Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench

 

Writer/director Damien Chazelle

Chazelle with musical composer Justin Hurwitz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH                 B-                                                     USA  (82 mi)  2009  d: Damien Chazelle

I believe the musical is so well suited to expressing romance because songs begin and end and are completely separate from the larger movie world.  It is this kind of momentary perfection of existence that the characters are able to reach, but they always know that it is inherently an illusion.  So for me, there is something very beautiful but yet very sad about the great musicals, but that’s part of the point.                                                                                                   —Damien Chazelle interview, November 13, 2010, Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger] 

This rather raw and crudely edited early student film remains largely unseen, made on a shoestring budget, Chazelle’s senior thesis project was made with classmate Justin Hurwitz at Harvard, written, directed, shot, co-edited and co-produced by Chazelle, a song-and-dance social realist musical with vérité roots in the French New Wave, shot in various Boston locations in gritty handheld black and white on 16mm, featuring original songs by Hurwitz recorded by the 90-piece Bratislava Symphony Orchestra, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (Original Movie Score), scoring all his later films as well.  Much like the Léos Carax film Boy Meets Girl (1984), this is a modern take on the irrepressibility of romanticism that so often leads to the impossibility of love, with diverse cinematic references that are all over the map, exhibiting more of an experimental style, capturing the spirit of the stripped down, free-form style of John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959), exploring similar themes of interracial romance half a century later, yet the kicker comes when a character breaks out into song in the most unexpected places.  A much more sophisticated version of this stylistic technique is Christophe Honoré’s DANS PARIS (2006), the first of his films where out of the blue one of his characters will break into song, complimented by original music written by Alex Beaupain, followed by several more musicals, including LOVE SONGS (2007), exploring the dynamics of a three-way relationship, La Belle Personne (The Beautiful Person) (2008), exuding in the pent-up passion of a Sirkian youth melodrama, and Beloved (Les Bien-Aimés) (2011), a real treat being able to see Catherine Deneuve work with her daughter Chiara Mastroianni.  Honoré’s films tend to leave audiences sharply divided, and his use of songs as an extension of the narrative is no exception, as he doesn’t accompany songs with traditional dance numbers, or a lively choreographed sequence, but instead delves into the downbeat psychological mindset of the character, often submerged in anguish, lost love, or grief, where musical numbers are used in the exact opposite manner of one’s usual association, which is happy and upbeat, such as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964), which just happens to be Chazelle’s all-time favorite film (Damien Chazelle names his favourite film of all time), as the entitled characters in this movie are borrowed from that film.  Demy is a great admirer of the Golden Age of MGM Hollywood musicals, where his films are basically a love letter to the Hollywood movies of the 40’s and 50’s, incorporating the dreamy music of Michel Legrand and bleak elements of poetic realism into his bursting kaleidoscope of colors that vibrantly come alive onscreen through movement and dance.  Demy is famous for making the black and white Lola (1961) with Anouk Aimée, described by Demy as a “musical without music,” stripped down to only one musical number, while also making the colorful musical explosion, The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort) (1967), featuring the adorable sisters, blond Catherine Deneuve and her red-haired older sister Françoise Dorléac, where the line between euphoria and melancholia is a thin one, subject to change by random encounters or a sudden change of heart, where missed connections are built into the storyline, like ships passing in the night, calling into question certain aspects of fate.  Introducing a lost love theme that Chazelle would revisit in his later works, this film explores the protagonist’s inability to balance his musical aspirations with his love life, the same subject of 2016 Top Ten List #10 La La Land, while at the same time musical passages initially heard here would magically reappear in that film. 

