Deception (Tromperie)

 

Director Arnaud Desplechin

Desplechin with Denis Podalydès

Desplechin on the set with Léa Seydoux

DECEPTION (Tromperie)                  B+                                                                               France (105 mi)  2021 ‘Scope  d: Arnaud Desplechin

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. […]  What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself – a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors […] that forms my repertoire.  But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one.  Nor would I want one.  I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

—Philip Roth, The Counterlife, 1986

Desplechin has always been a literary filmmaker, making a living on fast-paced, yet natural sounding dialogue, where this film is no exception, cleverly adapted from Philip Roth’s 1990 autobiographical novel, his first use of “Philip Roth” as a fictional character, coming during the decade of the Reagan/Bush years defined by the fall of the Berlin Wall, ushering in the era of the Clintons and the Internet.  Written entirely in the form of conversations, eschewing any narrative for the theatricality of straight dialogue, like a stream-of-conscious stage play, Desplechin and his recent cowriter Julie Peyr have collaborated before on 2015 Top Ten Films #7 My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse), which won a César award and Lumières award for Best Director, and the less successful psychoanalysis drama Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013).  In this film, set in London in 1987, it’s never hard to distinguish who’s speaking, dominated by the central character Philip Roth (Denis Podalydès), a middle-age American writer living in exile, describing himself as “a talk fetishist,” who is always gathering material for his next novel, gleaning information from his unhappily married female lover (Léa Seydoux), known only as the English Lover (perhaps a reference to Roth’s wife, British actress Claire Bloom), or several former flames, like Jana (Madalina Constantin), a Czech writer caught up in the insidious drama of the Cold War, Rosalie (Emmanuelle Devos), an American woman stricken with cancer (likely based on American novelist Janet Hobhouse, who died at the age of 42 from cancer), a former student from his teaching days at a university (Rebecca Marder), and his long suffering wife (Anouk Grinberg), as the studio that serves as his refuge where he writes is also the site of his affairs, mixing carnal pleasure into his profession, treasuring every word he hears, where astute listening leads to a private notebook of collected notes.  Told with chapter headings, the conversations occur before, during, and after sex, or in a restaurant, or bar, including flashbacks and advancing time lapses, and even includes an imaginary sequence where he is placed on trial by an all-female court for his overt hatred towards women, with prosecutorial suggestions that the women in his works are all vicious stereotypes.  What this attempts to unearth are the “rude truths” of daily existence, including the worldwide onslaught of anti-Semitism and his lifelong struggle of being an unapologetic Jew, with Roth becoming obsessed with observing the smallest details in his lover’s life, attuned to their most intimate thoughts, the moments of hesitation, or regret, the avalanche of painful revelations, while also maintaining an erotic fascination in the present which seems to keep the home fires burning.  All the characters seem to be in a state of flux except the writer, who has found his place, but at a price, as he feels lonely, exiled from the outside world, so he hungers for the stories these women tell and transcribes their words.  Desplechin used this Roth text in a DVD bonus of KINGS & QUEEN (2004), acting the final scene with Emmanuelle Devos, which was actually seen by the author, who encouraged him to do a cinematic adaptation of the book.    

Such an improvement on Roth’s other screen adaptations, Ewan McGregor’s American Pastoral (2016) or Robert Benton’s THE HUMAN STAIN (2003), but Isabel Coixet’s ELEGY (2008) about a 62-year-old literature professor having an affair with a 24-year-old student certainly hits the mark, becoming a fascinating mix of cultures, getting a feminine perspective from the Spanish duo of Penélope Cruz and Coixet.  Shot during the onset of the pandemic in France, with the slimmest of budgets, where the lockdown mirrors the seclusion of the writer, this film is succinctly fluid, a marvel of kinetic energy, rarely more than two people onscreen at any time, racing through the scenes like a director in the thrall of quick film shoots.  While the subject is middle age, it never grows maudlin or sentimental, exploring their lives in minute detail with a rigorous intellectual curiosity and explosive emotionality, as if eavesdropping into private realms, where both are equally fascinated by this psychological dissection, confessing the lies they tell others, or themselves, revealing the concerns they have about being perceived as weak or too strong, what they’ll tolerate or won’t, as they vent about the multiplicity of flaws in their partners, yet refuse to leave, as the English Lover declares, “The more trivial the defect the more anger it inspires.”  Gorgeously shot by Yorick Le Saux, who has previously worked with Olivier Assayas on 2014 Top Ten List #3 Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper (2016), and Non-Fiction (Doubles Vies) (2018), Claire Denis on High Life (2018), and Greta Gerwig on Little Women (2019), the lighting is especially impressive, creating a luminous private domain, which only frames and accentuates the rapidity of thought that we experience, where it has the feel of a theatrical stage play, quickly moving between scenes, where the common denominator is emotional authenticity and a lack of pretension, shot through a prism of desire, where Seydoux in particular truly excels in this regard, showing an ease of emotional restraint while expanding her astonishing range.  While she’s always had a sensuous onscreen presence, her probing self-reflective qualities are what stand out, exhibited by an intellectual curiosity balanced against her vulnerability, which are a perfect match for this writer, often seen matching wits, which is what makes her such an alluring muse, as he never tires of being with her.  While they banter about divorced friends, ruined children, and her husband who’s carrying on an extramarital liaison of his own, with a “tootsie” no less, one of the interesting aspects of exposing these personal revelations is viewers can only imagine what these women’s lives are like offscreen, as we never see any of them on their own, living in separate worlds, where they may be figments of the imagination, for all we know, only appearing in brief vignettes, like apparitions, always making reference to their actual lives, where artistic license is literally excavating the essence of who they are and what they have to say, as nothing is off limits in the creative world of fiction, which becomes a kind of utopia, where the author imagines himself, outside his novel, having a love affair with a character inside his novel.

