Belle Épine

BELLE ÉPINE           B                                     
France  (80 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Rebecca Zlotowski 

Every generation seems to have a teen angst movie like this one, from THE WILD ONE (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), to the film this most resembles stylistically, Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994), where the role of Léa Seydoux as Prudence most definitely resembles Virginie Ledoyen, both 16-year olds with absent parents who go on a binge of inappropriate behavior, where Assayas’s film carries more weight and complexity, as it has a better script and his use of iconic music is more cultural and a reflection of the times, while this first time director has a searing lead performance from Seydoux, a girl who will throw herself at anything in order to forget how empty she feels inside, but her life as well as the secondary characters remain largely undefined, where we only view them in passing instead of feel intensely immersed in their lives and affected by the outcome.  Prudence is largely indifferent to her circumstances, numb from the recent death of her mother, where in an early scene she’s caught shoplifting, meets another petty thief in holding, Maryline (Agathe Schlenker), where perhaps the shot of the film is watching her on her way out the door, as she hesitates before walking outside, remaining hidden behind a wall while the audience sees Maryline join a group of awaiting bikers, where all the action is interestingly kept out of focus as we see a series of guys on motorcycles doing wheelies, revving their engines, just generally showing off in front of the girl before she climbs on the back of a bike and they all ride away, creating quite a spectacle—apparently arousing Prudence’s interest.  Shot by Georges Lechaptois, the film is very much in the style of hand held Steadicam cameras closely following the rhythms and natural movements of the kids, where they have an easygoing attitude about sex and nudity, where frank discussions about sex, especially from the female point of view, are the norm.  If ever there was a movie ripe for the song Dear Prudence The Beatles - Dear Prudence YouTube (4:00), this is it, but sadly it was not to be.   

Prudence lives alone in her parent’s spacious house with her father continually absent except by phone, where her older sister Frédérique (Anna Sigalevitch) keeps an eye on her, but her life is an open door of new opportunities, expressing little interest in school, where she typically finds parties every night instead.  When she runs into Maryline, she expresses an interest in meeting the bikers, who are the kinds of guys more interested in bikes than girls, who will pay attention to girls when they have nothing better to do, but will drop them flat the minute any biking event is happening, where they hold impromptu races every night, some of them daredevil, all illegal, where it’s not uncommon for people to get seriously injured or killed, often due to poor maintenance standards, where the carelessness of one rider will kill another.  Somehow, they’re all immune to even talking about this gruesome subject, yakking and having a good time over beers instead, where together they display a 50’s homoerotic camaraderie.  It’s never made clear what interest this holds for Prudence except there are cloisters of guys, any number of whom would be happy to hang out with her, so she pretty much has the pick of the litter other than Maryline’s guy.  While this is nothing like Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), for instance, as it lacks the wild optimism and free-spirited energy and humor of the 60’s and instead projects an endless dreariness and monotony, bordering on fatalism, where kids are simply bored with the same things happening in their lives every day, where the idea of tempting death doesn’t feel like such a bad idea.  Any happiness expressed on the screen lasts only for a brief instant, like a quick thrill, whether on motorcycles or in bed, and then it’s over.             

There’s only the briefest hint of a storyline, clocking in at only 80 minutes, where sexual attraction may hold the audience’s attention briefly, but then it quickly wanes, as Prudence isn’t really interested in any guy, but that doesn’t stop her from having sex, or even from taking unnecessary abuse, as she can barely tell the difference.  There’s a cloud of gloom hanging over her shoulder, where her family is still grieving over her mother’s passing, but Prudence is living like there’s no tomorrow, where her sexual behavior looks like a textbook on how to obtain sexually transmitted diseases.  You’d think high school kids should be smarter and more careful, due to increased awareness and available information, but this girl simply doesn’t care what happens to her.  Despite the downbeat subject matter, the film has a fresh, near documentary style, where the awkward, uninhibited nature of teenagers is always appealing, and a good deal of the film has an upbeat musical backdrop that throbs and pulsates with a kind of electric energy.  Seydoux couldn’t be more committed to the role, where it looks like the part was written just for her, as her smoldering sexuality is always expressed in a low-key, offhanded manner, where she’s comfortable, relaxed, and even nonchalant while naked in front of the camera, but gives an edgy performance of moodiness, forever feeling like she’s lost in a rapidly descending sea-change of self-absorption, where it’s easy to see how everyone misunderstands her, continually thinking she’s selfish, as they’re missing the pain she’s trying so hard to avoid.  Of course the inevitable happens, where the end couldn’t be more predictable, even if told in a starkly unanticipated manner, where despite many excellent qualities in this film, especially the unflinching and naturalistic portrait of a glum teenage girl, the script is too bare-bones, never really fleshing out anyone else’s story or offering any new insights into grief or adolescence. 