Chazelle was born in Rhode Island to a French father and Canadian mother, both college professors, spending part of his childhood in Paris, with dual French-American citizenship, where his first love was becoming a jazz drummer, actually making an appearance in the film instructing the female lead protagonist on the correct way to hold drumsticks, Damien Chazelle Cameo in Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (HD) YouTube (1:23).  While the comparison to Cassavetes might seem apt, the difference is how essential building character was for Cassavetes, even with non-professionals, as his love and admiration for the craft of acting was an essential component of his naturalistic film aesthetic.  That’s largely what’s missing here, as viewers never really establish an emotional bond or connection to what we’re seeing onscreen, as the characters appear more haphazard or random, disassociated from any central dramatic emphasis.  This is a crucial distinction, something rectified in his breakout hit Whiplash (2014), which was all about establishing character, featuring an exceptional performance from journeyman J.K. Simmons, who simply inhabits the role, rising to public prominence immediately afterwards, where now he’s one of the more recognizable faces in the industry.  But this low fidelity film is comprised with non-professionals, starring Jason Palmer as Guy, a real-life jazz trumpeter who tours, records, and teaches at the Berklee College of Music, and Desirée J. Garcia as Madeline in her one and only screen appearance, simultaneously writing her doctoral thesis on musicals before publishing a book in 2014, The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream, and then in 2021, The Movie Musical (Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture), currently a film professor at Dartmouth.  In the first few minutes they are seen together on a park bench before he casually gets up and walks away, without any explanation, as the initial spark has gone out of their relationship and an ennui has set in, as neither one seems to really care anymore, spending most of the film in the company of others in what is essentially a breakup movie.  As they drift apart, we see their separate lives, as Guy plays in a small jazz combo in a dingy basement club setting, feeling very claustrophobic, allowing the music to fill the constricted space which almost feels suffocating, yet there’s also the social release of mingling with friends and well-wishers, as the camera lingers over clusters of loud conversations, never really getting the gist of what anyone is saying, yet the energy fills the air, having an alienating effect on viewers, who feel like perennial outsiders, never actually invited in.  Madeline, on the other hand, feels lost as she wanders alone through the park, like a stranger in a strange land, where she can sit and read, or simply watch others passing by, yet what’s emphasized is that she has no real connection to anything around her, as she’s simply a passenger in an unwritten story.  Alienated and isolated in the midst of a beautiful summer day, audiences are floored when she spontaneously breaks out into song, a clearly dubbed voice blending into the passing crowd near the Old North Church, downbeat and sad, a cheerless comment on her directionless life, yet the theatrical stylization mixes together an unadorned realism with a dreamy façade of artifice, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench - Before there was La La Land... (Clip) YouTube (2:10).  Leaving Guy behind, she briefly moves in with an older French jazz singer, Bernard Chazelle (singing in French), giving the filmmaker a unique opportunity to direct his own father.  What’s missing in this film is an actual script, feeling more like a series of random vignettes drowning in existential angst, as much of this is told aimlessly, yet the abrupt shifts of a constantly changing point of view never seem to have any real focus, leaving viewers adrift, though perhaps that is the intention.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the introduction of a new character whose name is not even in the title yet she dominates a majority of the screen time, Elena (Sandha Khin), initially seen watching a juggler performance, actually trying to pick him up afterwards, curiously providing her own name before correcting it.  