re around’ and then they would struggle and fight over it until the hero either gets it or fails definitively.

OK, so to set this up, let’s look at it backwards the way Malle must have ended up doing: this is the story of a 14 year old boy whose first full sexual experience is with his mother.

So the structure has two sides: the long build up to the incest scene, and the much shorter aftermath.

Malle wants to say, ‘Yes it happened, but it didn’t cripple the kid, it wasn’t bad, it didn’t leave him fixated on his mother.’

So the aftermath scene has the mother telling the kid, ‘It was a beautiful tender moment and nothing to regard with any shame or disgust, it was love, and it will never happen again. It will be our secret, and we will treasure it.’ After this, the same night, the mother falls asleep, the kid gets dressed and goes to the room of a girl he’s been wooing (they are at a spa to take the waters, as part of the treatment for the soufle au coeur (which of course has a double meaning) – isolating mother and son in this vacation setting is part of the strategy to push them into a heightened extraordinary intimacy). He tries to attack helene, but she repulses him. He shrugs. ‘What room is Daphne in?’ he asks, and goes to her, and Daphne does not repulse him. These two scenes tell us that the kid is still interested in girls his own age and not fixated on mom. In the morning he goes back to the room he shares with his mom, and finds his brothers and father have come to visit.

Caught red-handed sneaking back after not being in his room all night, the kid doesn’t know what to do. The father seems mad at first, but his brothers just laugh, and then the father laughs, and the kid laughs, and the mother laughs, and the whole family laughs together. This tells us that the family is not going to be split apart by this secret but they can go on. Indeed, this is the only moment when the whole family seems to be enjoying one another and not fighting – it is as if the tension of the boy’s being a virgin has now left, and that ghost is removed; but I doubt Malle wanted to say, ‘A little incest helps a family’ rather just ‘It didn’t ruin anybody.’

The long buildup involves many many scenes, and they get a little tiresome, as Malle is really pushing it – he shows Laurent and both his brothers as real spoiled rich bastards, and I can’t say I liked any of them or enjoyed their hijinks, though maybe teenagers would enjoy the fantasy of being a brat like that.

The older boys (who are only about 17 and 18 themselves) take young Laurent to a brothel to have his first sex experience, but just as Laurent is on top of the very nice young whore the madam has chosen for him, and he’s going along nicely, in come his drunk brothers and drag him off! So he doesn’t climax, and only counts himself half a virgin at this point.

Then he is after some other girls, but is rather a bashful fellow, just not saying anything then leaping on a girl. But he’s regarded as cute by all the girls, so they don’t get too mad at him.

An interesting strategy Malle uses is to make the mother foreign (Italian), as though he couldn’t imagine a bourgeois French mother going along with it. But I think an American could imagine a French mother doing it, so I think that the strategy works, kind of: the mother being a bit of a free spirit, rather young (35) and Italian kind of makes it ‘all right’ the way we can accept fantasy when it is set in a foreign country or the past.

There was no doubt a lot of discussion and negotiation over how to handle the incest scene. As usual with Malle, the dramatic moments – sex with the mother and then with Daphne afterward – are not what he wants to focus on, so he cuts past both of them. You’ve been in writing groups, you know what showing the script around is like. I’ll bet that the mother was in earlier drafts accepting of the son’s advances on that fatal night. But people reacted in shock and disbelief. The version might even have made it through preproduction into production, and the actress balked, and Malle had to negotiate with her.

So it happens on the night of Bastille Day, and mother is very drunk. Not quite passed out, she responds and kisses her son passionately, many kisses on his head and cheeks before we cut away to the aftermath. But her eyes are closed, she has just broken up with her boyfriend (yes she was having an affair, and son and mother discuss the affair and breakup in a scene that is used to advance the tension between them and bring them more intimacy as one of the final stages of the buildup to the incest scene) – and so we can’t be sure she is even totally aware of what she is doing, does she know who she is with, is she completely in control of her actions? This tends to exculpate her in the eyes of the audience who would otherwise condemn her.

Malle knows he’s dealing with dynamite here, a shocking taboo, and so he has to handle the buildup very carefully.

