The Aquatic Effect (L'effet aquatique)

Director Sólveig  Anspach    

THE AQUATIC EFFECT (L'effet aquatique)                      B                    

aka:  The Together Project

France  Iceland  (83 mi)  2016  d:  Sólveig  Anspach       co-director:  Jean-Luc Gaget

One of those quirky films that deserves to be seen, featuring oddball humor at its finest, yet it’s a rare style not easy to replicate, much of which must be attributed to the director Sòlveig Anspach, who unfortunately died of breast cancer in August of 2015, about a year prior to the release of this film, completed by co-writer and co-director Jean-Luc Gaget.  Having an Icelandic mother and an American father, yet raised her entire life in France, Anspach has a unique international perspective on life, one that is truly borderless, where in her wacky sense of humor and upbeat Voltairian manner she utilizes the best of all possible worlds.  Thriving on absurdity, sight gags, eccentric characters, and screwball comedy, she also creates wonderful characters that you won’t find anyplace else, carving out a unique niche in the world of cinema, awarded the SACD Award (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers) in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes in a jury headed by Bertrand Tavernier.  The third of her Trilogy of Comedies, following BACK SOON (2008) and QUEEN OF MONTREUIL (2012), this film picks up where her last film left off, in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil, featuring returning characters Agathe, Florence Loiret-Caille, who is utterly brilliant, unflappable in her calm assurance, yet fiery when it comes to things she doesn’t like, such as liars and phonies, and Samir (Samir Guesmi), a somewhat shy and aloof, yet quizzical French-Arab crane operator and construction worker with a hangdog expression who is immediately blown away by the way Agathe undresses a guy in public with a verbal tirade of incensed fury, where she blows her stack in a bar at a guy’s lame tactics to get into her pants, thoroughly brushing him off and leaving in a huff.  Her sense of indignation is classic, and her headstrong style unforgettable.  Wanting to see more, he learns she’s a lifeguard and swimming instructor at the Maurice Thorez municipal pool, signing up immediately for lessons.  His impeccable taste in Speedos catches the eye of another instructor, however, Corinne (Olivia Côte), whose offensive body humor and intrusive shower etiquette suggest sadomasochistic dominance, where he needs the help of a sorry looking ticket seller Daniel (Estebán) and eccentric pool manager Reboute (Philippe Rebbot) to help guide his way into Agathe’s class. 

Pretending he can’t swim, he enters at the introductory level, where he’s very impressed by her hands-on approach, growing a bit delirious at the thrill of it all, beautifully expressed in underwater scenes with both wearing goggles, yet he carefully conceals his glee until one night when he awkwardly gets locked inside the building.  Miraculously discovering Agathe alone in the pool, things go swimmingly, so to speak, as they both open up to one another, leading to a trip up to the high board where they share a kiss and an embrace before they are rudely interrupted by Reboute with a boombox, a bottle of champagne, and designs on impressing two young floozies by pretending to be the owner of the pool.  When one of the girls sinks to the bottom of the pool, Samir jumps into action off the high-dive, literally saving her from drowning.  Of course, Agathe realizes the deception and quickly exits, leaving Reboute to face the charges of his misconduct, where the investigation is led by none other than the film director herself.  She has a charming way of getting him to realize the error of his ways, as Reboute sheepishly tries every which way to squirm out of it.  By the time the storm has passed, Agathe is gone, having flown to Iceland for an international lifeguard congress in Reykjavík — only in this film would they invent such a thing, identified as the 10th International Congress of Swimming Coaches, where she is the chosen representative of the Seine-Saint-Denis region of Paris.  Not knowing what else to do, Samir heads for the airport.  Life in Iceland is decidedly different, as evidenced by the alternating schedule of City Counselors, Anna (Didda Jónsdóttir, an Anspach regular) and Frosti (Frosti Jón Rúnólfsson), where they switch who is in charge on consecutive days, with each thoroughly enjoying being the boss of the other, making them perform the most humiliatingly trivial jobs.  The sleek, modern look of the conference center has an inviting style of architecture that accentuates glass windows, creating an unusual sense of open air and unlimited space, providing a friendly atmosphere that breathes openness and understanding.  

With Agathe at the podium delivering introductory remarks, her eyes become fixed on the Israeli delegate, none other than Samir, where she decides to put him on the spot and cede the floor to him.  In halting speech, after a bit of stuttering and stammering, he comes up with the idea of meeting with the Palestinian delegate to build a joint Israeli-Palestinian swimming pool, accent on the often repeated word “together,” a peace gesture that he decides to call “The Together Project.”  The auditorium goes wild with enthusiasm, where he’s immediately heralded the celebrity of the day, with everyone wanting to shake his hand, or take selfies together, with a skeptical Palestinian delegate, a real estate developer, handing him his business card suggesting they meet, where overnight he’s the most popular guy in town, where all the girls want to share a drink with him.  Agathe, on the other hand, is stupefied by the trickery on his part, knowing it’s all an act.  But in Iceland, it’s all about Anna and Frosti, an exaggerated comic routine of hyperbole, slapstick, and personal ridicule, each continually making fun of the other.  But it’s also a glimpse into Anna’s extended family, viewed as a picture of complete dysfunction, where her son turns out to be a foie gras smuggler, stealing a farmer’s geese to manufacture his own product line, while at the same time Agathe fumes about the Israeli delegate’s deceit.  But when she describes how this guy lied to her and then traveled all the way to Iceland just to see her again, the others find it a terribly romantic gesture that subjected him to extreme ridicule, a French-Arab character pretending to be Israeli at an international event, yet he somehow landed on his feet, where all the Icelandic women now want to flirt with him.  Veering into totally unexpected territory, Samir loses his memory from a freak accident, leaving him neurologically compromised, as he can’t even remember his name, where he may or may not be faking it.  Who knows?  It ends up being a goofy love story that is hilariously offbeat, always providing the unexpected, yet it has the ability to capture characters at their most vulnerable moments, providing a window into their true selves, where they’re really just a couple of lonely people.  Totally implausible throughout, none of that matters, as it’s a touching film that is a delight throughout, where the zany experience feels like a breath of fresh air, where it will be extremely hard to fill the void left behind from the loss of this director. 