While Philip Roth as the womanizing central protagonist is anything but a philandering hero, the film becomes an exposé on the deception of masculinity and the privilege it brings, as men have the capriciousness to have affairs, commit adultery, and otherwise stray from their empty and disappointing marriages as if it’s a God-given right, with society at large turning a blind eye and never holding them accountable, while women are held to a different standard, with Madame Bovary (originally attacked for obscenity) being the moral handbook on how society condemns women more ruthlessly than men, often turning them into something they’re not, degrading their position and stature, having committed moral sins that are overlooked in men.  This film explores that shadow existence of men, that deceitful web of desire that may as well be invisible, as these sins have been ignored throughout history and never recorded alongside the many accomplishments.  Where does this entitlement come from?  In the surreal court proceeding with the author on trial, the judge mockingly asks, “Can you explain to the court why you hate women?”  It carries with it the absurdist rendering of Kafka, whose portrait hangs on the wall of the office by Philip’s desk, where the protagonist finds himself in foreign territory, an alternate imaginary universe where he is judged accordingly on this day of reckoning, guilty of sexism, misogyny, woman abuse, slander of women, denigration of women, defamation of women, and ruthless seduction, crimes he squeamishly denies, each carrying the most severe penalties.  Pleading artistic license, that a writer uses his imagination to portray real events, just like Shakespeare, something that has been part of the human condition since the invention of language, he is guilty nonetheless, having intentionally published books that cause women suffering.  Just like politicians, artists through the years have learned to become more and more manipulative, where the underlying motive at the heart of a novel is deceit, as the writer intends to deceive the reader into believing things that may have never happened.  That is the nature of their craft.  Having affairs with the wives of his friends, carefully concealed behind a web of lies and deceit, what gall must he have to think anyone out there would be interested, yet he gets away with it due to the fierce honesty and tenderness of what he writes, seducing readers just as he seduces women.  How can that not be infuriating?  And of course it is, as that’s part of the nature of the beast.  Is this really about Philip, the women in his life, or the art of creating, as they are one and the same, blended together into a stream-of-conscious mix of cinematic imagination, where actors help to provide the clarity the story needs.  Reveling in its intimacy, this film has an unusual appeal and is a joy to watch, where Desplechin seems to have been born to film it, with ideas on how to make it gestating in his mind for over thirty years.

American Pastoral

AMERICAN PASTORAL                C-                   

USA  (126 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Ewan McGregor               Official site

We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America.  We will loot and burn and destroy.  We are the incubation of your mothers’ nightmares.

—John Jacobs, Weathermen co-founder, December 1969  

A downward spiraling, extremely exaggerated sad and somber affair, and clearly an overreaction to the failed ideals of the tumultuous 60’s, which provides an underlying context for the film, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning 1997 novel by Philip Roth, suggesting what lies underneath the outward veneer of human behavior remains an unending mystery, something no one ever seems to get right.  Coming out of the optimism of the postwar WWII generation that saw new and expanded economic opportunities, the film reflects the tragedies of an American Dream gone sour, where living the perfect life takes on new meaning, as the ungrateful offspring turned on the economic prosperity enjoyed by their parents, blaming them for all that is wrong with the world, suggesting too much comfort and complacency allows societal horrors to continue unabated, similar to what happened in China, by the way, in their Cultural Revolution happening simultaneously from 1966 to 1976, where children turned government informants on their parents, with dire consequences, exiling their parents to agricultural farm re-education camps, like some kind of Twilight Zone episode, except it really happened.  While this isn’t quite so dire, it is a variation on the Paradise Lost themes, suggesting the journey that began with the riots and racial unrest of the 60’s Civil Rights movement and the anti-war fervor against the Vietnam War led to the Black Panther Party and the radical acts of the Weathermen, eventually exposing the lies and cover-up of the Watergate scandal, which led to the subsequent anti-government cynicism that plagues our nation today, where one can only conclude America’s age of innocence is over.  This film takes a look at one middle class family that chose to live in a beautiful old stone house out in the country in Old Rimrock, a fictional pastoral community a half hour from Newark with a history that goes back to the Revolutionary War, where the small town becomes a microcosm for the larger issues affecting the nation, as described in the novel: 

Let’s remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan.  The war-crime trials were cleansing the earth if its devils once and for all.  Atomic power was ours alone.  Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; in an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, coal workers, transit workers, maritime workers, steel workers—laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it.  And playing Sunday morning softball on the Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war.  Our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.  And the upsurge of energy was contagious.  Around us nothing was lifeless.  Sacrifice and constraint were over.  The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion.  The lid was off.  Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together.