The movie thus is a good one to study to watch several times if you are interested in the strategies Malle used to try to make this most-shocking, taboo act come off as natural and acceptable and even beautiful.

One final note of interest is the credit given to a co-director. The final credit is ‘written and directed by Louis Malle’ but a few title screens before that there is acknowledgment of the ‘co-metteur en scene’ and I don’t really know what that means, but it is a woman’s name. Maybe she helped with the child actors, which is what I guessed when I saw the title, but at the end now I’m wondering if she was not trying to give the woman’s point of view, and the mother’s point of view. Malle provides the personal recollection or fantasy (I don’t know how autobiographical this might be, but the kid in Au Revoir Les Enfants also had a young, very beautiful mother to whom he was overly attached, and a distant indeed never-seen, father) of the boy.

The whole film is dubbed, which gives it an odd feeling of performances being a little off; but again I was reading subtitles and not seeing the faces too much. The main kid actor can’t act too well, like the kids in Malle’s other films, and so we get the blank looks all too often – they were kind of annoying me in this one. It just seemed like bad acting, bad directing.

The old Hollywood movies when they had child stars, they had kids who could act, but only in the hammy, fake Hollywood style. Malle comes after the Method school changes everything, as well as the new wave, so when he casts kids he’s mostly condemned to amateurs and about the most he can manage is to get a kid who looks right, and then hope that the mosaic of the scenes in the screenplay will add up to a sense of the character that the actor can’t provide.

(written around 10 March 2009)

Au Revoir Les Enfants

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants a memoir of the second world war.

Julien is about 13. His mom and dad are wealthy. He goes to private catholic school. It is January 1944.

A new kid enters his class. The kids are rough to him, all the kids are little bastards. Julien is also rough on him but in time the two kids are together here and there and strike up a friendship. Julien snoops through the kid’s stuff and learns he’s really a jew the priest is hiding.

The shared secret brings the boys closer together. But then the Germans come. They get three boys, all the jews, and the priest, and arrest them. Julien waves goodbye to his friend. Later he will hear that his friend and the other two kids both died in Auschwitz; the priest died in another prison. ‘Though 40 years have passed I will never forget that day.’

Nothing remarkable about the filmmaking. The script strings together a series of scenes without too much structure. The main thing is the way the two boys are antagonists rivals and then friends. There are a couple of subplots. A portrait of France in that time.

Very good view of the school kids. No sentimentality. Solid filmmaking with nothing flashy. Decent soundwork for the scenes where the entire track is made up of foley and loops and ambience. One very expressive scene shows the kids playing war games in the woods; Julien and his friend get lost, but find the treasure. But dark comes down and there might be wolves. And the woods are quiet… that’s the scene where all the sound is done in foley and it’s very good, a bit heavy on the foley and looping, but nobody but a filmmaker would notice it.

A very human film. Even the guy who denounces them is quite well drawn and we understand very well why he betrayed them. We even sympathize with him. Like renoir said, ‘everybody has his reasons.’

(written around 28 February 2009)

PS — to read Aki’s translation of this post in Japanese, click here.

Franck Spadone

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Franck Spadone, a truly uninvolving, abstracted, BAAAAAAAD gangster movie from France. The story is such a cliché that the director tries to slow things down, minimalize, stylize. Some of the compositions are really powerful, but he is only really good at static compositions, so the movie is almost a collection of stills. I would guess this director is a fashion photographer turned director. The casting is really good for the look of people, the faces are perfect. But the dialogue (what little there is) is banal or bad, and the structure of the story…well, it just doesn’t come to an end, it stops.

I ordered it because it features Monica Bellucci. One interesting facet of the movie is that she is a glamourous stripper/prostitute, trapped in relationship with a mean gangster, but there is a handsome young pickpocket who gets involved, kind of, with her, and she uses him to escape, kind of, only there’s no resolution so, kind of, nothing happens. Nothing really ends.

Anyway Monica is actually quite a bit older than she looks, she’s in her 40s but she is playing these ultra hot sex-girl roles. And she is good in them, with a killer body, but also a powerful face. If I were casting her in the ideal role it would be an updating of Medea, that’s the kind of face she has, a very sad face, a face for deep, high tragedy.

