The Screengrab : l'amour fou

Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s Andrew Osborne shared with you his favorite movies from the second quarter of 2008, so I figured that I might as well get in on the act as well. Unlike Andrew, I’ll be writing about my favorite releases dating back to the beginning of the year, mostly because I didn’t write one of these back in April. But I’d like to concur with Andrew’s statement that the moviegoing year, like so many others, started slowly but quickly improved in quality as it continued, with both big-budget blockbusters and limited-release arthouse fare making strong showings thusfar.

My top five:

1. The Duchess of Langeais- had Jacques Rivette not made a film called L’Amour Fou forty years ago, he very well might have given his most recent film that title. Based on a novel by Balzac, Duchess often plays like a mirror image of The Age of Innocence- only this time, the knowledge (and flouting) of propriety only serves to drive an emotional wedge between the two lovers. The Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her officer (Guillaume Depardieu) must play games with each other in lieu of an actual relationship, and almost imperceptibly their innocent courtship spirals out of their control. All the while, Rivette’s formal boldness remains intact, resulting in his best film in over a decade- no mean feat for a master of Rivette’s standing.

2. WALL*E- speaking of masters, was anyone really surprised that Pixar’s latest turned out as wonderful as it did? In perhaps their most experimental gambit to date, much of WALL *E is practically dialogue-free, as director Andrew Stanton and his team make most of their points visually. And what visuals! So beautifully-rendered is the dusty Earth future of the film’s first half that the more traditionally eye-popping second half (with its interstellar mega-mall) looks almost chintzy by comparison, like all the life and heart was drained from it. Which is of course the point, as WALL*E’s message isn’t so much anti-corporate as anti-complacency, celebrating the industriousness and determination of its robotic protagonist while despairing of those who would content themselves with having their decisions made and lives lived for them.

3. Stuck- like The Duchess of Langeais, Stuart Gordon’s latest film tells the story of a man and a woman locked in a tragic, fateful duet. The difference is that this one is about a guy who gets stuck in a windshield. There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, from Gordon’s grimy visuals and grayish color palette to the behavior his film portrays, as the film’s anti-heroine (played by Mena Suvari) hides the accident victim (Stephen Rea) in her garage rather than risk jeopardizing the insignificant promotion she supposedly has coming to her. Stuck is a film born of its working-class setting, in which the poor fight over the scraps the rich give them, with little regard for the lives of those who get in their way. It’s ugly, harrowing stuff, but it’s also thrilling like the best exploitation films are, and Stuck is one of the best movies of this kind to come along in ages.

4. Paranoid Park- for years, Gus Van Sant has specialized in films about outsiders, but this is the closest he’s come thusfar to seeing the world through an outsider’s eyes. Much of the credit goes to the subjectivity inherent in Van Sant’s favored style, which he perfects with this film, as he follows a marginalized teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) who views his world- his parents, his peers, his girlfriend- from a distance, even before the killing he may or may not have been responsible for causes him to sever emotional ties from them altogether. He would sooner escape into his own mind as find a place for himself in this world, a point Van Sant makes most vivid in the scene where the protagonist takes a shower as the soundtrack becomes overrun with rainforest sounds. Simultaneously nightmarish and poetic, Paranoid Park is a major work by a filmmaker who remains as experimental as ever.

5. Speed Racer- yes, really. I sort of wonder if the overwhelming critical drubbing that was afforded the Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the animated series was due to the directors’ key inspirations- comic books, video games, Saturday morning cartoons- not being part of the critics’ pasts. Granted, I too was skeptical about the film going in, but it didn’t take long for it to win me over. I’ll be damned if I can find a subtext, but with its dazzling array of eye-popping colors, deliberately unrealistic effects, and snazzy edits (Ang Lee could take a lesson in the latter from the Wachowskis), that scarcely matters. The racetrack scenes alone gave me that rush that all big summer movies promise but which few deliver, playing like the Day-glo daydream of a Pixie Stick-fueled kid racing and smashing up Matchbox cars. Plus there are ninjas, and as any young boy can tell you, ninjas make every movie better.

