Beloved (Les Bien-Aimés)

BELOVED (Les Bien-Aimés)           B+                      

France  Great Britain  Czech Republic  (135 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d: Christophe Honoré

Christophe Honoré, a regular early contributor to Cahiers du Cinéma and an established novelist before he became a filmmaker, has developed into a remarkable cinematic storyteller, as his films are layered with meticulous novelesque detail.  A film dedicated to Marie-France Pisner, who died April 24, 2011, one of the screenwriters and actresses in Jacques Rivette’s landmark film Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont ... (1974), and an actress in Honoré’s own DANS PARIS (2006), which remains arguably his best film, and the first of his films where out of the blue one of his characters will break into song, much like the surprising use in MAGNOLIA (1999), which he uses to tender effect in a telephone conversation between lovers, a moment that rises to magical heights.  By now, he’s written several musicals, exploring the dynamics of a three-way relationship in LOVE SONGS (2007) and the pent-up passion in a Sirkian youth melodrama in LA BELLE PERSONNE (2008).  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 Demy’s THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964).  There’s even an umbrella sequence in this film which takes place in the howling wind and rain where the umbrellas are about to be blown away, and instead of the vivid kaleidescope colors, the frame is dark and dreary.  Honoré has been consistent in his career in exploring matters of the heart through non-conventional means, where MA MÈRE (2004) remains as unconventional a film as you’ll ever see, but also a film that makes terrific use of a recurring musical motif, the song “Happy Together” by The Turtles.  Music has always been one of the best attributes of an Honoré film, from the bone-jarring rock music used to disorienting effect in 17 TIMES CÉCILE CASSARD (2002) to the punk music that sets the stage for a moody and introspective assault to the senses in DANS PARIS.  In nearly every film, grief is a major element for the prominent characters, where his films show unusual levels of depth and complexity by intensely exploring how love is like memory, never disappearing, forever etched into the fabric of our lives.

One of the real treats of this film is seeing Catherine Deneuve work with her daughter, Chiara Mastroianni (who’s been in every Honoré film since LOVE SONGS), where one cannot help recalling Jacques Demy’s bliss-drenched THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (1967), where the main attraction is the adorable sisters, blond Catherine Deneuve and her older sister, brunette Françoise Dorléac, at ages 24 and 25, both stars from their teens, as this is the only time they ever worked together onscreen.  Deneuve has worked with her daughter before in André Téchiné’s charming MY FAVORITE SEASON (1993), also more recently in Arnaud Desplechin’s dysfunctional family portrait, A CHRISTMAS TALE (2008), but this is the first time they’ve worked together in a musical, and their scenes together are simply stunning.  Mastroianni, especially, as Véra, the daughter of Deneuve’s character Madeleine, is at the heart of the film, as her emotional turmoil reflects the anxiety of the era in which she grew up, the late 80’s and 90’s when the world was coming to terms with AIDS, where the terrifying idea of love is as under attack as the human body.  Ludivine Sagnier plays Madeleine as a young girl in the years before she had a child, where this film spans four decades from 1964 to 2008.  In the fashionable 60’s, Madeleine is strikingly attractive, catching the eye of an equally handsome and ambitious young Czech doctor, Jaromil (Radivoje Bukvic), very much in the mode of the Daniel Day-Lewis character from Philip Kaufman’s historical romance THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1968).  Completely offscreen, in a blip of the eye, they fall in love, get married, move to Prague, have a child, and get divorced, before she’s seen later in Paris.  But Jaromil returns to Paris years later, maintaining an on-again and off-again relationship throughout her life, even after she’s married to François (Michel Delpech), supposedly a stabilizing influence in her life.  Véra, meanwhile, develops an infatuation with two different men, one with fellow Parisian Clément (Louis Garrel, who’s been in every Honoré film since MA MÈRE) that’s already over by the time it hits the screen, and another with an American exile in London, a drummer named Henderson, played by Paul Schneider, from David Gordon Green’s ALL THE REAL GIRLS (2003) and Jane Campion’s more recent BRIGHT STAR (2009), where the tempestuous confusion in their relationship is fraught with difficulty. 

