Deception (Tromperie)

 

Director Arnaud Desplechin

Desplechin with Denis Podalydès

Desplechin on the set with Léa Seydoux

DECEPTION (Tromperie)                  B+                                                                               France (105 mi)  2021 ‘Scope  d: Arnaud Desplechin

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. […]  What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself – a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors […] that forms my repertoire.  But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one.  Nor would I want one.  I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

—Philip Roth, The Counterlife, 1986

Desplechin has always been a literary filmmaker, making a living on fast-paced, yet natural sounding dialogue, where this film is no exception, cleverly adapted from Philip Roth’s 1990 autobiographical novel, his first use of “Philip Roth” as a fictional character, coming during the decade of the Reagan/Bush years defined by the fall of the Berlin Wall, ushering in the era of the Clintons and the Internet.  Written entirely in the form of conversations, eschewing any narrative for the theatricality of straight dialogue, like a stream-of-conscious stage play, Desplechin and his recent cowriter Julie Peyr have collaborated before on 2015 Top Ten Films #7 My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse), which won a César award and Lumières award for Best Director, and the less successful psychoanalysis drama Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013).  In this film, set in London in 1987, it’s never hard to distinguish who’s speaking, dominated by the central character Philip Roth (Denis Podalydès), a middle-age American writer living in exile, describing himself as “a talk fetishist,” who is always gathering material for his next novel, gleaning information from his unhappily married female lover (Léa Seydoux), known only as the English Lover (perhaps a reference to Roth’s wife, British actress Claire Bloom), or several former flames, like Jana (Madalina Constantin), a Czech writer caught up in the insidious drama of the Cold War, Rosalie (Emmanuelle Devos), an American woman stricken with cancer (likely based on American novelist Janet Hobhouse, who died at the age of 42 from cancer), a former student from his teaching days at a university (Rebecca Marder), and his long suffering wife (Anouk Grinberg), as the studio that serves as his refuge where he writes is also the site of his affairs, mixing carnal pleasure into his profession, treasuring every word he hears, where astute listening leads to a private notebook of collected notes.  Told with chapter headings, the conversations occur before, during, and after sex, or in a restaurant, or bar, including flashbacks and advancing time lapses, and even includes an imaginary sequence where he is placed on trial by an all-female court for his overt hatred towards women, with prosecutorial suggestions that the women in his works are all vicious stereotypes.  What this attempts to unearth are the “rude truths” of daily existence, including the worldwide onslaught of anti-Semitism and his lifelong struggle of being an unapologetic Jew, with Roth becoming obsessed with observing the smallest details in his lover’s life, attuned to their most intimate thoughts, the moments of hesitation, or regret, the avalanche of painful revelations, while also maintaining an erotic fascination in the present which seems to keep the home fires burning.  All the characters seem to be in a state of flux except the writer, who has found his place, but at a price, as he feels lonely, exiled from the outside world, so he hungers for the stories these women tell and transcribes their words.  Desplechin used this Roth text in a DVD bonus of KINGS & QUEEN (2004), acting the final scene with Emmanuelle Devos, which was actually seen by the author, who encouraged him to do a cinematic adaptation of the book.    

Such an improvement on Roth’s other screen adaptations, Ewan McGregor’s American Pastoral (2016) or Robert Benton’s THE HUMAN STAIN (2003), but Isabel Coixet’s ELEGY (2008) about a 62-year-old literature professor having an affair with a 24-year-old student certainly hits the mark, becoming a fascinating mix of cultures, getting a feminine perspective from the Spanish duo of Penélope Cruz and Coixet.  Shot during the onset of the pandemic in France, with the slimmest of budgets, where the lockdown mirrors the seclusion of the writer, this film is succinctly fluid, a marvel of kinetic energy, rarely more than two people onscreen at any time, racing through the scenes like a director in the thrall of quick film shoots.  While the subject is middle age, it never grows maudlin or sentimental, exploring their lives in minute detail with a rigorous intellectual curiosity and explosive emotionality, as if eavesdropping into private realms, where both are equally fascinated by this psychological dissection, confessing the lies they tell others, or themselves, revealing the concerns they have about being perceived as weak or too strong, what they’ll tolerate or won’t, as they vent about the multiplicity of flaws in their partners, yet refuse to leave, as the English Lover declares, “The more trivial the defect the more anger it inspires.”  Gorgeously shot by Yorick Le Saux, who has previously worked with Olivier Assayas on 2014 Top Ten List #3 Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper (2016), and Non-Fiction (Doubles Vies) (2018), Claire Denis on High Life (2018), and Greta Gerwig on Little Women (2019), the lighting is especially impressive, creating a luminous private domain, which only frames and accentuates the rapidity of thought that we experience, where it has the feel of a theatrical stage play, quickly moving between scenes, where the common denominator is emotional authenticity and a lack of pretension, shot through a prism of desire, where Seydoux in particular truly excels in this regard, showing an ease of emotional restraint while expanding her astonishing range.  While she’s always had a sensuous onscreen presence, her probing self-reflective qualities are what stand out, exhibited by an intellectual curiosity balanced against her vulnerability, which are a perfect match for this writer, often seen matching wits, which is what makes her such an alluring muse, as he never tires of being with her.  While they banter about divorced friends, ruined children, and her husband who’s carrying on an extramarital liaison of his own, with a “tootsie” no less, one of the interesting aspects of exposing these personal revelations is viewers can only imagine what these women’s lives are like offscreen, as we never see any of them on their own, living in separate worlds, where they may be figments of the imagination, for all we know, only appearing in brief vignettes, like apparitions, always making reference to their actual lives, where artistic license is literally excavating the essence of who they are and what they have to say, as nothing is off limits in the creative world of fiction, which becomes a kind of utopia, where the author imagines himself, outside his novel, having a love affair with a character inside his novel.

