The Auteurs

Above: Luc Moullet.

Luc Moullet is one of the very best directors to come out of the French New Wave, but in America you would be hard pressed to know it. Although like fellow New Wavers, Moullet wrote for Cahiers du cinéma, he started feature filmmaking much later, with Brigitte and Brigitte (1966), and never was able to ride the crest of visibility that Godard, Truffaut, and the others did. That hardly stopped Moullet though, who has remained prodigiously active in criticism and filmmaking to this day. A small but unbelievably rich handful of his films are available on DVD in the U.S., including his debut, along with with his Jean-Pierre Léaud relationship-Western, A Girl is a Gun (1971), and slightly later works of considerable oddity and insight, Anatomy of a Relationship (1976, and starring Moullet as himself), and The Comedy of Work (1986). From what is available, you will never find craggier, funnier, more brilliantly lo-fi and completely idiosyncratic comedies. We caught a rare Stateside screening of a new Moullet last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, Le Litre de lait (The Milky Way), and at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival we covered his new documentary feature, Land of Madness. David Phelps and I were lucky enough to be able to sit down with Mr. Moullet for an interview during the festival.  Special thanks to Andy Rector and Doug Dibbern for assisting with the interview.

***

• DANIEL KASMAN: You mentioned in your introduction at Cannes that Land of Madness was initially suggested to you by Edgar Ulmer.
  
• 
  
• LUC MOULLET: Ulmer wanted to produce films by young people, and when I saw him he asked me to write something, but Ulmer had great difficulties getting his own movies produced, so this ended up not being made.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Was it originally a documentary?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: No, it was a fiction. It was too long and too expensive. Ulmer spoke a lot without really having the power to supervise this film made by young people. I took a little part of it—10% or 5%, all about madness, this little part—and came back to the documentary way of filming, which was easier and more interesting in this case. And less costly. That gave me the idea of the title.
  
• 
  
• DAVID PHELPS: Did you know other directors from that era? I know you interviewed many, and Fuller you worked with.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes of course, because I was writing text for Cahiers du cinéma, and I was just beginning so I couldn’t write about great, great directors; Truffaut and Rivette spoke about them, wrote about them, so I had to concentrate on other directors who were a little forgotten or not yet known, such as Ulmer and Fuller.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: And now they are associated with the New Wave and Cahiers.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: I remember when Truffaut came to New York there was a question, “who are the best American directors?” And he said Edgar Ulmer and Samuel Fuller! Which in ’59 was rather provocative since the critic who asked the question may not have known Ulmer and saw very little of Fuller. At the time, people said Kazan, or Stevens, or Zinnemann.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: That’s our cinema of quality.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Now not very many people of our generation watch those films any more.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: They are underappreciated, almost, because of their reputation for being overblown.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: I’m curious about the King Vidor story you mention as an inspiration for Land of Madness. He investigated a murder?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes. It was in ’67; he was looking for a film about the death of William Desmond Taylor, an American who died of murder in 1923. Taylor was the husband of Mary Miles Minter, who was a star at the time. It appears from the inquiry made by King Vidor that Taylor’s stepmother murdered him. I don’t remember exactly what happened; I don’t know why, if Taylor was a homosexual or brutal or addicted to drugs, but it was something like that. The killer was not discovered for forty years after the murder, and Vidor discovered the truth, he made an inquest in order to direct a film about this affair. But there were too many people involved who were still living, so Vidor quit the project. He was 70 years old, he was a little out of Hollywood, and it was difficult for him to make films. He made only one short after this; but someone called Kirkpatrick found the whole story in Vidor’s garage and wrote a book called “A Cast of Killers,” which is very interesting.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: So the book is like a detective story starring King Vidor investigating a murder?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes!
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Did you have that sort of trouble, going around the countryside talking to people about crimes that involved people who were still alive?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes, of course. There is a kind of “omertà”—an idiom of Naples—a kind of code of silence of the Mafia. And it exists, or at least a similar thing, particularly in the Southern Alps. So at first it was difficult to find people who could speak. Usually I could find one; though in one case a witness didn’t want to talk so I replaced him in the film with myself.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: In the middle of the movie you say that there seems to be almost a “culture” of madness and crime in the area. I got the sense that a lot of the people you talked to enjoyed telling these horrible stories—that they seemed more like stories than local events people were personally involved in. It was almost like folklore they were relating to us.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes, in the South of France when people accept to speak, they speak easily, you can see that here in Cannes, but it’s not the same in the North.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: When you interviewed the man who chased down his wife’s assailant, it sounded like a story the man was telling about his grandfather or that he was reading from the newspaper, even though it was his own story. That’s something I liked throughout the film, this distance between people telling the facts and the actual madness underneath.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: They were witnesses, or maybe bad witnesses, or the story was something they heard about because it happened many years before—so every kind of witness may be a little treacherous, they are not perfect. But who is a perfect witness? It’s difficult to say.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Who was that woman who you talk to throughout Land of Madness, almost as a commentary on your own film, about the people and their stories? She was my favorite part of the movie.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: It was interesting to work with her, because she seems an odd woman out, a little out of life; we begin to look at her with some laughter, some irony, and we find that she is very cute! Many people who seem a little out of the way are very intelligent people.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: That seems like a subject in the film. A lot of people you interview seem crazy but are talking about how normal they are. And then we have normal people talking about how they are crazy.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Normal people are often a little crazy.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: I was very startled to see this area of France on film. The landscapes here look like many of the landscapes I see in your movies, and it occurs to me that A Girl is a Gun could have been shot in your backyard. It was interesting to see the land that exists in your fiction films take such a vivid place in your documentary.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: There are certain landscapes for fantasies like a western film and for a true story for murder and madness, which we can see here.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: There’s something really romantic about your films, which I like. They have a reputation for being austere in a way, because they deliver facts, but there’s something really romantic about the landscapes.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: It certainly is a romantic landscape, and these are ugly stories in a romantic landscape—it’s an interesting contradiction. You could say the same about Wuthering Heights, a very beautiful landscape and a certain kind of madness. I think it might be the same as in West Virginia!
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: Do you look for inspiration in films that you love?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes, of course. I wrote many films about American movies, I made a book about Vidor’s The Fountainhead, and there are some influences, some borrowings from The Fountainhead in A Girl is a Gun, from Hitchcock in Brigitte and Brigitte. In Brigitte and Brigitte there’s a girl who has some difficulties finding a secret dictionary in her closet during an exam, and this was made after the end of Strangers on a Train, looking for his lighter—things like that. There’s a borrowing from The Whispering Chorus by DeMille in Le prestige de la mort; it’s a bit of a similar story. There are many things I borrow from American cinema, always in a different context because Brigitte and Brigitte is a comedy and Strangers on a Train is a suspense film. It’s always better to take things from other genres because then nobody sees them…unless I speak to you about them! There are some borrowings from Moonfleet in my short, The Milky Way.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Can you talk a little about The Milky Way? I was lucky enough to see it at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. Was it the landscape that inspired the story for the short, or visa-versa?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: in A Letter to Three Wives, we don’t see Addie Ross, the main character of the drama.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: The Milky Way seemed to be shot on 35mm, which is very rare for a short film nowadays. We know you're an admirer of some of Godard's video work, have you ever worked with video?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: "make a film on this subject, but it will have to be in video, or bust..." Anyway, video is not truly cheaper, since I use very few meters of film. The true problem is—will the audience laugh more with film or with video? Maybe they will laugh a little more with a film, which is cleaner.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: There’s an aspect in which your documentaries are not just documentaries, there are also scripted elements.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: There is a mixture of pure documentary—small, personal—and some impressions. In Land of Madness, you can see the woman who speaks about the itinerary of the murderer who tried to drown himself but couldn’t because there was no water in the countryside, and suddenly we see a little river, ten feet of water, and everybody laughs.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: It’s also a beautiful shot.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes it was lit effectively.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: Are you watching many recent films?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes, I have seen Inland, the Algerian film by Teguia which is interesting, and Solitary Fragments from Spain by Jaime Rosales. And of course Still Life by Jia Zhangke.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: Someone told me you think Jia is the greatest filmmaker working.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes, Still Life is a great film in many ways. It is a great subject, the dam, the tragedy of a dam.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: It’s actually quite a bit like your film.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Yes. You have great masterpieces about dams, such as Wild River by Kazan. I also liked very much Pineapple Express and films by Kevin Smith, Alan Rudolph, and Rose Troche (Go Fish).
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: With your new book on The Fountainhead out and the recent retrospective in Paris, it seems like you're a bit of a celebrity.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: It is a little dangerous to be famous, because many directors begin to get big heads. After, their films are less interesting because there is some infatuation. Anthony Mann, for example, at the end had films that made big business but were far less interesting than the B-films or medium budget films he made for Universal.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: But still, I’d like to see you direct a film on the scale of The Fall of the Roman Empire.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: Would you direct an epic if you could, with thousands of people?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: No, it’s dangerous. I’ll say that the more expensive a film is, the worse off a film director can be—Cleopatra, or 55 Days of Peking, or Ten Commandments.
  
