Elle

ELLE              C-                   

France  Germany  Belgium  (130 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Paul Verhoeven 

One sick fuck of a movie, one filled with disturbingly violent, adolescent male sex fantasies that degrade women, creating an ugly, highly exploitive, misogynistic atmosphere throughout, that is redeemed somewhat by a stupefyingly dark performance by Isabelle Huppert that is so over-the-top that it has comical elements, but honestly, despite all the accolades, this is a mindlessly excessive provocation that will end up doing more harm than good, as it normalizes criminal behavior, makes it blend in with normal bourgeois society where the participants often can’t tell the difference.  While that should be ridiculous, or hilarious, it is neither, as instead it sets a fatalistic tone of gloom that pervades throughout the entire picture, as if saturated by toxic air.  When considering the source, Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven, this is par for the course, as he seems to specialize in morally transgressive material, usually crossing the line into distasteful territory, where some obviously have no problem with it, but it remains surprising how something this revoltingly emptyheaded can be dressed up in arthouse production values, a stellar cast, and somehow the offensive material is considered acceptable.  Sorry, but it falls into the crassly exploitive territory, where this is one of the overrated films of the year, including Huppert’s performance, which is all show and surface texture, more a display of the grotesque, as the film has little redeeming value.  The film shows a rape scene not once, twice, or even three times, but four times, showcasing it for exploitive purposes, then immediately shifting gears, turning to Huppert’s blasé attitude afterwards, ordering sushi by phone, asking incredibly, “What is a holiday roll?,” before somehow blending rape into normalized sexual relations with people preferring a hard-edged, sadomasochistic kick in the head for their pleasure.  On top of this, the rape victim (Huppert) owns a video-game company that saturates its graphic content with increasingly violent, sadistic rape imagery that she criticizes at one point as “too timid,” where we then have to deal with the startlingly shallow, comic book personalities of the few insipid characters that create this kind of junk for a living. Before long, all of this has been mixed into an acceptable middle class attitude, where repeated rape attacks go unreported to the police, where violent sex becomes normalized in existing relationships, where the bottom line portrayal of men is so cliché driven, as if all they have is a penis, and nothing else matters or defines their character, as if this pervasive culture is contaminated by nothing but sick and disgusting men, suggesting the world would be better off without them, as who really needs them?  End of story.  And to further delineate a line of demarcation, let’s call the picture ELLE (She).  

The idea that one can tastefully trivialize and make a mockery of rape culture in glossy arthouse cinema is simply a bad idea, as is the idea of Huppert being an appropriate feminist response to violently inflicted trauma, applying vigilante justice to her perpetrator, encouraging him to do it without the mask on, as her character is too internally damaged to be relatable or believable, but again remains in the comic book world of delusion and adolescent fantasy, where the ridiculous nature of the film simply can’t be taken seriously.  Overall, people are getting sucker punched with this one.  Ostensibly a film about a middle-aged businesswoman Michèle Leblanc (Huppert), seen at the opening getting brutally raped in her own home by a man coming through the window in a ski mask dressed all in black, leaving her battered and bloodied.  But instead of going to the police, we learn she distrusts and despises them due to her past history, as her father is a convicted serial killer from the 1970’s who forced her, at the age of ten, to assist in the burning of all their belongings afterwards, where she was literally covered in ash when discovered by the police, becoming a subject of harassment, with her father serving out the rest of his life in prison, though he does have parole hearings every ten years.  Whenever her father’s infamous deeds appear in the news, Michèle is dragged through the mud as well, with the public reviling her and expressing their scorn.  As if in protest to good taste, Michèle along with her best friend Anna (Anne Consigny) are literary book editors who develop a brutally violent video-game business catering to teenage boys that exploits grotesque rape imagery, complete with ecstatic moans, appealing to the lowest element of male fantasia and delusion, which, of course, makes them highly successful, allowing her to live alone, along with her cat, in a lavish home surrounded by dozens of open windows allowing the intruder to appear.  As if to place her in a moral purgatory for which there is no escape, she is sleeping with her best friend’s husband, Robert (Christian Berkel), while separated from her own, Richard (Charles Berling), while raising an oblivious grown son who seems to have more psychological issues than anyone else in the film, which of course remain completely unaddressed.  At the same time, her elderly mother (Judith Magre) relies upon plastic surgery and paid young male escorts to make her feel young, a habit Michèle finds revolting and disgusting.  While this rapist is on the loose, he chooses to continue to send sick and twisted messages on her phone and in her bed, all of which suggest she remains a target, along with crude, mocking messages from within her own company, affixing her face to the animated female character getting raped, which is sent to the working computers of the entire staff. 