While Philip Roth as the womanizing central protagonist is anything but a philandering hero, the film becomes an exposé on the deception of masculinity and the privilege it brings, as men have the capriciousness to have affairs, commit adultery, and otherwise stray from their empty and disappointing marriages as if it’s a God-given right, with society at large turning a blind eye and never holding them accountable, while women are held to a different standard, with Madame Bovary (originally attacked for obscenity) being the moral handbook on how society condemns women more ruthlessly than men, often turning them into something they’re not, degrading their position and stature, having committed moral sins that are overlooked in men.  This film explores that shadow existence of men, that deceitful web of desire that may as well be invisible, as these sins have been ignored throughout history and never recorded alongside the many accomplishments.  Where does this entitlement come from?  In the surreal court proceeding with the author on trial, the judge mockingly asks, “Can you explain to the court why you hate women?”  It carries with it the absurdist rendering of Kafka, whose portrait hangs on the wall of the office by Philip’s desk, where the protagonist finds himself in foreign territory, an alternate imaginary universe where he is judged accordingly on this day of reckoning, guilty of sexism, misogyny, woman abuse, slander of women, denigration of women, defamation of women, and ruthless seduction, crimes he squeamishly denies, each carrying the most severe penalties.  Pleading artistic license, that a writer uses his imagination to portray real events, just like Shakespeare, something that has been part of the human condition since the invention of language, he is guilty nonetheless, having intentionally published books that cause women suffering.  Just like politicians, artists through the years have learned to become more and more manipulative, where the underlying motive at the heart of a novel is deceit, as the writer intends to deceive the reader into believing things that may have never happened.  That is the nature of their craft.  Having affairs with the wives of his friends, carefully concealed behind a web of lies and deceit, what gall must he have to think anyone out there would be interested, yet he gets away with it due to the fierce honesty and tenderness of what he writes, seducing readers just as he seduces women.  How can that not be infuriating?  And of course it is, as that’s part of the nature of the beast.  Is this really about Philip, the women in his life, or the art of creating, as they are one and the same, blended together into a stream-of-conscious mix of cinematic imagination, where actors help to provide the clarity the story needs.  Reveling in its intimacy, this film has an unusual appeal and is a joy to watch, where Desplechin seems to have been born to film it, with ideas on how to make it gestating in his mind for over thirty years.

Sibyl

 

Director Justine Triet

Triet with actress Virginie Efira

Efira and Triet with actress Adèle Exarchopoulos

SIBYL            B                                                                                                                           France  Belgium  (100 mi)  2019 ‘Scope  d: Justine Triet

The subjectivity of her words must seem objective to you.                                                       —Igor Maleski (Gaspard Uliel)

