Le Rayon Vert (Summer)

LE RAYON VERT (Summer)    B                  

France  (98 mi)  1986  d:  Éric Rohmer

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1986, and the fifth of Éric Rohmer's six-film cycle of Comédies et Proverbes, this plays out like an interior road movie, something of a travelogue to various summer vacation destinations in France, as expressed through the existential ambivalence of the weary traveler, Marie Rivière as Delphine, a girl who gets dumped over the phone in the opening moments of the film, where what’s really troubling her is not the failed relationship or losing the guy, but her two week summer vacation is coming up and she’ll have no one to spend it with.  This sends her into a tailspin of despair continually questioning her failing self-esteem.  Using a diary-like progression, where the passing days are listed on the screen, Rohmer reveals sketchy little episodes from her life, which could, over time, reveal the complexities of her character as it becomes more and more exposed, but instead she remains stifled in an emotional standstill with a petrifying fear of intimacy.  Delphine feels particularly delicate and fragile, where it’s easy to feel sorry for herself, refusing the positive overtures expressed from her Parisian friends, suggesting this is an opportunity to meet someone new, all of whom seem to have friends or relatives with empty summer homes that are available in August, when nearly the entire country takes their vacations. While Delphine herself is a secretary, not at all a high paying position, there is no explanation for the sudden display of wealth except to suggest they all may come from wealthy families, so her problems reflect the income range and social status of those who have the luxury to perpetually dwell on themselves for days on end.  Unable to spend her vacation alone, she initially discovers the port city of Cherbourg, which she visits with a friend and her family that openly welcome her, but she returns to Paris almost immediately, feeling out of place and uncomfortable, as she can’t really explain what she’s doing there, and every feeble attempt only makes her feel worse, where she’s constantly on the defensive having to justify being alone.            

One of the beauties of this film is the cinéma vérité style, using natural sound and a camera that follows Delphine for the entire duration of the film, shot on 16 mm, then blown up to 35 mm, using a 4:3 box aspect ratio that continually focuses the attention on the central figure.  In this manner, despite her visits to colorful outdoor locations, she remains confined in this box, unable to escape the trap she has seemingly set for herself.  Now resigned to accept the inevitable, having to spend the rest of her vacation alone, she travels instead to the mountains where a friend is holding a key, but after a hike to a superlative panoramic view of the Alps, she returns back to Paris the same day, worn out and defeated, but mostly disgusted with herself.  Her constant return to her own misery does become annoying after awhile, a cyclical broken record playing again and again, yet that is the central premise of the film, self-disgust, which ironically takes place at some of the most stunningly beautiful locations in France.  When she hits the sunny beaches of Biarritz, a beautiful coastal city lined with hotels, where the beaches are filled with playful activities and everyone seems happy, it’s like a drearily realistic counterpunch to Jacques Tati’s MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY (1953), which continually pokes fun at the stress people endure in the pretense of convincing others that they’re actually having fun.  Delphine is under no such illusion.  When a beautiful young topless Swedish blond (Carita, one has to wonder how could she have never made another film?) struts her way through the teeming throng at the beach, her cheerful, liberated body language the exact opposite of Delphine’s dour repression, finding her towel next to Delphine’s, she strikes up an instant friendship, convinced she knows how to overcome her defeatist mood, immediately picking up a couple of guys.  But this kind of obnoxiously forced intimacy makes Delphine flee in disgust, unable to endure another moment. 