Everything described thus far is simply the set-up, the terms of the game from which Michèle must maneuver and operate in order to turn the tables and regain a position of power, changing all the locks in her home, buying a small axe and some toxic spray while taking target practice at a gun range in order to protect herself, while Verhoeven has surrounded her with a myriad of possible subjects, any one of which have a strong reason to hate her, while also protruding into her dreams, where we see various revenge scenarios playing out in her imagination.  As for Michèle herself, she thrives on other people’s discomfort, exploiting their weaknesses, developing a casual disregard for conventional morality and has no problem snooping into the computers of her coworkers searching for clues, masturbating in a Buñuelian moment while watching a neighboring couple set up a Nativity scene, reaching orgasm exactly when the lights come on, or launching into a lengthy discourse on her own personal role in her father’s infamous deeds that she relates dispassionately at a party to one of her neighbors, Patrick (Laurent Lafitte), a stock trader with a beautiful but devoutly Catholic wife, Rebecca (Virginie Efira), where she may as well be describing a list of items on a shopping list, acting as if there is nothing inappropriate about it while at the same time carefully gauging his response.  Rather than offer any relevant comment on rape or societal conventions, Verhoeven is content to see the world through the disfigured life of Michèle, a tragic figure in every respect, considering what happened to her at a young age, yet the director refuses to see her as a victim and instead uses her psychological trauma as an excuse to explore all manner of human degradation, including sexual humiliation or those who are aroused by being beaten and raped, where he is trivializing human behavior, suggesting it’s all part of a wide-ranging collection of bizarre sexual behavior, suggesting I’m OK if you’re OK, yet it’s an excuse to display sadomasochistic male fantasies onscreen, suggesting what’s taking place behind closed doors could be anything, aberrant or otherwise, suggesting it’s all part of the human face.  What this adds to any discussion on human behavior is negligible, as it’s all been done to much better effect by Olivier Assayas in Demonlover (2002), one of the few artists to examine the detrimental effects of brutally violating porn on the Internet, suggesting it goes beyond mere desensitizing but is more about dehumanization, combining the deep-seeded ramifications of a soulless Internet entity with the ruthless ambitions of capitalism.  By comparison, Verhoeven’s revenge saga is deceptively shallow and a major disappointment, working in the French language for the first time in the director’s career, reduced to an offensive onslaught of hateful and demeaning imagery, yet it is a rather faithful adaptation of the 2012 Philippe Djian novel Oh…, the same writer who wrote Betty Blue (37°2 Le Matin) (1986), an author who is extremely popular in Europe but utterly overlooked in the United States, where there are few revelations anywhere to be found that distinguish this from typical male sexist content, instead becoming an opportunity to plaster the screen with exploitation genre, fetishistic rape imagery that is meant to be shocking, all in the name of entertainment.  Perhaps Dr. Verhoeven could move into pedophilia next.     

