La Belle Personne (The Beautiful Person)

 

 

Director Christophe Honoré

Léa Seydoux at Venice festival, 2009

Seydoux and Louis Garrel at San Sebastian, 2009

Seydoux and Garrel with their director at San Sebastian, 2009

LA BELLE PERSONNE (The Beautiful Person) – made for TV           A-                                  France  (93 mi)  2008  d: Christophe Honoré

I love you too much to let you think I can live without you.  I don’t care if you cheat on me as long as you are honest and tell me.  I don’t care if you hide me away as long as you come to find me again.  I am patient.  And while I await you I will recall your whole body.  I’m even in love with your knees.   —Martin’s secret letter to Mathias

Honoré returns us to a high school setting that couldn’t be more radically different from Laurent Cantet’s Palme D’Or winning The Class (Entre Les Murs) (2008), loosely adapting Madame de La Fayette’s 1678 novel of forbidden passions, La Princesse de Clèves, one of the first modern French novels set hundreds of years ago while offering commentary on current sexual practices and modern era standards of morality.  Honoré, author of a dozen novels, decided to adapt La Princesse de Clèves after French president Nicholas Sarkozy criticized the novel, which is required reading in French schools, declaring in a public meeting in Lyon in 2006 that there was nothing today’s generation could learn from a dusty old novel like this one, having no relevance for desk clerks, claiming he “suffered” through his youth by being forced to read it, suggesting whoever made it obligatory was “either a sadist or an idiot.”  Of course, sales of the book doubled within a year, while also generating student protests, occupying faculty buildings while reading the novel in its entirety on loudspeakers outside hundreds of government facilities across the country, even as far away as the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, as the French magazine Télérama asked a hundred writers to name their favorite books, coming in third behind Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Reflecting on a literary passage, “Never had a court had so many beautiful people,” this triggers a move from the 17th century French court of King Henri II into a contemporary Parisian high school setting, shot on location at Lycée Molière (Paris), where two enormous 19th century wooden doors are pulled open to reveal the entryway, with balconies overlooking an open courtyard, where a new student arrives, setting off a ballet of combative flirtation, as they fight and desire one another, spreading rumors, speaking behind each other’s backs, resulting in dramatic twists of fate, with teachers and students openly spying on one another, ultimately reviving a historical tale of love, courtly intrigue, infidelity, and death.  With music punctuating the performances, it becomes an elegiac teenage rapture of a dreamy yet doomed youth, expressed with an airy romanticism.  From the outset, we are immersed in the hectic energy of hallways and classrooms, where modern day kids hover around one another with good-natured ribbing and catch up on the latest gossip.  The subjects may be mathematics, Italian, or even Russian, where some students stand out with their intelligence and brash challenges to the teacher’s authority, yet over time we become more familiar with various students and teachers.  What’s apparent here is Honoré’s framing of faces in close-up, creating a stream-of-conscious montage of student’s faces, all in the same room, but each absorbed in something uniquely different from the other, creating a PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) silent era resemblance.  This actually focuses the audience’s attention on reading the faces of characters, as most are invariably hiding something from one another.  We are soon introduced to an Italian teacher, Louis Garrel as Nemours, now in his 4th film with this director, synonymous with the face of French cinema, son of director Philippe Garrel and an heir to the French New Wave’s Jean-Pierre Léaud, in particular Léaud’s character Alexandre in Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), who film critic Roger Ebert describes as follows:  “Alexandre is smart enough, but not a great intellect.  His favorite area of study is himself, but there he hasn't made much headway.  He chatters about the cinema and about life, sometimes confusing them… He spends his days in cafés, holding (but not reading) Proust… women can let a man talk endlessly about himself while they regard him like a specimen of aberrant behavior.  Women keep a man like Alexandre around, I suspect, out of curiosity about what new idiocy he will next exhibit,” The Mother And The Whore movie review (1999).  This is the character Louis Garrel has inhabited, the guy who talks feverishly to one woman while keeping his eye on another, dropping women whenever it suits him, never giving them a second thought as he’s on to his next conquest.  In the book his character is known as the dashing Duke of Nemours.

