November 19, 2020

2020 Roundup #3

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Romania, Cinema of the Philippines, Roundup | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel)

A young man at a bus stop glimpses a girl across the road. She gives him directions, and they board a bus together. There’s a spark between them. They look at each other, making sure their eyes don’t meet. The girl has fallen in love, the man hopes for a sexual encounter that doesn’t happen. “I’ll never forget you”, he says before he leaves town. Weeks later, the girl sends him a card, pouring out her feelings for him. He reads it and locks it up in a drawer without a thought. It’s hard to describe The Salt of Tears, or any of Garrel’s recent films for that matter, without running the risk of making it sound like a bundle of French art movie clichés. These films are all resolutely focused on romantic and sexual entanglements between young, heterosexual people and the seemingly infinite range of emotions they sustain in the participants. Digital black and white cinematography, a voiceover articulating the protagonist’s predicament and a sweet piano score all attest to a grand decadence at work. But Garrel is able to infuse these abstract, almost archetypal character relationships with a vitality, thanks to the extremely controlled actor gestures that concentrate the whole emotional force of these relationships.

Luc (Logann Antuofermo), the young man, aspires to study carpentry on the wish of his father (a wonderful André Wilms), whom he loves and looks up to. Something of a skirt chaser and a jerk—wholly inadequate words, for Garrel is interested precisely in a detailed exploration of what these judgments and coinages mean—Luc abandons Jemila (Oulaya Amamra), the bus stop girl, because he is too cowardly to tell the truth to his current girlfriend Geneviève (Louise Chevillotte), who gets to bed with him right after they meet. He abandons Geneviève too and tells himself that he was never in love because his feelings for neither woman could overpower his professional ambition or his bond with his father. So despite being focused on the sex, Luc has a little of the tragic romantic, looking for love even though he believes that finding it with wreck all his current certainties in life. It’s a characteristically French type, also seen in Jean Paul Civeyrac’s Le Doux Amour des hommes (2002), in which a world-weary young man wants to experience a love so Deep that it will rescue him from his emotional tundra.

The strength of the writing is that it doesn’t categorise Luc’s relationships into love and sex, and instead lets them hover on a fuzzy zone between and around these poles. Why he continues to stay with Betsy (Souheila Yacoub), his third girlfriend with whose male colleague he shares a ménage à trois, is no more a mystery than why he chooses to leave Jemila and Geneviève. What is sure is that Luc destroys one life after another with his behaviour, leaving the kind of lifelong scars he himself is unconsciously wishing for. When he does find in Betsy the love he was looking for, he loses his ties with his father, as he expected and wanted, but also becomes vulnerable, beset by jealousy and helplessness. Nuances of character description aside, much of the film’s pleasures are on its surface: in the way actors look at or hold each other, in the calming interludes with Luc or his father working on pieces of wood. There is a dance scene at a disco with Luc and Betsy that is a thrilling number hinged on Betsy’s energetic, sensual movement around the floor. Someone watching The Salt of Tears without an idea of who made it might take it for the work of a 21-year old. That, I suspect, is both its strength and weakness.

Uppercase Print (Radu Jude)

Found footage filmmaking, especially the kind that seeks to perform an ideological interrogation of the past, and particularly of a socialist past, seems to have a special power to produce some astoundingly lazy works. The end of the Cold War has meant that younger audiences cannot relate to accounts of life in communist regimes except in an ironic, patronizing way. We get it: the politicians are conmen, the people sheep, the fashion corny and the media so crude and manipulative. Nothing that a video search wouldn’t throw up. To be sure, Uppercase Print isn’t wholly a found footage film. Adapted from a ‘documentary play’, Jude’s film intersperses archival footage from Romanian television shows and news reports of the early eighties with dramatizations of a police case file from the same period. The case involves pro-freedom messages written in chalk on the walls surrounding the party headquarters. The security office takes accurate measurements of the messages written in uppercase, analyses the handwriting and convicts a teenager in the locality. Jude employs a set of gigantic sound stages designed like a pie chart. He has his primly dressed actors utter lines from the report—charges against the teenager, testimonies by his family and friends, and records of the security personnel tailing him—in a declamatory manner staring at either the camera or each other. The boy confesses, but claims he was inspired by messages on Western radio, while his parents chide him and urge him to recant. His friends and teachers turn against him and his seemingly innocuous deed marks him for life (and beyond). All this dramatization goes in circles, and is pretty testing, and saps all our interest before it moves ahead narratively.