While this style of endurance test narrative may even be somewhat conventional by now, much like the Biblical struggles of Job, where one must be put to the ultimate test before discovering what really matters in life, Marie Rivière apparently improvised a great deal of her extensive role, where Rohmer actually names her as a collaborative screenwriter.  While she plays a relatively young character, her complete mistrust of being alone may puzzle some people, as one doesn’t always play out their interior psychological dramas in full public view, as she does here, never opting for alone time.  Delphine carries a book with her in public, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but despite the gorgeous locales, we never see her reading alone, where many find this an excellent way to nourish scarred or damaged souls.  Instead she openly parades her melancholia, doing little on her own to rebuild her shattered confidence.  Purely by chance, she overhears an avid discussion about the Jules Verne novel Le Rayon Vert, something of a fairy tale love story that hints at a rare magical moment just after a perfectly clear sundown, nearly impossible to see, where legend has it that in the last instant, just after the sun sets, a flash of green is the last thing seen by the human eye, where if you’re fortunate enough to see it, you can read your own feelings and those of others as well, where your perceptions are greatly illuminated at that moment.  In the book, the young lovers who have been searching for the green light become fixated on the love in each other’s eyes, never bothering to look on the horizon.  With this in mind, Rohmer gives himself some leeway, as after a meticulous exposé of blistering honesty, where basically Rivière just won’t shut up about her problems, an uncomfortable human drama that leaves many in the audience disillusioned by her building distrust for the entire human race, the director builds himself a pathway to the horizon, where real or imagined, fate may ultimately have the upper hand. 

Stray Dogs (Jiao you)

STRAY DOGS (Jiao you)                    B     
Taiwan  France  (138 mi)  2013  d:  Tsai Ming-liang

A film like this should be required viewing for patrons of Hollywood action movies, whose attention deficit disorder mindset has become synonymous with American mainstream culture, where viewers should be locked in a room until they can write an essay explaining why this film could win critical acclaim and festival prizes, as this was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Venice where it premiered.  If all they can say is it’s “garbage” or “a complete waste of time,” which will likely be their first inclination, let them keep trying until they come up with something more substantial.  Tsai Ming-liang began making films that had more of a narrative aspect to them, but were largely expressed through avant-garde or experimental imagery, where he has always shown a proficiency for slow cinema, near wordless long takes and little explanation for what’s taking place onscreen.  As his career evolved, the narrative aspect nearly disappeared and his films have only gotten even slower, with long shots on a single held image, a throwback to many Warhol films, creating an effect that can only be linked with the visual mastery of other experimental filmmakers, where his long takes, many beyond the 10-minute mark, rival Michael Snow or James Benning.  As his films are shown at film festivals with more traditional forms of cinema, they tend to stand out, and there are inevitable walk-outs from viewers who simply can’t tolerate the completely different stylistic approach.  However, if they want to see this director in pure entertainment mode, they’d do well to check out the absurdly hilarious colorful artificiality of THE HOLE (1998), something of an apocalyptic ode to Hollywood musicals.  Tsai Ming-liang has always made movies about alienation, where he was born in Malaysia before moving to Taiwan, feeling like an outsider in each culture, never able to feel accepted anywhere.  Like American black artists of the 20th century who found more acceptance in Paris than at home, Tsai migrated to Paris and began receiving European funding for his films, and was one of the only filmmakers ever allowed to film inside the Louvre Museum in his prior film FACE (2009).  

With this film, his 11th feature, the director has announced it will be his last and final film, which would be a shame.  He is well liked among cinephiles largely because what he brings to the world of cinema is so unlike anyone else.  Even if you don’t dramatically engage with his films on a personal level, as they are so extremely emotionally detached, there’s always something in every one of his films that stands out, and it’s usually different for each viewer.  Much like watching an Ozu film, Tsai’s slower pace forces viewers to alter the way they watch films, as you’re not figuring out whodunit or looking for clues, and while there may be violence, it’s an entirely different approach, as it’s mostly internalized.  Instead you’re simply gazing at whatever incredible images happen to be onscreen.  The actor Lee Kang-Sheng has been in every one of Tsai’s films, becoming the director’s alter ego, where his wordless, deadpan acting style has more in common with Silent era cinema.  What story there is concerns a homeless father (Lee) living on the fringes of Tapei while raising two young children, entering into the mainstream during the day, but then disappearing into the outer margins by night, encamped in an abandoned concrete structure they’ve inhabited.  Without any indication, the film is really divided in half, where without initially realizing it, the second half may actually precede the first half, where the only real clue is the changing faces of the mother figure, who may or may not be the same character.  Initially separated from the children’s mother, the kids eat on the street and spend their time tasting free samples and running freely through the aisles of a modern supermarket, where a grocery clerk, Lu Yi-ching, takes a personal interest in the often abandoned children, as the father’s job requires him to stand on the side of the highway hoisting a billboard on a stick and simply remain standing there in all manner of weather.  Here he endures typhoon-like winds and is forced to endure the everpresent deluge of rain. 

