Take Two

Review: "Boarding Gate"

Olivier Assayas made his name from the late 1980s via a series of “typical” intimate French arthouse dramas done with bracing freshness and verve. He felt like a leading light in that country’s cinematic next wave, even arriving at the job as so many New Wave greats had a generation before—by first working at famed critical journal Cahiers du Cinema.

From early youth studies Disorder and Cold Water to 1998’s Late August, Early September, he seemed the latest in a line of Gallic filmmakers who made low-key, casual observation stealthily add up to something powerful. Even his rather large-scale, starry “Les destinees sentimentale” (2000) felt cut from the same cloth.

topics: critics, filmmakers, french cinema, reviews

more

Report

SF Int'l announces its 51st program and year-round screen

The San Francisco International Film Festival announced not only its 2008 program today at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, but also the June 13 launch of its year-round programming on one screen at the Sundance Kabuki.

San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat told the assembled that the Film Society has been working very hard since he arrived to turn its programming into a “year-round operation,” and that the SFFS screen will feature international independent and documentary features with limited U.S. distribution.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is published by SFFS.]

Most of the event was devoted to unveiling the work inside the 51st Festival, which runs from April 24 through May 8. It opens with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, starring Asia Argento—one of three films in the Festival’s opening weekend featuring the actress, who Leggat spoke of as “alluringly vulpine. And that’s a compliment.” The International’s closing night is an Alex Gibney documentary with roots in San Francisco publishing, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Jonathan Levine’s Sundance hit The Wackness is the Centerpiece presentation.

topics: documentary, environmental films, exhibitions, french cinema, genre films, independent film, international film, italian cinema, midnight movies, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, technology

more

Laurent Tirard on "Moliere"

With the ascent of President Nicholas Sarkozy — who jogs, plays at French cowboy, and has a jones for things American — the Gauls and the Yanks have entered a cautious entente cordiale. The coziness in the political arena is echoed on the cultural front this summer by Americans’ love affair with French cinema. This holds true especially for the mainstream entertainments that find distribution here. Viewers can get their French fix without getting lost in arthouse longueurs, or pistol-whipped by such Cannes faves as Bruno Dumont’s “Flanders,” with its rutting couples and atrocities of war. Now from Sony Pictures Classics comes Laurent Tirard’s “Moliere,” the latest contender in the specialty market to hit these shores. (SF360.org editor’s note: This interview was published originally in indieWIRE on July 25, 2007. The film opens today in the Bay Area. More at the Landmark)

Consider the robust performance of Picturehouse’s Edith Piaf drama ‘La Vie en Rose’ (which has raked in nearly $6.9 million in cumulative box office and a $3,123 average on 174 screens in its 6th week out); Columbia Tristar’s “The Valet” by Francis Weber; and IFC Film’s “My Best Friend” by Patrice Leconte (a hi-concept begging for a Hollywood remake), which aims to eclipse “La Vie” as summer’s top foreign-language performer. Even Kino’s art film “Lady Chatterley,” the sublime ground-breaker by Pascale Ferran, showed muscle after a small expansion in its one month mark out in theaters.

“Moliere” sits squarely in the mainstream yet outside the biopic box, Tirard’s second feature takes an ingenious tack in conjuring the creative evolution of France’s master of satiric comedy. History tells us that Moliere — a well-born young man who abandoned a life of privilege for love of a woman and the theatre – was thrown into prison for debt. He then disappeared from the records for several months.

Into this lacuna jumps Laurent Tirard to concoct an elaborate historical fiction. A Monsieur Jourdain (the nouveau riche from “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”) springs Moliere from jail – but on condition that Moliere teach him stagecraft, so he can seduce an alluring countess who favors men of wit. Once installed in Jourdain’s lavish, over-the-top chateau, Moliere falls for Jourdain’s classy wife Elmire (a character from that wicked satire of religious hypocrisy, “Tartuffe”). To justify his presence in the household, Moliere is disguised as a tutor named Tartuffe — a comic irony since the real Moliere hated nothing so much as the religionists of his day. You get the idea: in a kind of hall of mirrors set-up, Tirard’s film introduces Moliere to “real people,” who will later become characters in his immortal comedies.

