In the Shadow of Women (L'ombre des femmes)

In the Shadow of Women  (L'ombre des femmes)       B-                 

France  Switzerland  (73 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Philippe Garrel       

           

This is as bleakly minimalist and understated as a film can be, telling an age-old boy meets girl story, then boy meets another girl, and girl meets another boy, and there you have it.  That’s pretty much it, though the film is beautifully told in a streamlined, French New Wave, black and white style, shot on 35 mm, cinematography by Swiss cameraman Renato Berta, who has himself worked with Godard, using free-flowing, naturalistic dialogue, weaving in and out of the streets of Paris, all told with a monotone narrator that is right out of early 60’s Godard.  One’s appreciation for this film is likely to fall into the non-theatrical camp, as emotions are minimized, absurdity elevated, where the sexist, male-centric tone throughout where men continue to see themselves as the center of the universe, where everything revolves around them, is not likely to win any new converts.  It is this narrow lens through which the world is continually viewed that makes this feel like a time capsule from another era, as aside from the use of cellphones, there is little suggesting this film wasn’t made a good half century ago.  Philippe Garrel got his start making films in the 60’s, largely influenced by Godard at the time, so he’s no stranger to the milieu, though why he’s still churning out films like this is anyone’s guess, as it’s certainly within his comfort zone, taking a step backwards from Jealousy (La Jalousie) (2013), which was itself a remake of his second film made at the age of 17, a fifteen-minute short DROIT DE VISITE (1965).  Opening in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, the problem with the film is that it feels very formulaic, like we’ve seen it before, literally light years away from the brash cinematic energy exuded by Léos Carax in Boy Meets Girl (1984), or even the jump cuts from Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960), where it’s a return to a simpler age, as if we’ve never left.  While working with his wife Caroline Deruas and familiar screenwriter Arlette Langman, who got her start working with Maurice Pialat, what is different about this film is the use of writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a screenwriter for both Buñuel and Godard, though admittedly not in the last 30 years or so, placing this film in a kind of time warp, though it certainly adds a wry humor that is missing from the director’s other films. 

Pierre, Stanislas Merhar, who was in Chantal Akerman’s THE CAPTIVE (2000), is a somber, somewhat pompous director, while his wife Manon, Clotilde Courau, aka Clotilde di Savoia, Princess of Venice (Zimbio), works as his editor, where together they make documentary films that seem to be on the fringe of the industry, and while they are just scraping by, they’re committed to the kind of unvarnished work they produce, sharing an inherent need for discovering truth (vérité) in cinema.  Currently they are interviewing Henri (Jean Pommier), an aging survivor of the French Resistance, where Manon views her husband as an elite photojournalist on the verge of discovery as opposed to the hack he really is.  Despite the appearance of a happy marriage, where Manon’s mother (the brilliant Antoinette Moya) has some serious doubts about their sputtering careers, thinking she’s giving her husband far more credit than he deserves, reminding her daughter, “No man is worth sacrificing your life for,” then the first thing we see Pierre do is cheat on her, showing extra attention to a young intern named Elisabeth (Léna Paugam), literally following her home with a truckload of borrowed film canisters from a film archive that he utilizes, where he justifies his affair “with typical male equivocation” in a narrative voiceover spoken by the director’s son, Louis Garrel.   Believing he’s only doing what any man would do, where he skillfully balances his time between the two women, but he makes the classic mistake of bringing his wife flowers, which she immediately recognizes as a typical male ploy to cover up illicit behavior.  Of course, he denies having any such intentions, so the audience instantly sees the man as a fraud and a scoundrel.  What’s amusing about this particular story, however, is the way the interior narration continually justifies his boorish behavior, as if this is the right of every man.  Elisabeth, meanwhile, follows Pierre home to spy on her competition, as he’s not spending as much time with her as she’d like, only to discover Manon is having an affair of her own, which sends Elisabeth into the throes of depression, as if it reflects poorly on her to cheat with a man whose wife would cheat on him.  God knows what this all has to say about marriage, but more likely it reveals the director’s own views on monogamy, that it’s an outdated concept worthy of ridicule.           

