Caprice

 

self-portrait of Joanna Hogg, 1980

Hogg on the set with Tilda Swinton

CAPRICE                   B+                                                                                                        Great Britain  (28 mi)  1986  d: Joanna Hogg

Expressing a fun and playful side not seen in her other films, this is Joanna Hogg’s graduation short at the National Film and Television School starring a then unknown Tilda Swinton, listed in the credits as “Matilda” Swinton, a reminder of just how early in her career this is, having met when they were just ten years old, placed in the same dormitory as boarding school students at the West Heath Girls’ School in southeast London in 1971.  One thing that’s already apparent at this early stage is just how extraordinary Tilda Swinton is as an actress, exhibiting a wide range of emotions and facial expressions, where she’s just so transparently revealing.  Known for playing eccentric and enigmatic characters, working with directors like Derek Jarman, Wes Anderson, and Luca Guadagnino, with no formal training, yet she’s capable of shifting between sexes and centuries, sprinkling in mainstream films with indie roles, Swinton won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Tony Gilroy’s MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007), having begun her career working for Derek Jarman in the experimental and challenging film CARVAGGIO (1986), which was made immediately following this film.  She ended up making nine films with Jarman, part of a collective queer movement in London, a time when British culture was being eviscerated by Thatcherism, part of the Conservative government’s “family values” campaign that whipped up hysterical levels of homophobia when so many of her friends were ravaged by AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s, including Jarman who died in 1994, a year Swinton went to 43 funerals, all AIDS-related deaths, leaving lifelong scars that are so deep that it’s hard for her to return to London anymore.  Joanna Hogg, on the other hand, moved to Florence, Italy for a year to study photography before returning to London to work as an assistant to an advertising photographer in Soho, finding herself experimenting with the equipment on weekends, switching her focus to film school after discovering Derek Jarman’s Super 8 films, who gave her a camera to make her own Super 8 film PAPER (1982), a study of kinetic sculpture artist Ron Haselden for her entry into the National Film and Television School, where she resented how she was patronized by her all-male professors who created a learning environment that was generally hostile towards women.  After graduation, with few prospects of breaking into the film industry, she directed several music videos for artists such as Alison Moyet and Johnny Thunders in an era of punks and the art school cool of David Bowie, including Johnny Hates Jazz - Shattered Dreams (Official Music Video) YouTube (3:26) with 33 million views to date that reworked ideas from this graduation film, a stepping stone for a career in television over the next decade before she decided she needed to have more creative control, making her first feature film UNRELATED (2007) two decades after this thesis film was made, a straightforward character drama that is her least experimental work to date, winning praise as a “breakthrough” artist and “most promising newcomer” at nearly 50-years old.

Hogg’s relatively late career start as a feature filmmaker was an uneasy fit for most critics, too slow for commercial appeal, too psychologically remote for mainstream critics, also too white and upper class to have any contemporary relevance, yet there is always more to her films than what we see at first glance, often mystifying the viewer with its contradictory effects, as there’s something aesthetically internal that make them difficult to decipher.  But for sheer joy and unbridled enthusiasm, it’s hard to temper one’s appreciation for this short mixed media film, where our protagonist is literally swallowed up by the pages of a fashion magazine, which is a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, Alice in Wonderland - Falling down the rabbit hole YouTube (3:38), where you never know who or what you will encounter.  All shot on a single stage, where only the backdrops change, using a camera borrowed by Derek Jarman, the film is a comic satire on the world of product placement in fashion magazines, where everything is about selling wares to as many customers as possible, where this literally transports us directly into the imaginary universe of the magazine itself, with each product model literally beckoning us to buy what they’re selling, becoming an overwhelmingly crass experience, like an inescapable nightmare.  Yet the playfulness on display is endearing, especially when our guide through this magical mystery tour is none other than Tilda Swinton, with this film presenting both her and the director with their first chance at an artistic partnership, bonding together as boarding school students who “mutually loathed” private school, as it was designed to sculpt young minds for lives of privilege and produce bourgeois wives for the rich and powerful.  Like her other films, this mirrors her own personal experience, as Hogg was once caught smuggling a copy of Playgirl magazine into her West Heath dormitory, and the headmistress disciplined her by seating her in her office and asking her to turn every page of the magazine and offer commentary, which this film does in glorious color, a fusion of pop color with social critique, as embodied by Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 Choses que Je Sais d’Elle) (1967), opening up a phantasmagorical world to a bespectacled and shy woman named Lucky (Tilda Swinton), becoming a dark fantasia about the fashion-magazine industry, inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948) and Technicolor Hollywood musicals.  Lucky is a star-eyed young woman who is religiously obsessed by the glamor magazine Caprice, awaiting each new issue with a devoted fandom that knows no bounds, living and dying with each release, yet right from the outset the magazine cover girl (Rachel Byrd) speaks to her, inviting her inside, taking a zany dive into the surreal depths of 1980’s candy-colored pop and fashion culture, something of a cartoonish blend of comic touches and glam spectacle. 

