NYFF ’17: Lover for a Day

Comparisons between Philippe Garrel and Éric Rohmer were never completely inapt, because both French filmmakers had a knack for uncomfortably intimate relationship dramas. Some of us maybe didn’t realize it until now, but Garrel has completed a Rohmeresque thematic trilogy exploring the darker emotions associated with love. In the Shadow of Women addresses lust, whereas the subject of Jealousy is announced up front. This time around, Garrel examines fidelity, something cineastes probably considered to be positive and even laudable, at least before we saw it as the focal point of a Garrel film. Garrel is very Garrelian, but it is his daughter Esther rather than son Louis who co-stars in Lover for a Day (trailer here), which screens as a Main Slate selection of the 55^th New York Film Festival.

Having been dumped by her boyfriend Mateo and evicted from his flat, Jeanne has no choice but to seek shelter with her teacher father. However, she is rather surprised to learn middle-aged Gilles is cohabitating with a student roughly her own age. Initially, there is tension between Ariane and Jeanne, as they resent any form of attention Gilles bestows on the other. Yet, slowly and steadily, the two young women form a truce and share confidences. Ariane tries to instill in Jeanne a more casual approach to love and sex, to counteract her unhealthy fixation on Mateo. Given her sensitive temperament, it will be hard for Jeanne to put her advice into practice, nor does it necessarily reflect Gilles’ relationship notions.

Like all of Garrel’s films, Lover is talky rather than plotty, but like the best of them, there are some remarkably resonant moments. Renato Berta’s lovely black-and-white cinematography greatly helps evoke that late-night, soul-bearing vibe. Even when the characters are out and about at high noon, the film still has a 2:00 feel to it.

Without her famous brother to overshadow her, Esther Garrel really comes into her own as Jeanne. It is not necessarily a “likable” performance, but it is uncomfortably real and brittle, in a nakedly vulnerable kind of way. In her feature debut, Louise Chevillotte’s work as Ariane is admirably complex and notably restrained. Éric Caravaca’s Gilles is a suitably Garrel-ish, hypocritical man, but his resemblance to the late Benoît Régent, co-star of Garrel’s grueling masterwork I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar, adds a further element of eeriness.

We do not really remember Jealousy and Shadow being pitched as part of trilogy (thematic or otherwise), but they are easily retconned into a Rohmeresque series of moral tales. They also happen to be particularly strong yet highly representative Garrel films. Perhaps most significantly, the third film could be remembered as the film in which Esther Garrel decisively staked her claim to the family business. Recommended for fans of Garrel, Rohmer, and maybe even Cassavetes, Lover for a Day screens tomorrow (10/10) and Wednesday (10/11), as part of this year’s New York Film Festival.

Garrel’s In the Shadow of Women

Even by the standards of Philippe Garrel’s characters, Pierre is a real cad. In contrast, the highly flawed protagonist of his previous film Jealousy was one of his most sympathetic. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Garrel’s son, the popular French actor Louis Garrel, played the lead in Jealousy, but simply serves as the narrator this time around. It is a great part, but the unfaithful documentarian is sure to inspire strong reactions when Garrel père’s In the Shadow of Women (trailer here) opens this Friday in New York.

Pierre and Manon appear to be the perfect partners, both romantically and professionally. She has long been happy to perform supporting functions on the documentaries they collaborate on. They have something else in common too. They both have lovers on the side. According to Pierre’s chauvinistic attitude, it is all very well for a man to do a little roving, but it is unacceptable for women. He realizes this is somewhat contradictory, but so be it.

Unfortunately, Pierre is the one who discovers Manon’s affair. (This should go without saying, but if you are meeting your married mistress in a café, get a table towards the back, for crying out loud.) Since the somewhat neglected Manon was only enjoying a little attention, she immediately breaks it off. However, Pierre continues to torment her with his suspicions and holier-than-thou judgement. Meanwhile, he continues to carry on with Elisabeth, an intern at the French film archive. Yet, rather than having it both ways, it is more like he is trapped in two dysfunctional relationships. In fact, it is the problematically codependent and passive aggressive Elisabeth that initially tips Pierre to Manon’s affair.

As the title would suggest, gender double standards and the Garrel family’s relationship baggage certainly inform Shadow. However, none of the characters can survive Garrel’s withering examination of their private lives completely unscathed. This sort awkward intimacy is an acquired taste, but nobody does it better than Garrel.