Most of the film is spent wandering through the crumbling back regions of the city, through industrialized lots, unfinished construction sites, dilapidated buildings, and overgrown bush, where Tsai has an acute eye for visual irony, much like Jacques Tati in PLAYTIME (1967), where winding stairs lead into a dreamlike futuristic abstraction, much like a M.C. Escher drawing, where a clever use of camera angles produces an optical illusion of architectural impossibility, while the sterile and washed out look of the modernistic supermarket is reminiscent of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s austere documentaries.  But the decaying ruins of a home in the second half feels more like what’s left after fire damage, where the walls appear covered in soot, with oddly shaped fungi growing at random, and here the mother is Chen Shian-chyi, seen in the opening shot combing her hair.  The deepening divide with her aloof husband is perfectly expressed when she fumigates the bathtub and his clothes after he takes a bath, as if he is an insect that must be eradicated.  In their odd and mysterious way, Tsai’s way of telling a story evokes empathy, where the children appear, for all practical purposes, normal and fairly happy, even living outdoors in a demolition zone, but it’s impossible not to have sympathy for what they’re going through, where it’s as if they’re surviving in a war zone.  On top of that, the parents have unresolved issues which are never discussed, but are everpresent, hanging over their heads like a cloud of gloom.  As in so many Tsai Ming-liang films, a torrent of rain is everpresent, where the characters continue to be drenched, only adding to their miseries.  Finally, there is an unmistakable resemblance to Weerasethakul’s SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (2006), arguably still his best film, as the interior space has a life all of its own, much of it feeling toxic or contaminated, like The Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), where the camera develops a relationship with a wall mural sitting alone in the ruins of a decaying and dilapidated building, where on two different occasions, characters are so mesmerized by what they see that time literally stops, as they temporarily become frozen objects unable to remove themselves from the environment.  In much the same way, Lee Kang-Sheng can’t shake his environment, continually living on the edge in a dire economic state, seemingly frozen in time, dehumanized, on the verge of losing his children, no longer able to feel any real semblance of life, giving the finale a lingering taste of apocalyptic doom.        

The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort)

sisters Deneuve (left) and Dorléac

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (Les demoiselles de Rochefort)      A                  
France  (124 mi)  1967  ‘Scope  d:  Jacques Demy 