Some of the archival material is thematically linked to the case files, as when a graffiti about food shortage is cut to a TV report about new refrigerator models. But most seem to have been picked as quaint documents from the era: street interviews with traffic rule violators, Busby Berkeley-style musical numbers, televised cooking recipes, countless clips of children singing and as many of pageantry organized in honour of Nicolae Ceaușescu. With these assorted extracts, Jude may have been intending to give a picture of life in communist Romania comparable to what Harun Farocki did in How to Live in the German Federal Republic (1990). But, unfortunately, Uppercase Print doesn’t have necessary spirit of synthesis. The critique is hardly earned, and the film is even less instructive about life communist Romania than a broad comedy such as Tales from the Golden Age (2009).

To be fair, the juxtaposition of archival footage and the case files is interesting on paper. It taps into a fragility and paranoia underlying the functioning of the state which triumphalist propaganda tries to conceal: that the state perceives a boy’s zestful scribbling as a security threat is so absurdly out of step with the paeans to youth beamed across television sets. But there’s hardly anything here that hasn’t been explored already, and much more successfully, by the work of Andrei Ujică. For a film leaning so much on television footage, Uppercase Print intriguingly omits the televised struggles of the Romanian revolution itself. That’s because Jude’s film is less interested in TV as a medium than the messages its shows convey, among others the gradual incursion of capitalism into everyday life. To this end, the narrative makes a startling leap from 1985 to present day. As the camera pans across a cityscape in which large commercial banners cover drab, low-income housing, we hear the actors playing the security personnel justify their actions (of surveying and recruiting schoolchildren as informers), the implication being that these regime criminals have succeeded in blending into the anonymity of the new market economy. Nothing prepares us for this critical coup, though, and it’s a tedious journey by the time we arrive there.

Summer of 85 (François Ozon)

Whether Summer of 85 is in autobiographical in any way or not, I don’t know, but it certainly gives that impression. Adapted from the 1982 novel Dance on My Grave by British writer Aidan Chambers, the film tells the story of Alexis (Félix Lefebvre), a timid working-class teenager who finds love in a Jewish boy named David (Benjamin Voisin) after the latter rescues him from a boating accident. The year is 1985 and Alexis is 17, just about the age Ozon was at the time. When the film begins, he is in police custody, talking to us in a voiceover. As Ozon cuts between this gloomy present and the sunny few weeks preceding it, we are drawn into the mystery that looms over Alexis’s current situation and his relationship with David. We share Alexis’s confusion as David, aided by an excessively indulgent mother, seduces him, convinces him of their closeness and persuades him to work at his shop, even as David’s professor (Melvin Poupaud, the star of Ozon’s previous film, By the Grace of God (2018)) at school urges him to continue his literature studies. David seals Alexis’s trust by making a pact with him: the one who outlives the other will dance over the latter’s grave.