Clotilde Courau and Stanislas Merhar also might just be the perfect Garrelian couple, not including the various Garrels. They are still attractive, but have clearly been somewhat weathered by life. Courau and Merhar both exercise great restraint in their confrontations, eschewing cheap histrionics. Yet, that makes it sting even more when they slip the knife in.

Much as Willy Kurant’s lens did for Jealousy, Renato Berta’s arresting black-and-white cinematography heightens the Cassavetes-like hothouse closeness. These are uber-urban characters, but they feel like the only people in the world. Although Shadow is not quite as accessible as Jealousy it is still one of the better Garrel films for newcomers to start with. Recommended for his admirers and those who appreciate acutely honest relationship dramas, In the Shadow of Women opens this Friday (1/15) at the IFC Center.

The Garrels’ Jealousy

We expect the French to be very insouciant about trifles like infidelity and divorce, but the Garrels know better. The reigning first family of French cinema has long plumbed their very personal history for artistic inspiration. After thoroughly examining his tempestuous relationship with 1960s icon Nico, Philippe Garrel puts his late actor father Maurice Garrel on the cinematic pop-psychology couch, casting his son Louis as his grandfather. It is definitely a family affair. In fact, some of the father-and-son’s best work together coalesced in the senior Garrel’s Jealousy (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Known simply as “Louis,” Louis Garrel’s protagonist is leaving his wife and daughter for his sultry lover Claudia, much as his real life grandfather did. The former cad will try to turn over a new leaf, striving to be a faithful lover and attentive father to his young daughter, Charlotte. Indeed, one should not impose slavish one-for-one symbolism on Jealousy, lest Charlotte be taken for an analog of the filmmaker himself.

In terms of narrative, Jealousy is a simple story of a relationship that starts out full of passion and hope, but eventually turns sour. The differences between Louis and Claudia are not immediately apparent, but they prove too profound to withstand the test of time. Although they are both stage actors, she has not worked in years, whereas he constantly takes low-to-no paying gigs. Despite the occasional flirtation, he takes his commitment to Claudia seriously, whereas she adopts an attitude of what-he-doesn’t-know-can’t-hurt-him.

Jealousy is an intimate film, in the Cassavetes sense, but it is stylish and accessible. It might also represent Louis Garrel’s finest screen turn to date. Frankly, in past outings, he has perhaps tried too hard, projecting a cloyingly boyish persona (as in Love Songs and Making Plans for Lena). However, there is nothing twee or affected about his work in Jealousy—no sheepish invitation to ruffle his locks. It is a more mature, Zen-like performance that pulls us into the character’s life, engendering understanding and even sympathy. Although he did not try to play his grandfather outright, he presumably had more to draw upon from personal experience than had he portrayed some distant literary or historical figure.

Anna Mouglalis (the better of the competing Chanels in Coco Channel & Igor Stravinsky) also fleshes out some surprisingly deep dimensions in the impulsive Claudia. It is a bold, earthy turn that impresses. Yet nobody can match young Olga Milshtein as the precociously wise and winning Charlotte. Completing the Garrel family quota, Louis’s sister Esther Garrel brings some verve and energy as his on-screen namesake sibling.

Willy Kurant’s black-and-white cinematography arrestingly heightens the on-screen emotional conflict. It is a lovely picture that evokes the filmmaker’s earlier pictures, like Emergency Kisses, but it feels considerably less self-conscious. Philippe Garrel’s films may still be an acquired taste, but Jealousy is the right thin edge of the wedge to start with. Recommended for those who appreciate French post-Wave auteurs and chamber drama in general, Jealousy opens this Friday (8/15) in New York at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

First Look ‘12: That Summer

If someone is said to have an artistic temperament, it usually means they are not just creative, but emotionally tempestuous. The term certainly applies to Frédéric and his wife Angèle. They will dazzle and disturb Frédéric’s hanger-on friend and his lover with the sort of emotional games that have become the hallmark of under-sung auteur Philippe Garrel’s work. Presumably his final collaboration with both his son Louis and late father Maurice (1923-2011), Philippe Garrel’s That Summer (trailer here) screens this weekend during the inaugural First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.

Frédéric is a wealthy and talented French painter, who never sells his work. Angèle is a major Italian movie star, garnering the best reviews of her career. They are everything the penniless and untalented Paul is not. Yet, for some reason the artistic couple befriends the dubious actor and his girlfriend Elisabeth, inviting them into their home in Rome. The needy Elisabeth has attempted suicide in the past, but she will be a model of stability compared to their hosts.