Filmed after the international success of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cher... (1964), one of the most lavishly colorful films ever made, where nothing is spoken, everything is sung, this is another Demy musical with Catherine Deneuve, also long unavailable, lovingly restored in 1996 by his widow, Agnès Varda, and a hit in France, the film was originally released in America with an English dubbed version that was so poorly received in 1968 that Demy’s career never recovered.  THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT centers on, of course, the beautiful young girls, where the main attraction is the adorable sisters, blond Catherine Deneuve and her older sister, red-haired Françoise Dorléac, at ages 24 and 25, both stars from their teens, but this is the only time they worked together onscreen.  Co-starring as singing and dancing twins, culminating in a show-stopping final number together, both wearing glittering, skin-tight, slit-to-the-thigh matching red gowns, inspired by Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe’s musical duo “Two Little Girls from Little Rock” from GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953), Two Little Girls from Little Rock - Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (HD) YouTube (2:48).  Dorléac played Jean-Paul Belmondo’s stubborn girlfriend in Philippe de Broca’s THAT MAN FROM RIO (1964), also Truffaut’s mistress in THE SOFT SKIN (1964), and the young wife in Polanski’s CUL DE SAC (1966) before dying in a car crash the year this film was released.  For years, Deneuve was too distraught about her sister’s death to even discuss her.  Demy originally contemplated using Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn as the two sisters.  Of note, Bardot was paired successfully with Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s comic revolutionary romp VIVA MARIA! (1965).  Because of Demy’s insistence upon using American singer/dancer Gene Kelly, production had to wait two years until Kelly was free of other commitments, making him 54 at the time of the shoot, yet seeing him effortlessly dancing down the street recalls the vibrancy of AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951).  Jacques Perrin also appears as a young sailor and artist who paints his ideal woman without ever actually seeing her, but nonetheless keeps searching for her, looking exactly like Deneuve, though they’ve never met, becoming one of the many missed connections of the film.  One of Perrin’s first acting roles was working with Valerio Zurlini in GIRL WITH A SUITCASE (1961), playing a romantic lead opposite an enthralling Claudia Cardinale, becoming an actor/producer on the Costa-Gavros thriller Z (1969), where more recently he co-directed the sensational bird documentary WINGED MIGRATION (2001).  

This film reunites director-writer-lyricist Demy with musical composer Michel Legrand, offering one of their finest and jazziest scores, which plays over an odd combination of spoken dialogue mixed with what appears to be spontaneous moments expressed in song or dance, where characters at random form dancing combinations, seen twirling or spinning down the streets, often dancing or skipping out of the frame, where the streets are alive with continuous dance movements, all decked out in pastel colors, where the intoxicating, lighter-than-air mood of musical fantasia becomes the collective mindset of the movie.   The film was shot on location in the colorful port city of Rochefort, chosen because of its size and its central square where most of the action takes place, where Production Designer Bernard Evein repainted 40,000 square meters of the city’s façades, where the color white has never been more prominently featured and where every fire hydrant was painted a different pastel color, where Demy treats the town of Rochefort as if the city were a set built specifically for him and his movie.  The film takes place over a weekend celebrating the French holiday Fête de la Mer (Festival of the Sea), opening and closing with the arrival and departure of a caravan of trucks, motorcycles and horses, including two American actors, George Chakiris, Bernardo from West Side Story (1961) and also Grover Dale, and later Gene Kelly, who choreographs his own dances, seen driving a white convertible, where all arrive on a movable transporter bridge that acts as a drive-on ferry, where cars are seen driving past white clad sailors, white boats, white buildings, men and women dressed in white, until they arrive in the huge white colored city square where the sailors do an improvisational dance in front of the fountains with bright leotarded young girls 『The Young Girls of Rochefort』 Arrival of the Drymen - YouTube (3:34).  Demy’s grand, colorful, and unorthodox approach pays tribute to the American musical, yet mixes in French poetic realism, where dreams and reality coexist, though this may be Demy’s most exhilarating and cheerfully optimistic film, literally bursting with life and joy, a delirious expression where pure emotions are translated into motion and music, the essence and lifeblood of a Hollywood musical. 