The focus of Nemours attention turns to a student in his class, Junie played by Léa Seydoux, where the specter of Anna Karina haunts her performance, a strikingly pretty girl with dark hair who appears moody and keeps largely to herself, a new girl living with her cousin who has joined mid-term following the death of her mother and is subject to mood swings, but also exhibits a liberating sense of honesty, as she doesn’t believe in keeping secrets.  This is in striking contrast to Catherine in an early screen appearance from Anaïs Demoustier, playing something of a bad ass by threatening anyone exposing her secrets, as she hides the fact that she’s cheating on her boyfriend.  Junie allows Otto, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, so good in LOVE SONGS (Les Chansons D’Amour) (2007), to sweet talk and kiss her, a quiet, sensitive guy who adores her on first sight, as does most every other guy, but Otto is so innocently pure that he’s described by another student as “a saint.”  She treats him more like a friend than a lover, as he so willingly provides whatever suits her purpose.  What we witness are plenty of pairings, where the object of one’s love is often in love with someone else, as love is often hidden or can only be expressed in secret.  In class, Nemours plays a recording of Maria Callas singing Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor, setting into play a choreography of tragic emotions which has a profound effect on Junie, suddenly aware that she’s the center of attention and the object of everyone’s desire, Léa Seydoux - La Belle Personne 2 YouTube (1:16).  This environment of love in the air resembles musical chairs, as Nemours, obsessed by her allure, instantly dumps his two girlfriends, one with a teacher colleague (Florence Perin) and the other with Catherine, wiping the slate clean, while confiding his swelling feelings of love for Junie to a fellow teacher, La Belle Personne 2008 Segment 0 x264 YouTube (2:27). But Junie is no naïve girl, like the character in the book, who despite her royal marriage suddenly swoons and falls passionately in love with the Duke of her dreams.  Instead she remains heavily guarded, despite being handed a love letter and told it was written by Nemours, thinking it was referring to her, supposedly seen falling out of his pocket, but it actually originated as an exchange between her cousin Mathias (Esteban Carnival Alegria) and his secret gay admirer Martin (Martin Siméon), an affair they kept secret which is now suddenly out in the open, causing a scandal when another student Henri (Simon Truxillo), Martin’s former lover, vindictively gets his revenge.  This is a brilliantly inventive handling of the original source material, retaining the purloined letters and eavesdropping on private conversations, while also cleverly integrating a brief appearance by actress Chiara Mastroianni, who had a starring role in Manoel de Oliveira’s LA LETTRE (1999), an adaptation of the same novel, while Jean Delannoy, aided by an adaptation written by poet Jean Cocteau, also filmed his own French-Italian version of LA PRINCESS DE CLÈVES (1961).  Discredited by American audiences as a French recreation of a Gossip Girl episode, unable to see the tight-knit complexity of Honoré’s work as a gay auteur, or the darker underlying implications of unexpected violence, yet there is an exquisitely directed display of tenderness and lyricism, where Seydoux, wonderfully expressive with very little dialogue, embodies a sense of emotional restraint in a series of events that are continually swirling out of control, like a form of combustible energy, as for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, where everyone soon finds out what’s going on behind closed doors.  Junie is ensnared in this same web of intrigue, as she’s got a safe guy who loves her, but her thoughts lie elsewhere, so she confides in Otto, who soon discovers the real object of her desire, where a fatal misunderstanding sends him into a jealous tailspin.  In an astounding scene, Otto begins singing to himself as he walks through crowded space, a device used in DANS PARIS (2006), while everyone around him is oblivious to his character or his thoughts, as if he’s invisible, until he throws himself off a balcony, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet - Comme la Pluie YouTube (3:20), dying in despair, convinced his lover has betrayed him, ending in a striking image that resembles Manet’s The Dead Toreador, The Dead Man (Manet).    

