Set Me Free (Emporte-moi)

 

Director Léa Pool

SET ME FREE (Emporte-moi)                 A                                                                         Canada  France  Switzerland  (95 mi)  1999  d: Léa Pool

I think my movies deal with what’s difficult, missing, unsettled.  There’s no point in making films about uncomplicated matters.  The feminine presence in my films is always personified by the mother.  A father may be there, but he always plays a relatively secondary role.  Basically, he doesn’t add anything special on a creative level.  My mother’s very absence has become the almost inexhaustible theme of my work.              —Léa Pool

Léa Pool is one of the more distinctive Canadian filmmakers, marked by her own experience as a Swiss immigrant, making introspective films that focus on intimate emotions, exploring themes of love and exile, where her female characters are stripped of stereotypes.  Born to a Swiss Catholic mother and a Polish Jewish father who fled the Nazi’s in Poland and settled in Switzerland during the war, emigrating to Canada at the age of 25 where she studied communications at the Université du Québec à Montréal, switching to filmmaking after taking an editing class, experimenting with various media, including short films, documentaries, and television.  Influenced by European filmmakers Chantal Akerman and Robert Bresson, as well as writer-turned-director Marguerite Duras, Pool’s films are characterized by slow and fragmented narratives, intensely personal expressions of emotional turmoil, where this film specifically suggests cinema is a mixed media montage, using movie clips, musical selections, close-ups, and lyrical passages that include lesbian eroticism in a young woman’s coming-of-age search for expression and identity.  Written by three women, Pool, Nancy Huston, and Monique H. Messier, though Pool was sued by writer/director Isabelle Raynaud for plagiarism due to similarities in the material, and was ordered to pay $40,000 to Ms. Raynault, while also adding her name to the credits, though it largely reflects Pool’s own family experience, particularly the difficulty many experience in embracing new national identities.  Nevertheless, this deftly reflects a woman’s vision, as the director, producer, screenwriters, and cinematographer are all women.  Set in Montréal in 1963, Hanna (Karine Vanasse) is a 13-year-old tomboyish girl just entering puberty, where the turbulent nature of her parent’s unmarried relationship can be emotionally abusive, keeping her at a distance, with an older brother Paul (Alexandre Mérineau), with whom she has a close yet ambiguous relationship, yet she is especially close with her Catholic mother (Pascale Bussières), who is delicate and fragile, while her perennially unemployed father (Predrag “Miki” Manojlović) is a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi’s and spends his time working on unpublished poetry, where it’s noticeable that there are no relatives on his side of the family, a void left from the Holocaust.  Hannah refuses to be categorized as Christian or Catholic, claiming Judaism is passed through the mother, while for Catholics it’s the father, but she still faces vile anti-Semitism at her school.  Her father lost his nationality during the war and has never embraced either the Québécois or Canadian identity since then.  This sense of rootlessness is at the heart of the film, living in an economically deprived part of the city, where they struggle to pay their bills, with her mother working long hours at a sweatshop sewing factory, then typing endless revisions of her husband’s dictated poetry in the evenings, which is how he defines himself, leaving her depressive and suicidal, exhausted by the physical and emotional toll of their tortuous love/hate relationship, further exasperated by his angry, over-controlling nature, unable to see his own callousness, as he slaps her around, taking out his frustrations on her, which tears the family apart.  “There are very few films about the second generation of the Holocaust—who are the children of the survivors,” Pool says.  “You carry his pain as a child, his suffering, and his madness too.”  There are depths to this film not often found in coming-of-age stories, infused with moments of unsparing cruelty that recall Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), yet told with an impressionistic flair and artistic grace. 