World Film Beat: "The Duchess of Langeais"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The legendary French director Jacques Rivette is almost eighty now, but age seems to be speeding up his internal clock; his newest film, The Duchess of Langeais is two hours and seventeen minutes long, which, coming from the man who made Out 1 (773 minutes in its "restored" version), La Belle noiseuse (236 minutes), L'Amour fou (252 minutes), and Celine and Julie Go Boating (193 minutes), is kind of like Martin Scorsese reading the Bible in ten minutes while on crack. Rivette's 2001 romantic comedy Va Savoir actually set off concerned muttering among long-time fans who were worried about him because he'd only managed to get 154 minutes of movie into theaters; everybody was greatly relieved when word got out that there was also a 220-minute director's cut that he'd love to show you. (The concept of the director's cut might have been invented with Rivette in mind; he recut the four-hour La Belle noiseuse into a two-hour-five-minute film that was released to theaters as Divertimento, though it was not explained why anyone would want a shorter version of a movie that largely consisted of Emmanuelle Béart standing around buck naked.) Speaking as someone who has sometimes emerged from a Rivette movie feeling as if both my ass and my eyeballs were in need of a vigorous massage and possibly a chemical skin peel, I've always admired his willingness to test the boundaries of an acceptable running time for narrative films. It was as if he were saying to the audience for art movies, "Hey, you care about cinema, huh? You believe in the personal expression of the filmmaker? You're here because you think you might get something different than what you get from mainstream movies, is that right? That's great. So sit down, shut up, and prepare to pay the babysitter overtime!" Except that it would sound a lot better if Rivette said that, since everything sounds better in French. Although The Duchess of Langeais is much shorter than the frisky Va Savoir, I doubt that it will strike anyone as ominously lightweight. The good news for veteran Rivette fans is that while it's only a little more than two and a quarter hours, it feels at least twice that long.

The movie is based on a Balzac novel whose original title, which is also the movie's title in France, is "Touch Not the Axe," words that might be Rivette's motto in the editing room. It is not so much a love story as an exploration of the deranging possibilities of thwarted expectations and unrequited desire. Set mostly in Paris in the 1820s, the movie stars Guillaume Depardieu as a general who has become a fashionable celebrity because of his adventures, and Jeanne Balibar as the Duchess, who invites him to visit her at home in the evenings. Talking to his imaginary friend while he stands outside the Duchess's home, the general boasts of his intention to "make her my mistress." But once he gets indoors, the Duchess, who has carefully laid herself out for his delectation, asks him to tell her stories of his heroism, then, having gotten him all worked up, sends him homr frustrated night after night. Finally he cracks and declares that he can't take it anymore and will never visit nor have anything to do with her again — which, naturally, causes her to snap and begin moaning about how she can't bear to be without him. At one point she scandalizes the neighborhood by sending her coach to stay outside the general's house all night and into the morning, so that people will at least think that she's his fallen woman. It's a little like Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that instead of using the rules of love and seduction to wage cold-blooded war on others, the characters are flaunting how desperately they're at the mercy of their passions. At the same time, nobody's actually getting any. Most of the movie is a flashback from a scene where the general finds the Duchess, who has disappeared from Paris and his life, holed up in a convent on a Spanish island, serving as a Carmelite nun. They converse for a while in French, while chaperoned by a nun who doesn't speak the language, who thinks that the general is the Duchess's brother — though from all the heavy panting that he does when in his "sister's" presence, she must think the poor guy is about to drop dead of asthma. Finally, the Duchess can't take it anymore and cries out, "Sister, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" When I saw the movie, that line brought down the house. A lot of people in the theater burst out laughing, though it isn't supposed to be funny, and I don't think it was mocking laughter, either. It was obvious that we were about to see what had gone on between these two now, and it felt like people were laughing at relief and eager anticipation that now we were getting to the good stuff. Little did we know...

Rivette has made a terrific show of being faithful to his source. Most of the movie consists of carefully composed scenes where the actors speak their dialogue, and much of what narrative information can't be conveyed through these means is simply given to us written out on title cards. The movie is...well, it's kind of boring, but in a kind of fascinating way. The actors are up there smoldering away in these tight, frozen frames, and the emotions are over the top yet seem to be contained under glass. Balibar's performance, which has to run the gamut from cruel, controlling minx to helpless victim of love, is phenomenal; Depardieu's isn't as sturdy, but he's still hard to take your eyes off, if only because he looks enough like his father that watching him is like seeing a vision of what Gerard Depardieu might have looked like in his late thirties if he'd had his stomach stapled. Still, there's a sequence towards the end when the general is on a ship with some mates of his who want to help him abduct his beloved from the nunnery. The men in his posse don't have much to do, but just from the way they pull together on their mission and they way they grin while drawing straws to see which of them has to dress up in a habit and go undercover, they seem like a fun bunch of guys, and it's amazing what a relief it is to spend some time with them after two hours trapped inside with two neurotic, self-denying romantic masochists. The Duchess of Langeais goes into U.S. theatrical release next week, but tonight it begins its run at Walter Reade Theater in New York as part of the "Film Comments Selects" series. Some of the people seeing it tonight sure did pick a hell of a date movie for Valentine's Day.