Trouble Every Day

TROUBLE EVERY DAY                    B                     

France  Germany  Japan  (101 mi)  2001  d:  Claire Denis

Following the unanimous acclaim for Beau Travail (1999), arguably the director’s most erotic and deeply romantic work, this boldly challenges viewers with what must be what is described as an adult film, as it’s certainly not for everyone, revealing far more than the eye can see, significant as the only Claire Denis film that dabbles in the horror genre, something of a modern era vampire film, a graphically violent and thoroughly disturbing vision of carnal desire as a form of cannibalism. becoming something exquisitely revolting and truly frightening by the end, equating sex with death, and not like anything else out there.  Panned at Cannes and critically dismissed in America, the film has undergone a certain revival among cinephiles who recognize rarity when they see it, but the slow and languid pace of the film will likely turn off horror lovers, while the excruciating blood-letting will turn off art film devotees.  Despite the raw and graphic subject matter, this remains a Claire Denis film, expressed with an artful flourish and filled with poetic ambiguity throughout.  Only a more recent film like Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) conveys a similar attention to detail when it comes to flesh-eating monsters starved for blood, while at the same time offering a haunting sensuality behind the camera.  Beautifully filmed by Agnès Godard, this must be viewed as one of her triumphs, as this is a visually stunning film that operates out of its own unique conception, where it lives by its uncompromising rules even as it references vintage horror films.  At heart, this is a FRANKENSTEIN (1931) movie, where the tropical experiments of Doctor Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) went awry while researching experimental brain medicine and have now altered the human gene pool, creating vampire-like creatures with a ravenous need not only for blood, but for human flesh. 

The film may also be traced to THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1977) and CAT PEOPLE (1982), both films with earlier Black and White versions, as the first deals with the grotesque and disfigured effects of medical experimentation gone wrong, while the second deals with erotic transformation, where the sex urge turns humans into blood devouring, flesh eating beasts, returning to human form only after feeding.  However, in the hands of Denis, a consummate artist known for her poetic subtleties, much of what’s displayed onscreen is graphically disconcerting.  Opening with the music of Tendersticks, it’s one of their better scores, especially the hauntingly beautiful funeral dirge that opens and closes the film and has a way of burrowing under your skin, Trouble Every Day Opening Song Tindersticks - YouTube (3:13), while it’s also extremely effective the way Denis opens with a darkened kiss that fades to black for a lengthy period of time, leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation.  Once the picture returns, the familiar face of actress Béatrice Dalle is seen as Coré, flagging down truckers on the side of the road, where all we see is the bloody aftermath, where her husband (Sémeneau) tracks her down and brings her home, tenderly washing the blood off of her, then locking her into a boarded up room in their mansion.  Simultaneous to this event, an American couple on their honeymoon are flying to Paris, medical researcher Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his overly delicate wife June (Tricia Vessey), where Shane is inflicted with the same disease, having to continually hide from her every time he’s aroused.  While he’s using the honeymoon as a pretext to track down the infamous doctor, June only knows he’s hiding some deep, dark secret, and when she hears him violently masturbating in the bathroom, her pounds on the door evoke sheer terror. 

While this is a thoroughly confounding film, one that makes great use of Béatrice Dalle's physical features, giving her an animal-like presence, the film pushes the boundaries of cinema, much of it without dialogue, but using screams of hysteria, reflective of the Silent era, where it weaves in and out of dream states seemingly at will, and where half of this French-language film, including the title, is spoken in English, contributing to an otherworldy effect, like something out of Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).  When a young man’s (Nicolas Duvauchelle) curiosity leads him to Coré’s door, words can’t describe the sense of grim bewilderment overcoming the audience when they realize she is incredulously eating him before our eyes, smearing his blood all over the walls afterwards.  While the audience is aware something is not right with Shane as well, none of the people he meets have a clue, as he spends most of the film popping pills and hallucinating his blood-drenched wife, searching for a cure, but to no avail.  A seemingly innocuous event leads to the savage finale, as the maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) lingers in their room after making the bed, leaving her scent on the bedcovers.  Throughout the film this scene has been set up by shots of the back of the young maid’s neck, which Shane has obviously been tracking, like wild prey on the loose, eventually unleashing a wild, animalistic hunger that will not be denied.  It is this exploration of man’s basest rape instincts that prove to be the most deeply unsettling images of the film, like the horrors of IRREVERSIBLE (2002), complete with blood curdling screams and graphic sexual bloodletting that are among the most difficult scenes to endure in a supremely grotesque finale, as Shane finally gives in to his bloodlust, Claire Denis - Trouble Every Day...  YouTube (5:39).  A haunting shadow of doom overwhelms the senses along with a Tendersticks refrain, sending the audience out the door in a shivering fright.