As Madeleine transforms into Deneuve, Jaromil is amusingly played by Czech director Milos Forman, adding plenty of warmth and humor into his character, as he’s simply delighted to be around his ex-wife and daughter whenever he can, often making trips to Paris to revitalize his relationships.  Part of the appeal of this film is the use of actual locations in Paris, Reims, Prague, London, and Montreal, where Honoré uses his traditional cinematographer Rémy Chevrin and original music from Alex Beaupain, both of whom have worked with him on and off since his first film.  Chevrin’s hand-held camera work is simply superb, both in capturing the bustling energy from the world outdoors and in some of the most extreme close ups ever captured.  Beaupain’s songs are not to be compared with the legendary Michel Legrand, as none are particularly memorable, but they do feature the delightfully charming Ludivine Sagnier singing “Je peux vivre sans toi” Je peux vivre sans toi - Les Bien-Aimés (Extrait) - YouTube (3:03), or Clara Couste as a young Véra singing "TOUT EST SI CALME"- Les Bien Aimés Fi (2:39), an ensemble piece which interestingly features older characters of both Véra and Madeleine interacting in the same shot with younger versions of themselves.  In perhaps the scene of the film, Véra has the bar band experience of her life as she meets Henderson for the first time, the drummer in the British band that’s singing the 1956 Bo Diddley classic “Who Do You Love?” Thousand - Who Do You Love - Chiara Mas (2:58) in English, later heard again in a French refrain that is decidedly more downbeat Les Bien-Aimés - Qui aimes-tu? (2:44).  Perhaps more than any other director working today, Honoré continues to work on riffs off the French New Wave, often expressing the ebullient energy of youth in vibrantly colorful street sequences, but also the downside of this blissful and breezy existence, exploring the personal introspection and brooding nature of lost and adrift people who feel disconnected from the world around them, becoming painfully heavy at times, where the psychological torment can literally suffocate these characters, some of whom never recover.    

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau)

CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (Céline et Julie vont en bateau)        A               

aka:  Phantom Ladies Over Paris

France  (193 mi)  1974  d:  Jacques Rivette

Rivette, among all directors, has always added theatrical flourishes to his cinema, often directing plays onscreen, where watching a rehearsal more or less in real time constitutes a cinematic reality, where seeing the same screen characters offstage would represent an entirely different reality, while the use of dreams or flashbacks, or changes in time structure, shortening it or expanding it, might represent yet other realities, where he often shifts in between states without offering narrative explanation.  After failing his entrance exam at a Parisian film school, Rivette, along with fellow film companions Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard, began writing film criticism, eventually working together at Cahiers du Cinéma film magazine in the early 1950’s.  Rivette rejected this idea of an auteur theory, claiming film exists on its own level just awaiting discovery, where filmmakers must take caution not to alter or misshape its form.  Rivette’s experimentation with time led to a practice of making films well beyond theatrical acceptability, where the long version of OUT 1 (1970) is nearly 13 hours long, while the short version OUT 1: SPECTRE (1974) is just over 4 hours.  Spending his career directing both theater and films, he blends both artforms, where in this film he uses cinema as living theater.  While the audience is watching the screen, several characters in the film are watching and seeing their own version of what we’re watching, which may or may not be the same, as unlike us, only they seem to have the power to alter the events, where they are free to improvise and change or alter the dialogue, often exchanging places and becoming the other character, all to delightful effect, giving this a free-wheeling improvisational feel of the late 60’s, where liberation from all suffocating forms, including men, is the key ingredient.  The expanded wordless opening, along with the inner title which, like a Silent film, announces “Most of the time, it started like this,” which invites the audience to play along with this incredibly inventive, multi-layered film filled with such a positive spirit from the warm and wonderfully engaging performances of the two women, Juliet Berto as Céline and Dominique Labourier as Julie, who make this the shortest 3 hours you’ll ever experience, as time just races by. 

From the outset, the audience is amused by the Alice in Wonderland similarities, where Céline goes running through the park in a panic, dropping objects along the way, while Julie runs after her picking up the objects, apparently to help her, but as this sequence is prolonged, she grows more curious than helpful, lagging behind but hiding herself through an extensive labyrinthian journey through Montmartre and the streets of Paris, where the use of locations is stunning, gorgeously shot on a beautiful sunny afternoon by Jacques Renard, the beginning of which can be seen here Unknown Files #102 CELINE AND JULIE GO ... YouTube (10:15).  It’s clear there’s an unspoken communication between these two women, though they spend the opening half hour following, but avoiding each other without uttering a word.  By the next day, however, we have some idea what we’re dealing with, as the two are the best of friends, roommates, and spend every waking minute ecstatic to be alive, finding clever ways to thoroughly enjoy themselves, where their deliriously euphoric state of mind is something close to a fantasy world, an alternate state that exists just for them, where men in particular are not invited.  The overlapping events play out simultaneously, where each of them has their own unique experiences that highlights their beguiling personalities, where Julie pays a visit to a strange house where, oddly enough, a photograph can be seen inside a trunk full of children’s dolls.  Céline, meanwhile, takes a phone call from Julie’s well-dressed fiancé and agrees to meet him, where she arrives impersonating Julie, thoroughly embarrassing the poor guy (Philippe Clévenot), who never knew what hit him, eventually telling him to go jerk off in the daisies.  The entire film is an extended game they play, with the characters scripting much of their own dialogue, where they find themselves trapped in a play within a play, a composite of two different works by Henry James, the short fictional story The Romance of Certain Old Clothes and a novel later made into a play entitled The Other House, a strange and unfortunate tale revolving around murder and a cover up, perhaps the only James work to contain a brutal murder, which Rivette stages as an old costume drama with old-fashioned characters who seem to have been resurrected from mothballs, eventually turning into a ghoulish theater of the dead. 