While each goes to great extremes to keep their affairs hidden, both are eventually exposed, revealing jealousies, petty resentments, and a good deal of betrayal felt by each, where Manon tends to be more mature and understanding, while Pierre goes into full-throttle anger mode, showing little consideration, an extraordinary amount of disdain, literally seething internally, expressing hurtful behavior towards both women.  What makes this borderline ridiculous is the contemptuous display of brooding arrogance shown by Pierre, the wronged man, feeling trapped and blaming it all on the women, as if he bears no personal responsibility.  This moral hypocrisy literally blows up their marriage, as Manon is rightfully offended by his deluded, self-centered point of view, thinking entirely of himself throughout the ordeal, as if he is the only offended party.  This kind of thinking is simply outdated, as it’s outrageously out of touch with contemporary French society, where women have evolved beyond his pouting adolescence and wouldn’t spend their time with a manipulative egotist like this, as he’s exposed as a hypocrite and a fraud.  Even the documentary they were working on blows up in their face, in an amusing twist, but Garrel loves to pour out confessional male anguish along with feelings of hurt and alienation, but it’s getting to be old hat with this director, where women can come to his films to point out what “not” to do in personal relationships.  Promising more than it delivers, becoming a relationship in miniature movie, pared down to its pure essence, the real problem is the realization that this is really all there is to this film, where it doesn’t delve into the inner complexities of either character, but is content to dramatize the more obvious superficialities, highlighting how easy it is to break apart.  Little effort is made to actually repair the damage done, as Pierre becomes so condescendingly sure of himself that he’s not willing to waste any more time on a woman he loathes and finds despicable.  It’s such a narrow, anger-fueled perspective that the audience is light years ahead of this guy, as he’ll live to regret this decision, as Manon may turn out to be the love of his life, but he is so willing to devalue her and throw it all away.  While well-made, with all that’s going on in the world today, not sure that what we need is another battle of the sexes movie, as it’s well-worn and fairly trite material, where this film adds little to the perspective while retreading familiar grounds. 

Low Down

LOW DOWN         C+                       

USA  (114 mi)  2014  ‘Scope d:  Jeff Preiss          Official Site

One day we’re walking down the street, passing a newsstand, when I stop and pick up a magazine (maybe Life) with Thelonious Monk of the cover. I kiss it, and say, ‘Hi Monk.’ Dad, combusting with pride, picks me up, looks at me with those beautiful gray-green eyes, and says: ‘From now on, you’re not just my baby, you’re my ace-one-boon-white-coon.’ That, he would claim, was the day we forever connected, and became more to each other than everything.

I  loved him out of all proportion, as only a daughter could.

—Amy-Jo Albany (Elle Fanning)

There’s usually an intriguing allure to films centered around the outer fringes of society, that delve into a bohemian, neon-lit subterranean world exposing hardships of the human kind that border on madness, where the pursuit of artistic freedom becomes more than a passionate endeavor but a moral obligation, often lost in the smoky haze of narcotics and drug abuse, where in the words of American poet Allen Ginsberg in his epic 1955 poem Howl, Howl, Parts I & II | Academy of American Poets:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking

for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking

in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating

across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

Written by his daughter Amy-Jo Albany (Elle Fanning), Low Down:  Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood is a 2003 memoir by the daughter of a legendary but obscure jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes), one of the few white pianists to play Bebop with Charlie Parker in the 40’s and 50’s, but also a heroin addict and prison convict for a major part of his life.  Growing up on the dingy side of Hollywood among addicts, prostitutes, and various social misfits, the film is a dim reminder of what jagged edges some lives become, where every day is a struggle to survive, much of it lost on wasted opportunities.  Less about Albany’s chronic drug troubles and run-ins with the law, the film is more about a young adolescent’s rose-colored view of her father, trying to make sense out of the chaotic turmoil that was her life growing up in the 70’s, where she substitutes her interior heartache with larger-than-life embellishments of her father, making him out to be some kind of mythical hero.  Blind to the adult realities, her father a junky, her absent mother Sheila (Lena Headey), a former singer and full-time alcoholic, the overall tone is confusing and the story uneven and unfocused, filled with various recollections that rarely get under the surface, basically becoming a primer course on how to destroy your life and the loved ones around you.  Through it all, however, she prevails and writes the book, which is the point of the film, though despite a gutty performance by Fanning, she’s not really the interesting part of the story.  Joe’s the guy we’re interested in, as there’s so much about him we don’t know, but his life is largely unexplored and for long periods of time he’s not even in the picture, as Jo is shipped off to grandmother’s house, none other than Glenn Close, a six-time Oscar nominee looking surprisingly like Robin Williams in MRS. DOUBTFIRE (1993).  On Friday nights Gram is glued to the screen watching boxing matches, and on one wall in her home she has on display that legenday photo of Black Panther Party co-founder and Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton (seen here: Huey Newton.).  What’s also uniquely intriguing, but never explored, is the drug addiction of a jazz pianist, as more typically the addicts are horn players and lead singers, or both.  The piano is more of a percussive instrument in Bebop jazz, like Thelonious Monk (Jo’s idol in the opening quote), a driving, rhythmic force in simpatico with the drums and bass players, where you’d think they need to be clear-headed and sharp to play some of the more complicated arrangements.  

Surrounded by dysfunction, Jo is the worried daughter that spends much of her youth looking after the interests of her father, trying to maintain control and be the adult in the situation.  While Joe played with jazz legends Lester Young and Charlie Parker, it was more than a decade ago, as we only hear about it in offhanded conversations or in fan photos that decorate Jo’s bedroom walls.  When we see him play, he’s in some anonymous jazz trio in small clubs or off in some dingy bar somewhere playing alone.  By the time Jo is old enough to remember her father, the Bebop era is largely over, where the American disinterest in jazz (and repeated parole violations) drove Joe overseas to Europe.  After several years of repeated drug offenses, his passport is revoked and he’s sent back to America, revelations that are part and parcel with her growing up stage, as a stream of more unpleasant realities begin to creep into her life.  Joe’s life descends into a morass of addiction, where he simply can’t stop himself from using, becoming more gloomy and fatalistic, where by the end of the film each character has a major dramatic moment, as if Jo is revisiting her final moments with each of them, allowing them perhaps to finally just be themselves, naked and unvarnished, and not some embellished memory.  Why couldn’t the rest of the film be like that?  These brief moments suggest a much better film could have been made without the naïve innocence and child adulation that constantly comes in conflict with overtly traumatic subject matter.  While the director attempts to establish a turbulent family relationship, what plays out onscreen is continuously self-destructive and troublesome, leading to dramatic meltdowns and melodramatic overreach instead of real, full-fledged character development.  Chalk this up to inexperience.     