• 
  
• PHELPS: You’re like Orson Welles—as the films get less expensive, they get even more interesting.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: The more expensive, I think, the worse Welles is. Look at Kafka, it is difficult to film Kafka and his budget adds nothing to Kafka.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: You wrote a book in 1995 called Politique des acteurs—Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Cary Grant, James Stewart, which unfortunately, like much of your criticism, has not yet been translated into English. Could you talk a little bit about why you wrote the book, and what you say in it?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: Actors are very important to good authorship, especially in the comical field (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Raymond Griffith, Linder, Tati, Fields, Marx Brothers). Who remembers the official directors of their films, Clyde Bruckman, James Horne, Donald Crisp? I chose to write a book about actors because Truffaut always told me it was the most difficult thing to do, to write about actors. I liked this challenge. Before, almost nobody wrote seriously about actors.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Speaking of material unavailable in English, it is quite dismaying to see your work receive so little attention in the United States in terms of distribution. For someone unable to see most of your films, what have you been up to since the early 1970s?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: I can tell you that I worked in many of the usual genres, comedy, western, erotic film, murder film, sociologic documentary, copying (or try to copy) the career of Hawks.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: How do you see your filmmaking changing over this period?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: I don’t know what difference one can find between a film I made in 1960 and a film I directed in 2006. Maybe there are less puns.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: In the U.S. the French New Wave is almost exclusively associated with a very small group of Cahiers du cinéma critic-filmmakers—Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol. Again, due mostly to issues of distribution, access, and translation, we have seen little from other contemporaneous filmmakers and Cahiers writers such as yourself, Jacques Donoil-Valcroze, and Fereydoun Hoveyda.
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: My films have less success than those of Godard and Truffaut because I do not have their genius. I was a follower to them, a groupie, a fan. And all those who came after the Big Five of the New Wave had great difficulties during their—I mean Hanoun, Pollet, me, Eustache, Vecchiali, Straub, Rozier, Garrel. The audience had enough with the Big Five. We came too late, some months after, but it was too late.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: To my knowledge, unlike many of your Cahiers critic-filmmaker colleagues you still remain active as a critic. How do you see your criticism changing since your earlier days? Do you see a difference between the way you worked as a critic-filmmaker during the first years of your career as a moviemaker and now?
  
• 
  
• MOULLET: To write an article about a film and to do a documentary, that’s the same work—we show a reality that does exist, a film, a factory, a town. I took the same pleasure in writing the book about Vidor’s The Fountainhead and in shooting a film about Des Moiners, The Belly of America. What difference between my film criticism of 1956 and that of today? Difficult to say. I saw more films during those years. I am less interested in giving a shock to my audience. My analysis is more precise—I presume—and I am more fair with the films. Now I try to find the truth while writing my texts, and I no more try to impose a truth, a message before writing an article. The first years in criticism, we often to tried to impose aggressive judgments. After, all that is over.
  

Related Films

Land of Madness

Dir Luc Moullet

2009 France

A Girl is a Gun

Dir Luc Moullet

1971 France

Photo by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.

Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s star has been on the ascent for some time now, generally kept as a secret until 2006’s Colossal Youth’s screening at Cannes aggravated a certain kind of audience enough for us to know a new master had suddenly jumped into the limelight.  That impression, at least in the US, was confirmed in 2007 when Costa took six of his feature films—including the “Vanda” trilogy of Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2001)—and several shorts on a tour around the country.  It was an eye opening and formative event to discover this director uniquely channeling Jacques Tournuer, Ford, Ozu, Ray, and Straub-Huillet through his own sensibility and setting.  It was not just a discovery, but also an important moment for internet criticism; bloggers, particularly a younger generation, gathered around the Costa and Jacques Rivette retrospectives that toured that year, showcasing a new form of engagement and awareness of cinema in entirely new, quasi-collective, highly personal, and absolutely invigorating ways.

We all waited to see what these filmmakers would do next, after the discovery.  Costa’s path, less established, is also less certain.  Since his “purer” documentary works—many would argue his masterpieces—In Vanda’s Room and Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001), his video on Straub-Huillet doing post-production on Sicilia!, Costa has re-invested fictional elements into his recent films.  Colossal Youth, and the two shorts that followed it, Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters (both 2007) take the same setting as the Vanda films—the Fontaínha slum of Lisbon—but move in more allusive directions, suggesting fantasy.  So we were considerably caught off guard to discover that Costa’s next film was another documentary, his first in black and white since his debut O Sangue (1989), and on a French actress’ singing career to boot.  Ne change rien played in the 2009 Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, where both David Phelps and I wrote about it.  I had a chance to sit down with Costa the day after his film premiered, on the rooftop of the Palais Stéphanie.  The filmmaker already seemed weary of the festival atmosphere and process, and finishing cigarettes and espressos while squinting at a beautiful day in the French seaside town, seemed to talk of the film, shot long ago and only recently finished, as one would about a poignant but receding dream.

***

• DANIEL KASMAN: What was the difference between making Ne change rien—which is about working to make music—and Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? , which is about making a movie?
  
• 
  
• PEDRO COSTA: I could answer it another way. For the film about Danièle [Huillet] and Jean-Marie [Straub], that began as a request from Cinéma, de notre temps, and that began as a 60 minute film for the TV series in a certain format that I should more or less respect. When I prepared myself to shoot the thing, we really prepared. There was a film [Sicilia! ], there was a declaration of film production, and I was a bit afraid because I had this idea that I couldn’t to shoot Danièle and Jean-Marie shooting their film or being on a set because you can't see anything. We either had to see the work with the actors—you could probably see something there—or the editing. So I chose the editing, knowing it would be very difficult technically, just because it takes place in a dark room, and the concentration involved. And, above all, Jean-Marie and Danièle, who I knew a little bit before, but I had an image of what it could be. So I had sometimes two cameras, I had someone assisting me with the cameras; we were there always, always from 9-7, so we ended up with 100 hours or more of footage, just because I wanted to have it all. I was afraid of missing that moment.
  
• 
  
• For this project, it was a bit different, there was no film, and there is no film still.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: There is an album.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: There's an album, but there's never a moment I said to Jeanne [Balibar] or the musicians "I'm doing this to make a feature, I'm doing a documentary." It began because I knew Jeanne, apart from the fact that she's certainly the actress today I most admire. She kept inviting me to things, to a theater play, or "come see this, even if you don't like theater," that she was going to be in the studio and come spend some days; simple things. There was a moment when I said "yeah okay I'll come;" probably I didn't even say I'll bring my camera, I just arrived with my friend who does the sound and the musicians weren't surprised. And we were there as the other musicians were, the technicians. So there's this formality with Danièle and Jean-Marie that was not here. I don't want to say the work with Jeanne was lighter or more superficial, but it's a bit different than the work done from the editing of the film and especially Jean-Marie and Danièle’s methods. First, in this film, there's much more people around, even if you don't see it on screen, there's a lot of intrusion. You can feel it a bit in some moments, there's guys testing, some rock sounds, even some dispersion.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: The way the soundtrack works, you are never quite sure what the audio source is, whether it's coming from what's live on camera, or if it’s a playback loop, or if it’s off-camera.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: Exactly, there's friends visiting, there's people just sitting around. If the shots were wider or if my camera moved like in One Plus One, you could see the same thing, guys sitting around in funny hats. Of course, Jeanne and Rodolphe [Burger]—the corpus of the thing—were as concentrated and anxious as Jean-Marie and Danièle were, and for me that felt familiar. I saw the same protection. What I like about this film, and what related to Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, is the generosity they share. "If you fail, I'll fail"—very simple. Even if I don't like the projection here [in Cannes], if you see the film with a good print and good sound in a smaller theater, you'll see the eyes, which are very important. Small things in Rodolphe's attention and protection, that's very obvious. There's a link, a bond between him and the other guy, the bass guy, that's very close, almost an out-of-time bond. There's something very touching about that.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: The interaction between Jean-Marie and Danièle in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? is conversation. It's about the making of Sicilia! , but it goes far beyond that, whereas in this film, all dialog is strictly about the sound and getting the right sound, finding that tenor in construction and repetition.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: I was present for all the moments when you see Jeanne practicing the Offenbach opera, and that is probably the part of the film where I have more rushes. There you can see the same thing as between Jean-Marie and Danièle, the same severity, strictness, some very funny light tones, some erudition, there's more moments like "think of this Mozart piece," but then building the film, putting the pieces together, one part I was afraid of was charging these scenes so much, too much. It's a film about a form, I think, and it's Jeanne's form—tempo—and if I would put more of the opera or the rehearsals, it would just become…I don't know if I had the material to be that kind of film. Jeanne says it's more like Party Girl, but the gang, you know in They Live By Night when they go to the cabin in the forest and stay for four days? It's Nick Ray, it's [Robert] Siodmark. They're runaways, one has a guitar...they are running from something. It could be called The Fugitives.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Can you talk about your visual approach to the project? You shot it yourself on digital in color, and then printed it on film. I've seen digitally shot videos projected here in Cannes digitally, but I've never seen one of your digital films projected that way.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: I've done four or five films like this, and now I'm doing video, color—not HD, just regular digital—and then I do the transfer to 35mm. The problem with this film was that I wanted real 35mm, not color stock, but the real black and white negative, the silver nitrate. It's pretty expensive; five years ago you had Agfa, Kodak, Fuji, now you only have Kodak. The lab in Paris told me that in two years you couldn't do this, it's over, it's too expensive, it's too dangerous.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: It's a beautiful effect though, it reminds me of the black and white version of that high contrast digital in Godard's In Praise of Love, the vibrancy of the highs and lows. Did you light it yourself?
  