The ‘mystery’ itself is of no great interest; it’s Ozon’s highly cinema-aware way of unfurling it that holds the viewer’s attention. Ozon is evidently a cinephile, and while this sophistication weighed down heavily on the laborious Double Lover (2017), it treads rather lightly here. There are, firstly, the direct references to Joseph Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, which features two queer stars, not to mention gay icon Liz Taylor) in the film’s title, the poster in David’s bedroom, the plot elements of David’s mother ‘procuring’ boys for him and Alexis’s explaining the mystery through a therapeutic confession. Consciously or otherwise, Ozon also draws on several Hitckcockian elements here: a gay romance sealed by a pact (Rope, Strangers on a Train), the creepy, mollycoddling mother figure (Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Birds etc.), the beautiful sea cliff against which the action takes place (North by Northwest, Suspicion), a violent outburst at a fairground (Strangers on a Train, Stage Fright), an older teacher who solves the mystery (Rope), David’s remaking of the docile Alexis’s look (Vertigo) and Alexis’ obsession with exhuming David’s dead body (The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo). And the diminutive Alexis’s insecurity recalls Polanski’s reworking of Hitchcock. There’s a very morbid, very funny scene in a morgue involving a cross-dressed Alexis and David’s corpse that is something Hitch would’ve fondly approved of.

Like Hitchcock, Ozon seems to have precisely story-boarded his sequences to the last gesture, last glance, especially in the early stretch of the film, where the dynamic between Alexis, David and his mother is conveyed with great economy and efficacy. But Ozon is also trying to go beyond Hitchcockian mechanics to something more tender, less cynical. Once the film reveals its entire mystery about one hour in, it becomes something of a coming-of-age tale, turning its focus to Alexis’ heartbreak over David’s betrayal, his confusion with his sexual identity, his nuanced relationship to his blue-collar parents and his grief over David’s death, which was so far only a theoretical preoccupation for him and which is now seen as another betrayal. There is a good amount of nostalgia and a desire to imitate the ‘eighties aesthetic’ at work in the film, especially in its choice of costumes and colour composition, but Ozon’s sense of time and place, as always, is very sharp. Shot through what seems like a diffusion filter, the film captures the sights and sensations of summer in a memorable manner. Summer of 85 may be one of the few films set in the Normandy region that doesn’t provide a lugubrious image of the place. The muted colours and the low-income housing complexes, for once, don’t take on a moral quality. They simply are.

Genus Pan (Lav Diaz)

I haven’t followed Diaz’s work this decade as closely as I would’ve liked to. The few hours of The Halt (2019) that I saw at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival was very impressive in the way Diaz turns the film’s poverty of means into an advantage: the low-budget sci-fi atmosphere is so muted that it feels strangely contemporary. Clocking at 157 minutes—practically a short film by Diaz’s standards—Genus Pan is even more rudimentary in its production values. Three working-class men, Baldo (Nanding Josef), Paulo (Bart Guingona) and Andres (Don Melvin Boongaling), travel across the fictional island of Hugaw, returning from their temporary job. Baldo is mercenary and extracts commission money from the younger Andres, who wishes to save for his sister’s treatment. Paulo is a devout Catholic, and acts as a moderator between the other two, going so far as to reimburse Andres on behalf of Baldo. Not unlike the three characters in Stalker (1979), these men of different temperaments and beliefs wander about in a jungle where paranormal things may be happening. Hugaw, we learn, is a scarred land with several historical layers of oppression, violence and debauchery: once a trading post for intra-continental smugglers, it was successively colonized by the Spanish, the Japanese and the Americans. Today, it is ruled with an iron fist by a ruthless general who kills dissidents.

Diaz, as is his wont, is dealing in allegory, and we imagine that the island of Hugaw stands for all of Philippines. But there is also something universalist about Genus Pan, which is a reference to the undeveloped brain of the human animal. A radio broadcast tells us that many of us haven’t yet outgrown the traits of the chimpanzee. While parts of the film recall Hesus the Revolutionary (2002), the work that might be closest to this bitter, slightly misanthropic vision is Diaz’s Butterflies Have No Memories (2009), where too the political critique turns sour. The film changes rhythm once Andres comes back home to Hugaw to announce of the deaths of Baldo and Paulo. Paulo’s wife (Merly Bucong) and Baldo’s daughter (Diaz’s AD Hazel Orencio)—two of the most helpless creatures in all of Diaz’s cinema—suffer in silence, while one of the general’s slimy lackeys, Inngo (Joel Saracho in one of those sleazy roles that Diaz writes and casts so well), exploits them to exact personal revenge on Andres. The film is set days before Good Friday, and solemn processions of self-flagellating believers amplify the mournful ambience around Andres’s doomed fate. I’m certainly missing much of the social nuances of the story, especially concerning the tribes on the island, but I must add that Diaz himself abstracts much of the details, such as the Andres’ background as a dissident. It could be that these details were established in Diaz’s contribution to the omnibus film Journeys (2018) from which Genus Pan reportedly derives.