If all this sounds arty and inaccessible, it’s not. Au contraire, “Moliere” serves up farce, romance, and pathos in a pacey, tightly crafted script that would look foreign to Hollywood execs only because there’s writing on the screen. In fact, lose the 17th century French trappings, and you’ve got the bones of a Studio dramatic comedy.

Inevitably, Tirard’s exploration of a playwright’s creative process invites comparison with John Madden’s “Shakespeare in Love” – indeed, is being positioned as the French answer to “Shakespeare.” But while Shakespeare is universally known and studied, Moliere, for all his brilliance, retains a peculiarly French insularity. Most of us can name King Lear’s daughters, but – test question: how many of you out there A) could name le bourgeois gentilhomme; or B) even translate the term?

So, despite its high energy, sumptuous production values, and a cast toplined by the electric Romain Duris, Laura Morante, and Ludivine Sagnier, the questions remains, Will American viewers get “Moliere”? During a recent visit to New York, Laurent Tirard – fluent in English, with sapphire eyes that looked rimmed in kohl – discussed with indieWIRE the universality of “Moliere,” his American influences, and the inspiration for a film that stands the biopic on its head.

indieWIRE: You were at NYU film school from ’85 to ’89, and didn’t exactly jump right into filmmaking. How did you make the transition from journalist to screenwriter to director?

Laurent Tirard:: In film school, when I was 22, I quickly realized I wasn’t ready to make films. Then as a script reader for Warner Brothers, I realized that the writers of good scripts had one thing I didn’t have: life experience. I grew up in a privileged and protected environment. The little experience I had at 22 wasn’t worth writing about. I decided to make a living writing about films. I worked for Studio Magazine for 6 years.

indieWIRE: You can make a living in France writing about film?

Tirard: Well, it’s not the best paying job. All the while I was writing screenplays that got turned down.

indieWIRE: How do you weather rejection?

Tirard: People tell you to be professional, it’s just a script, don’t take it personally. But whenever I write a script or make a film, really it’s me on paper, me on screen. When people say they don’t like it, they’re really saying they don’t like me, and that’s hard to take.

indieWIRE: What was your breakthrough point?

Tirard: When I started to despair that nothing would happen, a company bought one of my screenplays for TV. The money allowed me to make 2 short films, which I showed to some production companies. One said, if you have an idea for a feature, come and talk to us about it. I wrote 20 pages of a feature and they financed the writing of the script. And then after that, everything went pretty quickly and easily.

indieWIRE: What prompted you to make ‘Moliere’?

Tirard: It all started accidentally when I re-read Moliere three years ago. I was amazed at how brilliant it was. I realized that the kind of comedies I wanted to write he had written 300 years ago. They were psychological comedies with a great insight into human nature.

indieWIRE: ‘Moliere’ feels fresh and innovative. How did you arrive at its form?

Tirard: I needed to come up with an idea that allowed me to pick everything that I love about Moliere, and also make a movie that both resembles a Moliere play and uses my favorite characters and situations from his work. And then I thought maybe the main character might be Moliere himself. So it would be a film that looks like a Moliere play but would talk about his creativity. That’s how it became a film about an imaginary encounter between Moliere and his future characters.

indieWIRE: Why focus the action on the 6 months Moliere disappeared from public view?

Tirard: I thought, if no one knows what happened during that gap, perfect! I can invent anything I like. [The story] also starts at a crisis point in Moliere’s life, when he’d been trying to perform tragedies, done very badly, and gone bankrupt. He had to accept the fact that he was made for comedy. So everything came together.

indieWIRE: Did anything specific trigger your idea for Moliere to meet up with his own future characters?

Tirard: The main influence was Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author,’ which to me is a play about creativity. The concept of that play — and it’s been used many times since — is for fictional characters to come into the real world and ask the author to talk about them.