• 
  
• COSTA: I did some things, but I brought no equipment, really. I just improvised again, more like I did in In Vanda's Room, with some aluminum foil or light boards off-camera. That's one funny thing, sometimes the light is sun, you think it's a lamp but it's the sun, it's real, bright sun. That's Hollywood; I mean the good Hollywood. And sometimes it's night and you think it's the sun...so I just helped a little bit. The shine in the eyes, things like that, very, very small things. I was worried, actually, because I often have the tendency to pull back...
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: But some of the close-ups are incredible, the shot that's also in the shorter version of this film, that profile of Jeanne that looks like Dietrich-Sternberg lighting...I don't know if that was the lighting of the club she was singing at or if it was your lighting.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: That was the club lighting plus a little bit—maybe—of manipulation, but just little things, density, contrast. That's a funny shot.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Is it sync sound or was the soundtrack remixed?
  
• 
  
• COSTA: Everything's direct. There's only one shot—the one in Japan—where the sound is from elsewhere. The image is something I did in Japan, I went to a cafe in the morning where we shot the concert in Japan. I went with Nobuhiro Suwa to Naruse's grave, and this cafe faces the cemetery. The door in this shot, you can see it in the window...there's a moment where you can almost see the gate of the cemetery. I went there and saw the grave and then I went for coffee and these two women were there, and they looked at me and I looked at them. And I set the camera simply on the table, I had no tripod, they smiled, I smile—Japan! But I had to add sound in the end, so when I mixed the film, I added this very tiny, tender sound. Every time I see this shot it reminds me of Jacques Tati, I don't know why. But there's a lot to be said about this shot. I would like to do a whole film like that—not silent—but there's something there.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Naruse's favorite actress, Hideko Takamine, once said that Naruse told her that his ideal film would be one where she stars against blank white backdrops. In a way, Ne change rien reminds me of this project, bodies hanging against a minimalist abstraction.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: We tried to find something that's under the surface of this film, not even a story, there's more than that, something about fear, the light and blackness. I’m sure it's not a documentary in that sense, a documentary about work, it's just about trying to get somewhere. But that comes from Jeanne's fragility, she's a bit misplaced at the opera, she's a bit misplaced in tempo with the guys, the pros.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Did you complete this film a while ago? Because I first saw footage from it two years ago.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: We shot it a long, long time ago. The first time was a concert in 2005, I believe. And then every year I shot more, in the way I told you, I came and went. The last time I shot was late 2007. I stopped for a while, I had a short film to do, and then I came back to this, sat down with the editor. From November until March I was editing and handling the lab things.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Was Ne change rien the same as with In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth where you had to sift through hundreds of hours of footage?
  
• 
  
• COSTA: No, we had much less. I had something like 80 hours for this film, because all the concerts are just an hour and I did not want to make a concert film where you go backstage or in the bus. I just shot the moments. Even the tiny small things that are in the film when the practice is over and the team goes to prepare food or whatever, really the rush just ends there. It's like Warhol, an experimental thing where you go to the end of the tape. I had much less material.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Was there much interaction between you and the musicians? If I remember correctly, you talk to Jean-Marie in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: Yes, with Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? the beginning was difficult, I was a bit lost in how to do it, and I found the door very, very late. But in this one, no, sometimes I told Jeanne something, but she's an actress so she knows what to do, she slightly turns a bit more to the light—but just for the light, not for the mise-en-scene like "let's do a scene like this"—I just served the thing, just being there, like a public service. [laughs]
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Are you working on something now? The two shorts came after this was shot.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: The shorts came in between.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: I love those shorts especially because of their length. When you were in New York for your retrospective, you talked about wanting to set up a television station in Fontaínha and these shorts felt like episodes in a potential television series.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: I would love to do that, but it's impossible. Every day it's more impossible. But to see this idea more and more contemplated from here in Cannes it makes so much sense. I'll do another short, more a museum thing, and then I'll go back to Japan to do another short film, I don't know the idea, but it will be a film with other directors, probably Godard and Sokurov.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: From In Vanda's Room to Colossal Youth there’s a move towards more...I want to say fictional elements, but not really fictional, just a move away from specific documentary that allowed for room of mystery. The two shorts definitely continued in this vein.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: The films with my gang in Fontaínha—it's not only me—they need that "fiction," or what we call fiction, they need it badly. That's very obvious and natural, this necessity, and it explains everything. We know each other very well now, it's been a long time–Vanda, Ventura, all the boys...well they're not boys anymore. At the beginning it was like "let's do the cop," and "let's do the chase," and "okay another boring one," and finally they are proposing—as in Tarrafal. I said I have this money, what shall we do? The second day this guy came with this letter about being expelled from the country, so let's do something around that, he said let's do that story, his story. I said where should we do it and he said "not here," "let's find a place." That was the first time they said let's imagine something, let's imagine our territory. The problem is they don't have a territory; they are between the new neighborhood, a no-man's-land, and a freeway.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: But there's that amazing sequence in the forest in those two shorts, where is that?
  
• 
  
• COSTA: [Laughs] That forest is...[indicates a small square]
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Oh, so just outside the frame there's nothing?
  
• 
  
• COSTA: It's ridiculous! But they needed that, and they wanted that. So now I think I should work on that, hear them much more, and go that direction. I think it will get closer to something..."purer" is not the word, but something verbal I'm sure. They want to tell the story with four or five elements, I don't know what they are…I don't want to talk about abstraction or minimalism but we'll probably go that way. So you are right; when I started, even with Ossos, I really wanted to see something, find out, put things in relation to find out about them. But now it's free. We don't care any more about a statement.
  
• 
  
• There used to be even a critique in what we were doing, and they say we should show a bit more, about how the other half live, and I said "no, this is just me looking at you." Now I don't care and they don't care, and it's about something else. It's freer. I hope the form will be freer. The monster is that it relates much more to the past than the present. They don't care much about the present, that's just it. They don't think a second about the future, they are completely numb, and violent, and much more violent than before. They are turning their backs and it's all about the past. It's all about missing people and missing the land. That's why I want to go back now.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: That sounds like a much more integrated approach to collaboration than what you are doing in Ne change rien or the Straub-Huillet film.
  
• 
  
• COSTA: Yes, and it's also much wider, more vast. In the beginning it was Vanda, it was a girl, then it was her sister and her friend. Now everybody is Vanda.
  
• 
  
• KASMAN: Does that make Ne change rien, this kind of film, more manageable than your work in Fontaínha?
  
• 
  
• COSTA: These are really prototypes, all of them, and this was unique in that it comes from no declaration of film, for the first time, not even a "let's see" attitude. It was strange, every time I went to see Jeanne, coming with a camera. I just read a Variety critique of my film, it says it all—"Arty fans will be enchanted" or something, "normal people, run away!" It's funny, because I know when "normal" people and Variety walk out of this film—it's when people start working. It's like Godard says, when people see a tiny bit of someone working in a film, it's dead.
  

Related Films

Ne change rien

Dir Pedro Costa

2009 Portugal

In his first U.S. interview about his new war film, Inglourious Basterds, provocateur Quentin Tarantino opens up about directing Brad Pitt and that "God" comment at Cannes.

“It would be wonderful to get nice reviews,” veteran French critic Pierre Rissient, a longtime adviser to the Cannes Film Festival, told Quentin Tarantino as the reaction to Inglourious Basterds started posting. “But you’re a provocateur. Nice is not always best. You need to shake it up, say ‘fuck you.’”

The 46-year-old American auteur took some comfort in Rissient’s words as he found himself the victim of the inevitable: Cannes backlash. No film could have lived up to the hype surrounding his homage to Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and World War II movies, Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino’s fifth Cannes entry after Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction (which won the Palme d’Or), Kill Bill: Volume II, and Death Proof was doomed to fall short of overloaded expectations.