Diaz’s modus operandi is familiar: shooting almost exclusively outdoors, he plants his camera at such an angle that a deep field is carved out in the frame. There are no camera movements or musical accompaniments. Unlike The Halt, however, the deep space here remains largely static as the action unfolds in the foreground. Much of the visual interest lies in the specific ways actors enter and leave the frame or, in scenes where they don’t walk, remain scattered across it. Because Diaz shoots in vast open spaces, at times, we aren’t sure about the scale of things until the actors appear in the frame. As the film shifts to the village, the shades of the forest make way for stark sunlight; I get the impression that Diaz has deliberately overexposed his shots a little which gives a bleached out, slightly uncanny aura to human figures. There are two instances of flashback—a device I don’t recall in Diaz—including one which dramatizes a false testimony. Instances of violence are directed in a very offhand, amateurish way which, combined with the broad characterization of the general, gives the film an imperfect, agit-prop, ‘Third Cinema’ kind of quality. Finally, while the action is leisurely paced, the editing is functional, hinting at a desire to end shots quickly and move on. I think that it’s refinement at work.

 

December 21, 2019

2019 Roundup #7

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Brazil, Cinema of France, Roundup | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Seven Years in May (Affonso Uchoa)

Brazilian helmer Affonso Uchoa’s forty-minute Seven Years in May contains only four scenes. In the first, a man walks long on the road at night. In the following scene, a group of young men chance upon a box with police uniforms and weapons. They change into these clothes and go out on a raid. They pick up a young man, who we learn is Rafael dos Santos Rocha (playing himself). They rough him up and ask him to reveal where a particular stock of drugs is in his house. Rafael denies that he has any, which prompts the young men to drag the man along with them into the dark. The third and the longest scene of the film is predominantly a monologue. Rafael sits by the fire, recounting the night the police brutalized him in search of drugs. He describes his life thereafter: going on the run, substance abuse, getting cheated, wandering the streets, going to a village to sell drugs, a second double-crossing and finally a return home. It’s clear from the vividness of the description that the trauma is fresh in his mind even though it happened seven years ago. He won’t forget their faces, he says; if he did, what they did to him will be complete. A cut reveals a listener—also a non-white man—who says that every story he hears seems to reflect his own. He declares that, though he believes in an eye for an eye, it’s better “for us and for everyone” to move on.

If one didn’t look at the credits or press notes, it’s hard to guess that Uchoa is mixing fictional and documentary modes here. Rafael, portraying himself, is presumably drawing from his own life for his monologue, which is much more polished and articulate than a spontaneous rendition would be. The second scene, then, is a reconstruction of Rafael’s real-life experiences, which raises the ethical question: why put Rafael through the harrowing situation again? Whether this recreation of violence is itself a form of violence or a therapeutic remedy is possibly only for Rafael to know. What is clear is that Uchoa is building a scaffolding in which power dynamics are presented as a product of role playing. The proposition that a bunch of possibly disenfranchised youth become aggressors by just donning police uniform finds its response in the fourth scene of the film: a white man in police uniform commands a group of about hundred non-white men and women. He utters one of two words—‘alive’ or ‘dead’—to which the men and women must respond by standing up or squatting. Those that react wrongly are ‘out’ of the game. The last man standing turns out to be Rafael, and he refuses to ‘die’ even when the instructor repeatedly commands him to. As a political statement, it’s laughably schematic, but as an instance of curative theatre, it’s at home in the film. Seven Years in May is an odd film that appears to be constantly shifting its axes of operation. Familiarity with the filmmaker’s earlier work would perhaps throw more light.