What’s remarkable in Honoré films is the consistent tone of emotional authenticity, even when using an artificial Sirkian melodramatic means to express it, such as the assaultive metal music taking the place of unspoken grief in Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard (Dix-sept fois Cécile Cassard) (2002), the hedonistic and incessant use of Oedipal sex while spewing philosophically transcendent dialogue in MA MÈRE (2004), framing characters speaking directly to the camera before veering into a reverential tribute to both Godard and Jacques Demy in the energetic French New Wave style in DANS PARIS (2006), or the clever use of original songs in a naturalistic musical that soar into the stratosphere of poetic expression in LOVE SONGS (2007).  In this film, much like the last, it’s the exquisite use of pop song culture that expresses the emotional sincerity of the teenage students, all of whom are more mature than their teacher Nemours, even in their mixed up confusion over being rejected or fooled in love, viewing love as an adventure, never knowing whether it will work out or not, where first loves are the most beautiful, while also the most painful, as nearly all the characters are tormented by their first encounter with love, with the director accentuating the restlessness brewing beneath the surface.  Their anxious emotions are real, even if covering up the catastrophe that is teenage life, literally drowning in existential angst, with everyone displaying a surprising nonchalance about student-teacher affairs, except Junie and Otto who are both devastated by its moral implications.  Honoré is deft in using music as a psychological thread throughout this film, first as background music or later as a read-aloud poem in Italian by Junie in class that turns out to be a pop song that is first read in Italian before being re-read again as it is translated back to French, Léa Seydoux - La Belle Personne 1 - YouTube (1:37), but he also uses the playing of a jukebox song or the recording of the opera, all creating a romanticized operatic atmosphere drenched in the spirit of love, exploring its essence inside and out without ever resorting to explicit sexuality.  There’s a wonderful line by aging bar owner Nicole (Chantal Neuwirth), who matter of factly confesses “I haven’t been French-kissed for 23 years,” later playing an old standard on the jukebox expressly for Junie that perfectly encapsulates what is going on, with the camera lingering on her passive expression, “She was so pretty that I didn’t dare love her,” Alain Barrière "Elle était si jolie" | Archive INA - YouTube (3:03).  There’s an interesting side story about a widowed librarian (Clotilde Hesme), who everyone assumed was quietly living alone with her grief for years on end, only to discover she had a secret lover all along, suggesting appearances are not the reality.  When Nemours obsessively turns into a stalker in pursuit of Junie, who is obviously avoiding him, unsure of herself, she agrees to talk with him, where he rushes her into a hotel room only to become a starkly realistic breakup scene where she describes what a cad he is, how she doesn’t wish to become another number in his forgotten list of lovers, so she’d rather avoid him altogether, deciding to honor Otto’s love even in death rather than disparage it, La Belle Personne YouTube (2:55).  What makes Honoré’s nuanced film memorable is the unique difficulty in adapting Madame de La Fayette’s novel, as it focuses on the inner workings of the heroine’s mind, making it difficult to exteriorize, yet Seydoux’s measured and remarkably understated tone mirrors the restraint that characterizes Lafayette’s 17th century representation of the royal court.  From an era of forced or arranged marriages to a day when women are free to speak their minds and reject interested suitors, it remains resolutely clear that despite any sexual or women’s liberation that has taken place, love still hurts in every way imaginable.  Nothing has changed that inherent fact of life.  Indescribably, this film was made for television, though there are no noticeable compromises in style or substance, with excellent camerawork from Laurent Brunet, brilliant editing from Chantal Hymans, terrific ensemble work all around, and an intriguing use of music from Alex Beaupain with songs by Nick Drake that enter the film like an unseen character.     