Despite a brief recording career in Europe and a few more sessions in the 70’s, Albany is largely unrecorded in the prime of his life, where a single 1957 LP exists entitled The Right Combination with Wayne Marsh on tenor sax and Bob Whitlock on bass.  The first song we hear in the film is Angel Eyes, where ironically one of the definitive, narcotic-induced renditions of this song Gene Ammons - Angel Eyes - YouTube (8:52) is played by Chicago tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons, another addict who spent much of his life incarcerated for narcotics possession.  Albany is a non-stop smoker throughout, as much a part of the jazz scene as alcohol or heroin, where the low ceilings and poor ventilation in the clubs also increased the health risks.  The film is infused with classic jazz music of the era, like Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach, with an extended piece played live before an audience by Albany over the closing credits, shot in grainy Super 16mm by Christopher Blauvelt, where the first-time director attempts to capture the atmospheric look of the dingy rooms and smoky clubs, but next to no insight develops here, as the depressive, downbeat mood overwhelms any attempt to reveal something significant, becoming more of an adolescent diary format from a young girl coming-of-age.  Much better films are Bent Hamer’s Factotum (2005), exquisitely shot on 35mm, similarly exploring the seedy world of Los Angeles as it follows a fictionalized world of drunk poet Charles Bukowski, also Philippe Garrel’s I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (J'entends plus la guitare) (1991), an autobiographical film that reveals the ten year romance of the French film director with Velvet Underground singer Nico, much of it spent in the throes of drug addiction and a constant fix, an unglamorous view that is downbeat and utterly sad, where an unsparing confessional tone is mixed with a raw internal dysfunction, with outstanding original music by French jazz pianist Faton Cahen, a piano and a few ascending jazz riffs on a sax, offering an eloquent testament to a narcotic induced haze.  

Jealousy (La Jalousie)

Director Philippe Garrel (left) on the set with cameraman Willy Kurant

 

Director Philippe Garrel (left) on the set with his son Louis Garrel

 

JEALOUSY (La Jalousie)        B+                 

France  (77 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Philippe Garrel

You don’t love someone in a void.     —Claudia (Anna Mouglalis)

At age 66 Philippe Garrel continues to maintain a link with the French New Wave, where it was his father, French actor Maurice Garrel, a resistance fighter during the war who acted in over a hundred French films, while Philippe embraced the 60’s counterculture, developing a particular fascination for New Wave giants François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, where his early films of the 60’s and 70’s were largely underground films or portraits of artistic alienation.  Working with miniscule budgets in relative obscurity, ignored by the mainstream press, virtually unknown outside of hardcore cinephiles, very few of his films have actually been released in America.  He started filming in 1964 at the age of 16, becoming part of the May '68 generation, dating German singer and Warhol Superstar Nico from the Velvet Underground from 1969 to 1979, where she appeared in seven of his films beginning in 1972, sharing a turbulent decade of wild bohemian lifestyle and drug addiction together that ended up with electroshock treatment.  Afterwards, his films were variations on his own life, becoming more autobiographical, making stark portraits of intimacy, alienation, and the pursuit of love, often shot under the shadow of lost loves or lost dreams of the 1968 uprising, perhaps best represented by REGULAR LOVERS (2005), a mammoth 3-hour work that looks behind the scenes of the student demonstrations in Paris during the late 60’s, starring Garrel’s own son Louis who may as well be the poster child for French films, the natural heir of Godard and Truffaut’s New Wave darling Jean-Pierre Léaud.  What perhaps distinguishes Garrel’s films are his bleak, claustrophobic portraits of intimacy and alienation, where abrupt moments of happiness are usually short-lived, eventually replaced by an all-consuming cloud of despair that hovers over his featured characters, shot in a portrait like style, using close ups and long takes, allowing conversations to develop where nothing feels forced.  His couples drown in each other’s sorrows, often suffocating on their misery, where suicide inevitably becomes an option.  JEALOUSY is a remake of Garrel’s second film, a fifteen-minute short DROIT DE VISITE (1965), made at the age of 17 and based largely on his own childhood memories when his stage actor father left his mother for another woman. 

 

Jealousy  The 51st New York Film Festival, from Film Comment   

 

Philippe Garrel is a true child of French cinema. His father was the great actor Maurice Garrel, he made a second home for himself in the Cinémathèque Française, he shot his first film at the age of 16, and he rode through the streets of Paris shooting newsreels of May ’68 with Godard in his red Ferrari. From the start, Garrel’s intimate, handcrafted cinema has stayed elementally close to the conditions of silent film—the unadorned beauty of faces, figures, and light—and revisited the same deeply personal themes of loss, mourning, and rejuvenation through love. In this sharp, vigorous film, shot in glorious black and white by the great Willy Kurant (Masculine Feminine), Garrel takes a fresh look at his titular subject, patiently following the professional and emotional crosscurrents between two romantically entwined theater actors played by the director’s son Louis and Anna Mouglalis. With a beautiful score by Jean-Louis Aubert. A 51st New York Film Festival selection, voted best undistributed film of 2013 in Film Comment’s year-end poll.

