Japan Cuts ‘17: Daguerrotype

If any old picture is worth a thousand words than the sweat equity that goes into a daguerreotype ought to increase the exchange rate dramatically. In fact, a rather anti-social photographer is convinced daguerreotypes constitute the only true photography. The punishing lengths of time he requires his subjects to sit almost seems to be part of their appeal. Not surprisingly, the only models who would regularly endure his long sittings were his late wife and his neurotic dead-ringer daughter. As a result, his new assistant will be walking into a rather tense family dynamic and maybe, possibly a slightly haunted house in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first French language film, Daguerrotype (trailer here), which screens during the 2017 Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film in New York.

Jean is initially hired as Stéphane’s assistant precisely because he has no proper photography baggage. He also doesn’t seem to mind working long hours, after his extended period of unemployment (this was Hollande’s France, after all). The old man finds him adequately adequate, but his nervous daughter Marie takes a liking to him. She clearly sees Jean as a potential ally in her quiet campaign to lead a more independent life. Of course, the obsessive daguerreotypist would not care to lose his best and really only model.

Stéphane is also not inclined to move from his spacious but ramshackle villa either, despite the lucrative offers made by the local council and Jean’s efforts to nudge him along (for a sizable commission). It seems his property is dead smack in the middle of a proposed “green works” boondoggle. It also might be haunted. Now and then, Kurosawa will show us hints of the uncanny, but he will maintain the ambiguity until very late in the third act.

In terms of its tone and approach to the supernatural Daguerrotype compares very directly with Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper. However, it lacks the breathlessly intense prologue of the Shopper, which really sets up the audience on pins and needles for the rest of the film. Instead, each door that mysteriously opens raises our hopes that he will finally get into it, only to find it is another tease.

Still, enormous credit is due to Olivier Gourmet who is absolutely riveting as the arrogant, guilt-ridden, and possibly delusional Stéphane. Frankly, one of the most frightening aspects of the film is watching him fall into an ambiguous mental state somewhere between sanity and madness. Tahar Rahim broods well enough as Jean, but Constance Rousseau’s remarkable portrait of Marie is achingly fragile and somewhat off. As usual, it is also fun to watch Mathieu Amalric do his thing in a small but colorful role as Stéphane’s sleazy agent.

This is Kurosawa’s first film with a Euro crew, but he certainly can’t complain about the tech contributions. Alexis Kavyrchine softly-lit cinematography is appropriately eerie, while Casa Stéphane is quite a feat of mise-en-scene. However, the truly ghostly life-size daguerreotypes are absolutely indispensable for the film’s look, tone, and overall effect. So, yes, a picture is worth a bunch of words. Good, but not the masterwork we’re all hoping for, Kurosawa’s Daguerrotype is still very much worth seeing when it has its New York premiere tomorrow (7/18) at the Japan Society, as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Desplechin’s My Golden Years

With that name of his, you would expect Paul Dédalus, he must be a Joycian figure. He most certainly had a difficult childhood and if you have seen his first appearance in My Sex Life, or . . . How I Got Into an Argument, you know he definitely appreciates women. Dédalus takes stock of his life as well as the great love of his life in Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Dédalus is about to transfer from his diplomatic post in Tajikistan to a cushy job back home in the French Foreign Ministry. Unfortunately, he will have to leave a perfectly good lover. It will not be his first affair to have a bittersweet ending, but it still has him feeling sentimental. As Dédalus returns to a more conventional life, he revisits memories of his formative years. His trip down memory lane very intentionally evokes the vibe of Truffaut’s Antione Doinel films, but Dédalus’s extremes were even more extreme.

Young Dédalus and his siblings grew up terrorized by their mentally ill mother Jeanne and neglected by their emotionally distant father, Abel. Dédalus was the one of always stood up to the unbalanced woman, but one day he reached his breaking point and ran off to live with his beloved great aunt and her understanding lesbian lover. As a teen, Dédalus is still a protective figure to his siblings, but he also develops an interest in politics and girls. By far, the best sequences in the film chronicle Dédalus’s school trip to Minsk, where he has secretly arranged to smuggle money and supplies to Jewish Refuseniks. However, the rather noble episode will have unexpected consequences years later, as the audience shall learn in due time.