Critics described Inglourious Basterds—starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a renegade Nazi-hunting brigade in German-occupied France—as “an obese, pampered adolescent” (The Guardian), “a distinctive piece of American pop art with a Euro flavor” (Variety), “blithely neglectful of basic storytelling tropes in order to indulge his auteurist peccadillos” (Time Out New York), and “a fairytale of unusual and thoughtful daring, a return at last by Tarantino to his combustible and operatic best” (The London Times).

“This is nothing new for me,” Tarantino says, remembering some of the bad reviews he got on 1994’s Pulp Fiction, especially. But the Cannes reviews were “frustrating,” he admits, because he has always relied on character and dialogue. “Who says a playwright has too much dialogue?” he asks. “The one time I eschewed dialogue with Kill Bill: Vol. I, all the critics complained.”

And Tarantino says he has always given his movies more novelistic than cinematic structures: “Separate film chapters tell our story. I create mosaics, following this story and that story, and eventually they all converge—unless you’re dealing with Reservoir Dogs or Death Proof, which have straightforward storytelling.”

It’s been a whirlwind year for the director, who has long believed in making films slowly to stand the test of time. That is, until Death Proof, which did not benefit, he says, from too much overfiddling. So he put Inglourious Basterds on a tight schedule with a Cannes deadline.

After finishing last July the 165-page script he had been writing on and off since 1999, Tarantino obtained backing for a $70 million picture from loyal patron Harvey Weinstein and Universal Pictures, landed his most megawatt star ever, Brad Pitt, almost canceled the October shoot before he finally found the multilingual Christoph Waltz to star in a pivotal role, and stayed on schedule during 10 weeks of shooting on location in Germany. And after three months of editing, he delivered a dripping-wet print to Cannes—a place he considers “Cinema Nirvana,” where “cinema matters, it’s important”—at a running time of two hours, 27 minutes: 13 minutes less than Pulp Fiction and 19 minutes less than he needed to retain final cut.

Now the director can go back to America and give the movie a proper preview outside California—which was always the plan—and tweak the timing with “an audience pruning cut.” (The movie opens August 21.) He may even add one of several scenes left on the cutting-room floor. While Maggie Cheung as Madame Mimieux will not be restored, Tarantino will see how an additional scene plays that features sexy Irish actor Michael Fassbender as a British film-critic soldier trying to pass muster as a German officer.

Inglourious Basterds is broken into five chapters; much like Kill Bill, each is influenced by a different movie genre. The opening sequence, a two-hander between Jew hunter Colonel Landa (Waltz) and a French farmer (Denis Menochet) seeking to protect his three lovely daughters, was inspired by Leone westerns as well as the opening sequence of Heaven's Gate. (Tarantino thinks his writing in this scene tops his personal best: the Sicilian speech in True Romance.)

The second chapter, which introduces the Basterds, led by hillbilly Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt), is a “Western with World War II iconography,” Tarantino says. The third, introducing French actress Melanie Laurent as a Jew hiding at a Paris cinema, is shot in lustrous black-and-white in French New Wave style. “From Chapter Four on, it becomes like ‘60s World War II guys on a mission, like The Guns of Navarone.”

The trick to keeping Tarantino’s movies modern so that they play well going forward, he says, is to play it risky, not safe. “One thing that makes a World War II movie quaint and old-fashioned is not doing the correct languages,” he says. So four languages are spoken in the course of the movie, much of which is subtitled.

And the women in the movie are as active, fearless and competent as the men, from Laurent’s Jewish French resistance fighter to Diane Kruger’s glam German movie-star spy, modeled on Hildegard Knef. Thanks to Tarantino, says Laurent, "women can be independent in a period film."

Nor does the director care if his reflexive use of titles, musical cues from Ennio Morricone, an unidentified narrator (Samuel L. Jackson), and multiple film references are distracting for audiences. There’s no knowing what he’s going to do, from charming us with heroic, charismatic Germans like Daniel Brühl to killing off the characters we like. “I want to do a movie that pushes you in, and pulls you out,” he says.

Tarantino didn’t set out to produce a love letter to European cinema, he says: “I go where the character and scenario takes me.” With Kill Bill, “I started to write a female martial-arts revenge movie, but that’s not what came out,” he says. “With Reservoir Dogs I wanted to write the best heist film ever and you never saw the heist. With Inglourious Basterds, I enjoy the war-mission subgenre but I want to forward it, make it bigger, broader, more artistic. I don’t want to do an art film meditation either, but when it comes to the last two reels, I have to deliver the good stuff. I got to write a war film and a love letter to cinema. I’m a slave to passions. But I never called it an action movie, ever ever.”

While the movie boasts plenty of violent killing of Jews and Nazis, including closeups of head-scalping and baseball-bat bashing by Hostel writer-director Eli Roth (who calls it “kosher porn”), Tarantino saves his big action set piece for last (spoiler alert) as the world is saved by a cataclysm of flame. In this alternate reality, Tarantino says, "the power of cinema brings down the Third Reich.”

Needless to say, modesty is not Tarantino’s calling card. While he was referring to his power over his characters when he told the Cannes press conference, “I am God,” he insists that Inglourious Basterds is a mainstream movie: “I think the popular response will bear that out. I think it will be the biggest hit I have ever done.”

The Daily Beast
www.thedailybeast.com
(c) 2009 RTST, Inc.
Original article.

Related Films

Inglourious Basterds

Dir Quentin Tarantino

2009 United States

In Land of Madness:  Luc Moullet giving us a sad, funny tour of “his movie collection,” awkwardly climbing a ladder to sit, hunched over, by himself in an empty little attic with a couple film cans scattered about.

In Navidad: In a festival with far too many unmemorable “naturalistic” performances, Manuela Martelli’s subtle, heartfelt turn, mostly done with her eyes, was very refreshing.  Not so much this film’s uniformly brown color palette.

In Un Lac: Chopping logs, and the shuddering tremor of the frame as the camera catches onto the tactile activity of the action (yet not it’s materiality, or sensuality, or sense of work).

In The Time that Remains: a bit of life in this lifeless film, a frontal (as usual) shot of a small girls’ chorus, and each and every girl seems to be doing something different while they sing, looking excited or anxious or distracted or forgetful or bored or…

In Enter the Void: I’d like to say something glib and provocative like “when the camera takes on the point of view of semen traveling inside a woman,” but David Phelps will attest to the fact that the ur-generic style of club/house/micro/dub music popular in every discothèque around the world except in the States will now forever be associated with this trip of a film.   I get the urge to beatbox that nocturnal heartbeat just thinking about Noé’s intoxicating first hour submergence into the neon-psychedelic darkness and deadened allure of urban clubbing.

In Adrift:  Vincent Cassel speaking Portuguese?  Who knew?  But seriously—I found the woman Cassel has a fling with on beach vacation in Brazil quite unreal—“the American” but for some reason dressed and made up like a 1940s glamour girl.  It’s not clear if this movie takes place in the 1970s or now, but either way, the feminine anomaly is strange and striking, an unexpected and unmotivated moment of stylization.

In Drag Me to Hell:  Raimi and Raimi grounding their horror story in the pettiness of contemporary money/success hungry America. Channeling both the sub-prime mortgage crisis and Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, this film is obsessed with money and possessions and the DOOM they naturally lead to.  Bravo!

In Visage: Like the film projects initiated by the Musée d'Orsay (Hou, Hong, Assayas), Tsai’s film is tied, big rivals-style—auteurs take your sides!—to the Louvre.  Yet, only one shot in the film is from the museum proper, and the rest of it takes place in the unrecognizable back alleys, underground ducts, and industrial corridors of the famed museum.  Only Tsai seems to have flipped the project on its head, turning the non-museum parts of the museum (if they really even are part of the building!) into art.  New York MoMA, it’s time to step up to the game!  I nominate Aaron Katz.

In To Die Like a Man:  Nothing if not the impression that, with its vitality and its composure, this is the kind of movie that Pedro Almodóvar should be making.  Have no doubt that it will be Los abrazos rotos and not João Pedro Rodrigues’s film that will get programmed at film festivals around the world this year, but from what I hear of the Almodóvar, and what I’ve seen of this terrific film, that is a major injustice.

Related Films

Land of Madness

Dir Luc Moullet

2009 France

The Time That Remains

Dir Elia Suleiman

2009 Israel

Enter the Void

Dir Gaspar Noé

2009 France

Drag Me to Hell

Dir Sam Raimi

2009 United States

To Die Like a Man

Dir João Pedro Rodrigues

2009 Portugal

Though 2009 may go down as an unusually average Cannes Film Festival, its size and prestige guaranteed a wealth of films and big name filmmakers that we were all very excited to see.  Below you’ll find an index of all our coverage this year.  Enjoy!

