Young Adam

YOUNG ADAM               A-            

Great Britain  France  (98 mi)  2002  ‘Scope  d:  David Mackenzie

If ever anyone says to you, “You can put that where the sun don’t shine,” think of this film, a deeply probing, excessively gloomy adaptation of Scottish beat author Alexander Trocchi’s novel.  Ambiguously set in postwar Scotland, this is a tense, sexually explicit lower class version of Polanski’s KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962) with a brilliant cast, the ménage à trois, Les and Ella, played by Peter Mullan and Tilda Swinton, an unhappy couple with a young son onboard who transport post-WWII fuel rations on a barge up and down the narrow canals from Glasgow to Edinburgh, who take on hired help in the form of Ewan McGregor who plays Joe, a chain-smoking, handsome lothario, a self-absorbed character largely based on the author himself, who was a heroin addict with squandered talent.  Filled with an attention to detail, few words, and an endlessly gray mood, the film opens on the docks as they sweep a woman out of the harbor dressed only in a flimsy petticoat.  Shortly afterwards, Joe is staring at Tilda Swinton’s every move, sharing close quarters underneath the decks of the barge, concealing little from her husband.  In this film, no words are needed, and after a brief sexual escapade outdoors on the grassy slopes, when Joe tries to say something, Ella cuts him off quickly, “You’ve said enough for one evening.”  In a series of well-placed flashbacks, Joe is seen meeting and romancing the drowned woman found in the water, Cathie (Emily Mortimer), picking her up on the beach, moving away onto the concealment of rocks where they have sex, learning more about their deteriorating relationship but only as the film progresses, where it seems to be moving in slow motion backwards and forwards, all at the same time.  The style is absorbing, moody, incredibly detached, but extraordinarily focused on each single moment at hand, which when gone, seems to have never meant very much to anyone at all, as if all is lost in a deep abyss of an existential void.  Easily comparable to the most famous barge movie of all time, Jean Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934), which also happens to be the name of the barge (The Atlantic Eve), this lacks the surging romanticism and optimistic feel and instead embarks upon a more somber and fatalistic mood that is diametrically opposed to Vigo, a downbeat depiction of working class social realism that accentuates physical intimacy, where Joe screws every woman he meets, with the audience sympathies and overall view of his character slowly deteriorating over time.  The story moves to the murder trial of the drowned girl, becoming a morality tale, as the police seem to be accusing the wrong man, which sparks the interest of Joe, who slowly, but surely, falls farther and farther from grace.  With an intriguing soundtrack by Talking Head’s David Byrne, the title, one assumes, refers to original sin.  To quote Michael Wilmington, “This is an unvarnished, pitiless look at real life by a man who knows his character is deeply flawed and does nothing to disguise or excuse it.” 