The preponderance of the film in some way addresses his complicated relationship with Esther, beginning in their school days and continuing rather awkwardly into his early professional adulthood years. She was pretty in high school and she knew it, but somehow Dédalus managed to charm her with his combination chutzpah and self-deprecating humor. For a while, they seem truly happy together. However, it slowly starts to unravel when his advanced studies force them into a long-distance relationship in the pre-skype era. Yet, it is Esther who becomes the needy, desperately clingy one, compulsively writing Dédalus at least one letter each day.

It all seems sadly inevitable, but Dédalus will have the final word on the matter when he chances into an old acquaintance in the film’s brilliant capstone scene that just might become emblematic of the careers of Desplechin and his frequent leading man, Mathieu Almaric.

Indeed, Golden Days is a film rife with telling exchanges, but its inconsistency makes it more of a masterwork than the masterpiece some have suggested. Frankly, there is more teen angst than you will find in an entire season of the CW television network. Yet, amidst all the high school stuff, Desplechin springs quietly powerful moments on viewers, as when Abel Dédalus suddenly decides to act like a father and tries to console his insecure daughter.

Despite returning to a familiar role, Mathieu Almaric is wonderfully unpredictable as the world-weary Dédalus. He can be cavalier one minute and burst into an eruption of nervous energy seconds later. However, the sad-eyed Quentin Dolmaire and the pouty Lou Roy-Lecollinet carry the dramatic load, developing relatively convincing chemistry as the young and naïve Dédalus and Esther, respectively. It seems like every French film released this year features André Dussolier, but that is not such a bad policy. True to form, he is rather elegantly sinister in his brief appearance as an intelligence service interrogator.

In terms of form, Golden Days is a Proustian memory play, but aesthetically, it is a big, rangy film that practically throws in the proverbial kitchen sink. It has its excesses and its pacing issues, but when it works, it devastates. Overall, it is a potently nostalgic film that amply rewards viewers who wrestle with it. Recommended for patrons of French cinema, My Golden Days opens this Friday (3/18) in New York, at the IFC Center downtown and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center uptown.

Sundance ’15: The Forbidden Room

It is like Guy Maddin put his collection of vintage silent and early talky prints through a blender and then screened the puree, except none of these films ever existed before. Unlike his Séances project inspired by lost films, these odd (odd is indeed the right term) film fragments are entirely the product of Maddin, his co-writers: co-director Evan Johnson, poet John Ashbery, and co-conspirators Robert Kotyk and Kim Morgan. Yet, as is often true with Maddin’s work, they feel like they must be real on some alternate plane of existence. Prepare for a trip when Maddin’s The Forbidden Room screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

It is a tall order to summarize Room and it would be impossible to do the many plot strands justice. Just so you know you you’re in the right film (not that you couldn’t tell immediately), Room starts with a lesson on how to take a bath. It then segues into a submarine disaster film, which is interrupted by a woodsman, who has come to tell the suffocating crew his tale, as if he were the Ancient Mariner. Like Thomas Pynchon on speed, Room thus proceeds on tangents to tangents, as each flashback and incidental anecdote begets more of the same.

Eventually, we will meet Mathieu Amalric playing a collector who lives in a swanky elevator and the train psychiatrist working on the Berlin-Bogota Express. In one story arc, a man meets his doppelganger, while Udo Keir continually pops up as different characters in various sub-films, because he’s Udo Keir.

Trying to track the film from point A to point B is a losing proposition. It could almost play in a continual loop as an installation piece, except viewers would miss the realization of the moment Maddin opens up the final “Russian doll” (to use an apt term from the press notes) and begins to re-pack them again.

The real point of Room is the mind-blowing artistry of it all. Each constituent film begins with its own credits sequences, which are graphically striking and perfectly representative of their respective eras and genres. Likewise the work of cinematographers Stephanie Weber-Biron and Ben Kasulke is never less than stunning, flawlessly evoking the look of noir black-and-white as well as that early nitrate color. It really is like walking through a cinematic dreamscape.

