Joy of Man's Desiring (Que ta joie demeure)

Director Denis Côté

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING (Que ta joie demeure)       B-                

Canada  (70 mi)  2014  d:  Denis Côté       official facebook page

The work place is the place where those arriving cross paths with those who are leaving early.   —Georges Courteline, (June 25, 1858 – June 25, 1929)

Denis Côté remains something of a radical, underground Québécois filmmaker championing the unfamiliar, including small and unconventional films, where his most recent film Vic + Flo Saw a Bear  (2013) is perhaps his most accessible, through it remains provocatively disturbing, while this is closer to his earlier work Bestiaire (2012), a wordless and minimalist film essay shooting animals living in the closed quarters of an amusement park, observing human behavior through the unpretentious eyes of animals, and vice versa, both seemingly on equal footing.  Côté is himself a former film critic from Montreal, and what he brings to his films is a certain objective detachment, where the key is observing without judgment.  While this is a free associative and contemplative work that focuses upon the routine aspects of industrial work, accentuating machine operators in nine small factories in Montreal, he establishes a precise rhythm of noise and machine, where humans are simply intermediaries, but slowly introduces a fictional element that finalizes the film.  While it may be completely unpretentious, it is quite different from the meticulously austere group of Austrian documentarians, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, OUR DAILY BREAD (2005), Michael Glawogger, WORKINGMAN’S DEATH (2005), SLUMMING (2006), and Whore's Glory (2012), Ruth Mader, STRUGGLE (2003), and Hubert Sauper, DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE (2004), which have a near mathematical precision to them.  Instead it remains open ended and ambiguous, where the director intentionally makes no social comment, but simply shows various stages of people at work, including moments of absurdity when a union official, from an apparent approved distance where he is allowed to stand, yells slogans at the workers while they are working. 

Initially viewers are greeted by the pounding rhythm of a machine press, including a montage of machines in close-up, while also subjected to a curious opening monologue asking for support, where the audience never sees who the comments are directed to, another worker or a machine (the director?).  This schism between man and machine has been the subject of much conjecture since the advent of the industrial age, where the interplay has not always been compatible.  As we hear the workers talk to one another, we discover one machine operates at a level of speed that most find dangerous, but that’s what attracts one particular worker to that machine, preferring it to all others, where he is able to utilize his own dexterity to achieve maximum results.  Another grows disillusioned with the job, losing interest altogether, where he’s sitting around in a state of depression when he’s approached by a person that could easily be a ghost of the worker’s past, where another worker claims they’re ready to take his place, asking if he’s ready to relinquish his job.  This visual sequence may simply be a passing thought in the course of the working day.  While workers are routinely seen at their work stations, the presence of the camera in such close proximity would seem to be a distraction and highly intrusive, perhaps dangerously so, due to the precise nature of this kind of skilled work where machines are manipulated into exact positions, where the degree for error is minimal.  Certainly one thought about what we see is that we never see the final result of their labor, but only the one piece of the puzzle that each worker is assigned to perform, creating a feeling of incompleteness, as while they are part of the whole, they never seem to be connected to the finished product. 

For the filmmaker, he entered into this project without any written script, becoming an improvisational journey that reveals itself over time, an experimental alternative where we are taken on an observational tour of various factory settings—metal working, carpentry, industrial laundry, a garment shop, mattress factory, and coffee roasting.  Alternating between people and machines as well as the raw materials that surround them, many toil in a kind of solitary silence, while others remain talkative and gregarious throughout with other staff.  Côté catches many of them during their idle rest periods having a quick smoke, but also having extended conversations about their jobs, providing shop talk, including an amusing parable about a crooked employer, or comments about work fulfillment, where one changed workplaces as she was barely noticed at her previous job and felt invisible, but remains just as invisible here as well, offering views of alienation and a sense of demoralization, as they spend half their lives in this claustrophobic environment, while others find a kind of mystical satisfaction in the constant repetitiveness of their actions, as if it offers the opportunity to cleanse the mind.  This kind of emptyheaded blankness balances with the focused concentration needed for the more intricate nature of some of the work performed, supplemented by an intriguing sound design by Frédéric Cloutier and Clovis Gouaillier.  By introducing fictional characters, some seen offering prayers to their machines, Côté accentuates the kinds of thoughts that might come into play, while also introducing other significant images, where a partially constructed wooden piano is seen at one point, which later introduces the titular Bach chorale Myra Hess plays Bach/Hess "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" YouTube (3:41) heard somewhere off in the distance to the worker’s contemplative thoughts, where this musical reverie is perhaps the idealized sound of their completed work, a kind of sacred musical construction of perfection.  What is perhaps missing is the feeling of any joy in the work, amusingly remedied in the final shot.  Despite the multiple layers in play, the narrow scope never becomes particularly revelatory, where it doesn’t impress as much as some of the other work by this director. 