La Belle Personne - ENGLISH subs. - YouTube  Entire film with English subtitles (1:33:35)

One Fine Morning (Un Beau Matin)

 

Writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve

Léa Seydoux with the director

ONE FINE MORNING (Un Beau Matin)                B+                                                           France  Great Britain  Germany  (112 mi)  2022  d: Mia Hansen-Løve

Premiering at Directors’ Fortnight at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Løve describes her films as “imagination and experience meeting,” as they tend to be about women who find themselves on a journey of discovery during pivotal moments in their lives, reflective of her own personal experience, a practice she has established throughout her career with films like All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonée) (2007), Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse) (2011), Eden (2014), Things to Come (L'avenir) (2016), and Bergman Island (2021), where this story was written just before the death of her father, exploring the lasting impact of such an imprinting relationship.  Both of Hansen-Løve’s parents were philosophy professors, with her father also working as a translator, while she studied German and minored in philosophy at university, with this film establishing profound philosophical implications that mirror her own journey, yet she’s one of the few filmmakers to offer a deeply meditative portrait of humanity with such a light touch.  Producing gentle slice-of-life films, shot on 35mm by Denis Lenoir, who also shot her three previous films, this features a woman in her thirties who works as an official interpreter during a turning point in her life, having lost her husband years earlier, raising her young daughter alone in the bustling city of Paris, yet two life-changing events collide with a resounding impact, the declining health of her father, a longtime professor debilitated from a neurodegenerative disease, no longer able to care for himself (her father suffered from the same ailment), and romantic sparks from a lifelong friend who is unhappily stuck in a loveless marriage, offering sober reflections on loss and separation while simultaneously a new love develops.  Often blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, with a flair for subtle nuances and precise observation, Hansen-Løve’s films are built by establishing rhythms of life, using narrative strands to establish character, much like a short story writer, creating a naturalistic language of her own that is tender and poetic, designed to establish empathy, and can be uniquely transformative, bearing some resemblance to the meticulous detail of André Téchiné, a master technician whose elegant films are similarly actor-forward and delve into the complexities of human emotion and relationships.  There’s also a minimalist simplicity to this film that resembles the tender father-daughter relationship in Ozu’s Late Spring (Banshun) (1949), both offering a haunting glimpse of life without adding documentary detail.  In an interesting aside, the lead protagonist is a translator of the works of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss author who wrote in German, reading her published letters to Klaus Mann, one of Thomas Mann’s children, which is the subject of Mia Hansen-Løve’s next film project, something percolating for about fifteen years, developing an obsessional interest, turning into a made-for-TV miniseries (The Flame), though Hansen-Løve acknowledges she doesn’t even own a television.  This film was written with Léa Seydoux in mind, a generational French actress who typically exercises emotional restraint, which was evident early on in films like Christophe Honoré’s La Belle Personne (The Beautiful Person) (2008) and Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Épine (2010), before becoming a breakout international star after the success of Abdellatif Kechiche’s controversial Palme d’Or winning film Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013), the first to award the prize not only to the director but the two lead actresses as well.  Seydoux reported the male director’s style was overly abusive during the sex scenes, and repetitive, taking ten days to complete a lengthy sex scene, making her feel like a prostitute, so Hansen-Løve was very protective of her (Mia Hansen-Løve Denounces Hollywood's Sex Scenes), acknowledging she is an extremely shy actress, so she worked to establish a degree of safety and trust before shooting the kissing and graphic sex scenes, where it’s significant to point out that women filmmakers demonstrate a different awareness in this area, with Seydoux praising the director afterwards, insisting, “Mia has a remarkable blend of precision and sensitivity.”  While Hansen-Løve acknowledges she finds it much easier to direct women, making films exclusively with female protagonists since 2015, Seydoux has rewarded her with one of her finest performances, where the self-contained, raw emotion on display is the centerpiece of the film, allowing larger issues to fully penetrate on a deeper scale.   