Granted, Room will baffle less adventurous viewers, even though it has an excess of narrative coming out of its ears. This is truly Guy Maddin raised to the power of Guy Maddin. Without question, it is the work of a genuine auteur who has no close comparison. Highly recommended for fans of the unusual and the aesthetically daring, The Forbidden Room screens again tonight (10/29) and Saturday (1/31) in Park City, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

NYFF ’14: The Blue Room

In a provincial town, there is no such thing as a no-tell motel. Nevertheless, Julien Gahyde thought he was being discrete in his regular meetings with the village pharmacy owner’s wife in the titular chambre bleue. Inconveniently, he learns their affair was largely common knowledge when he becomes ensnared in a murder inquiry. Just who was killed by whom will be slowly revealed in Mathieu Amalric’s adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel The Blue Room (trailer here), which screens during the 52^nd New York Film Festival.

After a long absence, Gahyde returned to his home town, making good as a John Deere sales rep. It probably was not just lust that drove him into an affair with the sensual Esther Despierre. She also happens to be married to an old classmate, whose wealth and privilege Gahyde always resented. Regardless, her talk about a more permanent arrangement does not sit well with Gahyde, so he uses a near miss with her husband as a pretext for a cooling off period. However, her reckless letters portend bad things. Before long, Gahyde is in prison, fielding questions from the investigating magistrate, but the film’s fractured temporal-hopping narrative structure jealously guards its secrets.

One thing is certain: Gahyde is in a mess of legal trouble. Even if he is technically not guilty, he still bears considerable responsibility for the state of affairs. Amalric and editor François Gédigier keep audiences on their toes with their frequent cuts, often emphasizing oddly elliptical perspectives. There is more than a hint of the old school Nouvelle Vague in their almost Pointillistic approach. (Coincidentally, one of Picasso’s best known Blue Period paintings was also called The Blue Room and it fits the spirit of Amalric’s picture rather well.) Yet, what most distinguishes the film is the degree to which Amalric captures the vibe and essence of Simenon’s non-Maigret hothouse psychological thrillers.

Director-co-screenwriter Amalric also gives himself an important assist, portraying the thoroughly compromised and increasingly confused Gahyde. There is something Kafka-esque about the weasely philanderer that inspires rapt fascination. Frankly, both Madame Gahyde and Despierre are rendered somewhat simplistically, as the standard issue wronged wife and Fatal Attraction mistress, respectively. However, in what might appear to be a disposable role, Serge Bozon (another actor turned director), adds a hard to quantify dimension, hinting there is much more churning beneath his magistrate’s poker face façade.

Amalric nicely distinguishes himself as a triple threat with Blue Room. Brainy and rather steamy at times, The Blue Room belongs in the top rank of Simenon adaptations, in the company of films from the likes of Chabrol, Leconte, and Duvivier. Recommended for fans of mature literary thrillers, The Blue Room screens this Monday (9/29) at Alice Tully Hall and Tuesday (9/30) at the Beale, as part of this year’s NYFF, in advance of its opening at the IFC Center this Friday (10/3).

Jimmy P: Head-Shrinking on the Plains

Georges Devereux credited his time in the field with Native Americans for turning back towards Freudian analysis, because they convinced him of the power of dreams. Fittingly, his “Dora” would also be a Native American patient, whom Devereux treats at the behest of the VA in Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

James Picard saw just enough action in the waning days of WWII to have his skill fracturing.  Suffering from debilitating headaches and dizziness, Picard checks into the Topeka VA hospital, from where he is soon transferred to the nearby Menninger Institute. There is nothing physically wrong with Picard, but the good Dr. Menninger never doubts his pain. Trying a different tact, Menninger calls in the controversial Dr. Devereux for a one time referral, hoping his anthropological expertise will facilitate a psychiatric diagnosis.

Like anyone, Picard made plenty of mistakes in life, which may weigh on his psyche. Devereux will do his best to untangle them for the sake of Picard’s well being and his own checkered career. Representing the best of Jimmy P, Desplechin’s scenes of their analysis sessions are written and performed with intelligence and unusual sensitivity. However, there is a great deal sluggish connective tissue, wherein Desplechin establishes and compulsively re-establishes the dry and sleepy late 1940’s Kansas setting.