Justine Triet is a graduate of École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, a classical and historical School of Fine Arts that mostly graduates painters, sculptors, and architects, where she discovered video editing, having made documentaries before turning to fiction, exploring the gray areas and vagueness in our lives, using subtlety, dry wit, and sensuality. Describing her movies as “self-portraits,” according to Triet in an interview with Le Monde, “I have a crazy fear of things disappearing.  I make films to freeze a moment in the present.  Films, for me, have the possibility of organizing the chaos of our existence a little.”  Accordingly, this is a fractured puzzle piece, a carefully choreographed musical chairs of rotating pieces, where Sibyl (Virginie Efira, described as “The best Belgian actress you probably don’t know” by the Flemish newspaper De Standaard) is at the center, a one-time novelist who has turned into an apparently successful Parisian psychoanalyst, but is having second thoughts, lacking any real connection to any of her patients, still devastated by the messy break-up of an earlier relationship years ago with Gabriel (Niels Schneider), ultimately leading to the birth of her first child, also reeling from the alcohol-fueled suicide of her mother, with whom she had a distant relationship, now having the unpleasant task of informing her patients that she is leaving her practice to return to her initial passion and take up writing fiction again, which causes violent outbursts for some who are not too pleased at the news.  This state of imbalance sets the tone, as this is a subtle drama about the cruelties that people, consciously and unconsciously, inflict on themselves and others, through selfishness, manipulation, self-deceptions, and half-hearted decisions, where the film is a whirlwind, blackly comic drama growing ever more exaggerated by the second, with the supposedly even-keeled Sibyl slowly losing her sense of equilibrium, discovering writer’s block even before she writes a single word.  She’s a recovering alcoholic who lives with a graciously understanding boyfriend Étienne (Paul Hamy), two young children, and her brazenly calculating sister Édith (Laure Calamy) who endlessly complains about the difficulty of being single and her lousy career prospects, eliciting Sibyl’s sympathy, yet seems to delight in deceptively undermining her more successful sister, hilariously seen teaching Sibyl’s daughter how to trigger her mother’s feelings of guilt.  Sibyl’s own therapist, Dr. Katz (Arthur Harari, the director’s partner and cowriter), recalling the evils from the diabolical, sado-masochistic lesbian Dr. Katz from Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss) (1981), thinks she’s making a bad decision, for reasons we only discover later, continually avoiding the demons of the past, as this is a tragicomic farce that delves into the intricasies of impulsive tendencies and human manipulation, exposing sexual, drug-related, and emotional addictions.  Anything but straight forward, the film takes a circuitous route through intrusive flashbacks and oblique references told out of time, where there’s always a suspenseful level of uncertainty to what we’re witnessing, never quite sure what to make of it, but Efira offers a stellar, tour de force performance that never wavers, yet borders on the edge of hysteria.  Psychoanalysis and cinema come together, blurring fiction and reality, where this exhilarating yet often confusing drama escapes any classification.  A somewhat subversive take on the modern, bourgeois woman, the title is likely a reference to the best-selling 1973 book Sybil (Sybil Dorsett, a pseudonym for Shirley Ardell Mason) that documents a patient’s multiple personality disorders, supposedly manifesting 16 different personalities, mirroring the Triet character’s erratic behavior and the changing nature of her identity, continually evolving into something new and different as the need presents itself, while Sibyl also references a prophetess in ancient Greek legend, speaking by divine inspiration on behalf of the gods, most commonly Apollo.  Neither one is ever mentioned in the film. 

Premiering at Cannes in the main competition, having already worked together with Efira in VICTORIA (2016), where she was nominated for a Best Actress César Award in France, Triet gets into the narrative mixer right from the outset, delivering a stunning amount of exposition in the first half hour through a dizzying series of edited vignettes that may leave viewers gasping for breath, wondering what in the hell is going on.  Just as Sibyl is ridding herself of her patients, she receives a desperate phone call from an up-and-coming actress on the verge of suicide, Margot, Adèle Exarchopoulos from Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013) and Michaël R. Roskam’s Racer and the Jailbird (Le Fidèle) (2017), who tearfully begs to see her.  Sibyl resists, but ultimately gives in shortly afterwards from the sheer persistence while scenes from David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) appear on her television set, as Margot discovers that she has become pregnant by her onscreen partner Igor (Gaspard Uliel in his final film before his tragic ski accident death), who is himself in a relationship with the German film director Mika (Sandra Hüller).  Fascinated to the point of obsession, Sibyl becomes more and more involved in Margot’s tumultuous life, with all signs pointing to an abortion, as otherwise her pregnancy could sabotage her career, with Sibyl secretly recording the young woman’s therapy sessions which she then uses as inspiration for her novel, taking salacious material directly from her emotionally distraught circumstances, living vicariously through her, raising legitimate questions about where artists actually draw their inspiration from.  There may be traces back to Gena Rowlands suffering a midlife crisis in the Woody Allen film ANOTHER WOMAN (1988), as she’s also trying to write a book, drawing inspiration from overhearing the psychiatric sessions of a pregnant woman in a neighboring apartment, becoming a stand-in for her own repressed emotions, while Sibyl also relives her own repressed tragedies.  Apparently unconcerned about artistic plagiarism, or how her novel might undermine her existing relationship with Margot, Sibyl is always viewed as the sane authority figure in the room, yet this blurring of reality is only heightened by recurring flashbacks of her love affair with Gabriel, becoming the cause of her earlier alcoholism, plunging her back into the vortex of her past, leaving behind a terrible sense of emptiness and loss.  The onscreen intimacy of Efira and Schneider is only heightened by the fact they are a couple in real life, where a central fireside scene together is erotic and brilliantly choreographed, as clothes are removed in one long sequence leading into nakedness and sex, always feeling natural and organic.  Despite reducing her caseload, Sibyl still holds onto a young boy, Daniel (Adrien Bellemare), playing board games together as a way of extracting pertinent information, but he’s clever enough to make sure she abides by rules they devised, apparently taking extreme pleasure in preventing her from asking too much at one time, thereby shielding her efforts to help him process the trauma of his mother’s death, but they have a delicate balance in their relationship that may be the healthiest and most satisfactory in the entire film.  Sibyl plunges headlong into her relationship with Margot, offering vague encouragement every step of the way, as she apparently cannot work without consulting her, developing a dependent psychological crutch that quickly goes off the rails, losing any pretense of professionalism, joining the actress on the movie set on the island of Stromboli, just off the north coast of Sicily, containing Mount Stromboli, one of the four active volcanoes in Italy, recalling Ingrid Bergman’s existential crisis in Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) that famously sparked a scandalous affair between the actress and her chosen director.  In an absurd development, Margot refuses to speak to the lead actor Igor, demanding that he speak through Sibyl when communicating, which over-emphasizes her role on the set, with everyone quickly turning to her whenever there’s a problem, expecting she’ll provide a calming fix to escalating tensions in the air.  