Sandra Kienzler (Léa Seydoux in an unglamorous role wearing no makeup, with a short-cropped, Jean Seberg-style pixie haircut), lives with her young 8-year old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins), who still sneaks into her mother’s bed at night to snuggle, exhibiting a warm and affectionate relationship, where it’s clear they enjoy each other’s company, doing projects together, seen picking her up after school, while also making regular visits to grandparents, including the director’s own 98-year-old grandmother with all her mental faculties still intact, and despite things physically breaking down over time, she refuses to be viewed with pity, and her father Georg, played by an aging Pascal Greggory, who once appeared as an effusive talker and jealous love interest in Éric Rohmer’s PAULINE AT THE BEACH (1983).  Georg has an established reputation in academia as a renowned German literature and philosophy professor, a man who values “clarity and rigor,” but his health has taken a sharp turn for the worse, diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome, a creeping brain deterioration already affecting his ability to read and write, leaving him nearly blind, including symptoms of dementia, where he’s having a hard time living on his own, unable to complete his own thoughts, but Sandra patiently cares for him with a noticeable tenderness, often completing his sentences, but he’s already exhibiting extreme signs of forgetfulness, needing guidance for every mundane activity, like eating or going to the bathroom, while there’s a heartbreaking sequence where she has to instruct him how to open the door.  While in the park with Linn, she runs into an old friend of her husband, Clément, Melvil Poupaud, who once starred as a young heartthrob in Éric Rohmer’s A Summer's Tale (Conte d'été) (1996), having shed his boyishness yet still maintaining a middle-aged charm, as the director establishes a rhythm alternating between beautiful and sad moments, with Sandra going through a roller coaster ride of constantly shifting emotions.  Their troubled romance subverts the norm, becoming a messy and unvarnished affair filled with unpleasant twists and turns, resembling our own troublesome lives, where there’s always an unwelcome or unexpected intrusion.  His job as a chemical cosmologist takes him to the ends of the earth, having recently returned from Antarctica, studying extraterrestrial meteorite dust left around the globe, (5200 tons of meteorite dust falls to Earth every year), where the extended time away from home has put a strain on his marriage, yet they manage to joke around over who kissed the other first, igniting a torrid love affair, her own avenue of escape from the brutal reality of her father’s disease, though he yo-yo’s back and forth dividing his time between the two women, unable to break away from his wife and young son.  Adding to the distress, Sandra’s mother Françoise (Nicole Garcia), who divorced Georg ages ago but helps care for him, reveals that he can no longer live on his own and that they need to find a nursing home, a deeply depressing prospect, as it’s difficult to spend any time in these dreary facilities because patient care is not prioritized, so they are basically left on their own.  With no other options, however, he moves around through various facilities in an arduous odyssey searching for the right one, exploring public versus private, discovering beds are not readily available, revealing the shortcomings of available services, while at the same time, they have to pack up his belongings and try to figure out what to do with them, which is an emotionally exhaustive process.  This may be the most true-to-life of any of Hansen-Løve’s films, as it’s grounded in such distressing and emotionally frustrating experiences that just about everyone has to deal with, as parents grow old and infirmed, where this is about having compassion for old age, while also learning to deal with deadly diseases inevitably leading to tragic endings.  This film hides none of that, told in measured tones fluctuating between the summer and winter seasons, exposing the toll it takes on family members, ONE FINE MORNING (2022) | Official Clip YouTube (49 seconds), yet paring this traumatic experience with the Madame Bovary consequences of adultery, while reserving all moral judgement, makes this feel distinctly French.  There are joyous moments as well, like when Sandra and Clément take a break from having nonstop sex in her cloistered apartment and visit an art museum, where she blends in with Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie (Seydoux appears in a Louis Vuitton ad in the same location), or the affectionately drawn mother-daughter moment when Sandra asks Linn for a lick of her ice cream and then steals the whole cone, or the hilarious Christmas Eve family reenactment of the arrival of Santa and his reindeer to the delight of giggling children who are discreetly tucked away and listening with their ears to the door.