But what was interesting about this casting, is that the pickpocket is obviously much younger than Monica is in real life. Odd twist on the old ‘middle-aged male star teamed with cute young actress’ kind of story. Here the guy is young and the girl is older.

But as I say Monica can still get away with playing supersexy hot babes, so she doesn’t look older. She does look more experienced than the guy, though.

(written around 26 February 2009)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Hi Aki,

This is an adaptation (directed by Julian Schnabel) of the book of the same name written by Jean Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine, after he had a catastrophic stroke. Totally paralyzed, he could only communicate by means of blinking his one good eye.

Now this is rather like My Left Foot in that the book is hailed, at least in part, simply because it was physically hard to write. I haven’t read the book and don’t know its qualities.

The movie is excellent though. Schnabel was nominated for Oscar for direction, and won it for Golden Globes. He takes us inside Bauby, which is difficult with so much of the movie POV shots. Eventually he breaks from this, but not before solidly anchoring us inside the head of the paralyzed man. Throughout, we hear the inner voice of Bauby, sarcastic, skeptical, sourly humourous. We get a feeling for the character which is very well drawn.

Structurally we are given closure by the use of an old French classic song, ‘La Mer,’ in an old recording; the film opens with Bauby’s first waking moments after 3 weeks in a coma, unable to remember ‘the accident’ which put him there. I assumed it was a car crash. Around the 2/3 mark he tells someone (by blinking his eye) that he wants to remember the accident.

He begins to make progress, moving his head a little, grunting, which raised my hopes that he might recover. Then, suddenly, pneumonia, and his final dictation for the book. The book is released to rave reviews, but he is fading as his ex-wife reads the reviews and shows him the published book.

Throughout the film we have had flashbacks and inventive dream-fantasy sequences that bring us (and him) out of the hospital. One more follows, as he remembers ‘My car…my new car’ and he drives off from his girlfriend, goes to pick up his son from his ex-wife for a day, and drives down the country roads. A feeling of apprehension rose in me, I knew this drive was leading us to the accident, and I wondered about the son…but we had seen the son visit his paralyzed father, or was that a ghost, and he was unable to accept he had killed his son in the crash?

Then right in the middle of talking to his son, Bauby begins to have a seizure. He can’t finish a sentence, trying over and over – he makes then an irrelevant remark about helicopters, and pulls over, stops the car. He has his stroke, terrifies his son, who gets out and runs to find help. The song ‘La Mer’ comes back up.

A title card tells us that Bauby died 10 days after the publication of the book.

One of the recurring images is of him in an old fashioned diving bell under the sea. This is how he sees himself in his current predicament, cut off, heavy, isolated, unable to communicate. The butterfly becomes a symbol of freedom and lightness, though I forget the specific reference which defines the butterfly. Anyway that’s where the title comes from.

Why is it moving? Well, Bauby is well characterized as I say, and the movie (and him) refuse to sentimentalize the situation – just the opposite. There are moments of humor. As we see him make little bits of progress, I gained some hope he might recover, at least part way.

There were also nice photographic techniques to indicate his waking up, blurry-eyed, not fully conscious, in the opening. These techniques were repeated at the final scene before the flashback/memory, another foreshadowing of the end.

Julian Schnabel is a name I know, but from what? Didn’t he make an art film about Basquiat? Or was that somebody else? I wasn’t expecting a French movie, but it was better not to try to americanize it. Maybe I liked it better because it was French, too. Also my experience of the movie, reading the subtitles more than hearing the inner voice and experiencing it as the movie should be experienced, put me at a little greater distance.

(written around 22 February 2009)

Angel-A

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched Luc Besson’s Angel-A. It was good, a sweet movie, maybe the Besson movie I liked the best somehow. Basically a two-character movie set in Paris. A punk, a loser, is in deep trouble. He owes several gangsters a lot of money and he can’t pay, so they will kill him tomorrow. He tries everything he can, it fails, so he decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge. But just as he’s about to jump, he sees a girl is about to do the same thing, a little farther down the bridge.