The look Demy was after owes something equally to French filmmakers Max Ophuls and Jacques Tati, his mentor, where the film specifically recalls the charming allure of Tati’s JOUR DE FÊTE (1949), but also Americans Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, as Demy was a great admirer of the Golden Age of MGM musicals, creating a bliss-drenched realm of pinks and gold, where work is viewed as confining, so characters come alive with a kind of French gaiety that refuses to allow anxiety and distress to interfere with their otherwise sunny lives, where life is always upbeat in heavy anticipation of love and romance, not to mention Deneuve and Dorléac, who always seem to be just around the corner.  One of the many wonders of the film is watching how each of the women carefully selects some outrageously fashionable hat to wear before they show themselves to the world outside, where they literally decorate themselves in matching colors.  Danielle Darrieux, playing the mother to the twin sisters, is the only one of the performers in the film who does all her own singing, while Demy’s real-life wife Agnès Varda can be seen making a cameo as one of the nuns visiting a music shop run by a young Michel Piccoli, seen with dark hair and thick sideburns.  The construction of the film bears an artistic similarity with Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994), another film that features an elaborate choreography of near misses, showing ships passing in the night, where key couples continually criss-cross past one another throughout the story, usually just missing one another as they go about their daily routines, so caught up in everyday life to notice what might be waiting for them just around the corner.  This becomes part of the fun of the picture, as lovers meant to be, in the storybook sense, keep missing one another.  Certainly a central theme is the frustration of searching for and just missing romance, where so many of the songs express a lost or missing love, yet they all yearn for that elusive kind of love expressed in Hollywood musicals that doesn’t actually exist in real life, where lost in the façade of candy-colored artificiality is seeing through the dream, where as in all Demy musicals there are dark undertones to all the bright sunniness.  This hyper-expressive, positively enchanting narcotic of a rapturous, over-the-top musical best expresses that idyllic dream of youth (where one can hope, can’t they?), which may never come true, but when we’re young, catching someone’s eye, or observing someone in close quarters, the instantaneous reverie and fantasia of love has been and will always be there in our collective imaginations, dreamily wondering what may happen, or if this is just another one of those missed opportunities.  

2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #4 Holy Motors

HOLY MOTORS            A 

France  Germany  (115 mi)  2012  d:  Léos Carax

My guess is the more experience you have with cinema, the more you’ll like this film, which defies any narrative construction, yet continually exhilarates in its pure love and devotion to film language, much of it feeling like bits and pieces of old films all strewn together like broken parts to make something completely new.  Those with a need for rational explanation need not enter here, as to many this will simply not make sense, but certainly anyone who does give this a try can’t help but be blown away by the sheer originality and mad energy of the movie itself.  In other words you don’t even have to like it, but you can appreciate the unbridled joy with which this film was made, almost like a love letter to cinema itself.  Carax was once the boy wunderkind of cinema, where at 24 his first film Boy Meets Girl (1984), shot in black and white on location in Paris, won the Youth Award at Cannes, while his next Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) was a post New Wave primary color extravaganza that won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, an award given to a movie which opens new perspectives in film art.  Given a free reign over his next project, the boy wonder’s cost overruns created the most expensive French production in history, where production was halted several times before finally releasing the extravagant The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991), a sumptuous and romantic tribute to both Paris and lead actress Juliette Binoche, which was a colossal flop in Paris, not released internationally until 1999, thirteen years after his previous film.  When his next film POLA X (1999) was a huge flop as well, his career was all but finished, where we heard literally nothing about the man throughout the next decade, returning another thirteen years later to Cannes with this mammoth work that literally defies description, but is so ingeniously wacky that parts of the movie are simply off-the-charts hilarious, once again starring Denis Lavant as the director’s alter ego and stand-in for the creative force required to make an art film in the modern era.

This devoutly uninhibited film has such an edgy, stream-of conscious style that it likely summons different thoughts and ideas inside every head that shares this film experience, which plays out more like performance art, where Lavant is an outrageous chameleon-like character who literally takes on various disguises and different theatrical personas as he injects himself into the streets of Paris causing mayhem wherever he goes.  What’s intriguing straightaway is the viewer questions whether this character is even real or whether it’s some form of visiting spirit from a world beyond.  While this may not make sense to some, but it was reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, a scarred or disfigured character hidden from the world due to some deep personal tragedy or loss, living instead in a subterranean or alternate universe, which seems to be a blend of the future mixing with the past, where the connecting thread is the pure unadulterated joy of cinema.  Lavant is known by a half a dozen different names, but he’s driven around the streets of Paris in a white stretch limousine, where Édith Scob, the aged star of a French horror film more than 50 years ago, Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), is the driver, also dressed all in white, including the color of her hair.  She may as well be the driver of dead souls, as she transports Lavant around town where he sits in the back and receives 8 daily case assignments one at a time, literally transforming himself into character for each assignment, where the limo is largely a dressing room on wheels, where Lavant spends most of his time getting perfectly into disguise, becoming the manifestation of faded roles from cinema history which might die out altogether if he didn’t attempt to resuscitate them back into the modern world.  Much like the use of memories in Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), which may die if not remembered, Lavant seems to be the reincarnation of near dead movie roles, literally attempting to breathe new life into them, but taken completely out of context when set on modern streets, where he is literally out of place, out of time, where people on the street are aghast at what they see.  