Most likely by design, the film has the spare black and white look of a 60’s Godard film, beautifully shot in ‘Scope, adding a visual elegance, made up largely of fragmentary, moment-by-moment sketches, where Garrel uses tight framing on an exasperated Clothilde (Rebecca Covenant), who is utterly distraught at the sight of seeing Louis (Louis Garrel) gather his belongings and walk out the door, shouting “Don’t leave me alone.  Don’t do this,” an emotionally devastating moment that Charlotte (Olga Milshtein, stealing every scene she’s in), their young and impressionable 8-year old daughter, witnesses through a keyhole from her bedroom.  While set in the present, the film recounts an episode in the 50’s when Maurice, a struggling actor, left Philippe’s mother for another woman.  That would interestingly make Louis (the director’s son) the director’s father Maurice onscreen, while the young child Charlotte assumes the identity of the director.  In REGULAR LOVERS (2005), it was Louis playing his father’s role in the turbulent 60’s.  Keeping things in the family, Louis’s younger sister Esther onscreen is played by his real life sister Esther Garrel.  Louis takes up with another actress Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), once thought to be a rising star, though she hasn’t had a part in six years, where both are down and out actors with barely enough to get by.  According to the director in an interview, one was able to survive in the late 60’s on three or four francs a day, where the barren, claustrophobic confinement of their tiny top-floor apartment was typical of the era.  While initially overjoyed to be with one another, striding quickly together arm in arm through the busy Parisian streets, Louis tries to help her land a job, while there are also amusing moments, like introducing Claudia for the first time to his overly inquisitive daughter, where Louis arranges to see Charlotte every other weekend, spending much of the time walking through the city or hanging out in parks, eating communal sandwiches, stealing lollipops, where they giddily converse with one another.  While Louis playfully has tickle fights with his daughter and is more gregarious, enjoying time spent socializing with friends in bars or restaurants, Claudia is more distant, something of a continually brooding, intellectual existentialist who is used to being alone and detached from the world.  When Louis asks, “If one of us ever cheats, do we tell?”, a giveaway hint that pretty much explains his state of mind, Claudia simply responds “You’re so complicated.  I only need you to love me.” 

At a modest 77 minutes, the film is a threadbare, small-scale project told in two parts with chapter headings, the first entitled “J'ai gardé les anges (I Kept the Angels),” mostly rooted in the first-hand experiences of the characters, while the second “Sparks in a Powder Keg” relies more on harder to reach memories, set in a barren, wintry landscape where jackets are even worn inside.  Louis lets his sister Esther in on the “law of the desert,” where you accommodate a stranger for three days and three nights under the safety of your tent, but then they must leave.  Having never heard this before, Louis claims it came from his Dad, but Esther points out regrettably and somewhat sadly, that she was too young to remember their father.  There are more dropped hints of Mayakovsky and Seneca, both of whom took their own lives, not to mention Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which also deals with suicide, while the ever dour Claudia is continually heard uttering cryptic comments like “This apartment will be the death of us.”  This foreshadowing lingers like smog or stagnant air for awhile as the couple settles into a kind of accepted resignation, where they pretend not to be ignoring one another.  When Claudia, who sleeps with random men by habit, begins an affair with a theater director, Henri (Eric Ruillat), finding work in the process, the director bankrolls an upgraded apartment that Claudia moves into at once, without even asking Louis, where the director is supposedly laissez faire regarding the continued presence of Louis.  But in no time, Claudia walks out on Louis much like he earlier walked out on Clothilde, leaving him feeling blindsided, emotionally paralyzed, and heartstruck by the move, as if it’s against the laws of nature, suddenly finding himself alone in an apartment he can’t afford.  While it’s actually amusing to see a completely perplexed Louis Garrel get his comeuppance, as in film after film he’s always playing the callous lothario, but here his grand and tragic gesture leads to a suicide attempt, shooting himself in the chest, and missing, where we see him afterwards hooked up to every known contraption in the hospital ward.  As it turns out, Maurice Garrel once tried to commit suicide in exactly the same way.  The sad truth of the matter is the film’s melancholic mood reveals how quickly dreams disappear and one’s idealistic hopes are crushed, beautifully set to the tender guitar music of Jean-Louis Aubert, one of the better scored films of the year.  Garrel offers one of his more likeable low-key efforts, expressing a genuine affection for his downbeat characters, another doomed short story about the fragility of happiness along with relationships loved and lost, where a friend points out to Louis, “You understand your characters better than those close to you,” — a poignant truth about cinema that runs throughout the New Wave era, where insights into art are more easily achieved than reflecting philosophically on one’s own existence. 