Written by Hogg and David Gale, shot by David Tattersall, this whimsical film was not understood at the time, viewed as a superficial, juvenile exercise by her professors, the exact opposite of the more serious British social realism films being taught in film school, and can be seen as a declaration of Hogg’s independence, filtered through a postmodernist lens while filled with pizzazz and personality.  Stylistically ambitious, the film has elaborate sets and dramatic lighting, fusing the exuberance of the highly stylized singing and dancing in Chantal Akerman’s visionary GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1986) with the splendorous set pieces of Powell and Pressburger, climbing a grand staircase to heaven just like the one featured in Powell and Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946).  Lucky is thrust in the middle of a larger-than-life fashion magazine, suddenly finding herself trapped in the pages of the magazine that initially seems like her road to liberation, where a first glimpse of the gorgeous fashion models in a pastel-colored fantasy sequence elicits her response, “I just dream of looking like that,” immediately getting a makeover and given a chic look, where she’s literally ecstatic about the idea of rubbing elbows with the people she idolizes.  But as she moves through different articles of the magazine, she’s drawn deeper and deeper into a labyrinthean cave where she finds herself in a maze of photo shoots, perfume ads, fashion layouts, and society pages, with someone selling their products around every corner, all trying to trap her in their captivating world of commerce, including a Douglas Furbanks (Anthony Higgins) matinee idol, a male model in black-tie attire who romances her with suave caresses and kisses, yet she’s forced to continually keep on the move in what amounts to a vacuous consumerist wonderland, as she suddenly finds herself at odds with her own desires, moving from enchantment to disillusion.  Perhaps most telling is a sequence that amounts to an entire music video, with girls in colored dresses doing a fully choreographed dance routine in front of a nightclub as Jackie Jones (Helen Cooper), “the hippest music editor Caprice has ever had,” introduces her to Billy Pez (Robert Parnell), a Billy Idol lookalike singing Games We Play, but of course, he turns out to be a cad in real life, instantly turning her off with his supreme arrogance, as all she represents to him is a potential buyer.  Though dated by a synthesizer soundtrack that places the film in the 1980’s, viewers can still relate to what Lucky is going through, as it’s a different kind of transformation, where at the center of it are all the pressures thrown at young women to look and behave in a certain way.  In the end, Lucky is offered a dream job at her favorite fashion magazine, but rejects it because she’d rather keep her integrity intact than sell her soul to an industry that would crush it.  What’s important is the discovery of her own voice, demonstrating a feminist, formalist sensibility by standing up to these powerful forces, accentuating advertising’s corrosive effects on women’s consciousness and identity, as all the relationships on display are transactional and surface-level.  For Hogg, a young woman who loved fashion magazines, this eye-opening film helps us understand the dark side of what they represent to young women wanting desperately to be accepted.