Still, there is something to be said for the restraint exhibited by Desplechin and lead actor Benicio Del Toro, who draws us into Picard’s interior torment, rather than howling at the moon and bugging out his eyes, like a Blackfoot Meryl Streep. Wisely, Desplechin allows Picard to maintain his dignity instead of using him as an easy figure of victimhood.

In fact, Desplechin and co-writers Kent Jones and Julie Peyr maintain an ambiguous stance regarding Devereux’s ethical sensibilities, allowing space for viewers to interpret him as either exploiter or altruist, which is usually how life works. Clearly, the film is deeply informed by revisionist criticism of manifest destiny, but it never hyperventilates with outrage. Frankly, aside from an orderly calling Picard “Chief,” the VA is largely depicted in positive terms.

As Picard and Devereux, Del Toro and Mathieu Almaric play off and complement each other quite other quite well. Almaric brings an especially welcome roguish energy as the Austro-Hungarian born French-American psychoanalyst (who happened to be Edward Teller’s cousin). While Del Toro’s lack of histrionics is a blessed relief, his extreme reserve sometimes has a lulling effect.  In support, Larry Pine does right by American psychiatry, conveying Menninger’s authority and compassion (anyone who has not yet seen him in Vanya on 42^nd Street should catch up with Louis Malle’s ultra-New York take on Chekhov at their earliest convenience), while Misty Upham adds a note of graceful tragedy as Jane, Picard’s great flashback love.

Desplechin’s pace is a tad on the leisurely side and Howard Shore’s score would better serve an unabashedly weepy melodrama. Nevertheless, the small ensemble shoulders through, making it all work at the end. It is a quality period production, but it never overwhelms viewers’ emotions or senses. Not quite at the level of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, but considerably superior to the recent French import Augustine, Jimmy P is recommended for fans of head-shrinking cinema when it opens this Friday (2/14) in New York at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet: Resnais Multiply Adapts Anouilh

Can a play from the 1940’s, based on classical mythology, still speak to contemporary audiences?  Alain Resnais will answer in the affirmative.  As a consummate cinematic game-player, he naturally stacks the deck, casting a who’s who of French thespians in his meta-adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice.  Regardless, the star-crossed love still resonates in You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Orpheus and Eurydice supply the back bone of YASNY, but the framing device incorporates Anouilh’s Cher Antoine ou l’amour Rate.  Playing themselves, the leading lights of French stage and screen are summoned to a memorial for their dear departed friend, playwright Antoine d’Anthac.  As part of the ceremony, they are to watch a video of his/Anouilh’s Eurydice, to determine whether the avant-garde revival is worth staging.  It is a work they are all familiar with, having each appeared in previous productions.  Watching the screen, they get caught up in the story and their own memories and begin to act out Eurydice in concert with the recorded rehearsal.

Cast members overlap and echo each other, but Resnais always maintains the integrity of Eurydice’s storyline.  It all sounds very post-modern, but it is really a case of the narrative overpowering its meta-conceits rather than being defined by them.

Of course, it is hard to go wrong with YASNY’s cast.  While Resnais has three sets of Orpheus and Eurydice at his disposal, he clearly favors Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma (two of his longtime collaborators), with good reason.  Watching this couple on the late side of middle age portraying the doomed young lovers is eerily moving.  Their experienced faces seem to amplify the tragedy rather than distract from it.  Nonetheless, Anne Consigny’s Eurydice is exquisitely brittle and dignified, overshadowing the aloof Lambert Wilson.

Former Bond villain Mathieu Amalric exudes a deliciously Mephistophelean vibe while maintaining the moral ambiguity of Monsieur Henri, death’s avatar, a role he mostly has to himself.  Michel Piccoli nicely anchors the film with his warm gravitas, ostensibly revisiting the role of Orpheus’s father, while leading the cheering section within the elite audience.  In addition to playing d’Anthac with eccentric flair, Denis Podalydès (from the Comédie Française) was recruited to direct the hipster Eurydice video segments, further complicating notions of what the film is and who is its author.  It is Anouilh’s Eurydice, as well as d’Anthac’s, but it is also partially Cher Antoine, mostly reconceived by Resnais, but also shaped by Podalydès.