So these two losers, the short dark fellow and the tall, leggy super-model blonde, team up to try to solve his problems, so she can get her mind off her problems.

And they have various adventures around Paris.

It’s not quite new wave, and the adventures don’t really engage the real city the way they should,instead it’s more fabricated, a fantasy after the old Hollywood movie – Besson loves old Hollywood movies.

I was thinking more about angela, and I have to add: it’s too talky. I notice it more because I had to read subtitles and could barely see what was going on! There were only a couple of moments where they weren’t talking, and those moments were such a relief.

Also the characters are only half-characters. The girl is a sort of amnesiac: she is in fact an angel, and once was human, but has no memory of when she was alive; she only knows her 300 years as an angel being sent down to help various mortals.

The guy has bits and pieces of details, but he knows nobody in Paris outside of the criminals who hate him and want to kill him. He has no place to live here, either. So it’s kind of no-character character, where the actor Besson casts, his way of speaking, his face, make it seem as though he has a character, but really it’s only casting. (good casting too: the guy is the one-armed short guy who was the helper to the greengrocer in amelie, who was always picked on. The contrast between the really-tall, impossibly-long-legged blonde girl and the short dark guy makes for great comic casting.)

Even making the girl an angel is a cheat in good writing. Ok, this loser guy teams up with a beautiful blonde and they set about fixing up his life, and along the way they fall in love. Good premise. Only … why, WHY would the blonde want to help this guy? And HOW can she help him? Who is she, anyway?

There could be a lot of answers, but ‘She’s an angel, and has magic powers’ is just about the easiest way to not answer those questions.

Frank Daniel had a name for this kind of team up, I forget the name. But the premise is that two people who want to get away from each other, are instead bound together and must learn to co-operate. The Defiant Ones has for example Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as convicts. They escape the police, they hate each other – but, they are chained together, so they must stay together. that’s a simple way to bond them.

The advantage of this kind of teaming is that we never know when, if, they are going to split up. They keep talking about it, and the trick for the screenwriter is to juggle this, ‘I want to get away,’ and ‘We must work together!’ back and forth, up and down, throughout the second act. Usually at the end of act 2, or early in the third act, they do part company, giving them a chance to miss each other. (in this way it’s like a romantic story where the lovers split up at the end of act 2, and only get back together at the very end.)

When Besson has the blonde be an angel (Angela, or Angel-A) who is assigned the mission of helping this guy, he loses the chance to show us the pair about to split up at various points. We lose the juggling act.

(written around 14 February 2009)

La Vie En Rose

Hi Aki,

So I watched la vie en rose and I didn’t like it. Man, I was confused – it’s as though You’re already supposed to know everything that happened in her life. This first struck me when she walks up this long staircase, into a big room, where there’s a body on the floor. Somebody offstage says, ‘It’s all her fault’ and she leaves, and meets a guy who says, ‘Come with me,’ and he’s a cop and ask her ‘Do you know Albert? How about manny the sailor? And him, and him, and him?’

Man, who died? What happened? I guess the French know all about that. But I don’t know shit.

Then it’s jumping all over the place, New York, California, Paris, 1920, 1947, 1960…where are we? When are we?

And what happened to ‘Daddy Leelee’ Gerard Depardieu, the guy who gave her the first cabaret job?

And who was the pimp she was paying, but refusing to turn tricks for? Is she a hooker or not? If she’s not, why is she paying him?

I didn’t know though that ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’ that song we mentioned before, came so late. it’s like the end of her career already!

And every scene was like the climax of another movie. she’s high, she’s drunk, she’s crazy in love, she’s crazy, it’s the most important night of her career, it’s the worst night of her career.

Some of it was so over the top it was like a parody.

It’s weird: some scenes required you to already know her life story, but in other scenes they tell you everything.

Basic problem of the movie is that she lived too full a life. Her life story is enough for 20, 30 movies. You can’t put it all into one like this, because you end up with ‘greatest hits’ of super-highs and super-lows just like this guy did, and she comes off as a parody of the show-business rise-and-fall story.