Thinking about that play, I said: Okay, the movie will begin in the real world, until Moliere’s thrown into debtor’s prison. Then Jourdain, a character from ‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,’ hires him under a pretext. Once Jourdain takes him home, it’s really a fictional world, where Moliere gets introduced to his own fictional characters – and Moliere himself must become another character and lie about his identity. Eventually, Moliere is released back into the real world to write about these people. It’s a metaphor for inspiration. I’ve never seen a film that combines the real and parallel worlds in quite this way.

indieWIRE: Why did you draw on farce? I’m thinking of how Moliere and Elmire meet cute, when he comes crashing through the window.

Tirard: I wanted the film to have all the different styles you can find in a Moliere play: psychological comedy, tragedy, and farce. He wrote ‘Le Misanthrope,’ one of his darkest, most cerebral plays, and two years later he wrote ‘Les Fourberies de Scapin,’ which is pure farce.

indieWIRE: Judging by the influence of Elmire on Moliere’s creative arc, are you suggesting the role of a woman is paramount in an artist’s life?

Tirard: I cannot think of a single artist who wasn’t influenced one way or another by a woman. For Woody Allen maybe it’s his mother.

indieWIRE: How is that true for you?

Tirard: Well, it wasn’t one woman, it was many women. At different times, I’d write to seduce a woman, or from the memory of a woman. And in my first film there’s a lot in the main character that was influenced by my wife and how she would read everything I write and be extremely blunt about it. And I’d resent it very much, but then 2 weeks later realize she’s right.

indieWIRE: Both ‘Moliere’ and ‘Prete-moi ta Main,’ which you co-scripted, share the propulsive pace of Hollywood movies. How has American filmmaking influenced your work?

Tirard: What I liked about studying at NYU and working at Warner Brothers was that filmmaking and script writing is considered a craft, with rules, a history, and tradition. I find very often in France this notion that you’re born an artist — a bit like in the 1700’s you were born into the aristocracy — and if you have this gift, you don’t really have to study, it comes to you naturally. Often it makes for lazy scripts. And though French films have a soul, they lack rigor in terms of craftsmanship.

indieWIRE: Do you admire American mainstream film?

Tirard: More the American point of view that filmmaking is a job, which you learn like everybody else learns a job — and only then can you have your own personality. We all know the downside [with studio films] is that it’s also an industry and makes for a very standardized product with too many people involved. And eventually the films that come out of the studios all look the same. Whereas in France films are really the expression of somebody.

indieWIRE: How does ‘filmmaking as a job’ translate into your life?

Tirard: My co-writer and I come to the office every day at 8:30 after we leave our kids at school. We like to say we work on scripts the way other people work at manufacturing watches. People ask, ‘How can you write with someone else? Writing is so personal.’ I say no no no, not screenwriting. Screenwriting has more to do with engineering really. The mechanics of the script. When we read Moliere’s plays we tried to figure out what the essence of them was. We would take each play apart piece by piece, almost as if we were watchmakers, trying to understand the mechanical workings. That I definitely got from this American influence. I do think I got the best from both worlds: American craftsmanship, while in France I’m given a lot of freedom creatively.

indieWIRE: Do you like the idea that ‘Moliere’ is being positioned as the French ‘Shakespeare in Love’?

Tirard: We were thinking of many examples of what we wanted and ‘Shakespeare in Love’ came up. I really didn’t know much about Shakespeare and the film made me want to read the plays. If we can accomplish that with Moliere, then really we’ll have been successful.

indieWIRE: Even people here who studied literature in college may not recognize the Moliere characters in your film. Will American audiences get ‘Moliere’?