Initially, Frédéric and Angèle seem like a perfectly compatible and loving couple, but over the course of the summer, their mutual contempt degenerates into a repeating cycle of infidelity and petty cruelty. For the most part, Paul and Elisabeth are spectators rather than participants in the proceedings—an audience for the imploding marriage as performance art.

As is often the case with Philippe Garrel’s films, Summer is often uncomfortably intimate. However, it is never as squalid, lurid, or coyly obtuse as some of his previous films, including even (or especially) his arguably best known, I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar. The dolce vita environment of Rome certainly helps.

Garrel’s son Louis also does some of his best work as Frédéric. More Byronic than petulant for a refreshing change, he is strangely engaging throughout. Unleashing her inner diva, Monica Bellucci radiates sexuality, while reveling in the melodrama of it all. Unfortunately, Jérôme Robart and Céline Sallette are rather dull as the sponging guests. Perhaps that is required of him to serve as the narrator. However, Elisabeth’s established psychological issues are never really conveyed or followed-up on in a substantive way.

Appearing briefly as Frédéric’s long deceased grandfather, a frail looking Maurice Garrel adds a redemptive coda, bringing meaning to the film. Indeed, it is always interesting to see the son and grandfather interact in the middle Garrel’s films, starting with 1989’s Emergency Kisses, in which all three starred.

Nouvelle Vague veteran cinematographer Willy Kurant’s gives it all a pleasing look, basking in the vivid blues and greens of the couples’ photogenic abode, while John Cale’s piano soundtrack always sounds politely refined. Frankly, Summer might be a good entry point into Garrel’s filmography. Though hardly action driven, it moves along at a reasonable clip for such decidedly arthouse fare. (Bellucci also has an early nude scene, so for some viewers it pays off quickly). Considerably better the response at Toronto would suggest, That Summer is complex and intriguing film, definitely recommended to discriminating viewers when it screens this Friday (1/13) during First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn

French auteur Philippe Garrel’s international following might stem as much from a voyeuristic fascination with his well-documented personal tribulations as from a regard for his critically acclaimed films. Indeed, his ill-fated relationship with pop icon Nico reverberates throughout much of his later work, including his most recent film, Frontier of Dawn (trailer here), an official selection of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival that screens this weekend at Anthology Film Archives.

It is always hard to untangle Garrel from his protagonists, especially with his son Louis Garrel cast as the lead. In Dawn, the younger Garrel plays François, a somewhat immature photographer assigned to shoot Carole Weissman, a beautiful but profoundly troubled actress. Though camera-shy, she easily seduces François, initiating a tempestuous romance.

Weissman is terrible girlfriend material for a number of reasons—the most practical being her marriage to another actor she hardly knows and rarely sees. She also happens to be an alcoholic and a relentless game-player, who proceeds to torture François, constantly pushing him away, only to reel him back in. Rapidly degenerating mentally, Weissman is eventually institutionalized, where she undergoes electroshock therapy in a scene directly inspired by director Garrel’s own notorious experiences.

Weissman’s self-destructive tendencies culminate in a long dark night of the soul, but even in death François is not free of her manipulations. Engaged to another fragile (but psychologically healthier) woman, François starts seeing Weissman’s apparition, in Ophelia-like funereal dress, literally through the looking glass.

Dawn is a strange film in many ways. While it has the unsparing intimacy that marks Garrel’s oeuvre, it takes an unexpected late turn into gothic territory, capped off by a finale sure to induce double-takes. There is also a sporadic Goddard-esque randomness to the film, as when François declares his Judaism to a drunken anti-Semite in complete dramatic non-sequitur. How this revelation is meant to inform our reading of the film remains obscure.

Still, despite the occasional stylistic indulgence, Dawn is a starkly beautiful film. William Lubtchansky’s black and white cinematography is appropriately haunting, while the classical soundtrack composed by Jean-Claude Vannier and performed by jazz violinist Didier Lockwood sets a truly eerie tone, effectively amplifying the turbulent emotions on-screen.

Laura Smet’s ethereal beauty, simultaneously alluring and forbidding, perfectly fits the troubled Weissman. She is also quite scary (in more ways than one), convincingly portraying her character’s precipitous mental dissolution. Louis Garrel also delivers one of his better screen performances, bringing believable dimension to an intentionally weak, malleable character. Together, they look right but feel wrong.