Tarantino’s 'Biggest Hit' Ever

Cannes 2009: Favorite Moments, Final Days

Cannes 2009: Awards

Cannes 2009: Through the Looking Glass (“Visage,” Tsai)

Cannes 2009: Playtime ("Father of My Children," Hansen- Løve)

Cannes 2009: Favorite Moments, Days 6 & 7

Cannes 2009: Day 8

Cannes 2009: So far, away (details, handheld, Antichrist, and meeting Resnais)

Cannes 2009: A Time and Space Odyssey ("Enter the Void," Noé)

Cannes 2009: Portrait of a Small Town on the Eve of World War I in Germany ("White Ribbon," Haneke)

Cannes 2009: Geographic Anomalies ("Land of Madness," Moullet)

Cannes 2009: Nouvelle Spitfire ("Wild Grass," Resnais)

Cannes 2009: The Saga of a Guerilla in the Philippines ("Independencia," Martin)

Cannes 2009: Pedro Costa, Our Favorite Melancholy Romantic

Cannes 2009: Favorite Moments, Days 4 & 5

Cannes 2009: Pilgrim’s Progress (“A Prophet,” Audiard)

Cannes 2009: Day 6

Cannes 2009: Agent Provocateur ("Antichrist," von Trier)

Cannes 2009: High Midnight ("Vengeance," To)

Cannes 2009: An American Multiplex in Seoul ("Mother," Bong)

Cannes 2009: Night, I Love Thee and Thy Darkness ("Kinatay," Mendoza)

Cannes 2009: A Host of Fools ("Mother," Bong)

Cannes 2009: The Quiet Smart Aleck ("Like You Know It All," Hong)

Cannes 2009: Favorite Moments, Days 3 & 4 (with a dash of 1)

Cannes 2009: Leave Her to Hell ("Abrazos Rotos," Almodóvar)

Cannes 2009: Costa Brief ("Ne change rien," Costa)

Cannes 2009: Questionable Observation ("Politist, Adjectiv," Porumboiu)

Cannes 2009: There outta be a moonlight saving time ("Ne change rien," Costa)

Cannes 2009: Mining for Morals ("The Molly Maguires," Ritt)

Cannes 2009: Sucking Zola ("Thirst," Park)

Cannes 2009: Bodybags are Beautiful (“Air Doll,” Kore-Eda)

Cannes 2009: Day 2

Cannes 2009: Favorite Moments, Days 1 & 2

Cannes 2009: "Tetro" (Coppola)

Cannes 2009: "Embodiment of Evil" (Marins)

Cannes 2009: "Spring Fever" (Lou)

Cannes 2009: Day 1

Cannes 2009: "Up" (Doctor & Peterson)

Cannes 2009 Sneak Peak: Image of the day (and week and month)

Cannes 2009 Line-up

Tsai Ming-liang’s movies, critics noted more and more in his last few films, are founded from parallel universes, banal reality and another universe that opens up inside it. The other universe can be one of movies, of musicals from movies, of water flooding bourgeois homes, of Europe in Taiwan, or of phantoms, in What Time is it There? and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, who come back to walk and eat among the living. Almost all of Tsai’s films feature these other worlds intersecting with a reality of lovers courtships, cookings and fuckings, as the whole courtship itself often seems to be nothing more than two bodies who intersect each other in the night, fuck and say they’re in love, and move on—“you look like you come from somewhere else” Jean-Pierre Léaud tells Fanny Ardant vaguely in Visage. As Tsai’s favorite, Boschian image is of contamination-as-bursting, always sexual—the bursting of a water pipe in the kitchen, the bursting of food out of its container, or a cock’s ejaculation—one world, in Tsai, tends to literally bursts into another, as if by spontaneous generation: the inexplicable floods that come from the insides of houses, the inexplicable neck pains that come from the inside of Lee Kang-sheng’s body in The River and the unseen disease that inexplicably infects the insides of a whole city in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, the ghosts that appear as living people, the sum of their bodily functions, throughout. “Each image throbs with a latent connection,” Adrian Martin writes, “that could at any moment be made manifest—and this feeling is what raises Tsai’s cinema above the more determinist prison-structures of a Michael Haneke or a Peter Greenaway, where the isolated vectors hold tight, and the fiction only confirms their crushing, indomitable weight.” About all of Tsai’s movies concern some metaphysical phenomenon—sickness, ghosts, movie characters, and love—that manifests itself out of nowhere and nothing as a body, usually in the kitchen, to use the toilet, fuck, and eat some food.

Visage requires something like a Tsai primer, or maybe is one: the film develops in Tsai shorthand, the symbols, motifs, and even scenes of his previous films given about a shot apiece. Martin calls Tsai’s closed, scrubbed spaces, where characters enact rituals over and over like hamsters on a wheel, “communicating vessels,” but for the first time in Tsai, the spaces don’t communicate; and Visage is nearly the sum of its symbols. Where previous Tsais are based on exploring buildings that operate like organisms—a flooded apartment complex, a movie house, and so many houses and rooms—each room and each shot in Visage is nearly self-contained from the rest, and each the real-time staging of a single idea as installation piece (with the key exception of a haunted house in an indeterminate location where sound carries from one shot to another and whose architecture is laid out in pieces throughout the whole film). The ideas vary from a woman blocking her window and her mirror with black tape (two shots, about five minutes each), to a woman climbing down an elevator, to Jeanne Moreau singing the song from Jules and Jim, to a woman packing meat in a fridge, to Jean-Pierre Léaud performing Tawainese rites for the dead, to a few musical sequences in the snow, to a man making a phone call, to a model putting on make-up, to Léaud crawling inside the Louvre. There is an elaborate story—a Taiwanese director whose mother dies and haunts his apartment and of his French producer (Fanny Ardant) who goes to bury her and of the film he envisions—told entirely as visual evidence: the only proof that Léaud, the star of the film, has even gone to Tawain is that he’s burying ashes in Taiwanese, just as the only indication that Lee’s mother has died is a shot of him crying, and the only sign that Léaud has been hurt is his producer complaining about the insurance company.

Visage exists in the gaps between the scenes; what’s shown, almost exclusively, is people reacting to unseen developments and their own unseen fears and urges. The film works, or doesn’t, as symbolism and film theory executed as performance art—an idea rendered physically. The main idea, as it always is in Tsai, is of people trying to isolate themselves from parallel worlds and the parallel worlds breaking through: Rivette-ian (there are echoes of L’amour fou), and Tsai's as good as Rivette at showing people standing in rooms, doing nothing, and contemplating themselves in total terror. Mirrors are everywhere, little worlds, like films, of images which people try to block out or enter into. There is a musical both Léaud and Lee (as director) dream of. There is a real elk in a fake snow, like one of Courbet’s symbols of majestic innocence, that wanders around. There are a couple shots of reflections in the window, one as a woman naps while cars track the lines of highways intersecting below. Nathalie Baye appears out of nowhere—things always appearing out of nowhere in Tsai—from under a table to join a conversation with Jeanne Moreau and Fanny Ardant. Later the same shot is repeated, chairs empty, as Moreau sings off-screen like a ghost. An actual ghost reaches its hand into a frame to grab an apple; it puts on slippers at the smell of cooking food. Water gushes, tomato paste seeps out of a can, and the movie bursts into song, though characters contemplate singing before they do. People try to lock themselves up, go to sleep, go to Taiwan—try to escape themselves—or sing songs and look at images from Truffaut films, even at an image of Truffaut himself—as if trying, like ghosts, to recover their past lives. Visage is based entirely on these echoes, done in still life longeurs of bodies enacting rituals: incantations as they call each other, even the elk, to come back, sometimes, and sometimes just the minute process of a “body-machine” (Martin) at work covering black tape on a window or dancing a pre-choreographed dance.

Physical isolation is a given in Tsai, but unseen forces inevitably break through to connect people: the smell of food, a virus epidemic, the tacky song a girl lip sings when she dances, someone realizing they’re desperately in love. And so Visage, after two hours of near-static repetitions and parallel stories of actors trying to connect to the roles they played, a director trying to connect to his dead mother, and Jean-Pierre Léaud and Fanny Ardant trying to figure out what to do with the fact they love each other, gives way to bursts of movements, transgressions, and connections as spaces are crossed and people come together. Tsai’s minimalism is so totalizing that all it takes to suggest sex—really good sex—is a model entering the slit of a plastic drape and coming over to kiss the director, also covered in plastic, asleep, and the soundtrack of rustling plastic to suddenly come on. Léaud’s entrance below a De Vinci, through a hole in the Louvre wall, also plays as some spontaneous generation of an icon, as does the elk’s return. In Visage’s final sections, ghosts and fantasies become manifest for a moment as characters perceive each other. The actress of the Salome film everyone’s supposed to be shooting becomes Salome. Léaud becomes King Herod. And three relationships, the director’s with his mother and the model with her boyfriend and Léaud with Ardant, all intersect as people reaching for what they can’t even see and finally do. “I’d give anything to see her dance,” Léaud/Herod says of Salome; “just look at me and you’ll love me,” the model tells her boyfriend, or words to that effect, and she tapes their apartment shut from light so that with a lighter, he won’t be able to see anything else.