Tirard: I’ve been with this movie to Japan, Greece, and Russia, where we got the Audience Award [at the 29th Moscow Film Festival] – and it’s always a big surprise to see how contemporary and universal these characters are. In Moscow they see M. Jourdain, and they say, ‘He’s Russian.’ When you look at Russia today, you have these guys with a lot of money and bad taste, but they want to acquire art. I said to a Chinese distributor, ‘The character of Dorante is an aristocrat and has all these privileges because he knows the king but he has no money. How are the Chinese going to understand that?’ And the distributor said, ‘He’s the bad guy.’ So I said, ‘Okay, it can really come down to that.’

Working with my co-writer we wondered how the aristocracy would translate to a modern audience that wasn’t French. And we said, Okay, if we were making a contemporary movie, what would Dorante and Celimene be? Celebrities. People who have privileges for no good reason and everybody is ready to spend money to be friends with them.

indieWIRE: Romain Duris is a somewhat surprising choice to play Moliere. Why did you cast an actor with such a contemporary edge?

Tirard: I wanted to send a message by casting Romain and say, Look, this is not going to be a biopic in the traditional mold. Not in the sense that Moliere was going to behave like a contemporary man — we had a coach who taught Romain how to behave, and we looked at paintings, etc — but there’s something very modern that radiates from Romain that I like.

indieWIRE: Which American filmmakers do you admire?

Tirard: This might not be a surprise: Woody Allen, certainly. And Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola – I grew up watching their films. And I like Steven Soderbergh – though I’m not sure about the ‘Oceans’ stuff. There’s a film by Soderbergh that no one saw which was really a turning point in his career that’s called ‘Schizopolis.’ All the things he experimented with in that film were really brilliant.

indieWIRE: Is French film generally turning more mainstream and commercial?

Tirard: I think for a while there were directors who wanted to be a continuation of the New Wave. And then there’s been a generation which I’m part of, that started making films in reaction to that. Saying, Okay, auteur films are great, but c’mon, there can’t be only auteur films in France, we have to go back to making mainstream films yet be a little personal in making them. ‘Moliere’ is a very mainstream film, but really I would argue that when I’m talking about Moliere, I’m also talking about myself. The audience will not necessarily get all the personal stuff, but people who know me, believe me, they know how personal ‘Moliere’ is.

topics: directors, french cinema, q&a

more

Reviews: "Private Property;" "One to Another"

“Private Property” makes money matter.

Some routine matters that can have quite dramatic consequences in real life aren’t deemed sexy or colorful enough as fare for actual drama — so when they do show up to drive a narrative, the effect is quite striking. Such is the case with director Joachim Lafosse’s excellent “Private Property,” opening Friday at the Roxie. It’s about a non-rich family torn apart by money matters — among other things, but principally money — a conflict that happens all the time off-screen but takes center stage seldom enough to seem very fresh here.

On the surface, Lafosse’s fourth feature is pretty typical French (or in this case officially Belgian-French-Luxembourg) arthouse fare: An intimate relationship piece, low-key and nuanced rather than high in melodrama. And like the best of them, it’s an accumulation of finely observed, sometimes ambiguous details that make the sum engrossing — though in excerpt any one scene might evoke ye olde phase “watching paint dry.”

An impressive, rambling old farmhouse in the picturesque Belgian countryside is home to middle-aged Pascale (Isabelle Huppert) and her non- identical-twin sons Thierry and Francois (played by real-life brothers Jeremie and Yannick Renier). Though in their twenties, the boys have scarcely made overtures toward building independent adult lives. Thierry seems to be taking a class or two and has a sorta-girlfriend (Raphaelle Lubansu). Francois does a bit of handiwork. But mostly they lay around watching TV, playing video games, screwing around on a dirtbike, and so forth. Though mom works (it’s not quite clear doing what), basically everybody is supported by Luc (Patrick Descamps), the husband and father she bitterly divorced over a decade ago.

This domestic trio acts more like squabbling-yet-inseparable siblings than parent and offspring. The boys tease Pascale mercilessly, backing off with “Mom, we’re just kidding” whenever it gets too cruel. They casually bathe in front of (or sometimes with) each other. They’re not incestuous — just really, really creatures of mutual habit.