Farewell to the Night (André Téchiné)

Muriel (Catherine Deneuve) runs a horse ranch in the southwest of France near the Spanish border. When her grandson, Alex (Kacey Mottet-Klein) arrives for a long-pending visit, she discovers that he has converted to Islam and has been radicalized by one of the farmhands, Lila (Oulaya Amamra). We learn this before Muriel does. When Alex meets Lila for the first time, they go out to the lake. She wears a burkini to get into the water, he remains on shore. They embrace, but never kiss. Their interaction and their attitude towards others follow the halal code. He refuses to greet-kiss another man, she refuses to serve men in the old age home she works at. He turns down alcohol and cigarettes, she refuses to uncover her sleeve at work. In collusion with another young radical, the pair plan to fly to Syria to ‘the front’, but are faced with money problems. They decide to steal money from ‘the kuffar’ Muriel, an act Lila justifies as ‘not haram’. Like any liberal-minded film worth its salt, Farewell to the Night ‘explains’ Islamic radicalism to us. The film unfolds over the first five days of spring in 2015. Local elections are underway and, we are told, the National Front is on the ascendant. It’s a soundbite intended to both hint at the other side of the divide and ‘explain’ increasing radicalism.

Lila rails about the rotten society that consigns old people to retirement homes, and she is genuinely compassionate towards the people she serves. On the other hand, the Caucasian Alex, still affectionate towards his grandmother, is sure neither about his sexuality nor about his new mission. Téchiné’s film psychoanalyses the radicals and professes its good faith by throwing in two “good Muslims”, including a Daesh renegade who tries to dissuade Alex in vain. As a portrayal of racial and religious divides in France, Farewell to the Night is a rather unexceptional. But the seventy-five-year-old filmmaker seems to be making a distinction between generational and cultural shifts rather than racial or religious. The world Muriel represents, in harmony with nature and with people of all stripes, is far removed from the polarized present. She is surrounded by children learning riding, and the first thing she does when she realizes she has lost Alex for good is to stop by a highway to watch boys and girls play football. Lila stays with a lonely old man who longs for company, while the foyer is a veritable refuge of those fading away. At one point, Téchiné cuts between the meeting of the stern radicals and a celebration at Muriel’s with wine and dance to indicate two different conceptions of community and culture. His ever-moving camera captures the landscape, vegetation and infrastructure of the region with an aim to please. Deneuve huffs and puffs her way through the ranch, but is all surface. Her purported devastation over her grandson’s fate and her guilt over her ultimate decisions don’t really register. There is, however, a great shot of her taking a swig.

The House (Mali Arun)

In an unnamed part of France, presumably in Occitanie, lies a massive spa retreat: a 22-room renaissance structure from the 17th century once visited by the likes of Voltaire and Casanova. Mali Arun’s film doesn’t give any more detail and simply calls the building ‘La Maison’. The House opens with a fade in from the structure’s original plan to its current decrepit state. Arun’s camera surveys the decaying façade and decrepit interiors of the house, a seeming repository of the debris of European culture: portraits, musical instruments and other objets d’art amassed carelessly in unused rooms and workshops. The attention soon shifts to the residents of this modern “ark”, as the filmmaker calls it: a constantly changing commune of white men, women and children galvanized around the permanent figure of a certain sexagenarian called Jacques. Arun’s voiceover tells us that the spring running through the site was exploited by Nestlé till the seventies, and that when the company left, they filled the water source with concrete to maintain their monopoly. Jacques and co. make plans of renovating the house as per the original plan. They draft monthly goals for their reconstruction project. They call a water diviner to retrace and restore the stream. However, the group, and Jacques in particular, seems to spend most of its time doing everything else.