Whether they’re real or dreamer’s delusions hardly matters—Visage, filmed largely in the back hallways of the Louvre, takes place, like almost all of Tsai’s films, in a ghost world where people can become artworks and artworks can become real. Nothing so different from Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. The problem this time is just that the spaces and people can’t connect; the characters, Tsai’s strangers passing in the night, go back to being phantoms, unable to touch or fuck each other, but at least aware of each other there even while they drift into private fantasies realms of sleep, empty rooms, and the underworld, here shown as a sewer. There are at least moments of contact, always desperate. Formally, one shot will echo the last (a model being made-up as a painting matched with a dead elk hanging on a wall), fake snow falls on a burning pile of the dead mom’s possessions, and motifs—the water that makes one girl drift towards her lover and away, the birds in the first second and the last and a tribute to dead directors in between, the fake elk, and the food—that draw threads through the movie. More important are the moments of physical contact: the dead mother coming for food; Salome coming to kill the director in seduction; Fanny Ardant rocking Jean-Pierre Léaud back and forth and smiling as she tells him she’ll take care of him and they look into the mirror. Whether it’s real or delusion doesn’t matter when the characters don’t know themselves. In Visage, everyone, even Tsai, gets a face-off in the looking glass.

Related Films

Face

Dir Tsai Ming-liang

2009 Taiwan

All is Forgiven is the name of Mia Hansen-Løve’s first film, Doris Day’s "Que Sera Sera" ends her second as cars enter and exit Paris, and the presumption that affairs move on and whatever will be will be is a good deal of what makes the world of her films as recognizably ours (mine) as hers. In both Hansen-Løve’s films—The Father of My Children is the new one—the narrative of a relationship or a life ends, and the film goes on to see how supporting characters grow up to deal with the residue; in both, characters walk around between rooms and talk to people they meet while background conversations and games continue as one character moves onto the next and wait to be reentered into. Obviously, she’s not the first to care about life beyond the frame—of the narrative, of the image—but unlike, say, Griffith, Tati, or Renoir, whose characters are resolutely themselves despite the surrounding context, or Hou or Yang or Assayas (something of Hansen-Løve’s mentor), whose characters are struggling to be themselves against the surrounding context, Hansen-Løve’s characters can tailor themselves to a situation at hand and seize it. This is one reason why all the context at the edges counts. The panoply of particular details in The Father of My Children—characters surveying the fridge mid-conversation and turning off lights as they leave the room—isn’t just valuable evidence of real lives lived in 2009, and isn’t just larkish beauty of people amusing themselves by dancing and hooking up and swimming. For the most part, it’s also evidence of all the situations, from hunger pains to bankruptcy, that the characters have to deal with, and all the people that have to deal with them. The story is of a producer whose company is in debt, and the things he does during the day and night.

Lives are relative in these movies, as in life: situations change according to the character involved, and characters change according to the situation. Only children, in The Father of My Children, are insistently themselves, and they’re always acting: Manelle Driss, as Billie Canvel, a 6-year old, tucks her mouth and blurts her eyes as she waits to deliver lines in a play, as if suffocating them to the moment, walks funny long strides with her family by a river, and winces widely when her mom expects her to tactfully say she’d like to move. All of these gestures are as hammy as they are revealing, and as revealing as they are real—Hansen-Løve’s technique was to get the kids playing, hide behind the furniture so they wouldn’t think about her, wait a few minutes, start rolling, and to call the main actors in for the scene. The result’s probably about the best film about children and childhood there could be.

Because even though The Father of My Children isn’t about children or childhood, it is: children’s comedy inside a bubble, adults tragedy outside, even though Hansen-Løve’s children are adults, able to cope with drama and move on, while her adults are children, innocents unable to deal with the practicalities of real life, and so childish not to think of the effects they have on anyone else (she’s said she deliberately picks actors with childish features, round faces). The childishness is also their charm: "yes, yes, I killed a man," says the producer, Gregoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), as playful as his kids, when the cops take him in for speeding and he calls home to explain where he is to his family. The major question of The Father of My Children is who these people are when they aren’t playing at life, and what they feel in a world where people express their love for one other by making each other coffee. The pivotal moment of Father answers the question even as it suspends it indefinitely. Where All Is Forgiven had soul-baring arguments, Father builds off the best moment of that film, where two characters who don’t know each other take a leisurely walk, look at each other occasionally, say nothing, and it’s clear their newfound love for each other is just an ability to get along well with one another.

Father only has these moments of hidden reserve, the children aside (and counterpointed). The film flies with these little grace notes of interactions, then slows down for its best moments, Impressionistic shows of leisure, almost from Renoir or Manet, as characters at key moments relax in isolation: a young girl with her face just emerging from milky white water (an image inspired by Nostalghia), her older sister as she sits by the window and light seems to soak into her, the older sister again after a night with a boy as she orders a cappuccino at a bar, puts her head on her hand, and listens to Lee Hazelwood. In a film that watches time pass and relationships change in the most minute exchanges, these are the hinges, Hansen-Løve explains, the moments of transition that she started the film with along with the real-life story. Somehow, it’s these shots of characters doing nothing but gazing off that are the most revealing, in a film where despair lingers inside and outside but is only once seen on-screen, the single moments characters have to themselves from time and the world.

Related Films

The Father of My Children

Dir Mia Hansen-Løve

2009 Germany

In Dogtooth:  the two girls dancing.  What is it about dancing in cinema?  I think it operates under the same principle as showing people hanging out at cafes or getting drunk, there’s just something so wonderful and true about filming such things that the spontaneity and beauty of such sequences can easily surpass the shortcomings of an entire film.

In Independencia: I was planning on saying the nefarious moustache of the American soldier, but thinking back on it, I really liked the opening scene—a prelude to the mother and son’s flight into the forest—that is a group of people in the street singing, dancing, and hanging out (note the axiom above for Dogtooth) moments before the Americans invade.

In Wild Grass:  As with Antichrist, it seems hard to choose one amongst so many!  But the strangest shot in the film is of André Dussollier creepily thrusting his head into the shadows of Emmanuelle Devos’ car window, and then reaching across her body to unbuckle her before planting a deep kiss on her mouth.  They also both seem drunk.  Weird, wild stuff.

In Inglourious Basterds: Brad Pitt’s caricatured performance standing alone in the world without an equivalent, a bizarre, mostly funny idea crowbarred into a lonely, empty film.  His random idiosyncrasy places him outside the film, and turns him into an even lonelier figure.

In Nymph:  Many filmmakers shoot driving scenes outside the car, with little attention paid to the reflection of the landscape against the glass of the windows.  Some give this its due (last I can recall is Chabrol’s Flower of Evil), and some, like Ratanaruang in this film, really run with the idea and turn the collage of images—inside and out, human and landscape—into something special

In White Ribbon:  Haneke’s decision to shoot a film that takes place in 1914 in digital, which will go hand-in-hand in the future with Michael Mann’s decision to shot his 1930s film, Public Enemies, also on this plastic, artificial format.  I’m still pondering what it means to restage history digitally, but my instinct tells me the results are intuitively uncanny.

Photo by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.

Above: Mia Hansen-Løve, director of The Father of My Children.  Photo by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.

24 hours after A Brighter Summer Day (wishful titling for a film in which light lags far in the background) and still in Taiwan with Uncle Fat and Sly and all the dumb teen hoods trying to hurry adulthood, Danny Kasman and I go for the free espresso, as much for the caffeine as the espresso girls. “Wouldn’t get this in the states,” says Danny; “not in the culture.” “The class,” I say, “they’ve got in France.” “The sexism,” says Danny. “Oh yeah, it’s great.” “Yeah.” The girl smiles. As real as the cotton pastries up the block, or anything we’re watching. Cannes’ a highway exit that looks like Florida; I step from one virtual reality to another.

Time here is measured by movies; each is a way to get to the next. I meet director Mia Hansen-Løve, 28, very wan, pretty, and exhausted; what I’ll remember are her stray blue eyes and a way of saying “goodbye” that sounds relieved to be 40 minutes closer to bed. She’s got about my favorite movie in Cannes, maybe because it’s a movie where people know how to tell jokes and the kids remind me of ones I was playing with a couple months ago who wanted to feed me to alligators and would point to farmers and yell “that guy looks like the guy we were drawing moustaches on in the newspaper!”

Kids are artists: wood floors are oceans of lava where the adults go; swivel chairs are mountains; walking is still a pantomime. Hansen-Løve gets it: The Father of My Child is about artists and kids forced to see things as they are, but it’s also a film, like Cassavetes’ or Rozier’s or Mekas’, assembled from a thousand favorite gestures from her life and her actors’. They’re moments not just expressive of how people live their lives—of course people go to the fridge when they’re hungry—but of how they live their lives in relation to each other—a producer’s distracted comfort with his wife that he opens the fridge while he’s talking to her, a testament to the way this family operates and lives and communicates, in one particular instance on one particular night, well beyond the range of Politist, Adjectiv and Huacho, with their long takes of people alone eating soup meant to symbolize every night and everybody. Those characters are tools to their own lifestyle, where if Hansen-Løve shows small moments of characters doing what they feel like, it’s because these are the only moments when they can. More on the film, differently, soon.