But Pascale has a secret — an affair with neighbor Jan (Kris Cuppens) — and as that involvement grows more serious, she contemplates starting a new life as well as a new marriage. Perhaps the two of them could open their own restaurant or B&B — if, that is, she sells the farmhouse that is her only asset. Of course, it is also home and all-around meal ticket for her sons, who naturally freak out once they catch wind of the plan.

It’s questionable whether she even has the legal authority to sell — Luc says the house belongs to his sons, not his ex-wife — but the mere possibility fast drives wedges between all parties concerned. It’s a classic collective-trap situation in which each feels unfairly thwarted by the other, resentments building until some disastrous explosion becomes inevitable.

Huppert is usually the magnetic focus of movies in which she appears, but here she successfully merges into a piece whose principal characters are given equal focus. Lafosse (a twin himself, though he says the screenplay co- written with Francois Pirot isn’t autobiographical, at least not very) encourages improvisation that results in family-life rhythms utterly convincing even when they’re teasingly ambiguous. “Private Property” is the kind of movie whose power creeps up stealthily, but leaves you a bit stunned nonetheless.

Body Contact: Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr’s “One to Another”

[SF360.org Editor’s note: This review was published originally in indieWIRE on June 27, 2007. The film opens in the Bay Area this Friday.]

There’s an ever more prevalent, if still marginalized, subgenre in international films today that is difficult to classify. In such films as Larry Clark’s “Bully” and Gael Morel’s “Le Clan” (released here as “Three Dancing Slaves”), groups of teenagers descend into violent oblivion while the filmmakers dispassionately, purposely objectify their supple flesh. The gap between the actions of the characters and the voyeurism of the filmmakers makes for an awkward, sometimes stimulating dialogue, even if it also leaves the actors somewhat adrift. The recurring image of these films are young, lithe bodies, supine, entangled: in “Le Clan,” three eye-catching brothers lay together in a tableau less motivated by their characters than the filmmaker’s whims. In “One to Another,” French co-directors Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr have their young actors lie atop, next to, and around each other with youthful, sexual abandon, and in a move similar to Morel’s, intimate an incestuous relationship between the film’s two main characters, brother and sister Pierre (Arthur Dupont) and Lucie (Lizzie Brochere), just by the sheer level of proximity and undress the two seem to share. It’s a teasing, half-formed approach to character, and the film, tiptoeing around its own narrative and ideas of sexuality, feels not fully formed.

The story itself, which Arnold based on a true story he read in the newspaper, concerns the murder of Pierre, and the investigation into his death taken up by Lucie. Floating in and out of the past and present without warning (often, you’ll only know what timeframe you’re in if Pierre enters the frame, hale and hearty), “One to Another” follows the distraught Lucie’s attempts to untangle the truth, although more often than not the film feels much less interested in the outcome of the mystery than in the myriad flashbacks presenting the malleable sexuality of hot Pierre and his even hotter friends, often seen shirtless (and in the film’s first, and best image, beat-boxing as afternoon silhouettes against a sunny red rock wall) and in various states of canoodling, sometimes with Lucie, sometimes with each other. It’s Pierre’s declared bisexuality that anchors the group of friends (who also perform together at local clubs in a small-time band), the rest of whose sexual preference remains as vague as their personalities, which usually seem shell-shocked either with grief or perhaps guilt.

“One to Another” almost forthrightly eschews forward motion or drama in its depiction of all this angst, favoring a shooting style so definitively casual that it’s hard to muster up much visual interest. Dupont’s Pierre of course remains a necessary abstraction, yet Brochere’s Lucie often comes across as even more inert. Most easily identified by their matching birthmarks, Pierre and Lucie stick in the mind as flesh and little more; perhaps that was the intention, as it is uttered in the film, “Only a body can know another body.” Yet one can’t help but want for a little soul to finish off the equation.

Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and the managing editor at the Criterion Collection. Reprinted with permission, copyright Michael Koresky, indieWIRE 2007.)

topics: french cinema, reviews, roxie

more

Reviews: "Lady Chatterley;" "Manufactured Landscapes"

Under the rainbow: Pascale Ferran’s “Lady Chatterley”

Showered with Cesar awards in its native France, Pascale Ferran’s “Lady Chatterley” faces a more uncertain fate stateside (Gallic awards committees can’t resist a pretty woman in a field of sun-kissed wildflowers; just ask Claude Berri). Though based on a version of D.H. Lawrence’s long-banned, “pornographic” final novel, it’s too restive and restrained to draw in the blithe, shock-hungry Terry Richardson/“9 Songs” contingent, too explicit for the AARP-discount crowd looking for a period romance that’ll act as a soothing tonic — and as for American critics, there’s never any shortage of twits eager to reenact the aesthetic skirmishes of 50 years past, “daring” to fatuously sneer at the sight of a petticoat.

[SF360 editor’s note: This Reverse Shot review was published originally in indieWIRE June 21, 2007. The film opens in the Bay Area this week.]

It’s a work that deserves more consideration, though it’s worth asking: Why another film of “Lady Chatterley” now? Lawrence’s story has been brought to the screen several times already – Lady Constance Chatterley (here played the half-British actress Marina Hands), neglected by her war-shattered, impotent husband, blows aside all social protocol to surrender to the caresses of their estate’s groundskeeper (a brusque Jean-Louis Coulloc’h). The answer: Regeneration through sex, in response to a world tormented by violence and class disparity, is a more relevant, and better, idea than most movies manage.

The 168-minute cut being released in theaters distills Ferran’s TV miniseries, shearing it of nearly an hour — in its present state, some referred — to plot points seem to have been left behind in the editing suite, but I didn’t mind; it sometimes feels superficially like a Maurice Pialat film (though without the insight into interclass sex seen in “Loulou”). A goodly amount of that still-imposing runtime is given over to copulation, the intimate documentation of Chatterley’s increasing comfort and satisfaction with her new lover; and though a note of drudgery sets in, the sex is good sex, shot and blocked with intelligence, relying on faces more than anything else to communicate Connie’s gradual expansion.

Lensed by Julien Hirsch, the florid passages of romantic-erotic idyll are suffused with bursting, blossoming, growing things, the passage of time referred to in ellipsis featuring handsome views of the Chatterley grounds in the raiment of the seasons. But there is no more instructive illustration of the difference between the pleasingly picturesque and the actually spiritual than that which comes in placing “Lady Chatterley” alongside another Francophonic imagination of the English countryside, Truffaut’s “Two English Girls,” which, as shot by Nestor Almendros, remains an invigorating gush of light and air. In fact, Ferran’s “Chatterley” comes off badly in almost any of the canonical comparisons it invites – to Lawrence, Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, Jane Campion, among others – without ever establishing an identity unto itself. At times you might believe this cross-channel hybrid was entirely the product of the British film industry, in all of the worst ways. A distinct “almost… but not quite” air permeates all of the lovely, calendar-perfect fecundity, the performances as manicured as the grounds of a Normandy estate, the artfully timed fade-outs, the period-detailed, deftly staged scenes that flitter by, lacking for nothing except for a single thing to make them stick in the mind.

[Nick Pinkerton is a Reverse Shot staff writer and editor and frequent contributor to Stop Smiling. Reprinted with permission, copyright Nick Pinkerton, indieWIRE 2007.]

The World at Large: Jennifer Baichwal’s “Manufactured Landscapes”

[SF360 editor’s note: This Reverse Shot review was originally published in indieWIRE June 7, 2007. The film opens in the Bay Area this week.]

Initially, Jennifer Baichwal’s “Manufactured Landscapes” recalls last year’s “Our Daily Bread.” A clinical crawl through a gargantuan Chinese factory – with its endless, evenly spaced stations of laborers glued to tedious tasks – hauntingly echoes similar tracking shots Nikolaus Geyrhalter used in his film to explore the lulling, mechanical uniformity of industrial food production. “Our Daily Bread” discovers otherworldly environments and depersonalized regiments behind the curtain of modern agricultural processes; “Manufactured Landscapes” investigates those of the entire world.