So much of this film is so incredibly original and inventive, where perhaps the best bit in the entire film is Céline’s stand up magic act in a dive of a theater consisting of about a half a dozen men in the audience Celine holder.flv - YouTube  (1:11).  What’s adorable about this short video scene, using fake electronic music *not* used in the film, which has instead a burlesque style piano player, is the little kid to the right, who breaks out into a huge smile after she pops the balloon.  Later Julie takes Céline’s place onstage, coming up with an uproarious and simply remarkable piece of intimate theater herself, beautifully highlighting her own natural inclination to get carried away with herself:  Dominique Labourier performs in Celine and Julie ... YouTube (7:31).  Check out the guy in the lower left in the audience, as he’s simply dumbstruck, especially after she calls them a bunch of “cosmic twilight pimps.”  In this film, Rivette never distinguishes between what’s real and what’s only imagined, where the internalized adventure seems to reject memory, actively engaging a netherworld between the past and the present that exists in a fictional haunted house, like a parallel universe, much like the subsequent Rabbits sequence in David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (2006) or the whole inverted narrative of MULHOLLAND DR. (2001), both of which seem hatched from this film.  Both Céline and Julie have what feels like dream experiences inside the house, exchanging roles in a continuously replaying murder mystery, where afterwards they forget where they’ve been unless they munch on a piece of candy that’s been transported out of that world, recreating the experience all over again, like an LSD laced hallucination, where as they rewatch it together it takes on a world of seemingly infinite possibilities, yet the laws of memory want to hold everything in place, exactly as it was.  When re-experiencing events, both seem to want to take a more interactive role in changing the outcome, which goes against all those science fiction stories that suggest if you go back in time you can’t change the outcome of history, only here there’s no such rule, as anything’s possible.  

The laws holding the repetitive nature of the story in place grow more absurdly ridiculous after awhile, as why shouldn’t it change?  Memory isn’t fixed or absolute, but is subject to any number of factors, such as age, distance, wish fulfillment, shame or regret.  In this haunted house, where the audience becomes overfamiliar with the repetitive aspects of the play, they may wish for outcomes that break through the cyclical patterns of the narrative.  In this way, the characters can literally reinvent themselves by redefining the terms, eliminating any significant male influence, which has no use here other than it’s a male who is directing the film, where part of this is his vision, but this is a collaborative process designed to envision what amounts to a feminist universe, where Céline and Julie’s entrance into the fictional world is the world they were born into, where the power of intellect and choice may lead them to entirely different outcomes than what was originally written or planned.  This flexibility is the beauty of the film, as it’s the euphoria that Céline and Julie experience together inside their own imaginations, where hallucinogens are needed to enter this self-reflective world, and where they’re free to invent new narratives.  What’s particularly interesting is the common thread of cats seen throughout, who seem to thrive on their own instincts, but also an experience unique to Julie, where at one point she visits a smaller house across the street from the usual house and visits a woman from her own past, an older woman (Marie-Thérèse Saussure) who remembers her mother.  This visit suggests these stories could have been imagined by Julie as a young girl, where perhaps there is another house nearby that might hold the key to Céline’s past, which is never revealed, where her character only looks forward.  The clash between the present and the past is met in a Surrealistic finale that is breathtakingly beautiful, a kind of serene resignation that suggests certain events remain fixed in our memories, perhaps frozen in time, where we will revisit them exactly as they are in a continuously replaying cycle for the rest of our lives.  This film bears some resemblance to the puzzle construction of Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), but rather than the icy and aloof model figures used in that film which has a continuously cold and calculating, near impenetrable feel, perhaps an over-identification with the male, this film, in contrast, is an ecstatic and utterly jubilant women’s vision.