She feels more like the emotional center of the picture, exhibiting far greater range of expression, where her outgoing nature is really on display when she’s seen meeting Guy purely by chance on a jam-packed commuter train, both standing, holding the grab handles, eventually coming right next to one another, as they do this mysteriously erotic, wordless dance of starting apart, inching ever closer, seeing only the movement of their feet as they begin to face each other, slowly making eye contact and brushing against each other before finally touching affectionately, ending up sleeping together in Guy’s apartment.  While her bubbly personality gives this film a jolt of adrenaline, the same thing happens in this relationship as well, quickly growing sick of each other, as she fails to comprehend his self-absorbed passion and obsessive devotion to music, as that’s time he’s not spending with her, while he never mentions her to his friends and fails to introduce her to his visiting family, played, surprisingly enough, by the actor’s real family, so there’s an emotional disconnect, despite such a dramatically visualized effort to emphasize a near idyllic initial attraction.  It’s a strange shift of fate, which they never really discuss, as this is a film that eliminates any hint of intimate conversation, where the social awkwardness resembles the mumblecore films of Andrew Bujalski, who similarly came out of the Harvard Film School which features a very documentary-heavy program, becoming a choreographed ballet of shifting emotions, copying the template of Demy, yet the emotional indifference exhibited here is in stark contrast to the vivacious energy and elegant luster of Demy’s films, where each of the characters are more closely defined, and the spaces in-between shine with a poetic realism.  As Elena drifts apart, she’s once again alone in the city, seen in combatant situations with rudely overzealous young men on the street making obnoxious come-ons, where a strange older man named Frank (Frank Garvin) tries a less obvious technique, yet it’s a come-on just the same, simply presented in a more politely palatable manner, with rather amusing results.  Much of the film features street scenes, including street vendors, performance artists, and children playing in fountains, where there’s an interactive quality with the city of Boston, showcasing several of their parks and monuments, with the characters drifting around Copley, the Back Bay, and South End, yet one overriding feature throughout this film is a heavy reliance upon extreme close-ups, where an intimacy is achieved through the camera’s love affair with facial portraiture, while also exploring an interesting social dynamic, as Palmer is black, Khin is Asian, and Garcia is Hispanic.  The real showstopper, however, is a Godard-inspired musical number paying reverence to the iconic café dance, Bande à Part - Madison Cafe Dance Scene - Jean-Luc Godard YouTube (3:50), by Anna Karina in Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), as Madeline is stuck in a monotonous waitressing routine at a mostly empty fish shack, taking orders from some clueless manager, yet suddenly she breaks out in another song, The Boy in the Park YouTube (4:55), adding an inexplicable tap-dancing routine (Boston tap legend Julia Boynton from the Harvard Dance Program was a dance consultant), joined by the rest of the wait staff, becoming an idealized vision of the kind of unbridled freedom she never has, all playing out in her mind, expressed with the kind of infectious joy missing from the rest of the picture, which may be what Chazelle imagined before shooting the film.  It leads to a very clever ending, which recalls the pitch perfect finale of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004), as the couple reunites again under fortuitous circumstances, where in a single take the young director captures the beauty of wordless expression, exactly what this film has been searching for, while also discovering a new meaning in their lives.     