***

For the most part, the directors here aren’t artists (by-the-definition): they don’t transform life, they pigeonhole it. Movies like Politist and Huacho treat the viewer as a tourist here for a summary of different lifestyles. Practicalities and particularities are the subject of Politist, as in Porumboiu’s first film, 12:08 to Bucharest, as in the other major films recently out of Romania, as the simplest, loftiest goals get entangled in minute procedure and wasted prep time. But these particularities are all formalized. There’s a strong sense of real life in Politist, and every moment of it funny for its pointlessness; nobody can communicate with anyone else except procedurally, which is why the couple key scenes obsess over language—nobody can express themselves in any other way, in gestures or in glances or in acts. Whether Politist mocks life reduced to rules and dead time or reduces it to rules and dead time itself is probably enough of a question to make the film a must-see: it can’t do one without the other.

Whereas Huacho, another ethnographic scrapbook of peasants cooking and napping and noting they’re getting older, affirms a tourist’s stereotypes. Where’s the old peasant I farmed next door-to a couple months ago, who forged his own sheep bells to be in tune with each other and trained his sheep to follow him, so that we’d hear him coming for coffee with a hundred chimes? Making his lead characters idiot mute aborigines, Warwick Thornton, in Samson and Delilah, offers empty capsules for audiences to insert themselves into. It’s the Malick-meets-neorealism shtick of David Gordon Green: innocent people trying to love each other and being brutalized by terrible, arbitrary things (the main girl gets kidnapped, raped, and run over by a car) amidst “ambient” shots of running water and sun flare to show the natural beauty in an overdeveloped Eden. Sound’s manipulated strangely—two characters listen to different music, but the soundtrack fades to one song—and manipulatively. Audiences loved it. And as usual, a film didn’t open up a world, old fat ladies beating the young girl when her grandma dies aside, but closed it down. The main message of Cannes, so far, is not to become a Romanian narcs officer, or a Chilean peasant, or a beatnik aborigine, especially when you can watch the movie. Stay at home, in a movie theater. In Dogtooth, a family grows up without ever leaving their house; they dream of their mother falling in the pool. And so my dreams here have been imagining Antichrist as a neorealist chase movie, and that there’d be a full Moullet retro on the Croisette.

Dogtooth is on the other side, the static movies that make bedrooms look like studios, behavior look trained, and treat characters as graphic designs (The Time that Remains a conscious Tati homage but Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void so much closer to Tati’s ant farms). For the hell of it, Danny and I split movies into two groups: crickets and sadism. Crickets, inevitably with bugs on the soundtrack on opening and closing credits and all throughout, are the ambient, realist routines about nobodies living daily life in the middle of nowhere. Bad handheld is usually a staple: where cricket-masters like Stan Brakhage (silent) and Jacques Rozier composed an image and let it shake to let the wind in, never to let the shot be self-contained, a new generation uses it to avoid composition altogether. Eastern Plays has a camera jerking to figure out how the scene should be shot; Huacho and Min Ye (by Souleymane Cissé, whose Yeelen is the opposite film) hold their cameras to upper bodies, with no sense of where people are in scenes; Samson and Delilah centers the character and wastes space at the edge of the frame. Sadism, which usually centers on a couple trying to humiliate each other through mutual temptations, or a closed family or community stuck in a house or village as demons are released, inevitably proposes that staid society was created to repress destructive, sexual urges: the old theme from Hobbes or Voltaire, Renoir or Kubrick or Buñuel. This year, it includes at least Dogtooth, Argento’s Giallo, Air Doll, Eccentricities of a Blonde, and Vincere, another rabid call for freedom from Marco Bellochio, as usual (for him) setting up forms to burst them apart in futurist and documentary interludes, and sudden spurts of red.

***

The two most interesting genre films and best comedies—Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and Luc Moullet’s Land of Madness—are works of crickets and sadism both and neither, both of them positing homicidal madness as the only means of grappling with the void, not to be confused with Enter the Void’s void, a catalogue of circular objects borrowed from Kubrick to represent birth and death and rebirth as the camera, which represents the disembodied soul of a dead drug dealer in Tokyo, dives through one and out another: manholes, ashtrays, vaginas, nipples, ova, fire pits, windows, and the heads of Japanese scum fucking his sister. Enter the Void’s one-way symbols, techno-beat movements, stunt editing (a roller coaster recalls a truck accident, though why the inside shot of a fucking dick isn’t cut with both these is a question) and retreads of 2001, Jordan Belson, and Grand Theft Auto in riffing as tackily as possible off of Scarface is too clever to count as insanity; Antichrist and Land of Madness are, occasionally, insane. Both are built from clichés: Antichrist’s over-intellectualizing husband and sex-charged wife (a mind/body split that’s the most obvious appropriation from Tarkovsky), fairytale woodlands, and word-by-word illustrations of dreams and fantasies taken to mutinous parody; Land of Madness’s endless talking heads in their kitchens telling stories of murder.

What’s easily missed is structure. Where every other film in Cannes imposes a style onto the movie that’s endured a couple of hours, Antichrist reinvents itself every few minutes, but also takes a germ of an old idea—a couple that needs each other to express their desperation—and lets it ripen to its furthest of far-flung conclusions: castration, impalement, and an irritated Willem Dafoe stuck in a hole in the ground between a bird about to eat his eyes out on one side, and his wife about to stab him in the back on the other. There’s a Night of the Hunter Loony Toons horror of narrative, form, and two lovers in constant free-fall; von Trier, spontaneous but never arbitrary, has made a movie about two people trying to make sense of their fears and hates through diagrams of “fear pyramids” and mythic constellations, that’s every bit as preposterous in its irrationality as its characters attempts to rationalize. The same goes for Land of Madness: as characters calmly discuss historical killings on one side of the screen with cloud-covered mountains behind them on the other, as Moullet shows the audience his film collection (“come with me… to my attic”) and restages a suicide attempt by sitting on the edge of a bridge, then redoes the ending of his Anatomy of a Relationship with a zoom-out to the landscape, Moullet shows himself again one of the great working Romantics (but as usual, not all of the film is like this). As in Antichrist, nature is sublime, inspires madness, and madness, then, is the only reason to live. And die. Like most of Moullet’s films, Land of Madness is an attempt to make the epic banal and the banal epic, and bring them both back again.

***

Finally, Alain Resnais’ Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass, but Folles also means mad) changed everything; it’s the one film whomever I talk to agrees is a masterpiece and the only one. At a small press conference with 12 journalists leaning in around a table, and a spry, boomerang-bent Resnais leaning back, Resnais told us that the film was inspired by Eisenstein (for the colors) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (for the comedy); that he knew he was on the right track when he saw Larry David was in Woody Allen’s new movie; that the logic of the film, as in Lewis Carroll, is largely based on puns (even English ones—the problems of a pant’s fly as a man flies a plane); that his camera imitates a plane; that he’s never seen The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which at the center of the film has almost the same ending as Resnais’ film; that Leo McCarey understood details better than anyone; that he and Andre Bazin were good friends, though at first he didn’t have much respect for Bazin, who never watched any movies; that at 18 in Provence, he argued with his friends whether cinema was an art form, since it can only show reality instead of interpreting it (as, contra Bazin, his friends insisted art must), and that he defended himself with the Kuleshov effect and invocations of the editing of Pudovkin and Lubitsch;  that Abel Gance or von Stroheim would probably be thrilled by the possibilities of TV series like The Sopranos; that he’s read his films are about memory, but that’s not true; that they’re really about imagination (“but that includes a bit of memory, too”); that he doesn’t distinguish between a real apple and an apple painted by Cezanne (all his movies in a line?), but that he might prefer to eat the real apple, and might prefer to keep Cezanne’s.

Related Films

The Father of My Children

Dir Mia Hansen-Løve

2009 Germany

The only avant-garde film in Cannes’ Competition is Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, which picks up the gauntlet thrown down by the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer of an endlessly malleable cinema of acid-trip colors and plastic gymnastics and runs with it to endless, forceful, and nihilistic results.  The problem the Wachowskis couldn’t solve was perspective—how to justify in their story what they were showing visually.  That film took risks, but could neither explain why, nor push those risk far enough due to a reliance on Hollywood restrictions of story and content. Noé, the man behind Irreversible, has no such problems.  Springing from ideas explored in video games from the past ten years and by Stanley Kubrick (stealing from 2001 wholesale but also brilliantly pursuing and exploring The Shining), Enter the Void literally takes a first-person view of its protagonist—a heavily tripping American drug dealer (Nathaniel Brown) living in Tokyo—until he dies and his vision is freed from his body, which proceeds to fly around the city following what happens to his corpse and to his beloved sister (Paz de la Huerta).