What’s never made clear in the film, though it’s the book’s central premise, is that the protagonist Seymour Irving Levov, played by Ewan McGregor, who also directs the film, does not look or behave like a Jew, one of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in the 1940’s from a preponderantly Jewish public high school in Newark, New Jersey, who became known as “the Swede” for his blond hair and athletic stature, star of the baseball, football, and basketball teams, often leading the school to city and state finals, becoming the envy of everyone in his high school and a legend throughout Newark, spawning fantasies almost as they imagined Gentiles, where you could forget about work or building a career and instead place all your hopes on athletic prowess.   The opening narration comes from Nathan Zukerman (David Strathairn) while attending his 45th high school reunion, as he still idolizes the Swede even after all these years, never really knowing what happened to him, but at the reunion he runs into the Swede’s younger brother Jerry Levov (Rupert Evans), who had just attended the Swede’s funeral.  Rather than the dream of what was supposed to happen to him, filled with all manner of heroism and success, we learn from Jerry what actually happened to the Swede, which plays out in a flashback.  Despite being a natural at sports, defying the Jewish stereotype that Jews are not athletic, the Swede passed up an opportunity to play professional baseball with the New York Giants and instead, like a responsible Jewish kid, went to work in his father’s business, where almost effortlessly he becomes equally successful manufacturing women’s gloves.  Yet the embodiment of his success is marrying a shiksa, Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly), a good Catholic girl who is also a beauty queen, named Miss New Jersey in 1949, where the pre-nuptial, face-to-face discussion with the Swede’s father Lou (Peter Riegert, boldly honest, easily the best thing in the film) about how to combine the mixed faiths on birthdays and holidays is positively hilarious, as they wrangle about “making concessions” like it’s some sort of business deal.  In order to enjoy their success, where we assume he’s a millionaire, he moves out into the country to lead that perfect, idyllic existence that most Americans can only dream about.    

The apple of his eye is Merry (Ocean James as an 8-year old), a Daddy’s girl, his over-privileged daughter and the source of parental pride and continual extended family satisfaction, although she speaks with a stutter.  As this appears to be more than a phase, they eventually seek professional help from a speech therapist, Sheila Smith (Molly Parker), who believes the problem stems from deep-seeded psychological issues where she’s expected to live up to the idealized perfection of her mother, a beauty queen, suggesting the deck’s stacked against her, a rather amusing and unexpected personalized diagnosis that leaves both parents squirming in denial.  All this happens in the opening fifteen minutes of the film, a beautiful set-up, but it’s all downhill from there.  By the time Merry (Dakota Fanning) reaches adolescence, she hates her mother, hates their upscale life, and rages against the capitalist exploitation of the mostly black workers in her father’s factory, becoming a budding radical who lines her bedroom with political posters and slogans.  When Newark goes up in flames from the race riots of 1967, with roving gangs destroying much of the city, most white businessmen bail out during the rising tensions, but not the Swede, who keeps his factory open, maintaining the jobs of his workers.  But this isn’t enough for Merry, inspired by radical groups in New York, waging war against America’s war in Vietnam, “bringing the war back home,” an infamous Weatherman slogan, where she’s the lead suspect in a local 1968 bombing of the Old Rimrock post office that killed an innocent civilian, disappearing afterwards where she’s not heard from since, apparently joining the Weather Underground.  While her parents continue to deny their 16-year old privileged, upper middle-class daughter could have anything to do with this, this incident shatters their life and their marriage, blowing to smithereens any concept of the American Dream.  The actual timing is out of whack, as posters discovered in her room suggest Merry is following the rhetoric of the Weathermen a year before they were actually formed in the summer of 1969.  While there’s reason to believe a lot of students and workers around the world felt this way, for more on that, please see Chris Marker’s definitive work The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge) (1977), but Merry is simply a stand-in for others, Mark Rudd, Katherine Boudin, and Jane Alpert, all in their twenties, Jewish, middle-class, college-educated, yet somehow turned violent in their anti-war radical stance committed to revolutionary action, and determined to change the direction of the United States government.  While this may seem unfathomable even to this day, the film’s trajectory simply defies belief in attempting to explain this “abnormality,” growing more pathetic with each subsequent scene, yet Roth, the author of the book, remains equally perplexed, where he goes so far as to suggest the Swede was destroyed because he wasn’t a very good Jew, that he passed for a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) in society, something that in his mind he could not escape, opening him up to God’s wrath, inflicting a terrible Job-like punishment.  These are all terrible reactions that miss the mark, as they still fail to understand the underlying context of what drove the radicalization of the 60’s.  Believe me, it was not God’s wrath, and might be better understood by reading Frantz Fanon.