But the beauty of the film lies in the brilliance of her escape into movies, as she obsessively watches Jean-Luc Godard’s My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie: Film en douze tableaux) (1962), drawn by the allure of feminine mystique in the ill-fated heroine, Anna Karina, who she tries to emulate, as she holds a cigarette like her, enamored by the liberated way she speaks and dances, exuding confidence and an air of sophisticated nonchalance that girls her age simply don’t have.  Beautifully edited by Michel Arcand, who edited seven films by Pool, mixing various styles together, including clips of Godard’s film that are like a love letter to cinema (exactly as Godard intended) skillfully interwoven into the narrative, accentuating a musical sequence where Hanna shimmies just like Karina, Emporte-moi (1999 Léa Pool) YouTube (1:28), with Godard’s film actually infusing a refreshing New Wave energy into the film, while also instilling gravity into her character, where it’s essential she follow Karina’s example and learn to become responsible for living her own life.  The Swiss-Canadian filmmaker gives thanks in the end credits for the use of the clips to Godard, her favorite filmmaker who made his home in Switzerland, which is a small country, sharing the same sound editor, François Musy, writing a hand-written request, to which he responded, a note she still keeps, “Dear Léa, Do what you want. — Godard.”  It’s a remarkable offering that he didn’t allow others, having an unmistakable impact on this film.  Hanna projects her obsession for Karina onto her teacher (Nancy Huston, one of the screenwriters), who bears a strange resemblance, developing into a fantasized crush, while also taking romantic interest in another girl, Laura (Charlotte Christeler), Emporte-moi (1999 Léa Pool) YouTube (1:58), with both of them helping her navigate her way through the tricky aspects of adolescence.  The skyline of the city of Montréal is a backdrop to the film, viewed as a place of transition, authentically capturing some of the complexity and difficulties of becoming an adult in the 1960’s.  Yet it begins in the rural countryside of Québec where Hanna is spending her summer vacation with her overly strict grandparents, spending the sunny days swimming in the lake, yet when her father phones at dinner time, her grandparents immediately grow testy, claiming that meeting him was the worst thing in the world for her mother, accusing him of being a no-good, out-of-work communist, but what they really hate is that he’s Jewish.  Such things were said in the early 60’s, but it’s a reflection of the dysfunctional family dynamic, mirrored by recurring scenes of Hanna sinking underwater, seemingly weightless, images that appear like a leitmotif throughout the film.  Something must be said for the innovative musical selections, featuring plenty of rock ‘n’ roll, like Inez and Charlie Foxx - "Mockingbird" (1963) - YouTube (2:35), Ben E. King - Stand By Me - YouTube (2:57), Dion - Runaround Sue (HD) YouTube (2:51), while also incorporating the atmospheric, mood-inspiring cello music of David Darling and the avant garde jazz sax of Jan Garbarek, though the original music was written by Robyn Schulkowsky.  One thing this film features, which you never see today, is kids sitting around and just “listening” to music.

