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.

2014 Top Ten List #3 Clouds of Sils Maria

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA               A                       
France  Switzerland  Germany (123 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Olivier Assayas 

His best film in years, known only as SILS MARIA in France, Assayas stunningly returns to peak form in this modernized twist of his earlier film Irma Vep (1996), a film about the making of film, this time starring Juliette Binoche instead of Maggie Cheung, written by Assayas specifically for her in a project he describes as “A Juliette Binoche movie about Juliette Binoche with Juliette Binoche” in a film about an international theatrical star Maria Enders (Binoche) who is asked to perform in a film adaptation of the play that made her famous twenty years ago, but this time switching roles, no longer playing the beguiling 18-year old rising star actress in the part that made her famous, but the older leading lady, a tired, middle-aged business woman having an affair with the manipulative young female ingénue who eventually drives her weak-willed boss to suicide.  Partially financed by Chanel, which supplied the actresses with clothes, jewelry, accessories and makeup, this also allowed the director to shoot this sumptuously looking film on 35 mm.  Shot on location by cinematographer Yorick Le Saux in the mountainous Swiss Alps towns of Sils Maria as well as Zurich, Switzerland, Leipzig, Germany and South Tyrol, Italy, the locations are an integral part of the story, as Wilhelm Melchior, the author of the aforementioned play Maloja Snake, is a creature of those spectacular mountains, filled with their own secrets and mysteries and naturally occurring phenomenon which begin to take on human characteristics while also offering its own commentary on the changing nature of time passing, which is visibly seen in a fog-like cloud formation that drifts through the valley between the mountains in the form of a snake.  Melchior becomes an unseen central force in the film as Maria, at the height of her stardom but also in the middle of a contentious divorce, is accompanied by her more laid back American personal attendant Valentine, Kristen Stewart in Converse shoes, while traveling to Zurich by train to accept an award on behalf of Melchior, where on route they learn of his sudden death.  Assayas immediately shows us the back side of a famous artist, the side we never see, as Maria seems terribly dependent on the expert social media skills of Valentine, who meticulously plans everything out for her ahead of time, but also acts as a human receptacle for her more candid comments that the public never hears. 

While Maria is obviously shaken by the unexpected death, this doesn’t stop her from doing a planned Chanel dress photo shoot once she arrives at the hotel, where her immediate transformation from ordinary train passenger to international diva is a bit stunning.  Much to her chagrin, they have also invited actor Henryk Walk, Hanns Zischler, a self-centered, autocratic older man in the manner of Erich von Stroheim who took full sexual advantage of the young actress at the beginning of her career, which she has never forgiven, to provide his commentary about Melchior, as they were also close personal friends.  After the Awards ceremony, she meets an in vogue German movie director, Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), considered hot property due to his series of successful films, who offers her the older role of his adaptation of Melchior’s play.  While she initially expresses no interest, Val talks her into taking the role, suggesting she would reach an entirely new audience, and with this decision comes the title card announcing “Part 2,” which takes the audience completely by surprise, as there was never any “Part 1.”  This idea of an actress reaching a point in her career (Binoche is 50) when she is no longer considered young and desirable for leading roles, but becomes thought of only for less desirable parts as a character actor, is considered the death of their careers to some actresses, and has been explored before by John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands (in her late 40’s) in Opening Night (1977), one of the gutsiest films about theater ever made, right alongside Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952) and Desplechin’s ESTHER KHAN (2000).  All are dialogue-driven vehicles featuring extraordinary performances, where Rowlands (whose name Binoche amusingly appropriates when disguising her identity) was pathologically reticent to take the part, not yet ready to cross the threshold, while Binoche is clearly more comfortable as an aging actress, partly because she has continued to work with all the best directors and still receives scripts that are written with her in mind.  She couldn’t appear more natural in a film while still playing a role, always seen as warmhearted and charismatic, but the real surprise is Stewart, who matches her scene for scene throughout the entire film by completely underplaying Binoche’s theatrics.  What’s particularly interesting is how quietly reserved and contemplative Binoche is in English, as if always holding something back, while saving her more extroverted outbursts for French language scenes.  