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear

VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (Vic + Flo ont vu un ours)             B+         
Canada  (95 mi)  2013  d:  Denis Côté

With VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR, Denis Côté re-emphasizes what a talented and provocative filmmaker he is, one of the few artists working today where the word “radical” comes to mind, as it’s hard to find anyone else comparable, creating a deeply probing character study, yet at the conclusion of this film, audience members will be scratching their heads, searching for any explanatory information, as there are unanswered questions about what it all means.  Typical of other Côté films, the director refuses to explain anything, and instead leaves out pertinent details in his film to make sure the questions remain unanswered.  While some directors intentionally leave clues for the audience, helpful hints to whet their appetite, especially in mysteries, Côté on the other hand makes sure there are no clues whatsoever to guide the audience, where the less information the film provides, the more the viewer must discover on their own.  It should be pointed out that the less you know going into this film, the greater the impact.  In this manner, it is somewhat reminiscent of Rolf de Heer’s ALEXANDRA’S PROJECT (2003), another film that adds an underlying element of creepiness into what otherwise appears to be just another day.  This film is equally unsettling, and not in ways the audience could possibly anticipate, incorporating menacing psychological shifts through the use of heavily percussive music by Melissa Lavergne, like primitive drumbeats suggesting trouble lies ahead, often using humor like a battering ram to keep the pernicious forces at bay.  A former film critic from Montreal, certainly one of the director’s goals in all his films is to acutely observe unfiltered human behavior as objectively as possible, without rendering judgment, where what’s in store for the viewer is likely to be eye-opening.  On this point alone, the director succeeds brilliantly in this film, winner of the 2013 Silver Bear (Alfred Bauer 3rd Prize) at the Berlin Film Festival.

Like Gloria (2013), the Berlin film that won Best Actress, both films feature performances by characters in their 60’s, a rare occurrence in today’s youth oriented cinema, but Victoria (Pierrette Robitaille) as Vic couldn’t be more different, recently paroled from a life sentence for a crime that is never revealed, a woman with a hard edge to her character, who speaks directly and to the point, often using a biting sarcasm to undermine the authority of others.  There’s a brief opening segment, like a story prelude, where she sits next to a young kid dressed in a boy scout uniform trying to play the trumpet where she informs him he’s not very good, and shouldn’t be asking for money when he doesn’t know how to play, but he quips “You could give me a little money, as encouragement.”  It’s a strange moment that seems to foreshadow an unbalanced state of the world, as Vic is seen quickly walking down the road lugging her suitcase behind her, where the baggage she carries may as well be a past that continually haunts her.  Finding a house in the woods, with an old man sitting paralyzed and mute in a wheelchair on the porch, she finds a shirtless teenage kid looking after him, apparently a neighbor boy named Charlot (Pier-Luc Funk), and informs him she’ll be moving in and looking after him, as the old man who used to run this “sugar shack” is her Uncle Émile (Georges Molnar).  Content to sit idly on the premises and do nothing, she ridicules the prowling interests of her visiting parole officer Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin), who arrives unannounced and meticulously inspects the premises like a trained detective, asking probing questions that she contemptuously reflects back onto him, revealing as little as possible, yet she’s subject to this continued scrutiny where after each visit she’s forced to observe him sitting at the table writing notes, never revealing the contents of his observations.  Like his earlier film Bestiaire (2012), where his camera wordlessly gazes upon penned animals, as his intent appears to be observing human behavior through the watchful eyes of animals, the director similarly observes penned-in characters here. 