Interesting parallels exist between Vigo, whose life was cut short by tuberculosis, actually directing part of L'Atalante from a stretcher, and the author Alexander Trocchi who wrote his novel from the drugged stupor of a lifelong heroin addiction.  Instead of believing in love, the underlying power of Vigo’s film, this is all about sex, viewed as a short-term substitute where there is no possibility of love.  One main difference in the film is the lack of an inner narration, which is provided by Joe in the book, instead the film wordlessly sees the world through his eyes.  A gritty depiction of working class life, this parallels the poetic realism of Vigo’s film, both offering sumptuously beautiful cinematography (in this case Giles Nuttgen), but this film couldn’t feel more claustrophobic, as the cramped quarters inside the boat are squeezed right next to each other, with paper thin walls offering no privacy to speak of, with Joe using reading a book as an excuse not to go into town with Les, or cuts his visits to the pub short, as his real purpose is to have moments alone with Ella, growing used to each other after a while, even bored, as is suggested when he watches a fly sitting atop her naked breast, which holds little interest anymore.  Simultaneously, Joe is seen staying at home attempting to write on a typewriter while Cathie works all day, but he fails miserably, a writer with no inspiration, usually in a sour mood when she gets home, or drunk, treating her terribly, at times like a sexual predator.  This picture of domesticated bliss is always soiled and stained, a picture of opportunities wasted, yet she yearns for the stability while that most of all is what feels like its breathing down his neck, suffocating him, offering him no relief, eventually making a quick exit.  This failed relationship is what leads him to Les, seeing him throw his typewriter away into the river, offering him a job on the barge, where Joe is viewed as just another drifter.  There’s another scene in the film that’s not in the book, a moment when Ella’s young son falls into the canal, with Joe jumping in headfirst to save him, perhaps offering a bit of sympathy to this otherwise wayward character, suggesting he’s capable of moral decisions even as he openly flaunts behavior that suggests otherwise, having regular sex with Ella right under the nose of Les, thinking only of himself, taking advantage of every opportunity, showing no regard for others.  Pretending to express little interest in the ongoing investigation surrounding the drowned girl, the seemingly unflappable Joe is fooling no one, least of all the audience, while Les just wants to see his name in the papers.  Their closeness is revealed, however, in a scene scrubbing each other’s backs, wiping the coal dust off their bodies, which is done without an ounce of pretense, where it’s simply viewed as a necessity.  Along with trips together into town to visit pubs, this friendly male bonding on the one hand and willful sexual promiscuity with his wife on the other reveal the moral divide that actually defines this picture.    

Moody and extremely atmospheric throughout, while there is an idealized freedom that comes with the barge, with no set hours, no punching the clock, living on the river away from the noise and traffic of the city, the film does an excellent job revealing a near-documentary view of ordinary life traversing the narrow bridges and locks along the river, loading and hauling a variety of commodities.  None of the other characters have much character development, though Swinton makes Ella proud and self-aware while Cathie completely surrenders her dignity and self-respect, instead focusing upon Joe’s sexual exploits, showing little affection and even less responsibility.  Through a series of flashbacks Joe’s despicable inner character comes more prominently into view, in particular a defining scene that reunites Joe with Cathie, accidentally running into one another sometime after they split up, where they strip naked and have sex in the dirt and grime under a truck, hardly a romanticized view, as instead it’s just another depiction of loveless sex.  When she announces she’s pregnant, Joe grows alarmed and immediately defensive, angrily suggesting he may not be the father.  And while she acknowledges having another lover, a likeable plumber named Daniel, there is no question in her mind who the father is.  Gathering his things to walk away, she chases after him and slips along the riverbank falling into the darkness of the river with no sign of her afterwards.  Seemingly paralyzed into inaction, Joe gathers all her clothes and throws them into the river as well, wiping his fingerprints from anything he can recall touching.  Taking an avid interest in the trial afterwards, as Daniel is being charged with murder for the death of Cathie, the film takes a turn into social injustice, as a wronged man is condemned to die, yet it’s just another day in the ordinary lives of a working underclass, making their positions clear in the crowded pubs where gossip takes center stage, eager to equate sex with criminal intent, becoming morbidly intriguing to Joe who listens transfixed to what is being said without ever uttering a solitary word, witnessing a developing lynch mob mentality ready to convict this innocent man.  Joe on the other hand conveniently runs away, away from himself and his conscience, like he’s always done.  And while the book may be an existential critique of a disconnected bourgeois society that is no longer in touch with its own moral values, the film is more of a psychological study of Joe’s own moral failings, expressing a near pathological indifference inherent with his own failure to adjust to the constantly changing world around him.  Far from innocent himself, his crimes are those of narcissistic indulgence, apathy, and self-disgust.  Joe’s connection to the corpse is intentionally withheld until the latter stages of the film, allowing viewers some clue into the kind of man he is, a morally irredeemable character, where any Dostoyevskian guilt or anguish are simply beyond his grasp. 

The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups)

THE 400 BLOWS (Les quatre cents coups)     A                   

France  (99 mi)  1959  ‘Scope  d:  François Truffaut

Here suffers poor Antoine Doinel, unjustly punished for a pinup that fell from heaven. It will be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.         

—Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud)

One of the earliest examples of such vivid realism in a feature film, shot in a near documentary style that features plenty of long tracking shots that makes the neighborhoods of Truffaut’s Paris come alive, but also the lengthy running shot at the end that leads Antoine to the sea, where an entirely new world is revealed by the detail of the passing landscapes.  Largely a lyrical, unsentimental character study of 13-year old Antoine (the incomparable Jean-Pierre Léaud), whose life very much resembles Truffaut’s own neglected childhood, right down to the use of his old neighborhood, beautifully captured in black and white with lighter weight, hand-held cameras by Henri Decaë, where perhaps the film this most resembles is the biographical chapter outline in Godard’s later work VIVRE SA VIE (1962), a story told in 12 chapters, where the audience sees various segments of a person’s life that in its totality reveals a wrenchingly honest portrait.  Truffaut takes us through various phases in Antoine’s life, none of them happy, as he’s immediately picked on by his teacher in the opening moments of the film, an incident replayed almost exactly in the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film TOKYO SONATA (2008) with an entirely different outcome, where nearly 50 years later the student stands up to his teacher. 

But this begins the cycle of abuse heaped upon the shoulders of this 13-year old boy who, for the most part, is a charming example of boyhood curiosity, a kid who reads Balzac and creates a candle-lit shrine in his honor, but also a kid who continually gets into classroom troubles, which only matches his home life difficulties where it’s apparent neither his mother nor step-father have any real interest in his welfare, preferring instead to allow him to fend for himself, where he hangs out on the streets with his friend René (Patrick Auffay).  There are momentary reprises, such as visits to the cinema, a carousel sequence The 400 Blows (1/4) Movie CLIP - The Carousel (1959) HD  YouTube (2:51), and a phenomenal children’s puppet sequence The 400 Blows Les Quatre Cents Coups The Puppet Show YouTube (1:41), but eventually he has no place to go, suspended from school and running away from home, where if he stays he’s threatened with being sent to a military academy.  Instead, after a meaningless arrest, he’s sent to an all-male juvenile detention center where they actually lock up visiting girls in cages to prevent the boys from causing them any harm.  Much of the vaunted realism holds up today, as kids still get into trouble at school, are unwanted at home, get suspended, run away from home, and end up on the streets where some die, while many get arrested, placed in jails or juvenile detention centers.  All of this is a familiar scenario even fifty years later.    

Seen as one of the best films ever made on young adolescence, some of the more harrowing scenes involve his own family, who speak about him to his face as if he’s an imposition to their lives.  His mother is secretly having an affair with a coworker, Monsieur Lucien (Jean Douchet), seen by Antoine on a day he ditched school, and continually stays out late while his dad enjoys spending time at a club on weekends, leaving Antoine alone.  He’s continually treated as an outsider, like a kid who doesn’t belong, but what has he done to deserve this?  He is accused of plagiarism when he writes an essay on the death of his grandfather, a reference to Balzac, who is the closest thing to family he has.  So his real feelings which he’s forced to keep bottled up inside are simply ignored or misconstrued.  The film details a series of events that starts with spending a single night on the streets alone, having to steal a bottle of milk to drink, which eventually escalates into petty thievery, where he steals a typewriter but gets caught trying to return it after he couldn’t sell it. 

Easily the most heartbreaking scene is being interviewed by the psychologist at the detention center, where the camera quietly sits in front of Antoine and stares at him as a silent observer as he casually reveals the hidden truths of his life while nervously playing with his hands Antoine's Questioning - The 400 Blows - YouTube (3:03).  Given the Best Director award at Cannes after being prohibited from attending the festival the year before due to his anti-Cannes remarks, there isn’t a single shot that doesn’t in some way add to the whole, beautifully captured by the meticulous detail given to the processing of his arrest, from mug shots and fingerprints, spending time alone in a tiny cell the size of a broom closet, to a slow ride in the back of a paddy wagon through the now well-known streets of Paris where he wells up in tears.  The music may have aged a bit, but particularly fascinating is Jean Constantin’s repeating theme played in the upper registers of a triangle and xylophone, which could easily be considered “Antoine’s Theme.”  Following a long tracking shot of his escape from the detention center 400 Blows Final Scene  YouTube (4:28), Antoine finally arrives at the sea, a place he’s never seen, which brings a look of puzzlement into his eyes in a freeze frame at the end—a classic ending for a classic film that perfectly blends the future into the present.   