The key point is it is all good.  With its cast members handing off their batons like relay runners, YASNY’s affection for the theater’s passion and artifice becomes infectious.  Featuring music by X-Files composer Mark Snow and Eric Gautier’s richly noir-ish cinematography, it is an unusually elegant film.  Cerebral yet strangely poignant, the highly recommended You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet opens this Friday (6/7) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

Chicken with Plums, from the Creator of Persepolis

Over an eight day period, Nasser-Ali Khan will become the anti-Scherezade.  As he wills himself to die, stories from his past, narrated by the Angel of Death, will explain how the musician reached such a state of profound melancholy.   Love and death become intimately intertwined in Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud’s Chicken with Plums (trailer here), their fantastical but sophisticated live-action follow-up to the rightly acclaimed Persepolis, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Khan is widely regarded as the greatest Iranian violinist of his generation, but he has stopped playing.  On the surface, his silence appears to be the fault of his wife Faringuisse, who destroyed his prized violin during one of their frequent squabbles.  However, his depression is really the result of an elegantly tragic tale of love denied.

Technically proficient but never impassioned, Khan’s music took on uncommon richness after he was forbidden from seeing his true soul-mate Irâne, the traditional clockmaker’s daughter.  Music never has been considered a stable profession by protective fathers.  As Khan’s reputation rises, he acquiesces to his controlling mother’s wishes and marries Faringuisse. For him, it is a loveless union.  For her, it is a marriage based on unrequited love.

Frankly, Khan is a crummy husband and a negligent father, but it is difficult to condemn him after witnessing his compounded heartaches.  Mathieu Amalric, with his big sad eyes, is perfectly cast as the exquisitely sensitive jerkweed.  Viewers will sympathize with him, even as they shake their heads at his casual cruelty to Faringuisse.  Likewise only more so, Maria de Medeiros (Bruce Willis’s girlfriend in Pulp Fiction) explodes the harpy exterior of his nagging wife, revealing the pain and vulnerability of Faringuisse.

Set in the late 1950’s pre-Shah, Western-leaning Iran, Satrapi and Paronnaud’s fable of star-crossed love would seem to hold limited political ramifications.  However, it is not an accident Khan’s forbidden love is named Irâne (as they confirmed in a post-screening Tribeca Q&A).  That she is played by Golshifteh Farahani is also clearly significant.  The internationally acclaimed actress was barred from returning to Iran after (tastefully) posing nude in a French magazine to protest the Islamist regime’s misogynist policies.  A radiantly beautiful woman, she also invests her character (and the film) with a graceful sadness.

Visually, Plums is also quite arresting, incorporating brief animated interludes (evoking its graphic novel source), expressionistic sets, and highly stylized design elements.  Their inspired technical team definitely creates a seductive atmosphere of magical realism that is a pleasure to get caught up in.  Highly recommended, Chicken with Plums opens tomorrow (8/17) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.

Tribeca ’12: Chicken with Plums

Over an eight day period, Nasser-Ali Khan will become the anti-Scherezade.  As he wills himself to die, stories from his past, narrated by the Angel of Death, will explain how the musician reached such a state of profound melancholy.   Love and death become intimately intertwined in Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud’s Chicken with Plums (trailer here), their fantastical but sophisticated live-action follow-up to the rightly acclaimed Persepolis, which screened at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival and will also unspool today at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.

Khan is widely regarded as the greatest Iranian violinist of his generation, but he has stopped playing.  On the surface, his silence appears to be the fault of his wife Faringuisse, who destroyed his prized violin in one of their frequent squabbles.  However, his depression is rooted in an elegantly tragic tale of love denied.

Technically proficient but never impassioned, Khan’s music took on uncommon richness after he was forbidden from seeing his true love Irâne, the traditional clockmaker’s daughter.  Music never has been considered a stable profession by protective fathers.  As Khan’s reputation rises, he acquiesces to his controlling mother’s wishes and marries Faringuisse. For him, it is a loveless union.  For her, it is a marriage based on unrequited love.