The mix of fabulously designed set pieces and on-site locations are part of the brilliance of the film, as Carax does create an otherworldly impression throughout, where never for a single moment does anyone in the audience have any idea what’s happening next, where the built-up intrigue of these imaginary characters and what they’re doing returning back to earth is befuddling to say the least, where even the actors onscreen seem in complete bewilderment at Lavant.  In one assignment, like a creature from the silent era, Lavant turns into a little green Leprechaun with bright orange hair, a hideous creature that never utters a word but instead makes weird animal sounds.  When he crawls out of a sewer and leaps into a crowd on the street, people back away in disgust, where a high fashion photographer is taking photos of Eva Mendes as an haute-cuture fashion model, a statuesque figure of beauty, but this beastly creature instantly grabs the photographer’s attention, where he orders one of his underlings to immediately sign the creature up for a photo shoot.  When she attempts to communicate with the monster, she ridiculously attempts to relate by asking if he’s ever heard of Diane Arbus, famous for taking pictures of giants, dwarfs, and other freaks of nature.  Lavant simply grabs the model and carries her off into his lair in the sewers beneath the city that exists in stillness and in silence.  In such a short period of time, the marvel of invention that occurs in front of the camera in this one sequence is wildly imaginative and extremely cinematic, using rousing music in much the same way there are frequent cinema homages, as Carax is simply re-inventing cinema by reconnecting all the unused pieces, much like reassembling all the broken body parts of mannequins that we see strewn around the empty warehouse settings.

Midway through his day, Lavant’s assignment book reads “Entracte,” or intermission, conjuring up quick images on early archival black and white film stock of a shirtless man peforming before a crowd, like a circus act, which quickly cuts to Lavant leading a march of accordion players "Let my Baby Ride" by Doctor L (RL Burnside Cover)- Holy Motors OST  YouTube (3:20), an utterly enthralling piece of music that literally comes out of nowhere adding a sense of exhilaration to the film.  Who knows where Carax comes up with these ideas, where Lavant enters a Tati-like modern glass designed skyscraper dressed in a glow in the dark outfit where he does outrageous MATRIX-like dances in a darkened room, where he receives instructions from an unseen voice, like Warren Beatty in Mickey One (1965), becoming highly experimental using a dazzling strobe light effect, eventually joined by a shapely woman contortionist who can bend her body like a pretzel, with Lavant somewhere entwined.  Using two cinematographers, Yves Cape and Caroline Champetier, the streets of Paris often become hallucinogenic-tinged, or the shapes of buildings literally melt, creating phantasmagoric images of a reality unfolding into itself, where the world is seen in utter transformation.  Purely by chance, Lavant runs into an old flame, where he wanted to use Binoche, who apparently would not agree, so director Claire Denis suggested he use Kylie Minogue, where they have an extended sequence together that feels altogether unworldly on the rooftops of Paris, a direct reference to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) that starred Minogue, literally bringing in film segments from every bit of the director’s own imagination.  This may be too much for some, who may wonder what in the hell is going on, but this is a quintessential dip into the collective subconscious history of cinema, where the entire movie is a subliminal flash in time, spliced together using bits of broken pieces, where the finale with Lavant finally at home, innocently looking out his window at night feels like he’s just a kid waiting for the arrival of Peter Pan.