While one of the earliest examples of French New Wave films, budding signs of which can arguably be seen in Roger Vadim’s AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (1956), this is certainly one of the movies that firmly established the future of a new filmmaking style of intensely personal films that remained stylistically different.  Following in the footsteps of Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut was a film critic at the highly influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma before ever making a movie.  The film is dedicated to André Bazin, one of the most renowned and influential film critics, a father figure to Truffaut, and the man who helped secure his position at the magazine.  Born in Paris, Truffaut spent his earliest years raised by a nurse, followed by his grandmother, as his parents were elsewhere most of the time.  When his grandmother died, he returned home at the age of eight.  Never knowing his real father, his mother was only 17 at the time he was born, who herself took refuge in marriage with Truffaut’s step-father a year later.  Insisting that he remain quiet, Truffaut found outlets in both reading and the cinema.  Like the young protagonist of the film, he would often play hooky and sneak into movie theaters or steal money for a ticket, while also running away from home at age eleven, informing his teachers his father had been arrested by the Germans.  The character of Antoine Doinel became a composite of both Truffaut and his young actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, encouraging the young actor to use his own words when at all possible.  According to the director, his aim was “not to depict adolescence from the usual viewpoint of sentimental nostalgia, but…to show it as the painful experience that it is.”

Debts to both Rossellini and Renoir are evident, both stylistically and thematic, using actual locations, mobile hand-held cameras, as well as lengthening certain scenes, heightening the real world effects over studio sets, while the theme of student rebellion against the rigidity of authority more likely has its roots with Jean Vigo’s short film Zero for Conduct (Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables... (1933).  Like Vigo’s earlier short À PROPOS DE NICE (1930) Two Jean Vigo shorts, the study of a city with an emphasis on contrasting the worlds between rich and poor, Truffaut’s framing of the streets of Paris, as seen almost exclusively through the eyes of young Antoine, show a similar contrast between the storefront windows of affluence and the young boy’s descent into homelessness and poverty, where the exterior shots of Paris connote a certain lyrical freedom throughout.  Rooted in Truffaut’s own childhood, THE 400 BLOWS not only pays homage but becomes fully immersed in the history of cinema, and literature as well, where Truffaut establishes a sense of renewal by sustaining a longterm collaboration between the director and actor in a series of films on the Antoine Doinel character as he grows up, becoming a Doinel saga, from the early short film Antoine and Colette (1962), to Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés) (1968), Bed & Board (Domicile conjugal) (1970), and Love On the Run (L'amour en fuite) (1979).  Jean-Pierre Léaud was only 14 when he auditioned for the part JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD'S FIRST AUDITION FOR THE 400 BLOWS  YouTube (1:32), perfectly capturing the needed feeling for the character, played with a solemn detachment, one of sixty young boys who responded to the ad, who ironically skipped school to get to the audition, but Truffaut chose Léaud because “he deeply wanted that role…an anti-social loner on the brink of rebellion.”