Some of the best scenes in the film are reserved for Binoche and Stewart who work brilliantly together, retaining a hint of the sexual undercurrent expressed in Melchior’s play while also expressing their own unique feminine personalities quite differently, as they retreat to the Melchior estate in the mountains to prepare for the role, which the playwright’s widow Rosa (Angela Winkler) has graciously offered, as she needs to get away to avoid all the constant reminders of his presence.  As they read through the play’s scenes, offering fresh extemporaneous comments as they go, Assayas intelligently dissects the present through the past, with both women displaying strong-willed characters with probing intelligence and an acerbic wit, but also an affectionate side where they’re simply happy to be in each other’s company.  As they weave in and out of the play, while also preparing elaborate meals or taking long walks through the picturesque mountainside, it’s impossible to tell where the play ends and reality begins, as they seamlessly intersect with a surgical precision.  While both women have their own star power, which is beautifully utilized by Assayas, it’s curiously deferred to the ideas of the play, as if they are mere players in the world of art, expressed without an ounce of pretension.  This honesty is then contrasted with the director’s shrewdly calculating choice to play the ambitious young girl, Chloë Grace Moretz as Jo-Ann Ellis, an actress Maria has never heard of.  As Val thumbs through Google searches, hilarious YouTube videos, and even more demented celebrity interviews where Ellis comes off as a teenage prima donna and a full-time party animal whose center of the universe is never far from herself, Maria finds this ghastly while Val is impressed by her ability to hold the audience through each of these arrest records and real life disasters, where she remains exactly who she is without any hint of compromise.  The fact that she’s a walking disaster in real life means nothing, as she knows how to command the screen.  This contextualization couldn’t be more hilariously insightful about what Hollywood is today, while the scene of the film that takes one’s breath away is the appearance of the snake, which finally appears at a crucial stage in the film, expressed through the eloquence of Arnold Frank’s 1924 ten-minute silent short film CLOUD PHENOMENA OF MALOJA (Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja), which is an awesome declaration of the artistic significance of cinema in its purest form, literally dwarfing what we see today, given such a beautifully sophisticated articulation by Assayas who has made another truly exhilarating film.    

Only Lovers Left Alive

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE           B                   
Great Britain  Germany  (123 mi)  2013  d:  Jim Jarmusch           Official site

I’m more of a Stax girl, myself.            —Eve (Tilda Swinton)

Typical of what’s happening today in the movie industry, Jim Jarmusch indicated this film was seven years in the making due to an inability to obtain funds to make the movie, as American backers dropped out, so he had to search for European financing.  And while Tilda Swinton and John Hurt were onboard throughout the lengthy ordeal, Michael Fassbender was eventually replaced by Tom Hiddleston, where it’s impossible to think of the film without him, as Hiddleston’s imprint is all over this film, especially the slowed down pace of lethargy that captures the creepy feel of vampire characters that have lived for centuries.  Hiddleston plays a worldly vampire with connections to a centuries earlier golden age in science, literature, music, and the arts, once friends with Schubert, and authors Shelley and Byron, now a depressed underground musician, aka Adam, whose spacey, mournfully hypnotic music Only lovers left alive | Adam's music YouTube (1:49) played on retro equipment brings back opium-induced thoughts of the hallucinogenic world of APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) and is reminiscent of an earlier 60’s era of Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground, yet he plays the part of a reclusive rock star who makes psychedelic new music while in hiding, much like Mick Jagger as Turner in Nicolas Roeg’s PERFORMANCE (1970).  Only Gus van Sant’s LAST DAYS (2005) captures the same dreary mood, a portrait of a suicidal Cobain-like musician’s final days where nothing much happens, but he similarly retreats from reality and ignores everyone, lost in a haze of oblivion.  This atmospheric funk is beautifully realized by Jarmusch’s choice to shoot the film in the empty ruins of the economically ravaged Detroit, which he calls “a decimated city.”  Truly representative of a city in decay, we return to constant images of empty downtown streets and the remnants of an industrial wasteland, where the residents feel like ghostly inhabitants of a once thriving city.  Living in a dilapidated Victorian house in a deserted area on the outskirts of town, looking like the morbid set for a Halloween movie, Adam collects vintage electric guitars, builds his own underground electronic grid, but also has various electronics memorabilia like a 50’s TV, a 70’s phone, while playing classic turnstyle LP records like Charlie Feathers “Can't Hardly Stand It” CHARLIE FEATHERS Can't Hardly Stand It - YouTube (2:52). 