I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (J'entends plus la guitare)

J’ENTENDS PLUS LA GUITARE           A               

aka:  I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore  d:  Philippe Garrel

France  (98 mi)  1991

One doesn’t get a chance to see films like this very often, a premiere in Chicago 17 years after it was released, opening with little or no fanfare, no special announcements or critical appraise, little to alert the public of a special event, playing in a near empty theater where only those few who have heard about it by word of mouth are there.  Garrel’s more appreciative work was his most recent film, REGULAR LOVERS (2005), a mammoth 3-hour work that looks behind the scenes at the student demonstrations in Paris during the late 60’s which played the festival circuit and was widely acclaimed, starring Garrel’s own son Louis who may as well be the poster child for French films.  To my knowledge, that is the only film that had a run here in the United States.  Garrel’s other 25+ films have only been talked about, perhaps a few have been screened across the country in recent retrospectives, but most have never been seen.  This is a magnificent looking film, one that takes full advantage of the utilization of space, usually from close to medium range shots where the emptiness of the unfilled space between characters becomes one of the themes of the film.  Cinematographer Caroline Champetier makes it all look effortless with an extremely fluid camera style that at times resembles choreography, particularly the way she changes the focus between characters by following the pace of their body movement.  This is an extremely naturalistic film, one of the quietest seen, much of it shot in interior rooms conveying a maximum amount of silence where even natural sound appears to be muted, where quiet, near inaudible conversations appear to be taking place in a vacuum, as if the outside world is not allowed to protrude.   This mood is perfectly accentuated in brief glimpses by outstanding original music by Faton Cahen, which features a piano and a few ascending jazz riffs on a sax, an eloquent testament to a narcotic induced haze.  

While this nearly non-narrative, highly impressionistic film is certainly not for everybody, as it’s clearly downbeat and utterly sad, an unglamorous view without artifice of what might be described as the cinema of no emotion, but what it does offer is an artistic appreciation for realism with a nervy intelligence.  With no particularly likeable characters, this is an extremely personalized, understated, autobiographical film, a fictionalized recreation, opening in bed with a couple awakening from sleep on the sunny Italian Riviera, Gérard, Benoît Régent, a stand-in for the director, and Marianne, Johanna ter Steege, brilliant as a stand-in for his real-life girlfriend Nico (Christa Päffgen), from the Velvet Underground, with whom he spent ten years of his life and made 7 trippy films together in the 70’s.  While discussing the ramifications of love, it’s apparent they are questioning every word, every syllable, in attempting to break down anything phony in their commitment to one another.  Marianne especially finds Gérard’s words to be a kind of empty articulation that feels learned and ingrained, hardly spontaneous revelations “of the moment.”  Régent offers an unusual style of being completely noncommittal, almost as if he’s not even there, as we never learn his profession, what money he lives on or anything about his background, instead he remains hidden behind a cloud of mystery, somewhat reminiscent of Bill Pullman in LOST HIGHWAY (1997).  Marianne on the other hand, whose every movement is followed by the camera, has her own sensual style with a playfully inquisitive mind, very direct and to the point, but never forcing the issue, simply asserting her views openly.  They share their time with another couple, Gérard’s friend Martin (Yann Collette), a painter who has lost an eye and his girlfriend Lola (Mireille Perrier), with whom Gérard may have at one time been intimate.  Anouk Grinberg as Adrienne plays yet another outside interest.  Together they express a free wheeling, somewhat indulgent philosophical style that represents a lofty, grandiose view of themselves. 