Coming on the heels of Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål) (1998), a coming-of-age same-sex romance that captures all the cruel complications of being a teenager, much of it growing out of the insecurity of the age, Hanna is at times tender yet also openly rebellious in this quietly devastating film, possessing a powerful emotional resonance, set in a precise historical context, the Quiet Revolution, a period of unbridled economic and social development in Québec.  Beautifully shot by Jeanne Lapoirie on 35mm, this is a simple but lyrically conveyed story, deploying surreal montages and underwater dreamlike sequences to reflect Hanna’s mental confusion and sensory overload.  By concentrating on same-sex relationships throughout her career, Pool, who is openly lesbian, establishes a personal connection, where themes in her own life appear in her work, demonstrating an effort to transcend conventional categories of identity, creating a universality more reminiscent of European arthouse cinema.  Yet in this film a love triangle is problematic, as not only is Hanna attracted to Laura, but so is her brother, who quickly starts dating her, creating both same-sex and incestuous desires, perfectly expressed in a kissing game, and a night together in the same bed, yet these conflicting feelings are not anchored in any specific identity, remaining elusively outside the realm of convention.  Same-sex attraction can also be understood as a compensation for insufficient or altogether absent motherly love, as Hanna is continually searching for a source of affection, a common theme throughout Pool’s films, “I believe that femininity is built on identification with one’s fellow man.  The mother first.  When she is not there, the little girls find substitute figures.  That’s what my film is about.”  Her parents are ghostly figures, as they retreat and disappear as often as they make their presence, with her mother suffering emotional difficulties, prone to overdosing, where she’s taken to a Catholic sanitarium at one point after a failed suicide attempt, remaining nonresponsive to her daughter’s pleas to talk, while her father’s combustible anger sends her fleeing in disgust, sleeping on the streets, emulating Karina’s work as a prostitute, which ends badly, only to turn up on her teacher’s door one morning, where she urges Hanna to find her own voice, lending her a Super 8 camera to use over the summer, where the impressionistic imagery serves as the genesis that would later emerge in the director’s own career.  Throughout the film, Hanna has been trying to get close to her mother, to have her be a presence in her life, with no success, but with a camera she’s finally able to bring her into her life.  An exploration of identity and exile, as well as her Jewish heritage and sexuality, the film is dedicated to Pool’s own mother and to her daughter, ending with Hanna accompanying herself on the guitar with a song Brigitte Bardot sings in Louis Malle’s A VERY PRIVATE AFFAIR (VIE PRIVÉE) (1962), Brigitte Bardot singing Sidonie 1962 YouTube (1:02), which plays out over the end credits.  Interestingly, the film was released in the United States on a single screen in New York, receiving a wider release at film festivals in fifteen countries, where it was awarded Best Screenplay at the Chicago Film Festival, while also winning the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin.  Made during a time when there weren’t many female directors, Pool acknowledges, “I think what makes it difficult is that we have now 100 years of the history of cinema that was completely done my men.  When we arrive with our scripts and our imaginations, they think we are weird.  They don’t think it’s a script.  It doesn’t look like a script or it’s too different or there isn’t enough action and they don’t know what to do.”

After Yang

Writer/director/editor Kogonada

AFTER YANG          B                                                                                                                USA  (96 mi)  2021  ‘Scope  d: Kogonada

I don’t mind if there isn’t anything in the end.             —Yang (Justin H. Min)

A somewhat confusing yet immaculately produced new work by Korean-American film essayist turned director Kogonada, which is about as far removed as possible from the lyrical naturalism of 2017 Top Ten List #5 Columbus, failing miserably at the box office, released at the height of the Covid pandemic when movie theaters were largely empty.  Based on Alexander Weinstein’s short story, Saying Goodbye to Yang, a collection of science fiction stories from his 2016 book Children of the New World, what jumpstarted the idea is something we’ve all been victim of at some point in time, that deafening moment when our computer died, taking with it years of contacts and creative output, instantly cut off from the outside world, when all suddenly goes silent.  It’s a rare feeling, as if left on an island, when life strangely appears quite different.  You might even say it feels like a death in the family.  Written about the same time that people were getting iPhones, expressing how much they loved them, becoming invested and attached to something they don’t really understand, where one gets the sense that people were all starting to forge this very deep emotional connection with technology.  Anyone who grew up watching people stare for hours at TV screens, constantly warned of the dangers this poses for children, can identify with the obsessional nature of people glued to this smaller screen that anyone can carry around in their pocket, with so many kids unable to part with their phones in school, where there is a looming question about our overreliance on technology.  Originally screening at Un Certain Regard in the Covid-delayed Cannes Festival in 2021, before screening again six months later at Sundance in January 2022, where it won the Alfred P. Sloan science award, it feels like a pandemic film, written and edited by Kogonada, shot in ‘Scope by Benjamin Loeb, appearing overly dark and somber, exploring a virtual reality existence, yet the dialogue is soft and meditative, exuding gentleness and a quiet introspection, with a seemingly joyless yet probing message of sadness that uses artificial intelligence to question human existence.  Posing big existential questions, many that were asked fifty years ago by the sci-fi android classic written by Philip K. Dick in 1968, (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), or before that in the 1942 classic I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov that forever changed the world’s perception of artificial intelligence (A.I.), the characters seem to drift through this film in a sluggish melancholy, where the overall sense of detachment can feel overly oppressive, reminiscent of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, like The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), which also featured Colin Farrell.  However there’s also a mesmerizing sense of wonderment in the spectacular use of location, the Eichler House on the outskirts of New York City (East Coast Eichler Home by Jones and Emmons), with its glass windows, where the lavish designer home set decoration by Joanne Ling and production design by Alexandra Schaller are nothing less than stunning, where the East Asian influence is evident, exuding a Zen tranquility.  It’s a strange tale taking place somewhere between 20 to 30 years in the future, with minimal clues provided, following a young mixed race, middle-class couple whose robotic “technosapian” member Yang (Justin H. Min) has suddenly gone dead, forcing the family to come to terms with an irreparable malfunction, becoming an elegiac study of loss and alienation, evolving into a meditative and melancholic inquiry into what it means to be human, looking inward, exploring memories that make life worth living, while at the same time becoming an allegory for the Asian-American experience. 