Adding to the mix is a sudden visit from Vic’s girlfriend, Florence (Romane Bohringer) as Flo, former cellmates who pick up where they left off under the sheets, where her presence adds a great degree of comfort for Vic, where the two of them openly defy the rest of mainstream society, but the bisexual Flo feels suffocated by the remote isolation, taking repeated side trips into town searching for men, leaving Vic disappointedly alone some nights, petrified that she will lose her.  Part of the film’s unique strength is the significance of secondary characters, as Côté weaves them in and out of the tapestry of an evershifting storyline, bringing them prominently into play for a sudden outburst, often shattering any notion of equilibrium.  One of the telling scenes of the film is when Flo meets the incensed neighbor next door (Olivier Aubin), a short, fat man with bulging eyes who initially scowls at her in a bar before revealing his profound resentment for Vic, “What’s a chick like you doing in that shack with that old hag?”  Apparently this guy continues to hold a grudge against Vic for failing to take care of her paralyzed uncle all those years she was incarcerated, a gender bias that suggests instead of he and his son, this is a more appropriate role for women.  His venomous outburst only adds to a perception that it’s these two lesbian lovers in the woods against the world, where any venture outside only points to potential trouble.  Vic and Flo’s tenderness with each other is contrasted by their growing indifference towards everybody else, yet the hostile forces of the world outside have a way of penetrating into their secluded alliance, where Flo’s emotional ambivalence becomes even more threatening, opening the door for ill winds.  A sudden shift in tone reveals the gruesome effects of unleashed hatred and horror, seemingly for no rhyme or reason, as the director provides no backstory to help explain this sudden eruption of jarring images, an aspect that may in fact resemble real life, where irrational hate crimes, for instance, are committed but police investigations often reveal no known motive.  Part of the brilliance of Côté’s film is how meticulously constructed it is, creating complex and convincing characters caught up in an idyllic affair living on the edge of an enveloping wasteland, creating a perilous existential angst surrounded by cruel and sinister forces of primevil intensity that exist without explanation while showing no mercy, a grim and often unrelenting film where perhaps the cruelest joke is the return of the trumpet boy, whose playing has only slightly improved, yet he offers an emphatic punctuation to this unexpectedly horrifying and tragically absurd finale, infused with poetic resonance and a bewildering mystery, while the 80’s French electropop music of Marie Möör’s “Pretty Day” Marie Möör - Pretty Day (Official Cover) - YouTube (2:04) plays over the end credits and almost mockingly whispers “It’s a pretty way to die.”    

Bestiaire

BESTIAIRE           B               

Canada  France  (72 mi)  2012  d:  Denis Côté

This film is no fiction, obviously. However, if it were a documentary, there would be a “subject.” Also, to describe it as an “essay” would entail a polemic or partisan implication, corresponding to the proper literary term. Cinema has come to label this genre of proposition as “object.” I don’t know how to label it myself, and even better, if this film is difficult to subsume but poetic at the same time. I started out with a naive desire to explore certain energies and to observe the relations or maybe even the failed encounters between humans and animals. In the end, this film is about contemplation — and something else. Something indefinable, something more obscure which I hope to find out more about with the help of the audience.

—Denis Côté from the film’s press kit (press-bestiaire)

Midway between Plattsburgh, Vermont and the city of Montreal in Canada, a distance of 60 miles, lies Parc Safari (home - Parc Safari), an animal and amusement park founded in 1972, featuring both an African and Asian species of elephant, but none of those details matter in this visual essay, a wordless and minimalist work that refuses to explain anything, but instead simply observes without judgment, accumulating detail over time.  Similar to Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (2010), the camera wordlessly gazes upon a world largely unfamiliar to us, where at least part of the distinguishing attempt here is not to embellish or beautify what we see, or even allow preconceived knowledge or understandings to interfere with the director’s mission, which is to observe human behavior through the unpretentious eyes of animals, and vice versa, both seemingly on equal footing.  A key factor in making the movie is to allow the mind to remain completely unpresumptuous throughout, where an unquestioned reality seeps through unfiltered, where neither species has an unfair advantage.  Like the Cahiers du Cinéma magazine writers who became filmmakers during the 60’s French New Wave, Côté is himself a former film critic from Montreal.  A champion of small and unconventional films, he redefines the viewing experience by infusing his films with a certain objective detachment.  Opening in the dark with the sounds of pencil on a sketch canvas, we quickly see a handful of art students *studying* something that stands before them, each scrutinizing the subject, gazing intently, before they return to the canvas.  What they’re eyeing is an artificially preserved deer, an example of the kind of wildlife you might see in national park visitor centers, mysteriously bringing the stuffed animal to life on canvas, where one would never know if the original subject the artist is rendering was real or imaginary, as it takes on new life in the eyes of the artist. 