Once we get on the set of the film, the chaotic, behind-the-scenes atmosphere resembles Fassbinder’s BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE (1971), a satire on the film business itself with a doomed production unit where both the cast and crew are besieged by every possible thing that can go wrong, where nerves are continually on edge.  At the center of the controversy is the unraveling relationship between Margot and Igor, the stars of the film, which sends shockwaves through the rest of the crew, having a debilitating effect on the exquisitely high-strung director Mika, especially when Igor ignores Mika’s exasperated stage directions, constantly pleading for more emotions from her actors, even as they personally despise one another.  One by one they turn to Sibyl for some sense of balance and sanity, seeking in-the-moment professional help, yet Sibyl strangely ends up taking the place of the actors when they refuse to participate, actually walking off the set in disgust.  Inevitably, Sibyl’s best intentions are sabotaged by her own deluded obsessions and unfilled desires, as they are all dysfunctional without her, becoming too close to each one of them to render any objective impartiality, where she can’t help impulsively catering to the needs of others, so there are daily meltdowns of histrionic theatrics, with a kind of screwball comedy in the dizzying dialogue that grows ever more exaggerated at every turn, elevating the tragic dimensions of the idiosyncratic characters, evidently a staple in Triet’s films, where the inappropriate emotional eruptions match the sputtering volcano seen in the background.  The insanity is fun to watch, filming on a yacht out in the open sea, as Sibyl is helpless to stop the production tailspin, actually contributing to it, where Sandra Hüller’s comic talent is effectively utilized, continually asking for what the actors can’t give, literally driving them headfirst into a wall over and over again, creating indescribable tension, yet she’s unable to see the ridiculous aspect of her unhealthy and unrealistic expectations, as her self-righteous focus is more interested in maintaining her tyrannical control over the set, turning to Sibyl, of course, to back her up, yet the crew is having none of it, so in total desperation Mika simply jumps into the sea and swims to shore, leaving Sibyl in charge of directing the final scenes.  While it’s bravura filmmaking of comedic outlandishness, each of the characters contributes to the dysfunction, always turning to Sibyl as some kind of savior for a seemingly doomed film, where her calm demeanor becomes more and more frazzled, clearly out of her element, having no experience whatsoever in this kind of artistic endeavor, yet she meticulously documents it all in writing her new novel, actually reenacting scenes each night in her room, literally immersing herself in someone else’s life, violating all professional boundaries, where ethics and art are diametrically opposing forces that merge into personal ambition.  Sibyl’s publishers are overjoyed with their first glance at this new material, describing it as a war of the sexes on a backdrop of social revenge.  Sibyl recedes back into alcoholism from all the added pressures, where drunken scenes escalate into slapstick comedy, always uncomfortable territory unless handled deftly, and Triet seems content on pushing the uncomfortable limits of the audience, with Sibyl sliding ever further out of control, unleashing a flood of emotions, as her past and present repeatedly collide, creating a more volatile personality, making a mockery out of her life and profession, and her surprising career move to transition back into being an author.  She sacrifices her soul by stealing the life of one of her patients solely for personal gain, which has an increasingly pathetic look about it, especially when an out-of-control Margot destroys a hotel room in a fit of rage, but it’s wrapped in a bow of comic sketches brilliantly stitched together designed to titillate viewers with a grotesque yet carefully choreographed theater of the absurd that grows bleaker by the minute.  While it’s a curious venture, reprehensible characters with dubious motives fill the screen, as there’s nothing in this chaotic narrative that ever draws in an audience or ties any of this together, as if the director herself lost her way in this sea of possibilities, continually leaving viewers on the outside looking in.