One other interesting thing: the movie avoids the second world war entirely. that’s one good aspect to jumping around like they did, they could just ignore those 8 years. I imagine they ignored those years because Piaf did things then that even these guys didn’t want to admit.

Another problem with the film is that it treats an artist, but you’d never know she was an artist. The guy who introduces her in his cabaret makes her practice; the guy who trains her for music halls and concerts trains and instructs her ruthlessly; but we never see her taking her art seriously. She remains the drunk, drug-addict little girl who sings on street corners for pennies, and might be turning tricks at night too.

It’s like the National Enquirer version of her biography (with the war left out)

… I checked Wikipedia: Papa Leplee, Gerard Depardieu, disappears…because he’s the body on the floor! I didn’t even recognize who it was! Amazingly bad work, although maybe in cinema I would have seen his face better.

And the war years are controversial: some called her a traitor for singing to the Germans, she claimed she was a secret member of the resistance, and maybe it was just too complicated to get into. But it remains a big gap, for that period is soooooo important to France.

Oh, here’s another thing that bugged me in the film. Marilyn Cotillard did a very good job at acting especially, teamed with the makeup people, in aging from 20 to a very-decrepit looking 44 (she looked more like 80) – but when she sang, although she matched lips perfectly, her throat didn’t move. It looks fake, and it’s worse when you have a closeup on a singer who is only known for belting out the songs with great emotion – there just isn’t the life there when you don’t see the throat muscles working and the veins bursting.

(written around 7 February 2009)

Le Deuxieme Soufle

Hi Aki,

Le Deuxieme Soufle (second breath, second wind) opens with two title cards. The first says basically, ‘We don’t endorse the things these gangsters do, we only make a movie based on a fiction book.’ The censors of de Gaulle must have given them a hard time. The second expresses some of melville’s philosophy: ‘the only right a man has is to choose when he will die. If he chooses to die out of weariness, then his life will have had absolutely no meaning.’

Tough guy Gu (Lino Ventura) breaks out of prison after serving 10 years. He finds his girlfriend and several buddies still loyal, still willing to help him get out of the country. But he needs money first, and gets involved in a armored car robbery of 500 kilos of platinum. They pull off the heist, as usual in heist movies, but then, also as usual, things start to go bad. Gu still has to hang around to get his piece of the platinum, then arrange a sale. But he gets caught by other gangsters who claim that Gu’s group cheated, the heist was the ‘Angel’s’ job, and they stole it from him. Gu says, ‘Paul wouldn’t do that, if he did he’s crazy, but I always follow the rules, the Angel knows that!’ – but he has been tricked: the thugs are really cops, under command of the wily Inspector Blot, and they now have Gu’s voice on tape implicating Paul.

The tape isn’t legal evidence, so the cops bring in Paul and they torture him (interestingly, they waterboard him!) and beat up Gu, trying to get them to confess and name the other two guys in on the heist. But paul won’t talk, and neither will Gu.

The cops also release to the papers that Gu has talked, named paul, and that ‘other arrests will follow.’ So the other two guys think Gu has broken the code of honor, and that he will name them too. His name is put on a hit list.

Gu breaks out of jail hospital and makes a miracle recovery from his torture. He kidnaps one of the cops and forces him to write and sign a confession that he tricked Gu, that Gu never confessed, and that the cop tortured Gu and paul. Then he murders the cop.

Gu takes the confession to show the other two guys. But paul’s brother, who’s a bit of a rat, is now pushing them to kill Gu. They don’t believe Gu, and he’s forced to kill them all – but he gets shot in the battle, and can’t walk. he’s trapped in a crummy apartment while the cops come – led by Inspector Blot. In a shootout, Gu dies in Blot’s arms, and his last breath is the name of his girlfriend.

Outside, the girlfriend asks blot if Gu had any last words. Blot says, ‘not one.’ She’s disappointed of course. He tells her to go home and forget all about it. Then he ‘accidentally’ drops the notebook with the other cop’s confession next to the reporter, and says, ‘you dropped something, I’m sure it’s yours.’ So the last two acts of blot seem to be to honor Gu’s memory, and to try to let the girlfriend move on with her life.