Unlike groundbreaking directors like Tarkovsky or Bresson, Côté is not looking to transform the art of cinema, but seems content to stake out his claim for something imprecise or undefined, as the director has radically argued his experimental film is not a documentary.  Railing against the popular success of warmly humanized animal documentaries like WINGED MIGRATION (2001) or MARCH OF THE PENGUINS (2005), which create lovable subjects in the eyes of humans, turning animals into a form of human entertainment, much like soft, cuddly puppies, the director instead uses long-held, static camera shots gazing at animals as they often stand there gazing back at us.  Other times the camera may find animals simply staring out into empty space.  In each instance, no action is visibly happening onscreen to capture the attention of the viewer, but one grows curious about the surroundings, which are anything but natural.  In what must be approaching feeding time, a lion in a cage compulsively bangs against the locked door, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, as if demanding that the door be opened bringing food, where the sound is heard even after the camera shifts elsewhere, but the film instead offers no explanation other than the sight of a lone zoo employee standing nearby ignoring the commotion.  Initially the outdoor shots feature animals in the snow, like a small group of horses assembled together against a corrugated tin building, some only partially in the frame, moving about until there is only one staring directly at the camera, using no accompanying music, only natural sounds, as seen here:  Bestiaire (Dir. Denis Côté) Trailer - YouTube (1:29).  Only with the addition of more animals, like a small group of buffalo, does the audience realize this is a large scale zoo, mixing indoor and outdoor shots, mostly animals alone, many of them caged, where by spring, off in the distance with the grass suddenly turning green, a herd of elk may be seen running freely. 

After a fade to black, the camera is suddenly in the cramped studio quarters of a group of working taxidermists, with stuffed animals scattered about, also pieces of animals hanging on the wall, like antlers or horns.  One man is meticulously reconstructing a duck, which is a painstakingly slow process, where initially the animal isn’t even recognizable.  It’s an odd comment on animals, suggesting a bizarre afterlife, but ultimately it seems to say more about humans than animals, as they have a need to preserve life after death, even in an artificial form.  Obviously, in the more open outdoor space, thought is given to separate the caged predator cats and tigers from the zebras or impalas that roam free, but there’s no aesthetically designed space.  Most of this resembles the disorganized look of a working farm, with rutted tire tracks everywhere, random objects stacked in piles, where off in the distance touring cars are seen driving through the grounds with the arrival of summer.  With nothing resembling a carefully designed structure suitable for animal interaction, where they can move about hopping onto something resembling their natural habitat, instead we see a lone gorilla sitting on a dilapidated wooden structure, immobile, gazing at nothing until a couple with children walks into the frame, where the two have an animated discussion, even a kiss, where the viewing attention turns to them instead.  Just as quickly, the presence of people completely disappears during a rainstorm, but zebras still delight in seemingly having the entire outdoor grounds all to themselves.  There are no commercial shots of the concession stands or the children’s games, amusement rides, or the miniature golf, anything that reveals the mundane nature of the actual business operations.  Instead it’s a more isolated, free associative and contemplative film, observing a lone giraffe standing up against another corrugated tin structure, or a solitary elephant walking through the vast landscape, a stark contrast to the prevailing view of elephants living in the harmony of tight-knit family groups, unfathomably dwarfed by the emptiness of the wide open spaces, somehow questioning the meaning of it all, much like the existential dilemma facing mankind.