Frankly, Khan is a crummy husband and a negligent father, but it is difficult to condemn him after witnessing his compounded heartache.  Mathieu Amalric, with his big sad eyes, is perfectly cast as the exquisitely sensitive jerkweed.  Viewers will sympathize with him, even as they shake their heads at his casual cruelty to Faringuisse.  Likewise only more so, Maria de Medeiros (Bruce Willis’s girlfriend in Pulp Fiction) explodes the harpy exterior of his nagging wife, revealing the pain and vulnerability of Faringuisse.

Set in the late 1950’s pre-Shah, Western-leaning Iran, Satrapi and Paronnaud’s fable of star-crossed love would seem to hold limited political ramifications.  However, it is not an accident Khan’s forbidden love is named Irâne (as they confirmed in a post-screening Q&A).  That she is played by Golshifteh Farahani is also clearly significant.  The internationally acclaimed actress was barred from returning to Iran after (tastefully) posing nude in a French magazine to protest the Islamist regime’s misogynist policies.  A radiantly beautiful woman, she also invests her character (and the film) with a graceful sadness.

Visually, Plums is also quite arresting, incorporating brief animated interludes, expressionistic sets, and highly stylized design elements.  Their inspired technical team definitely creates a seductive atmosphere of magical realism that is a pleasure to get caught up in.  Highly recommended, Chicken with Plums was enthusiastically received by audiences at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.  For those in the Bay Area, it also screens today (4/30) and Wednesday (5/2)  as part of the 2012 SanFrancisco International Film Festival, concluding this week.

French Rendezvous ’12: The Screen Illusion

Hotel concierges pride themselves on their resourcefulness. However, one rather dodgy operator promises to show an estranged father the life of the son he disowned. Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique (a.k.a. The Theatrical Illusion) is reset in the present day rather shrewdly and faithfully in Mathieu Almaric’s The Screen Illusion, which screens today as part of the 2012 Rendezvous with French Cinema.

In the original Corneille, Alcandre is a magician who shows Pridamant images of his son on the wall of his Platonic grotto. Alcandre the concierge takes the remorseful parent to the nerve center of the hotel’s closed circuit television network. He has quite a story cued up for the man.

Clindor (as his father knew him) is now the hired muscle for Matamore, a blow hard special ops video game developer. Matamore is in love with Isabelle, whose mobbed up father has promised her to the well heeled Adraste. Finding them both sorry excuses for masculinity, Isabelle has been having an affair with Clindor. Unfortunately, their secret really isn’t one. Lyse, Adraste’s ambiguous security consultant, knows all about them. She also loved Clindor, but her ardor has soured into resentment.

Corneille’s Illusion is surprisingly hip for its time, self-consciously toying with distinctions between comedy and tragedy before ending with a fifth act twist that is still widely ripped off in contemporary film and television. While the rhyming couplets proved a bridge too far for the subtitlers (and fair enough), English speaking audiences still get a sense of the rhythms and cadences of Almaric’s adaptation, apparently simplifying Corneille’s language, but keeping its character.

His cast certainly enjoys chewing on it, especially Julie Sicard, who is a scene-stealing standout as the sort of scorned Lyse. Loïc Corbery’s Clindor might seem a bit bland, but that is just how it is with young prodigal stage heroes. However, Suliane Brahim shows considerable dramatic presence and chops, holding her own with Sicard in a key scene. As Alcandre, Hervé Pierre’s knowing roguishness holds it all together quite nicely.

Conceived as part of a series of Comedie Française television movies updating classic French stage dramas, Almaric’s Illusion is definitely worthy of the big screen. The modernizations are quite clever, yet Almaric maintains a romantic fable-like atmosphere throughout. Smart and completely satisfying, it is one of the highlights of this year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema. Enthusiastically recommended, it screens today (3/4) and Tuesday (3/6) at the Walter Reade, at BAM also today, and at the IFC Center tomorrow (3/5).