Postscript

According to the Trivia section of IMDb, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009) - Trivia, shortly after completing this film, a friend suggested Chazelle watch the Barry Jenkins film Medicine for Melancholy (2008), another contemporary black and white indie film, while around the same time a friend of Barry Jenkins told him to watch this film shortly after completion of his film.  Both directors were up for numerous Academy Awards in 2017 for their critically acclaimed films, Chazelle’s film 2016 Top Ten List #10 La La Land won Best Director, the youngest recipient to ever win at the age of 32, while the Barry Jenkins film 2016 Top Ten List #1 Moonlight won Best Film.  Neither was aware of these earlier recommendations until they spoke after the Oscar gala ceremony, discovering they were inextricably linked. 

Varda by Agnès (Varda par Agnès)

Varda with her husband, Jacques Demy

VARDA BY AGNÈS (Varda par Agnès)                 B                    

France  (115 mi)  2019  d:  Agnès Varda                  

I know the art of evoking happy moments.

―The Balcony, by Charles Baudelaire, 1857, Le Balcon (The Balcony) by Charles Baudelaire, read by Varda in the opening of her film Jacquot de Nantes (1991)

Released at the Berlin Film Festival a month before she died of breast cancer at the age of 90, this film serves as the last testament of the artist, an overview of her entire career, much of it delivered in a lecture style before a live audience, where her commentary is actually read aloud from prepared notes interspersed with film clips, providing an overall vision of her artistic career, where this film is meant to be shown instead of an in-person talk, much like Inspiration and good mood: THAT’S CINEMA! | Agnès Varda | TEDxVeniceBeach (25:54), with the artist herself having the final summation.  While anyone that’s ever seen Varda will recognize this lecture format, as it’s very representative of spending a few hours with the director herself, yet it’s unusual for a final film, as it departs from her own visual style, which is more often spontaneous and playful, offering jovial insight, while this adheres to structure and a predetermined outline, not wanting to forget or leave out anything, feeling overlong and rushed, not really having a chance to edit the film properly, so it’s kind of a “warts and all” film, combining biography into a documentary, cramming her entire life into a two-hour format, becoming overly congested, with little time to process all the material, which apparently ran on French TV in two episodes a week or so before her death.  It’s an apt portrait, however, the maker of 24 features and 22 shorts, obviously saying what she wants to say, but despite its personalized expertise, it will not be the final word on this artist, as her place in history has yet to be determined.  Not part of the boy’s group that ushered in the French New Wave, many writing previously for the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma magazine prior to directing, Varda set her own path, even as she was largely ignored by this male fraternity, which also includes books written about the French New Wave, ignoring shorts and documentaries for all practical purposes, which Varda continued to make throughout her lifetime.  This film also concentrates on a few art museum video installments, something she shares with quite a few other contemporary visual artists, but it’s unusual to include them in cinema retrospectives, spending an inordinate amount of time at the expense of films not mentioned.  Another rare distinction is Varda’s expanded audience, which includes people of all ages and nationalities, as she continues to make films accessible to children (something that would be unheard of from Godard, for instance), such as a video instillation of a colorfully illuminated grave for her dead cat, which actively encourages kids to express themselves.  Varda is simply a different kind of artist, as was the more experimental Chantal Akerman, both born in Belgium, but Varda grew up in France living on a houseboat during the war, and then in the same apartment on the Rue Daguerre in Paris for almost seventy years, studying art history, philosophy, and photography, working professionally as a theater photographer even as she was making her first films in the 50’s, having no film school experience to draw upon, no professional training, and having seen virtually no other films.  Because her early films predate the New Wave, she is considered part of the Left Bank (Rive Gauche) cinema movement (Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group ...), a group of experimentalists that would include Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Varda’s husband Jacques Demy, all of whom shared a love for cats.  

An argument was made by Georges Sadoul, a noted French journalist and film historian, that Varda’s LA POINTE COURTE (1955) was actually the first film of the French New Wave, edited by Alain Resnais, shot in her mother’s hometown of Sète, a small fisherman’s village in the south of France, carefully observing a place she was already familiar with, the same location used for Abdellatif Kechiche’s THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN (2007).  Unlike the other young guns from Cahiers, her film was not a response to previous works of cinema, but to literary novelist William Faulkner’s Wild Palms, claiming that was “the intellectual basis for the film,” yet it stylistically resembles what would become the New Wave criteria, shot outside the studio system on actual street locations for next to no money, as none of the actors were paid, capturing a daily rhythm in the lives of the working poor, thoroughly embracing their ordinary hardships, accentuating an existing reality that feels like the ends of the earth.  Viewers expecting Varda’s whimsical, lighthearted material will be disappointed, as this comes across as a densely scrutinized masterclass of filmmaking, including her role in the history of cinema, with meticulous asides and heavily detailed annotations, providing a multitude of personal anecdotes, producing what amounts to scholarship material, creating a massively detailed overview of dozens of films, reflecting on them for her audience, sharing the origins, recalling what she remembers about making the film, some of the people involved, what she was most challenged by in the making of the film, and what she was going through in her life at the time, having the benefit of time passing in taking a look back, offering her personal and professional views.  Viewers are not always on the same page with her due to the massive breadth of material she is discussing, where she is personally invested and more intimately familiar, yet plenty rubs off on viewers along the way, while historians may use this film as a living outline that follows her career.  Certainly one of her most excruciatingly personal experiences was making Jacquot de Nantes (1991), a living testament to the life of her husband Jacques Demy, married for 28 years, though challenged by his bisexual lifestyle, a practitioner of poetic realism and author of some of the most lavishly colorful musicals ever made, like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort) (1967), who wrote the outline of his own childhood to becoming a filmmaker as he was dying of AIDS, too ill to direct the film himself, allowing his wife access to shared intimate moments as she was making the film, using extreme close-ups as the camera glides across his skin, showing every pore and blemish, becoming an intensely recalled farewell visual memoir of his life, much as this film turns out to be for her own life and career.  One would be hard-pressed to find two more poignant “cinematic love letters” than Varda’s elegiac film tributes to both Demy and herself, the final artistic career summations of husband and wife filmmakers on their own separate cinematic journeys.  It’s an unfathomable accomplishment. 