And since the most significant new player on the global stage at the moment is China, Baichwal wisely follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky – famed for his surveyor’s eye ability to bring out the unreality of mines, oil fields, and other landscape-changing undertakings – as he captures in precisely framed compositions the ravages upon urban and rural landscapes a rapidly developing nation has affected through destruction, pollution, waste, and aggressive dominance. Yet when Burtynsky isn’t providing the film’s vision through his work or his example, “Manufactured Landscapes” falls just short of finding its own voice.

Nevertheless, “Manufactured Landscapes” contains some remarkable material. One gets a sense of it from Burtynsky’s photography, which the film, as if turning the floor entirely over to him, often arranges in montage sequences preceded by the artist’s own voice-over explanations. A particular series of photographs demonstrates how during the last decade and a half of economic revitalization entire Chinese villages have gradually adapted themselves into recycling stations for electronic waste, with enormous heaps of wire and metal rummaged through by masked workers attempting to salvage reusable parts. It’s stunning evidence of a scavenger culture emerging from prosperity’s forgotten debris, even if it’s merely presented as a cinematic slideshow. Elsewhere in the film, as with the opening shot, her camera mimics Burtynsky’s cool, detached gaze, resulting in the most visually impressive moments – the standout being the world’s largest engineering project, the Three Gorges Dam (also the subject of Burtynsky-esque Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s new film, “Still Life”), transformed by the lens into a sentinel of earth-altering autonomy.

Toward film’s end “Manufactured Landscapes” looks at Burtynsky’s work on the gentrification of Shanghai and the gradual takeover of modern high-rises in an urban city forced to expand and efface its architecture. Here Baichwal loses sight of Burtynsky’s photography, interviewing a bourgeois real-estate agent clearly meant to serve as a subject of derision. This wrong move wouldn’t be worth pointing out if it didn’t seem so unnecessarily included at the expense of larger issues left untouched — does the beauty of Burtynsky’s work, for example, detract from a more urgent sense of the political meaning it invokes? Baichwal does a fine job bringing attention to Burtynsky and the issues which he in turn raises, but when it comes to picking up where Burtynsky leaves off, she’s only just begun.

[Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also writes for L magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon. Reprinted with permission, copyright Michael Joshua Rowin, indieWIRE 2007.)]

topics: french cinema, political film, reviews

more

Reviews: "Bamako"; "Angel-A"

Justice in the court and courtyard with “Bamako”

In “Bamako,” the 2006 film from African director Abderrahmane Sissako (recently screened to much fanfare at the San Francisco International Film Festival), the policies pursued in the so-called developing world by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — in fact, the whole system of neo-liberalism flying under the flag of the Washington Consensus — go up on trial in a modest sun-drenched African courtyard in a poor neighborhood of Mali’s capital. The trial brings together real professionals and activists as well as regular citizens to argue (in rousing, eloquent fashion) a case of immediate real-world concern: namely, whether the regime of “aid” and “development” that over the decades has saddled countries in Africa and the world over with crippling national debts and reduced social services is, as the plaintiffs argue, an imperial and criminal system of exploitation that continues the legacy of colonialism in new guise.

At the same time, life continues to go on all around this makeshift outdoor-indoor courtroom, in particular the routine of a club singer named Melé (the astonishing Aissa Maiga) and her unemployed husband Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), who stays at home with their infant daughter and doggedly tries to learn French (in what seems doubtful hope of gaining work as a security guard, as we learn in one of the film’s priceless bits of desultory dialogue). Trial and daily life thus serve as backdrop to one another, in a subtle but powerful interplay of comment and contradiction that meshes distinct social classes as readily as it does cinematic genres.