Existing somewhere in the same android universe as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), and Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime (2017), where artificial life forms intersect with human existence, the most unique twist, however, may come from the film’s resemblance to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (Wandafuru raifu) (1998), where memories can be turned on and off by command through a visualization of cyberspace, opening up doors to a virtual reality universe.  A photography sequence leads into an enthralling, high-energy dance number playing through the opening credits that offers a glimpse of the cast, After Yang (2021) title sequence YouTube (3:37), as Kyra (black actress Jodie Turner-Smith) and Jake (Colin Farrell) are two working parents using a “cultural techno,” or refurbished android Yang to help familiarize their adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) with her native Chinese culture, using him in the role of big brother, babysitter, and storehouse of cultural knowledge all in one, with hopes of connecting Mika with her heritage by providing “Chinese fun facts.”  But Yang suddenly stops working, leaving Mika emotionally devastated, as she’s actually much closer to Yang than her more distant parents.  Largely told through Jake, who is worn down and emotionally detached, seemingly going through the motions, avoiding his sense of paternal responsibility, allowing Yang to intervene in his behalf, but when Yang shuts down, he mostly seems inconvenienced, viewing this as just another problem he has to deal with, already feeling overburdened, yet when we see him working in his artisanal tea shop, there are no customers, as he’s losing business rapidly over a failure to convert to the more popular “tea crystals,” deluding himself into believing he’s always busy.  Not only does he have to figure out how to turn Yang back on, but also explain to his daughter why he is missing.  While he’s not that emotionally invested with Yang, what really stresses him out is how to carry out his new responsibilities, something he’s completely unfamiliar with, while the more scientifically rational Kyra has a sensible view, thinking they’ve been overly reliant upon Yang, hoping this may bring them closer together as a family.  No longer under warranty, repair is an expensive proposition, as the original business that sold Yang is gone, with companies instead offering to recycle him, like an older-model smartphone, discovering a Kafkaesque labyrinth of corporate disinterest where everything is disposable, so Jake turns to an underground black market repairman named Russ (Ritchie Coster), an eccentric fringe character who illegally breaks into Yang’s core, reporting he can’t be fixed, while also discovering what may be a malicious surveillance device, adding a conspiracy aspect of Big Brother paranoia, with weird elements of racism creeping in.  Out of a sense of desperation, Jake takes Yang to the Museum of Technology, where Cleo (Sarita Choudhury), the museum curator and A.I. historian, explains that what he discovered is not a surveillance mechanism, but Yang’s database of recorded memories, opening up a flood of new information that Jake accesses through virtual reality glasses, plunging into the unexplored realms of Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt)  (1991), which accentuates the technological visualization of dreams, where brainwaves are sculpted into a new kind of cinematic awareness, plunging into the depths of the subconsciousness, creating a kaleidoscope of intersecting forms and shapes and colors.  As Kogonada carefully weaves between the present and the past, memories in this film evoke a time-traveling aura moving back and forth in time, changing with each human host, who recalibrates them in their own unique way. 