Swim Little Fish Swim

SWIM LITTLE FISH SWIM               B                     

USA  France  (95 mi)  2013  d:  Lola Bessis and Ruben Amar        Official site

An offbeat coming-of-age movie written, directed, and produced by a husband and wife team that is actually about the choices made by young child/adults as they navigate their way into adulthood, as if it is a foreign territory to be avoided at all costs, where the perilous consequences are likely to be unalterable once entered.  This is a film where things happen not in any particular order, but in the randomness of the moment, where caught up in this idiosyncratic world are Leeward (Dustin Guy Defa), a perennially unemployed musician that appears to exist out of the 60’s or even an earlier era, as he routinely allows strange people to crash in their home, spends all day making music with friends and neighbors, and has little thought about personal responsibilities, though he seems to be a devoted father to his young 4-year old daughter that he insists upon calling Rainbow (Olivia Costello).  Mary (Brooke Bloom) is a full-time nurse that has to work extended hours just to make ends meet, whose nerves are tested by the seemingly anything-goes philosophy of her husband, who she finds lazy and irresponsible, an overgrown adolescent who seems incapable of holding down a job, though she believes he’s certainly talented enough musically, as he writes songs all the time, but refuses to get paid for them, while insisting upon calling their daughter by her real name, Maggie.  Into this blissful existence comes Lilas (Lola Bessis, co-writer and director), a perky young French artist struggling to find her way into the New York artworld and the daughter of a world famous painter (Anne Consigny) in Paris.  What each of these characters has in common is their perception of feeling misunderstood, believing they are doing the right thing for the right reasons, but feeling lost and alone as no one else seems to care. 

The film has an interesting New York City vibe to it, centered around the East Village filled with Bohemian artists, street musicians, rollerblade skaters and the everpresent bustle of street activities, much of it taking place in a cramped Chinatown apartment that seems to attract a myriad of people when Leeward is home during the daytime, most all of whom are ushered out when Mary arrives back home, completely flustered at having to deal with all these strange people.  One of these is Lilas, a video artist that walks around the streets of the city with a portable projector in hand, who is promised a spot on the living room couch for a few days, much to the chagrin of Mary, who is rarely allowed to crack a smile, as she’s the only one working to pay for the supposed comforts of others.  After a bit of browbeating, she gets Leeward to agree to check out a job writing music for a commercial, something that wouldn’t particularly be that hard for him, but Leeward has an anti-capitalist bent about him, a holdover from the more radical leanings of his grandmother we later learn, who encourages him every step of the way to walk to the beat of his own drum irregardless what others think.  Mary, however, is led to believe he is performing the required work assignment and is in line to receive a hefty paycheck, so on her own she explores a cute little house in the suburbs of Jersey City, thinking this could finally become a reality.  Instead, however, it’s Lilas that is having an effect on her husband’s choices, both struggling artists, where they mutually agree they should simply quit stalling and go for it, where Lilas intends to get an art exhibition at MoMA PS1, a move that could extend her expiring VISA, as it would make her a working artist, while Leeward makes arrangements to cut his first record in a studio.  Simultaneously, each pursues their own dream while concealing it from a significant other. 

While the film is about freedom and self-expression, often expressed in a joyous communal celebration, it’s also a film of emotional neglect, as Lilas’s overcontrolling mother is more used to telling her daughter what to do instead of listening to her, while Leeward is tone deaf to his wife’s increasing stress about their financial hardships, where she’s tired of living hand to mouth while supporting the entire neighborhood.  When Mary gets serious about making a down payment on a house, it’s out of desperation for a better future, concerns that Leeward simply ignores, as he’s too caught up pursuing his own dreams.  Their daughter, despite the mixed signals, seems to be happy and content, where Lilas takes to her like a long lost daughter she never had, while Maggie seems to be thrilled by all the activity taking place in her home very day.  To that end, filmmaker Nathan Punwar contributes stunning Super 8 video footage that is tastefully interspersed throughout the interweaving narrative, that may as well be a world seen through a child’s eye, filled with bright colors and an unmistakable magic and charm.  While each is trying to achieve something they want, including the build-up of their own heightened expectations, reality can be a sobering reminder of how difficult dreams are to achieve.  As it happens, Lilas’s mother is planning an exhibit of her own at MOMA in New York, asking her daughter to come help out, but she’s disappointed to learn that her own project has been short circuited, denied a place in the exhibit, sending her back into the control of her mother.  Undeterred, she does so on her own terms, using the moment to express herself anyway, even if no one’s listening, an affect that finally gets her mother’s attention.  This is one of those quirky little films that is all about wacky artists, absurd personalities, and lofty ambitions that wind up with an altogether different expression than anything imagined, becoming, of all things, an intriguing family drama about the worth of each individual, with an appropriate musical soundtrack accredited to Toys and Tiny Instruments.  

Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles)

WILD GRASS (Les Herbes Folles)      B+          
France  Italy  (104 mi)  2009  d:  Alain Resnais

No matter, we shall have loved each other well.  —Gustave Flaubert, L'Éducation sentimentale, 1869

A surprisingly light-hearted French comedy from the master of the nearly incomprehensible Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad)  (1961), a bold existential reverie told with a striking geometric visual scheme filled with perfectly dressed characters looking like mannequins who exist in a purgatory of forgotten memories that are about to disappear forever.  This film makes use of small, somewhat quirky overlooked moments that might easily be forgotten, yet they’re given a synchronous narrative structure where they become the highlights of the film, quite reminiscent of Wong Kar-wai’s charmingly upbeat use of the same sort of romantic structure in CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994), where this film even looks like it was shot by Wong’s cinematographer Christopher Doyle, but it is Eric Gautier who provides a stunningly beautiful color palette that is so brightly lit, an impressionistic blur of neon-lit colors, that at times it takes one’s breath away.  Since the narrative itself is minimal, a woman’s purse gets stolen and the man who finds her wallet is struck by the myriad of possibilities with the thought of returning it to her, which leaves plenty of room for character driven improvisation, something the French excel at.  A comedic battle of the sexes ensues.  The woman who loses her purse is the director’s live-in companion, Sabine Azéma, a flaming red-head some 27-years his junior, while the man who discovers the missing wallet is André Dussollier, who is the picture of manners, convention, and social grace.  There seems to be a story within the story about his real profession that’s barely referenced, only alluded to, and then swallowed up by an entirely new train of thought, leaving all those possibilities behind in exchange for brand new ones.  Through a whimsical narration that also includes people’s heads and thoughts popping up like an animated comic strip, this film has fun with its own conceptual design, as despite the occasional hilarity, the sequence of events are extremely well edited and there is a remarkable display of wit.  For many this will be a bizarre little headscratcher bathed in the luminescent light of a budding love story that feels innocent and warmhearted enough, becoming a master class on cinema itself, but makes little sense.   

While Dussollier wishes to make a personal impression after he returns the wallet, he ends up talking to Azéma’s answering machine every night, leaving revealing messages where he expresses an interest in meeting, but when they finally talk, she tries to put an end to that idea.  So he starts writing her letters instead, including one that appears to be about 10 pages long, revealing his life’s story and his various thoughts of the day, as if she were his best friend.  This all gets a bit tricky, but he’s consumed by her while she deflects his interest, though it’s clear he’s made some sort of impression, as she’s clearly enamored by his attention and misses it when she puts a stop to it.  So she turns the tables and starts secretly following him, where the moment they meet is electric, like something out of pure fantasy, yet there it is happening before our eyes.  She begins calling his home, where his wife (Anne Consigny) calmly answers as if this is nothing out of the ordinary, where they all seemingly become best of friends, yet the underlying motivations shift around and remain unclear.  The pursuer becomes fascinated by the unknown, never knowing quite what to expect, while the pursued seems to love the attention, even if they’re already married and the pursuer comes to sit in their living room.  The audience doesn’t really know what to make of this either, as the married couple seems perfectly content and not at all jealous, apparently pleased with each other’s happiness, where the added interest only seems to brighten up their lives.  No one knows where any of this is going or where it will lead.  What’s truly remarkable is the ease with which these veteran actors sink their teeth into their parts, as they’re a joy to watch simply to discover what they’ll do next, becoming instantly familiar characters, cleverly drawn and skillfully inhabited, with a series of movie references, including familiar movie music and title cards appearing on the screen, including several endings.  But mostly what works is the thought process that leads us through this bounty of oddball experiences, looking through the cracks of our well-ordered lives, as there’s a refined intelligence behind it all and an uplifting spirit that feels remarkable, as if we in the audience are missing out on the choices we make in our daily routines, continually overlooking these deliciously small moments that when maximized seem to define our humanity.  It hardly matters if we make fools of ourselves, what people remember is the effort, which is the proof that when we lived, we cared.   