Late August, Early September (Fin août, début septembre)

LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER (Fin août, début septembre)      A                    

France  (112 mi)  1998  d:  Olivier Assayas 

After writing film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma between 1979 and 1985, much like the New Wave directors had done in the 50’s, Olivier Assayas emerged as a prominent filmmaker during the second half of the 1980’s.  Not only learning to articulate cinematic ideas and choices, Assayas also experimented with short films while writing screenplays for André Téchiné, like RENDEZ-VOUS (1985), SCENE OF THE CRIME (1986), and ALICE AND MARTIN (1998), where the critical success of his first screenplay is how he was able to get his first feature financed.  Like many great artists, Assayas has been able to keep a close circle of artistic collaborators with him throughout his career:  Denis Lenoir and Éric Gautier (cinematography), Luc Barnier (editing), William Flageollet (sound mixing), Françoise Clavel (costume design), and François-Renaud Labarthe (art direction/production design), all of whom worked on this film, except Gautier, who collaborated on eight other films beginning with Irma Vep (1996).  Similarly, a stable of recurring actors has followed as well, including Virginie Ledoyen, Nathalie Richard, and Jeanne Balibar seen here, also in minor roles Elli Medeiros, Alex Descas (still working with Claire Denis), and Arsinée Khanjian (married to Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan).  The stellar ensemble cast assembled for this film is a coterie of young French actors that later became major French film stars, but these are their early years, very much like the parts they play in the film, Parisian friends in their 30’s, most all at a midway point in their lives, where they are at an age when they’re settling down and becoming respectable, a time when money and a career are a necessity, as they can’t pay rent on youthful idealism.  The story revolves around the lives of six people, where money is a constant worry, but especially for Adrien (François Cluzet), the only one to reach forty, a critically respected writer who has already written three novels, but none were a success, becoming unfailingly critical of his own failings.  He develops an unknown sickness that nearly costs him his life, where the film plays out like THE BIG CHILL (1983), where a group of friends grow increasingly concerned, but it’s not his death, but their own mortality that is suddenly challenged, beautifully conveyed with a probing, novelistic density.

After becoming familiar with the work of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Assayas, in a 1999 interview in ArtForum, believed he has “a particular way of describing time, of describing the progression of action:  you’ll have fragments of the same reality, and sometimes time is not moving.”  In this case, the center of the film is an ailing man, but the narrative structure is developed from eliciting a series of personal reactions to his sickness, including characters sharing thoughts and recollections, who are also involved in their own personal connections, both present and past, all of which add complexity to their lives, as the audience is able to develop a greater understanding of all the characters through a series of interconnected relationships.  The film is divided into six chapter headings that only slightly advance the story, such as a week later, or two months later, reflecting a passing of time, yet the connections between the characters are only slightly altered, yet over time, this change, both in time and subjectivity, becomes more significantly noticeable.  Gabriel, Mathieu Amalric, always nervous and insecure, is a book editor that admires Adrien and looks up to him, who undergoes a pronounced change when the usually stoic Adrien starts revealing personal feelings about himself and his life, such as his illness.  Gabriel has a highly volatile but extremely attractive younger girlfriend, Virginie Ledoyen as Anne, but he’s not yet ready to commit, which only angers her, often disrupting things for the worse.  Gabriel is selling his former apartment with his ex-girlfriend, Jenny, Jeanne Balibar, exposed and vulnerable.  In a case where truth is stranger than fiction, these two in real life were involved romantically at the time, and their scenes together as ex-lovers couldn’t feel more natural, as you can sense their still thriving but not acted upon attraction, though both are two of the most gifted actors working in France.  Adrien also has a secret teenage love with the 16-year old Vera, Mia Hansen-Løve, currently married in real life to the director, and a director in her own right, though only 17 at the time, while Arsinée Khanjian is his old flame, still bitter about their breakup.