This blending of court and courtyard is a masterful stroke by writer-director Sissako, and goes to the heart of the logic of “Bamako,” the latest from the esteemed creator of “Waiting For Happiness,” “Life on Earth,” and “October.” For in the film’s supple overlaying of documentary realism and dramatic fiction comes the illuminating cinematic juxtaposition of center and periphery, elite discourse and social reality, hallowed halls and the hovels of the unemployed, mouthpieces of power and sidewalk hucksters. In so far as the film successfully harnesses cinema to the most pressing subjects of the day — and its gently unfolding storyline, sly self-referential humor, harrowing testimonials, graceful pace, and beautiful images and sounds all brilliantly feed its transformation of the abstract into the vital — “Bamako” is a film of rare political and dramatic force, which substitutes for the deadening rhetoric of globalization (and the pernicious evolutionary ideology behind its concept of “development”) a profoundly potent economy of human faces and stories.

Earthbound: Luc Besson’s “Angel-A”

[SF360.org editor’s note: This review appeared originally in indieWIRE on May 24, 2007. The film opens in the San Francisco Bay Area this Friday.]

In a comeback that I’ve been anticipating only slightly more than the reemergence of JNCO jeans or polio, Luc Besson now returns to American theaters after a nearly decade-long absence. The occasion is the release of “Angel-A,” a Paris-set variation on “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which replaces Clarence (dowdy old character actor Henry Travers) with an improbably gorgeous girl who — this being a Luc Besson movie — can kick ass with impunity.

Andre (played by popular comic actor Jamel Debbouze, most familiar to Americans from “Amelie”) is a globetrotting hustler who’s found himself at loose ends. A life of borrowing and welshing is closing in on him; he’s penniless, and the underworld types he’s indebted to are now preparing, in unison, to test out the “blood from a stone” adage on him. Melodramatically despairing, he prepares to fling himself into the Seine, only to spy a statuesque fellow jumper, Angela (Rie Rasmussen, quite memorable as The Legs from Brian De Palma’s “Femme Fatale”), just ahead of him in line.

Forgetting his plans momentarily, Andre winds up dragging her out of the drink, and right off she proves herself no wilting distressed damsel — in fact, she’s in-control enough to take good care of herself and her rescuer, straightaway starting his life on extreme makeover, settling his accounts and bolstering his self-esteem in the way that being seen with a perfect female specimen tends to do. All told, it’s a variation on that unusually popular contemporary fable in which a febrile, helpless failure finds his salvation through the love of a good woman — who in this case happens to be sent from Above (life experience suggests these fix-up-job relationships aren’t the ideal formula for Happily Ever After, but then actual human emotions don’t have much relationship to this film). Despite the nod to Capra, “Angel-A” never explores the depths of abjection that justified his sophisticated sentimentality: when Andre is getting ready to jump, there’s never any sense that he’s at risk of something worse than a pratfall, and the dangers he’s escaping from are simplistic comic-book thugs — one only needs to turn the page to make them disappear.

The film’s unsuppressed eccentricity does allow for a few nips of pleasure through the lopsided pairing of Rasmussen and Debbouze — in heels, she’s at least a head taller than him – which inherently achieves the fairy tale whimsy strained for elsewhere. But by any measure, it’s a wreck of a movie. Spending most of its runtime on the razor’s edge of incoherence, it bobbles every decisive scene that it tries to build (excepting maybe one crucial pep talk that Debbouze delivers into a bathroom mirror, which the actor’s tremendous likeability halfway sells), uses its Parisian backdrop in the most unimaginative “triptych” fashion possible (“Do we have time to ‘do’ Sacre-Coeur before lunch?”), and stymies any chance for the considerable charms of the leads to take effect by glomming them up with mouthfuls-upon-mouthfuls of literal-minded soul-searching dialogue.

Nick Pinkerton is a Reverse Shot staff writer and editor and frequent contributor to Stop Smiling. Reprinted with permission, copyright Nick Pinkerton, indieWIRE 2007.)

topics: african cinema, french cinema, reviews

more