Moving back to Paris, the interior mood has darkened considerably, as has their increased drug use, introducing heroin into their relationship.  It’s interesting to see how one’s obsessed notion of “need” can become an illusion, used frequently as a romantic expression between lovers, yet with narcotics it’s a foregone conclusion who (or what) becomes the real need.  Humans become completely irrelevant.  Marianne quickly disappears without a trace, presumably with another man, though perhaps out of self preservation, which leaves Gérard nearly immobile and alone.  Like an answered prayer, a woman appears at his door, announces she’s a friend of Marianne named Aline (Brigitte Sy, Garrel’s former real life wife and mother to Louis), who proceeds in grand style to nurse Gérard back to the living, which includes getting married and having his baby, all of which is realized in a single shot.  Compared to everything else we’ve experienced, usually seen through oblique, intensely personal conversations, a dinner sequence with her family and the newborn baby has a tinge of the ridiculous, yet it’s perhaps the most normal scene in the film.  When Marianne returns, Gérard is torn between separate lives, his old and his new, and hasn’t a clue how to make it right, as it’s clear his earlier high-minded ideals and confessed promises to Marianne are coming back to haunt him.  The internal damage this causes each of them after supposedly cleaning up their lives, is devastating, perhaps best represented in a scene between Marianne and Aline, which appears to be something of a peace offering but soon deteriorates into a strange personal confession by Marianne describing her life with Gérard, which evolves from an existential meaninglessness to greater transcendent heights, all of which is meant to casually dismiss Aline’s world to the near-irrelevant, but it perhaps drives a stake through her own heart instead. 

This film is gorgeous, intelligent, and surprisingly tender, offering little if any emotion emanating from the screen, but that is the Bressonian mold which forces the viewer to supply their own emotional perspective.  Partly that is what makes this film so unique, as it doesn't follow convention any more than the characters do, as when moving in a single shot from the day he meets Aline to a subsequent day when they are married and already have a child.  That type of economy is, to say the least, unusual.  Also, of interest, the filmmaker spares no one, especially himself, revealing his own inadequacies in nearly every shot, especially the last one.  This kind of ruthless critique of one’s own behavior deserves some recognition.  The spared down version of how he tells the story of his life is unique, yet due to the way he films it, where so much detail permeates specific periods, it's as if we've read a book, as we feel intimately familiar with the lives of the central characters.  Marc Cholodenko is credited with the stunning dialogue, much of which owes a debt to Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), as the unsparing confessional tone is mixed with a raw internal dysfunction, where the physical quality of the peeling paint on the walls literally takes on a life force of its own, where people’s lives start to resemble the worn out, dilapidated buildings that they casually inhabit all their lives, never giving it a second thought.  Yet by the end, it’s clear that Gérard was never honest with himself throughout the entire film, a realization that haunts him and taints his memories of Marianne, clearly the singlemost significant relationship in his life.  What stands out is the amount of time wasted in this director’s life where so much is lost on drugs and personal missteps, where only after Nico’s death does Garrel come to realize how much he loved her and that she was in fact the love of his life.  With this film, the haze has cleared and Garrel finally has the opportunity to tell the unvarnished truth.  The film is dedicated to Nico who died three years before its release.