Arun’s film is interested less in the history of the building or the personalities of the residents, who get to do little more than pose for closeups. It’s more concerned with the building as a space of memory and experience than as a physical presence. Arun’s emphasis is on the way of life of the inhabitants. We see them cutting trees, making music, cooking, discussing and debating, calling relatives on phone, playing with water, moving pianos, rehearing plays, raising bees and, if time permits, working a bit on the house. Despite Jacques’ central status, there’s no hierarchy within the commune, nor is there any binding faith or vice defining them. At best, they exhibit a faint decadence in their epicurean life of wine and music. For the most part, we see them in the all-purpose workshop-turned-piano room, fine-tuning the instruments, practicing pieces and preparing for recitals. There’s a bit of talk about administration, maintenance and financial problems, but nothing that disrupts the character of the place. As the description above suggests, The House is very loosely organized to give a sense of an ambiance. Even though Arun divides the film into seasons of the year in what seems like a last-minute effort, this lack of a structuring element collapses the distance between the filmmaker—who is part of the commune and is pregnant during the making of the film—and her subject. The outcome is a sentimental work, no doubt successful in certain aspects, that asks us to accept it without furnishing a justification as to why we must.

Slits (Carlos Segundo)

Carlos Segundo’s explosive horror-sci-fi hybrid is a high-concept work that draws ideas from quantum mechanics to explore themes of loss, grief and memory. Catarina (Roberta Rangel) is a physicist studying the quantum properties of light. She’s European, but works as a visiting scientist in the city of Natal in Eastern Brazil. In her supplementary research, she makes ‘sound-photos’ to analyse the “displacement of light caused by sound of matter”. For that, she first captures wide shots of ordinary scenes in Natal—digital footage with direct sound. She then ‘dives’ into a particular point on the image—zoom-ins of several thousand orders that abstracts the image—and listens to the ‘noise’ emanating from it. These dives enable her, like the sound engineer of Blow Out, to see with her ears, enter another space-time and listen to stories from another place and period: a kind of synaesthesia that breaks down the barriers between light and sound, visible and invisible, past and present. Shot in crisp, high-definition digital video, Slits is a bracing meditation on the nature of the medium. It finds an expression in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of the contradictions inherent in the digital image: the tug of war between details and stability, between richness of palette and noise. Like the zoom of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Catarina’s dives reveal stories to her, accounts that belie the banality of the image.

The same uncertainly becomes an expression of Catarina’s existence as well. Through the course of the film, we learn that Catarina has had a stable, privileged life with too many options and no crises whatsoever. She is apolitical, doesn’t know the troubled history of the region and doesn’t even participate in the university strike. Her only student, a fisherman, speaks of the need to initiate movements instead of expecting predictable results. Catarina has come to Natal, historically a region of passage, at a moment when natives are trying to leave the place. We also learn that she has become estranged from her husband in France following the loss of their baby daughter. In a sense, Catarina is fleeing Europe, her past and her reality for another dimension. Like the protagonist of The Invention of Morel, she finds refuge in a world of abstract images and sounds. And like Scotty of Vertigo (referenced here) and Laura of Don’t Look Now, she seeks to make sense of her tragedy through a process of reconstruction and interpretation. Her closest cinematic relative is, however, the gamer of Chris Marker’s Level Five, who too loses grip on the present in a quest to reconstruct the past. In the last shot of Marker’s film, the gamer zooms into a video image of herself to a point of obscurity, enacting the same instabilities besieging Catarina: observing reality from too close, she loses sight of it, just like how the extreme telephoto of the painted portrait at her home becomes one with the image of the sea. Catarina’s observations are coloured by her own subject position, and starting off from scientific premises, she ends up with results that can only be unscientific, unobservable and unrepeatable. As she tells her husband who urges her to move on from her mourning, time for some is chronological, for others its chronic.