On the other side of the globe living in Tangiers, with the streets cast in a golden hue, is Adam’s wife Eve (Tilda Swinton), a collector of books in every language, which she’s able to fathom simply by running her fingers over the pages.  Dressed in a hijab covering her hair and neck, Eve literally glides through the empty streets ignoring the men popping out of dark corners promising “We’ve got what you want,” as she proceeds to a near empty café where she meets fellow vampire Marlowe (John Hurt), Shakespeare’s contemporary and her longtime lover/confidante who hoards his secret that he secretly penned Shakespeare’s works, while also being her blood supplier, offering her a taste of “the good stuff.”  These vampires have long ago sworn off attacking human victims, who they call “zombies,” claiming they’ve tainted the blood supply with their careless lifestyles and reckless disregard for their health.  Adam has a black market procurer (Jeffrey Wright) in the blood supply section of the hospital, where he arrives with a large wad of cash dressed in a doctor’s gown posing as Dr. Faust or Dr. Caligari, where getting their fix is like feeding a heroin habit, as they’re seen going through a rush of euphoria, with fangs starting to protrude.  Adam uses Ian (Anton Yelchin), in awe of the man’s genius and one of his biggest fans, but also a naïve stoner kid as his Renfield, a go-between to the outside world, while also using him, no questions asked, to track down hard-to-find specialty items, like vintage guitars or recording equipment, and even a specially-made wooden bullet.  When Eve realizes the extent of his deep gloom, she decides to board to flight to Detroit, packing Dostoyevsky and David Foster Wallace, wasting no opportunity as they reminisce about their glory years, as Adam recalls when they hung out with Byron, “a pompous bore,” or wrote an Adagio movement for Schubert, and recalls with affection meeting Mary Shelley.  When asked what she was like, Adam snarls “She was delicious.”  Not since SID AND NANCY (1986) have we seen such a dreamily lethargic and quietly disengaged couple, where he drives her through the empty streets of Detroit at night, past the deserted Roxy Theater and the Michigan Theatre, which is now used as a parking lot, where they seem alone in the vast desolation of boarded up warehouses and factories.  “How can you have lived for so long, and still not get it?” she reminds him.  “This self-obsession is a waste of living.  That could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship… and dancing!”  Suggesting he might show her the Motown studios, she responds, “I’m more of a Stax girl, myself,” grabbing her partner off the couch as she chooses to play a Denise LaSalle song, “Trapped by a Thing Called Love” Only Lovers Left Alive - Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton dancing YouTube (2:00), which just happened to be released on the Detroit-based Westbound Records label. 

Shot entirely at night by Yorick le Saux, with an extraordinary score from Josef van Wissem and Jarmusch’s own band Sqürl, Jozef Van Wissem & SQÜRL - The Taste Of Blood YouTube (5:54), where it’s easy to lose yourself in the feedback and trance-like psychedelic guitar sounds where the desolation of the vampire underworld stretches to an endless abyss.  The opening forty minutes or so are riveting and show great promise, but peters out a bit by the end, where the sophistication and urbane wit of Adam and Eve represent a kind of cultured, upper class variety of vampire, where Jarmusch has created a uniquely original, alternate universe existing right alongside the present that sarcastically comments upon the superficiality of the modern era where there’s scarcely a genius left alive, no one to challenge their infinite knowledge, forcing them to withdraw ever further into themselves, yet constantly needing to feed, resembling drug addicts.  The film perks up with the arrival of Eve’s naughty kid sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), a cute but mischievous brat vampire whose unstoppable impulses are a destructive force of nature, returning to the reckless carnage and instability of youth, bringing nothing but turmoil into their orderly lives.  They make an appearance at an underground music club, hoping to be inconspicuous, but Ava’s continued flirtatiousness draws unwanted attention, where the kick-ass music, however, is White Hills “Under Skin or by Name” White Hills - Under Skin or by Name YouTube (5:40) and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club “Red Eyes and Tears” Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Red Eyes And Tears  YouTube (3:59).  Despite this surge of energy, it’s only a reminder throughout time of family dysfunction and the capacity for humans to destroy the world they live in, which includes, among other things, the contamination of the blood supply.  Of note, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s recent take on the vampire novel, which led to Tomas Alfredson’s film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008), was similarly concerned with the harmful effects of “impure blood.”  This leads to the question of whether vampires can survive under these toxic modern conditions, which, of course, looking at the nearly demolished picture of Detroit, is a question we should be asking ourselves?  How does a city’s destruction, caused by the unconscionable eagerness of people or corporations (like Ava) to thoughtlessly serve only themselves, benefit anyone?  Through the perspective of centuries, we are at a particularly noteworthy crossroads in determining just what kind of future we’ll have, yet Ava’s gratuitous self-centered greed and her childlike refusal to see the bigger picture suggests a dire future, emblematic perhaps of those ineffectual voices currently haggling over world peace, where self interests above everything else certainly places the planet at even greater risk.  Of course, it wouldn’t truly be representative of a Jarmusch vampire format unless the future of the human condition was utterly dismal.