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Vous n'avez encore rien vu)

YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET (Vous n'avez encore rien vu)        C   
France  Germany  (115 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Alain Resnais 

This is another of a recent series of aging filmmakers to express themselves through sheer artificiality, much like Manoel de Oliveira, 100-years old and still counting, and the recently deceased Raúl Ruiz, whose immersion into literary source material often leaves their films rigid and lifeless onscreen, so stark in execution that the viewer ends up spending a majority of time simply reading the subtitles, as these are films with non-stop verbiage, almost as if the filmmakers preferred stories that were read to the audience.  While the last film of Resnais, Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) (2009), couldn’t have been more playfully energetic with its quirky story of near forgotten moments leading to a budding romance, intoxicating with its impressionistic blur of neon-lit colors, where it obviously had plenty of whimsical fun with its own conceptual design.  Not so here, where you’ll be hard pressed to find any ounce of spontaneity or flair for life in this film, a re-enactment of French playwright Jean Anouilh's 1941 play Eurydice, where the story of Orpheus and Eurydice has previously been told quite impressively in Jean Cocteau’s magical surrealist film ORPHEUS (1950) and the spectacularly colorful BLACK ORPHEUS (1959), a Marcel Camus film that uses the lush backdrop of Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival, featuring the exotic delights of fabulous costumes, nonstop dancing, and wall to wall samba music.  While the play itself was written during the Nazi occupation of France, this historical context is completely left out of the film, though one can infer this may have been the reason it lingered for so long in the director’s imagination. 

In the opening interlude expressed in a montage of split screen images, a varied group of actors receive identical phone calls informing them that Antoine d’Anthac (Denis Podalydès), a friend and beloved theater director has died, requesting their visit to his country estate for the reading of his will.  Once the guests arrive, all gracefully met by Marcellin (Andrzej Seweryn), they are treated to a video performance of the Jean Anouilh play, where as the actors recall their own performances, Resnais blends a mixture of theater, memory, and real life into his own film.  While it sounds clever enough, what it amounts to is largely a filmed theatrical piece, using three different sets of performers, where Resnais interjects onto the screen two sets of older actors watching the movie who recall performing the play in their youth, where they are suddenly projected onscreen as the featured players alongside a video version of younger performers from La Compagnie de la Colombe which was actually filmed by Denis Podalydès.  With a brief break between the first and second acts where all the assembled players light up and smoke, Resnais simply films the entire play, intercutting brief elements of another more modern Anouilh play, Cher Antoine ou l'amour rate from 1969.  So while there is some interest in how the concept initially develops, there are no more surprises, and despite some of the best French stage and screen performers, there is little interest in the play itself, as it exists in a cautious, overly refined, and artificialized setting that accentuates the literary aspect of the play, adding little visual enhancement.    

While there is some pleasure in watching great actors, with Sabine Azema and Anne Consigny as Eurydice, matched by a young and vivacious Vimala Pons, from Jacques Rivette’s final film AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (2009), and Pierre Arditi and Lambert Wilson as Orpheus, it must be said that the team of Azema and Arditi badly overact, adding a neurotic element that goes way over the top, turning this into an antiquated melodrama.  Rivette is probably the most brilliant director incorporating theatrical performances into his films, but he also infuses his characters with intelligence and a probing curiosity, where one can’t help but take interest in the energizing aspect of their appeal, as they are literally teeming with life.  But Resnais has made a film that only grows deadly boring after awhile, where the energy of the young and relatively unknown company actors consistently outshine the cadre of stars who never bring this piece to life, as it instead sits there onscreen like a stuffed shirt overly pleased with itself.  Never invoking the dramatic power and tragedy behind the immortal play, where the all consuming power of love offers Orpheus a chance to bring Eurydice back from the dead, which initially comes from Greek mythology, revisited in various artistic forms for literally thousands of years, from Plato, Virgil, and Ovid to painters like Titian and Puissin, as well as music from Monteverdi, Gluck, and Offenbach, this can only be considered a minor version of a master work, a pale comparison to the legendary Cocteau film, the second of his Orphic Trilogy Films, which notably does make historical reference to the buildings in ruin after World War II, using them as the eerie setting for his underworld, where the Orpheus trial was made to resemble the German inquests after the occupation.  While this was touted on the festival circuit as the swansong for Resnais, whose first film short was made back in the 30’s and first feature followed the war, there is yet another film already in post production, another collaboration with English playwright Alan Ayckbourn, his fourth film adaptation, where it will continue this obsession of aging film directors with literary works.