Hansen-Løve is known for compassionate character studies, and here they are vibrantly created, filled with personality and charm, especially Françoise, an aging 60’s radical who still thrives on disruptive and often illegal civil disobedience protests with Extinction Rebellion, adding a jolt to her personality, though Sandra at one point indicates she’s not particularly trustworthy, all of which gives her a distinctive edge.  Sandra and Clément can be exhilarating together, featuring scintillating dialogue and naturalistic sex scenes, but then they’re bogged down by issues with his family, who we never see, with the camera remaining focused upon Sandra, who is caught between hope and disappointment, staying fixated on her phone waiting for a response from him, One Fine Morning Movie Clip - I Love You (2023) YouTube (1:02).  Her job as a French-German-English interpreter takes her into formal diplomatic sessions taking place in closed-door parliamentary meetings, her profession isn’t reliant upon one culture or language, embracing a larger world sensibility, so there’s a curious cinematic reference when we see Sandra in a theater watching Brigitte Helm in the Hanns Schwarz German silent drama THE WONDERFUL LIES OF NINA PETROVNA (1929, which allows her to be seen in a silent setting.  Yet one of the most dramatically compelling sequences happens at a Memorial tribute commemorating the Normandy D-Day landing (D-Day: The Allies Invade Europe), a chilling historical reminder, and while the scene is short and compact, probably just a minute or so of screen time, the power of sacrifice still resonates with its hair-raising implications.  At the nursing home, Georg talks constantly about his girlfriend Leila (Fejria Deliba), seen only briefly, and while she visits regularly, he can be seen wandering the halls searching for her, as she’s the only one he actually remembers, having forgotten everybody else, including his daughter, who is completely devoted to him.  Sandra finds a notebook her father used to keep track of his declining health, which reminds him of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an astonishing and somewhat surreal revelation, feeling trapped in the illness, like being caught in an abyss where there is no beginning and no end.  She also identifies a rough manuscript for the memoirs he always intended to write, which she reveals to her family during a Christmas dinner, noting the title of one of the notebooks was written in German, Um einem schönen Morgen, which translates to One Fine Morning, with this film serving as a transmitted completion of that unwritten work.  Included in the director’s submitted ballot for the once per decade 2012 BFI Sight and Sound poll for greatest films, Mia Hansen-Løve, listed again on her 2022 ballot, (All voters - Sight and Sound), she includes Maurice Pialat’s The House in the Woods (La Maison des Bois) (1971), an expansive six-hour film made for French television, yet it unfolds with a literary style, using a recurring musical theme that plays at the end of each of the 7 chapter headings.  She employs a similar device here, where a recurring musical theme feels like pages turning in a book, Jan Johansson - Liksom en herdinna (Official Audio) - YouTube (2:57), borrowing this theme from Bergman’s THE TOUCH (1971), also featuring an adulterous affair, with suggestions that music carries with it the memories of those associated with it.  In similar fashion, there’s a beautiful moment where Sandra, looking at her father’s extensive library collection with complete editions of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kafka, his most prized possessions that took a lifetime to accumulate (actually filming her own father’s books), confesses “I feel closer to him around his books than when I’m around him.”  This association lingers well after death, as these memories are our way of holding onto those we cherish.  Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment occurs when she brings her father a CD player, allowing him to listen to his favorite music, yet when she plays his most beloved piece, Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 20 in A, D.959 - 2. Andantino YouTube (7:17), he recognizes it instantly, but quickly needs her to shut it off, as it’s too painful for him, written with the composer’s knowledge that his death was imminent, playing again in her head during the bus ride home.  It’s a tragic reveal, as he’s already lost his ability to read, which he valued more than anything, where all that’s left is a further descent into forgetfulness.  Charged with understated filmmaking, the subtle yet poignant power of this film offers clear insight into death and aging, yet it’s never overwrought or melodramatic, interjecting humor in the most improbable moments, offering a surprising amount of clarity that few other films can offer, making beautiful use of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in an eye-opening panoramic view of Paris from the dome lookout, ending with a film-defining song, Bill Fay - Love Will Remain (Official Audio) - YouTube (2:24).