The film is shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm, where part of the artistic vision is achieved by the masterful hand-held cinematography by Denis Lenoir, much as he did in Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994), using long, unbroken takes, where the constant camera movement reflects the continuing restless anxiety of the characters.  The episodic structure, divided into segments like chapter titles, emphasizes the effect of time and the way people drift in and out of each other’s lives, where often weeks or months pass between visits, yet the viewer has a deep sense of each character, where it’s interestingly a time when writing letters was how absent lovers expressed themselves, where a passage of time would have to occur before there was a response.  The film often skips a step and jumps ahead, where the relationship has already shifted, expressed by a glance, or a few words, such as the advancing illness of Adrien, where the change has a noticeable effect on each one of them.  Much like the Ozu title suggests, the movie is filled with ordinary moments, yet when strung together it leads to remarkable lives.  Without an ounce of sentimentality, we get a sense of changing seasons and time passing, where throughout Assayas scrutinizes personal relationships and changing perspectives, including the role of sex, family, career, and friendships, not to mention how each of us responds differently when facing mortality.  The film is an impressionistic mosaic of interconnecting lives, where the social drive for honesty and truthfulness with one another is a surprisingly tender notion often lacking in modern era films, which, despite the improvements of social media, are more often defined by alienation and distance.  This is a film that beautifully expresses the subtlety in relationships, where Gabriel and Anne visit his brother (Eric Elmosino) and wife (Nathalie Richard) at their home in the country with family and close friends, including Gabriel’s ex-lover Jenny.  As they all try to come to terms with the seriousness of Adrien’s condition, they are intensely expressing their grief while the younger Anne, still seen sitting off to the side, quietly withdraws into herself, completely excluded from the intensity of this adult world, literally unable to comprehend this entire chapter of Gabriel’s life.  Similarly, the way Adrien’s friends discuss the teenage girl Vera after he dies is heartbreakingly cruel, where she’s largely seen on the periphery of the screen, saying little, where she remains an entity unknown to them, so she is excluded from what rightfully belongs to her when dividing up Adrien’s artworks and personal possessions, as she’s not viewed as a mature person.  Unknowingly, they are disconnecting what we already understand to be a loving relationship. The beauty of the film, however, is the ease in which relationships form and split apart, only to reconnect again in a completely unexpected context, becoming a brilliant character study where relationships are never static, but continually adapt to the changing world around them.   

Cold Water (L’eau Froide)

COLD WATER (L’eau Froide)         A                      

aka:  Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge...  (All the Boys and Girls In Their Time) – made for TV (Commissioned by French television as one part of a series of nine films entitled Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge, including other directors:   Patricia Mazuy, Chantal Akerman, André Téchiné, Olivier Dahan, Emilie Deleuze, Claire Denis, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, and Cédric Kahn.  Released theatrically, however, before it was shown on TV)  France (92 mi)  1994  d:  Olivier Assayas

Janitor of lunacy
Paralyze my infancy
Petrify the empty cradle
Bring hope to them and me

Janitor of tyranny
Testify my vanity
Mortalize my memory
Deceive the devil's deed

Tolerate my jealousy
Recognize the desperate need

Janitor of lunacy
Identify my destiny
Revive the living dream
Forgive their begging scream

Seal the giving of their seed
Disease the breathing grief

—Nico “Janitor of Lunacy,” 1974, written for Brian Jones (1942 – 1969), Nico - Janitor of Lunacy (Peel '74) - YouTube (4:25)

If you ever have a chance to see this film in a theater, don’t pass it up, as it’s likely to be the best film you’ll see all year.  An almost perfect film, arguably the stand-out work in this director’s repertoire, as this film along with Nicholas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), and perhaps André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994) from this same commissioned series, may be the most outstanding coming-of-age films to ever probe into misunderstood adolescence, while it’s also one of the greatest 60’s counterculture films, even though it was set it in the early 70’s.  In addition, it features superlative use of handheld cameras by Denis Lenoir, where the fluidity of motion perfectly matches the restless interior states of mind of the lead characters, where what immediately comes to mind is the sustained intensity level throughout, especially in the lead character, 16-year old Christine (17-year old Virginie Ledoyen’s greatest performance), as if the weight of the world is literally flooding through her body and soul at every moment, where her instincts of self-preservation lead to a constant state of rebellion, where befuddled adults have legal control over what to do with her, which includes sending her to a psychiatric hospital against her will because they can’t deal with her.  Assayas beautifully captures the mood, atmosphere, and raw, unpretentious intensity of anxiety-ridden adolescents caught up in their own indecisions, the terrible choices they make, how easy their emotions are sparked and then extinguished, and how eloquently, beyond their own words (blank piece of paper), this film describes their fatalistic viewpoint about their all-too-hopeless future, made as part of the celebrated French TV series, “Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge” (1994), ALL THE BOYS AND GIRLS IN THEIR TIME, a collaboration of various directors recalling their lives at 16, including Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, and André Téchiné's Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), where one rule was they had to include a party sequence, all dealing with dramatized stories set during their adolescence.    