The stunt work is poor by Hollywood standards. Black and white photography in this print is not great, grays and washed out. But the no-nonsense gangster code is great; ventura and paul meurisse (as blot) are terrific.

This movie is good to see next to Army of Shadows – as the woman commenting on Shadows said, melville’s resistance fighters act like gangsters, and his gangsters act like resistance fighters.

I see no hint of misogyny in the way melville treats the girlfriend here. she’s never ugly, she’s always loyal, and follows the code in her own way. She is however in need of male protection, as she has a big guy as bodyguard, and inspector blot remarks that without him she would never have lasted. Again, melville shows us a man’s world, in which women are almost irrelevant. Men can love women, and they can play a part in the world, but women can’t be equal in this world.

Blot is an interesting character, the sort of cop who knows all about the underworld and its code. You get the sense that he could have been a gangster himself if he wanted to; but the other cops (mostly the guy who tortures Gu and paul) are clearly stupid, and would never last long as gangsters – they’d be third-rate thugs at best.

Blot at one point tells how Gu used the same gun to kill the armored car guards as he had used last month on other thugs. ‘it’s a gun he knows, and is comfortable with, he will use it on this important job. But he doesn’t care if we know he did it. He is doomed and he knows it.’

Other references indicate that Gu himself is in agreement with this: he knows he has almost no chance to escape the country, and he is determined not to go back to jail. He will die first. So the whole story is how he faces death.

The heist itself is almost irrelevant. The other guys involved, when they hear Gu is going to join them, wonder if he is up to it; ‘in jail I heard about him, he’s washed up, too old, he’s lost his nerve.’ The heist then becomes more a chance for Gu to prove to them and himself and us, that he does still have what it takes – to be a man, ultimately.

Then the aftermath of the heist is just a chance for Gu to live up to the code. Though he was tricked into confessing, and it can’t be used to convict him, he still risks his life to get proof that he didn’t rat out paul or anybody else, and he dies in the effort to prove it. Another man offers to take the confession to the other guys, but Gu is adamant, he will go himself. it’s his mess and he’ll clean it up.

Gu’s share of the platinum remains where he buried it, in the cellar of a house where he’s hiding. Nobody else knows it’s there. The other guys are dead, we don’t know what happens to their share. Paul might still get out, he has a wife giving him an alibi, and she and his lawyers will probably know where the platinum is that’s paul’s share, but it seems most likely that inspector Blot will get the armored car informant to confess, that paul will be guilty on the informant’s confession, and will have to bargain and lose his shre as well (but this is only my guessing at what’s probably going to happen).

Melville and ventura were well suited for this kind of story. Both were middle aged at this point, and ventura could perfectly express the notion of the strong man, not yet washed up, but definitely past his prime, with really nothing to look forward to. He is matched in the movie with a younger crook, and you get the feeling that the younger guy will end up like ventura, like Gu, if he lives that long. But he crosses Gu and he doesn’t live that long. Too bad.

It’s absurd and a little existentialist in this sense. The point is not what you do, but how well you do it, if You’re a true professional or not, if You’re in control.

But also for melville, the gangster stands in for the resistance fighter. The way he looks at gangsters is colored by his experiences as a youth living under foreign occupation and war.

The woman commentator on the disk (she French; paired with a british male commentator) said that for the French at this time, a stretch in prison was a common symbol for France during the occupation, which was interesting.

The novel this book is based on has lots of the backstories of the characters, but melville strips all that out of it. he’s only interested in the present. it’s a very abstract portrait in many ways, which gives it an added mythic quality. it’s clear in the way we see the movie, that it’s like a western, like yojimbo: not real, but symbolic. This lets us enjoy rooting for the gangster, the murderer. But also as you note re: the yakuza, the same code is mentioned here, that ‘civilians’ are not to be harmed if you can help it. He kills the motorcycle armed guards, but he wishes he didn’t have to, that there was some way to get the platinum without any killing. In another sense of course the armed guards are not civilians – they have uniforms, they carry guns, and this is their job, to guard the goods.

A grim tale, told in few words, but great tough guy actors.

(written around 4 February 2009)