Central to Varda’s cinematic understanding is the term cinécriture, a kind of cinematic signature, or intuitive thoughtfulness, which goes well beyond the concept of an auteur, but describes, in her eyes, all the various notions of what an artist thinks about when constructing a film, as they write, cast, direct, edit, scout locations, choose the scenes, the season, the crew and the light, any voice-over commentary, and provide the visual look they want, all deliberate choices that ultimately provide different meanings:

A well written film is also well filmed, the actors are well chosen, so are the locations.  The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc.  In writing it’s called style.  In the cinema style is cinécriture.

Among her lesser known films are those made in Los Angeles when Demy was working in Hollywood, filming a threesome of drug-happy hippies in Los Angeles, contacting Andy Warhol to work with actress Viva, along with the two male creators of the musical Hair, then hiring Shirley Clarke to play a version of herself filming them all tripping the light fantastic, capturing the blistering originality of Mexican wall murals, yet always venturing to the water for her lifelong affinity for beaches.  In one of her bigger failures (which she can laugh about today), she pairs Robert de Niro with Catherine Deneuve, with De Niro speaking a hilarious phonetically learned French, while in another outlandish vision she turns her own Parisian neighborhood into a seaside excursion (with apologies to her neighbors who weren’t so thrilled), dumping a pile of sand onto the streets while recreating a festive Jacques Tati-style beach adventure.  But the majority of time is spent with her more familiar works, sitting under umbrellas in the rain with actress Sandrine Bonnaire discussing Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) (1985), the only Varda film to actually make money, arguably her most heartbreaking work, reminding the world of her importance as a feminist filmmaker, but decades earlier she made Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) (1962), an existential reflection on mortality, a film that captures the terror of cancer, examining the subjective experience of being a woman, told in real time, divided into thirteen chapters, as Cleo literally transforms her initial superficial views, self-obsessed by fashion and how she looks to others, allowing beauty to determine her sense of identity, but this slowly transforms her views, suddenly discarding her earlier notions while taking an emotional leap into the future, where the streets of Paris become a mirrored image of her personal odyssey as she redefines and reshapes her own view of herself.  In THE GLEANERS AND I (2000), she uses a road movie format to offer a reflective essay on waste and recycling, using a digital camera for the first time, lighter, with no reliance upon a film crew, allowing her greater personal access, spending a year touring France, capturing the people who scavenge and salvage the food and objects left behind by others, from discarded crops in the field, illustrated by paintings hanging in art museums, to extracting precious metals from abandoned junk, and even to artists who create entire worlds from trash or found objects, while also offering a meditative commentary on growing old.  Eventually viewed as the grandmother of French cinema, her bubbly personality and overly gregarious approach may actually influence how her films are perceived, cheerfully alert and buoyant, beloved by everyone, but never viewed as ponderous, yet she’s been making films for seven decades, never losing her enthusiasm, offering her own unique commentary on each time period.  A thorough analysis of her place in history will likely only rise after her death, but this film is an initial step in resurrecting the full scope of her lengthy career, revealing a marvelously quirky inventiveness and originality in film language, a curiosity of spirit that has never aged, an artist constantly reinventing herself, capturing the essence of what it means to be alive.