This film is set in the outskirts of Paris in 1972, where the story examines the lives of two defiant 16-year old delinquents from broken homes, Christine and Gilles, played flawlessly by Virginie Ledoyen and Cyprien Fouquet.  Christine has already been sent to the psychiatric asylum, is caught by the police as a partner in a shoplifting crime committed by Gilles, a more comfortable middle class kid with little to no life experience, and is then returned to the asylum by her father, with the consent of her separated Scientologist mother (Dominique Faysse) and Arab boyfriend (Smaïl Mekki), while Gilles is expelled from school and is expected to be shipped off to boarding school by his single father, intelligently played by László Szabó.  These opening set-up sequences show adults straining to understand the seemingly senseless actions and motivations of youth, where ironically the best listener turns out to be a sympathetic police inspector (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), but he is viewed as untrustworthy like all the other authority figures, where these kids are so alienated and lost that they often don’t understand their own thoughts and are afraid to share their innermost secrets with anyone.  This is one of the better films at expressing the vast divide between age groups, where people over thirty are simply not to be trusted, as their actions even when well-meaning are seen as cruel, reflective of their own narrow interests, so it’s quite natural for these kids to rebel against what they perceive to be the source of injustice and such emotional upheaval in their lives.  In fact, the romance between Christine and Gilles is as much the result of a shared opposition to authority as it is a mutual attraction.  This is also one of the few films to include a minority, an Arab boyfriend, as among those overly heavy-handed adults they need to rebel against, which is an interesting twist, considering minorities are usually perceived to be on the receiving end of social injustice.      

Christine escapes and meets Gilles at a country house where a horde of teenagers are convening for a midnight party.  In one of the more enthralling scenes, Gilles travels through an unimaginably beautiful green forest walking his bicycle while spouting (in English) the Allen Ginsburg poetry of his 1966 anti-war poem Wichita Vortex Sutra, taking a winding path through the woods where the quiet solitude is unmistakable until miraculously finding a paved road in a blue mist, which appears like an open portal to another universe, riding and escaping into the mist, while Christine seems on the verge of a mental breakdown and after cutting off some of her hair, attacks another girl with a pair of scissors.  Rarely mentioned as one of the key films of the 90’s as it never had an American release other than festival screenings and has still never appeared on DVD, but can only be seen in retrospectives, it is nonetheless one of the key films of the 90’s, where it climaxes with a memorable riotous all-night party in an abandoned château, which resolves into a 15-minute sequence of American music with no dialogue, just the passing of a bong pipe, a raging bonfire, music and dancing, evoking feelings of liberation, starting with Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” Assayas - cold water 1994, party scene excerpt  YouTube (29:49, unsubtitled, though the dialogue stops around the 4-minute mark), Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” L'eau froide YouTube (2:01), Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” L'eau froide : slow  YouTube (2:10), reaching a rousing crescendo, ascending to unimaginable heights with Creedence Clearwater’s “Comin’ Round the Bend” L'eau froide : feu de joie   YouTube (2:56), so good they have to play it again, interspersed with the piercing scratch of the needle ripping across the phonograph record while abruptly changing songs.  With the kids smashing the windows throwing all the home furniture into the bonfire, it has a feel of storming the Bastille, where revolt and revolution are in the air.  Assayas uses Nico’s “Janitor of Lunacy” L'eau froide : matin blême  YouTube (2:56) as the coming down song, an ode to the Rolling Stone (Brian Jones) that died too young, leaving a foggy aftermath that dreamily hovers over the proceedings like finding yourself lost in a wasteland.  Much like Cassavetes’ landmark 60’s film Faces (1968), Assayas uses closeups to brilliantly capture the expression on the faces of his young characters, using a drifting handheld camera that reveals a stunning intimacy, showing us their isolation as well as their union.  The two escape in the middle of the night to the idea of a better place (freedom) that exists only in Christine’s mind, and on a wintry night, Christine finds herself walking waist deep in an icy cold river that is pushing or pulling her with unrestrained force and whose decibel level is ominous, where one feels she is about to throw herself in, but instead decides to give herself to Gilles that night only to disappear by morning, leaving little trace of where she’s gone, L'Eau Froide - O.Assayas YouTube (4:40).  In this film, much like the ambiguous, existential ending to Five Easy Pieces (1970), there is no definable future, there is only today.