The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf)

THE LOVERS OF PONT-NEUF (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf)        A                    

France  (125 mi)  1991  d:  Léos Carax 

Only recently released, seven years in the making, the film has taken on legendary status for a multitude of reasons, long considered one of the best of the decade, yet never seen.  The Pont-Neuf bridge crossing over the Seine River is one of the most beloved historical landmarks in Paris, but based on Carax’s passion for certain kinds of shots, and the length of time needed for the production, Carax decided he couldn’t shoot there, and instead erected in the South of France a two-thirds replica of the famous bridge and the neighborhood surrounding it.  The production was halted several times, but resumed because of the interest of the star, Juliette Binoche, who was Carax’s lover at the time.  The whole thing took three years and ended up costing $28 million, the most expensive French production in history, but a mere pittance by U.S. standards, for which Carax risked his career to realize his vision.  Having now seen the film, one would have to say it was well worth the risk, as it blends the authentic with the fantastic, mixing documentary style naturalism with exaggerated film extravagance to create a great urban expressionist fantasy.  Yet despite the extraordinary style of the film, much of it realized by the superb camera of Jean-Yves Escoffier, the subject matter matches the visual intensity, using the city’s physical characteristics to poetically reflect the consciousness of its characters.

Opening with a documentary portrait of the homeless in Paris, then centering on two homeless lovers who mentally and physically are a wreck to look at, they live on a dilapidated bridge that is under construction.  The woman, Michèle (Juliette Binoche), is going blind and wears a patch over one eye, while the man, Alex (Denis Lavant), a former circus performer walks with a limp, as we are witness to a car running over his leg early in the film.  Both appear wretched and filthy, like weary decrepit souls living on the outer fringes of the world, so the story delves into what’s inside and cannot be seen, their love story evolving into an incredibly rich fantasy life, culminating in the most unimaginably spectacular fireworks display, the sky ablaze with explosions bursting over the lovers on the bridge, both delirious with joy, unable to keep their bodies from dancing under this deluge of delight, continuing the fireworks fantasia by water skiing down the River Seine, explosions like birthday candles and sparklers bursting all around them, bathing them both in streams of light, a wonderfully powerful and ecstatic vision from such tragically bleak and battered lives.

The film is reminiscent of another French film yet to be made, Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994), which is sort of a teen version of delinquents on the run searching through unimaginable depths of their souls for love and salvation, featuring a brilliant bonfire scene.  There’s a tugging reminder of Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS (1931), and the ending, when both rekindle the love in their hearts in an underwater scene pays homage to Jean Vigo’s underwater love fantasy sequence in L'Atalante (1934), using a similar barge down the river.  Unfortunately, the commercial epic TITANIC (1997) also ripped off what otherwise would be one of the more memorable images of the film, the two lovers in each others arms on the bow of the barge.  This mental reference to commercialism is an unwelcome reminder to how much imagery is literally stolen in art, a maddening thought that unfortunately comes during the very climax of this film.  

Another disturbing thought that continuously haunts the viewer afterwards is the reprehensible behavior of Alex, the manipulating and conniving male lover in the film, certainly a tortured soul in his own right.  It is impossible not to be reminded of that, where one realizes these are homeless people who live on the verge of the irrational, a separate universe from our own, but it turns out the coldest, bleakest, most hideous aspect of the film is his purposeful act to keep her blind, to keep her helpless and homeless, to maintain her need for him at all costs, no matter the price.  One can’t help but think of the cliché, love is blind, I would do anything for love, but this is such a typical, self-serving act of male misogyny on such a high order that it is impossible not to shiver with disgust.  One must ask themselves, what is that doing in this film?  And we’re left to believe that urban homelessness on the deteriorating bridge stands for the state of moral decay, the crumbling of what was once the pillars, the foundation of society, signs of a deteriorating moral order that leaves us with the Neanderthal cave man who has always been there, but has now disguised himself in civilization with clean pants and a close shave.  Leave it to the French to describe:  woe is me, what a weary state is man.  Despite the fact the bridge can be rebuilt, the love rekindled, the homelessness and decay remain, even if it’s not seen.  It’s almost as if Carax is saying, only in your imaginations can you be free, as the world and the people in it care nothing about you.  And we are left with this troublesome thought at the end of this hauntingly intense and beautiful film rather than caught up in the rapture of romance, quite a bleak contrast from the wondrous optimism of the Vigo film.