Dawn is a weirdly elegant film that might even alienate some of Garrel’s admirer’s with its supernatural overtones. Yet it might be his most accessible for the same reasons. Though deemed a revival engagement by Anthology Film Archives, it will be a first run film to most New Yorkers, having previously had a very limited theatrical run, in Brooklyn. Unsettling but affecting, it screens Friday (11/20) through Sunday (11/22) at AFA.

Two by Garrel

Philippe Garrel X 2
Zeitgeist Films

It seems nearly impossible for Philippe Garrel’s characters to discuss their feelings, particularly love, without resorting to epistemological arguments. Yet the examined life is not necessarily the happiest in Garrel’s films I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar and Emergency Kisses, now available on DVD in the two-disk collection, Philippe Garrel X 2.

Though hardly a household name in America, Garrel’s art-house stock has been rising in recent years, partly due to the relatively recent theatrical release of Guitar. Inspired by the death of the director’s longtime lover Nico, the celebrated Velvet Underground vocalist, the film mirrors their tumultuous, drug-clouded ten-year relationship. As viewers first meet Gerard and Marianne, everything seems sunny for the passionate couple, enjoying an Italian holiday with his artist buddy Martin and his girlfriend. However, following a jealous outburst from Marianne, the supposedly enraptured Gerard abruptly leaves the next morning without notice.

Throughout the film, this pattern of attraction and repulsion will repeat itself. At times, their on-again-off-again affair is quite sordid, as both succumb to heroin addiction, hoarding smack from each other, while living in abject squalor. Periodically, Gerard is cleaned up and straightened out by the loving Aline, but despite his better judgment, he can never resist Marianne whenever she resurfaces in his life.

Garrel presents a somewhat less harrowing portrait of problematic love in Emergency Kisses, which he filmed two years before Guitar, perhaps because it was more of a family affair, both on and off-screen. As the portrait of Mathieu an emotionally distant filmmaker, his actress-wife Jeanne and their young son Lo, played by Garrel himself, his then wife Brigitte Sy, and their son Louis Garrel, respectively, Kisses obviously has great autobiographical significance as well.

When Mathieu casts a different actress in the role of his wife in a prospective film based on his life, it causes a deep fissure in his marriage. However, despite various resentments and infidelities, their son keeps them connected in a way Gerard and Marianne (the neglectful parents of children from separate relationships) can never be.

Kisses and Guitar share many similar elements, beyond their troubled central relationships. Both Mathieu and Gerard seek the wise counsel from more mature figures, each of whom has a certain scarred elegance. Yann Collette has a charismatic screen-presence as Gerard’s indulgent friend Martin, despite the glass eye which usually relegates him to villainous roles. Likewise, the wrinkled and weathered veteran French actor Maurice Garrel, real-life father of Philippe and a frequent mainstay of his films, appropriately plays Mathieu’s understanding father.

Both films are marked by their quiet sound, but sparingly feature effective jazz-oriented scores. In concert with Jacques Loiseleux’s black-and-white cinematography, Barney Wilen’s saxophone themes often lend Kisses a noirish vibe. It compares with the moody, impressionistic Miles Davis soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Scaffold on which Wilen also played. For Guitar, French fusion artists pianist-composer Faton Cahen and violinist Didier Lochwood, along with British avant-garde alto-player Elton Dean, perform more lush, classically-oriented themes, which sound great but at times are at odds with the tawdriness of Gerard and Marianne’s train-wreck romance.

There are moments of wince-inducing honesty in both films, but at other times Marc Cholodenko’s overly intellectualized dialogue defies credibility. Even in France, can people really talk like this? Yet, Garrel’s merciless close-ups have such emotional directness the films often feel like a voyeuristic experience.

Garrel is a fascinating filmmaker, whose work is distinguished by his patience and unrelenting frankness. He elicits some brave performances in what are clearly very personal films. (Despite Guitar’s arguably greater critical reputation, Kisses might be the more rewarding film, thanks to its intriguing father-son dynamic.) Garrel’s use of filmmaking as both a therapeutic outlet and psychological defense mechanism is explicitly explored in Philippe Garrel: Artiste, a French television documentary featuring extensive interviews with the director, which is included as a bonus feature. Altogether, Garrel X 2 is an impressive package that should further enhance Garrel’s burgeoning reputation.