Noé shoots Enter the Void under the illusion the entire film is one long take that segues between points of view: the first-person, seen-through-the-eyes of view of the living boy; a third-person, over-the-shoulder view of the boy’s life seen in flashbacks; and the hyper-third-person, God’s eye view of the boy’s floating consciousness.  That last one takes up most of the film and is the most structurally interesting, as Noé suggests an entire elimination of editing in his film by camera movement.  Instead of cutting between sequential events, the camera cranes out of a room and them swoops over Tokyo, passing though other buildings and rooms before landing in the next scene.  If time has passed between one scene and the next, instead of literally transversing physical space Noé’s camera—again, the dead boy’s view point—achieves a metaphysical ability, plunging into lights and traveling through a psychedelic ether to emerge, on the other side, some time and space later.  These transitions may grow tedious as this nearly three-hour movie goes on and one realizes every time we have to change scenes we literally have to travel between all this space and time, but the literal visualization of what happens between an edit is unexpectedly like watching film theory come to life.  More than anything else, Enter the Void is indeed an experiment in visualization, of taking conventional ideas of focalization in dramatic cinema—what perspective a story is told from—which usually lurk quasi-invisibility under the surface of storytelling, and flips the emphasis on its head.  Instead of seeing a story visualized, we see the visualization of a story.

If I haven’t talked much about this story it’s because there isn’t much of one.  Enter the Void takes place in a nocturnal world of drug trips, heavy bass house music, strip clubs and love hotels, and an extreme heightening of the most clichéd visual trope of Japanese cities, florescent neon.  It is a grimly vacant world, a place evacuated of characters, of morality, of sentimentality, of drama.  There is nothing to care about, except the visual splendor, invention, and ideas that move through this emptiness.  While Noé grossly missteps in reaching for 2001’s stars of grand structuralist explorations of birth, life, and death, Enter the Void is a vision of a kind of mainstream post-mainstream film that knowingly eliminates all that might be poignant about cinema beyond aesthetics.  And aesthetics are all that remain: the slickly uncomfortable flow of the false long takes that walk down streets and stairs, plunge into throbbing clubs, move through characters heads, take on the point of view of semen—all are ideas turned into moving images, audacious but lifeless, vibrant and morose.

Related Films

Enter the Void

Dir Gaspar Noé

2009 France

In a Competition line-up that is intentionally overwhelmed by intentionally controversial cinema (Tarantino, Noé, Park, von Trier), Michael Haneke shows them all up by making a respectable picture.  White Ribbon is more like a Western or an American television series than anything else, which is what makes it so much more audacious.  Simply, it deals with community.  It is a small village community bound to the estate of a local land-owning baron, and it takes place right before the First World War.   But the setting seems arbitrary; Haneke is dealing with his perennial themes of oppression, repression, violence, and hypocrisy in bourgeois families, and whether this all comes in black and white in the first half of the previous century or color in our current one, society remains the same, and so does Haneke’s incision.

White Ribbon’s boldness comes from showing a group of this society rather than a single family (Caché) or disconnected individuals (Code Unknown); the repetition of cruel patriarchs, exploitation, and silence reigns not among one but among all. Haneke, in this film that feels sprawling and restrained enough to be based on an old novel (it’s actually an original screenplay), conjures an atmosphere similar to Bela Tarr’s Satantango, of the grave, spare tight spaces of family houses and local gatherings that confine and bear down on the innocent and the guilty alike.  Stark digital photography eliminates subtlety of lighting, instead leaving only true dark or blinding white tones, where shimmering wheat fields and the empty spaces between houses in the small village cut unfriendly geometric space across the frame, and at night the insides and outsides of the village can be lit only by candles and torches.  It is a cold world, but one where children visit each other’s houses, the village’s teacher courts the baron’s nanny, and he, the doctor, and the parson all make house calls.  The community exists, but does not feel.

Weaving its way through this setting is paranoia, for violent and unexplained crimes lashing out at both the children and the adults, the poor and the rich of the community begin with White Ribbon’s first shot and continue unabated and unsolved.  A doctor’s horse is tripped, a local disabled boy is beaten, a barn is set on fire: all serve to continually heighten a sense of ambient anxiety around and within this group that lives together but never seems close, never relate like humans.  Where another film might make dull social-psychology observations of cause-and-effect (beat a boy and he might torch a barn), this one is subsumed by the idea of a town organically manifesting terror through its quietly unending unhappiness.   As in Dostoyevsky’s Demons, the hint of a conspiracy behind the scenes causing horrible disturbances paradoxically gives a more concrete sense of communal activity than the barren visible relations between people of the town.   It is in granting so much pain and power to a community, to a group of people—and especially the town’s children—seem and unseen alike that White Ribbon strikes as something new brought to the cinema screen, or, perhaps more accurately, something old reinvested with some of its old power.

Related Films

The White Ribbon

Dir Michael Haneke

2009 Germany

Luc Moullet's juts into the frame pointing out the southern Alps on a map of France, and tacks, labels, and a rubber band are secured be even more specific, carving out a parallelogram of bloodbaths and insanity in Moullet’s new documentary, Land of Madness.  A playful gravity inflects Moullet’s half-romantic, half-appalled investigations into the shocking number of incidents of madness and murder in the region, where the director himself has a family history.  Interviewees talk of local murder and eccentricities leading to entire families being wiped out like they are passing down folklore from centuries ago, and Moullet hints that the locale of hilly, lonely hamlets, villages and small towns may in fact feature a culture of madness, a genetic predisposition that travels not just through blood but through stories.  This may or may not actually be true—Moullet, a too-often unheralded member of the French New Wave and spectacular critic for Cahiers du cinema, has such a deadpan touch it is a challenge to know what is a fact and what is false.  Regardless, if this culture of lunacy does not exist, Land of Madness calls it into being, tracing the geography, connecting the towns with the camera (panning from one village to another, one crime to the next), placing its interviewees in their own malformed landscapes, desolate, romantic, and expressionistic.  By the end, in true expressionist fashion, Land of Madness takes on its own particular quality of schizophrenia, seeing a twinkling, mirthfully droll humor in these stories—featuring plenty of speculative motives and vagueness—catching onto a madness of the cinema for the mad, for extremity of people, of landscapes, of the history of crime and passion.  No one is without some folly, and, in appropriate fashion, even the film's cineaste is mad by the film's end.

Related Films

Land of Madness

Dir Luc Moullet

2009 France

Some may remember the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for the ephemeral brouhaha of Antichrist, but time will be most understanding of all to Wild Grass, the new masterpiece by Alain Resnais.  It has breathed life not just into the festival but into cinema itself, a true, effervescent delight as sad, hilarious, and wonderful as can be imagined, which is exactly the point.  It is the ultimate Resnais film, an entire story, an entire cast of characters, and entire candy-colored film world all pitched as speculation.  Maybe.  If.  Perhaps.  It could be. Why not?

Above all a dance, a dream of sadness and a wish for fantasy, a pickpocketed wallet draws a forlorn married man (André Dussollier) to a lonely unmarried woman (Sabine Azéma), the possibilities of romance flitting between the chance that chance has put two strangers in strange contact with one another.  It is the most melancholy Hitchcock film, the wise, post-irony comedy he never made, a thriller cum romance cum elegy with the bravura whip-pans, crane shots, and crash zooms of a De Palma film, told (with a wink) with the humor of the 1930s and the insight of an 86 year old master.  It is a menagerie of all past Resnais dove-tailing through the branching possibilities of fiction, imagination and possibility opening the void before us, and filling it with equal parts horror and delight.

Our hero is a killer (perhaps), a philanderer (could be), a happily married man (why not?), a fiction maker (definitely); in short, like the rest of us, he is a what if kind of guy. Dussollier, in an extraordinary performance that suggests a maniac as much as it does a lonely romantic, stalks Azéma through letters and messages, forcing on her a fantasy if not of his mind, than of the film's.  Narrated by an anonymous man with access to everyone's thoughts and an eventual part to play in this film fogged over with a haze that blurs the boundaries between the darkness and the light, tragedy and comedy, Wild Grass roves and grows from flight.  Flight not just of our wallet woman's Sundays spent at the aerodrome, but flights of fancy above all else, swathing the world an artificial neon-tinged miasma that must be a dream, one that feels like silks running through your fingers and looks like dissolved satin.  This look—also to be found in the jukebox insides of Private Fears in Public Places—equates all things, this auteurs' instrumental explorations of time and memory taken the Nth degree, where anything can happen in a mad, sad, deliciously malleable world vacated by our old, stolid understandings of time's passage, of events’ linearity, our consciousness' limits, and the separation of fiction and life.

It could be the most generous film ever made, since anything is possible, and that possibility is as joyous in its romantic whimsy as it is a mournful in the complete uncertainty of every moment and sensation.  And to embrace these sides of life's equation—and in equal parts!—one simply stands in awe not of Resnais' understanding but of his realization.