By shifting the focus onto Yang’s memories, the film accentuates a different journey, expressed through a first person perspective, where the formalized cyberspace aesthetic is given a breathtaking presentation, largely attributed to visual effects artist Raoul Marx who works with Antibody, Yang's Memories Scene from AFTER YANG YouTube (5:19).  The imagery, combined with the memories Yang chose to keep, make these sequences more touching, unlocking certain mysteries about his past that were unknown to his family, taking us into unexpected places, like where Yang came from, which has a way of humanizing him.  Jake discovers Yang’s romantic interest with an enigmatic young woman at the center of his memories named Ada (Hayley Lu Richardson, who literally breathes life into this film), something no one even knew was even possible, adding another layer of human incomprehension, which only deepens the mystery.  Tracking her down from Yang’s memories, Jake tries to fathom who he really was, wondering whether he felt slighted by his limitations, with Ada (a human clone), already upset at his loss, adding bluntly, “That’s such a human thing to ask.  We always assume that other beings would want to be human.  What’s so great about being human?”  Yang couldn’t know what it is to be human, but he developed a meaningful sense of connection, to moments, people, places and things, which incites Jake’s philosophical search for meaning, confronting his own mortality, ultimately lifting him out of the dreariness of his own life.  At one point Mika, who has a habit of getting up in the middle of the night for a glass of water, surprises Jake watching Yang’s memories, and asks, “Are you watching a film?”  When he replies that he is, not only is Jake having a personal and epiphanic experience, but by watching the film, so are we.  There’s a discussion between Yang and Jake about why he has such a particular fascination with tea, seen through the eyes of Yang, which captures an opening into a completely different world, expressed through spoken dialogue repeating itself, but with a different delivery, offering a slightly different perspective.  One is how Jake remembers it, but the other is Yang’s objective reality, taking a single memory but elevating it into something more dramatically impactful.  As he delves deeper into Yang’s memories, where the compositions are just stunning, he discovers an entire life lived with a previous owner, and yet another one before that when he first met the original Ada, who has gone through her own transformations, as that first owner had children, grandchildren, and eventually died of old age, After Yang (2022) - Original Ada Memory - YouTube (3:27).  These are memories that Yang refused to let go of, having a significant meaning for him that was completely undetected by either owner, with suggestions that artificial intelligence may have a consciousness.  The unraveling of these memories plays out like Tarkovsky’s MIRROR (1975), where even the verdant setting along a fence near a wood looks exactly the same, as you see the prior family playfully running along a pathway, followed by the exact same setting with the people missing, where the emptiness is starkly moving, tapping into the same territory as Kieślowski’s THREE COLORS: BLUE (1993), becoming an enduring portrait of loneliness and grief.  He’s able to see not only Yang’s life through his eyes, but also his own life through Yang’s eyes, giving him more of an appreciation for his own family.  Kyra has her own experiences with Yang, After Yang - What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly (Lao Tzu) YouTube (4:21), while this also extends to Mika, who is bullied in school for not having “real” parents, so in a “grafting scene,” Yang shows her a botanical technique of combining different roots and branches to create a new plant, as Yang attempts to explain how an extended family has their own interconnectedness, much like trees and plants in nature, which helps her come to terms with being adopted.  When she responds that some limbs are held together by tape, this is a reference to Yang’s own unnatural artificiality, yet he has a unique ability to bring this family closer together.  Pondering his own place in America’s racial landscape, Kogonada brilliantly captures this diasporic condition in Yang’s duality as a Chinese A.I. in a multiracial family.  There is a piano-centered score by Japanese composer Aska Matsumiya (ASKA), supported by the legendary Ryuichi Sakamoto, while also re-introducing a song from Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (2001), which happens to be Yang and Mika’s favorite song, an endearing part of Japanese pop culture, covered by biracial Japanese-American musician Mitski, Mitski - Glide (cover) (Official Audio) - YouTube (3:41), with the song echoing their hidden interiority, with Mika speaking an untranslated Mandarin saying her final goodbye in Yang’s empty room, a nod to that final goodbye sequence in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000).