Joanna Hogg’s Closet Picks  Criterion picks on YouTube (4:22)

Caprice (1986) on Vimeo  entire film may be seen on YouTube (27:50)

Masculine Feminine (in 15 Acts) (Masculin Féminin: 15 faits précis)

Director Jean-Luc Godard (right) on the set of Masculin Féminin (1966)

MASCULINE FEMININE (In 15 Acts)          B-                   

aka:  Masculin Féminin: 15 faits précis

France  Sweden  (103 mi)  1966  d:  Jean-Luc Godard 

No, it’s more a film on the idea of youth.  A philosophical idea, but not a practical one—a way of reacting to things.  It’s not a dissertation on youth or even an analysis.  Let’s say that it speaks of youth, but it’s a piece of music, a “concerto youth.”  I have taken young signs, signs that have not yet been deformed.  My signs haven’t already been used a thousand times.  I can talk about them now, afterward, because when I made this film, I didn’t have the least idea of what I wanted.

Godard on "Masculine Feminine"   Pierre Daix interview with Godard from Les Lettres Francaises, June 1966 (pdf format)

We’d often go to the movies. We’d shiver as the screen lit up.  But more often, Madeline and I would be disappointed. The images flickered.  Marilyn Monroe looked terribly old.  It saddened us.  It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make... and secretly wanted to live.            

—Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud)

Following on the heels of the highly popular Pierrot le Fou (1965), a lightweight comedy featuring a handsome couple (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina) as outlaws on the run through some of the most gorgeously photographed locales in southern France’s ravishly beautiful Cote d'Azur region, this is a return to low grade black and white, notable for being Godard’s last film in black and white, where Godard’s regular cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, has been replaced by Belgian-born Willy Kurant.  Unlike the sumptuous color of his previous effort, creating an almost exhilarating giddiness, this film is shrouded in an overall feeling of gloom, where there’s not an ounce of warmth or compassion anywhere to be seen in the film.  In view of Godard’s own crumbling relationship with actress Anna Karina (divorced in 1968), who is absent from this production, only to reappear again in one final film together, the barely seen MADE IN U.S.A. (1966), the director seems to be working out his own personal frustrations within the context of the more despairing characters who lack the energetic optimism of his previous films, becoming a meditation on the seeming impossibility of relations between the sexes.  Of course it wouldn’t be a Godard film if he wasn’t also making a satirical comment on the vacuousness of celebrity worship while dramatizing the commercialism of contemporary art and music.  Using natural lighting and synchronous sound, shooting many of the scenes at night, capturing the rush of Christmas shopping, exactly as Éric Rohmer does in My Night at Maud's (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) (1969), Godard’s film is a time capsule capturing a city for all seasons, a portrait of everyday Paris.  Shooting on the streets of Paris in the winter of 1965, a contrast to Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1963), which was shot on the same streets during the spring of 1962, and Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (Chronique d'un été, Paris 1960), which was shot in the summer months of 1960, all are early examples of cinéma vérité.

   

Moving away from narrative, using a near documentary style, as the title suggests the film is more a series of incidents all strung together, where there is little connection to any of the characters.  Like a missing adventure from Truffaut’s Introduction to The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, featuring actor Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel, he reappears here in a Godard film as Paul, much the same, now 21-years of age, still a young idealist whose job description continues to be hitting on attractive women, rather awkwardly and usually unsuccessfully.  Here he drifts through various jobs, currently working for a public opinion poll, though rather than adhering to a specific script, obtaining scientific objectivity, he spontaneously veers into questions of his own interest (allegedly spoken into his ear by the director), blending fiction and documentary, reflected in a painfully forced, near ten-minute take of a lengthy interview of “Miss Nineteen” (Elsa Leroy), an attractive model/singer who represents the youth of today, which grows ludicrous in the sheer stupidity of the questions, grilling her on subjects she knows nothing about, yet very similar to the kinds of nonsensical questions asked of the Beatles during their early 1960’s press conferences as reflected in A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (1964).  While this is going on, there’s also an inner struggle with Paul, where he questions his own motives.   

The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette - Pa  James Monaco, 2004

Little by little during these three months I've noticed that all these questions, far from reflecting a collective mentality, were frequently betraying and distorting it…Without knowing it, I was deceiving [the people I was questioning] and being deceived by them. Why? No doubt because polls and samples soon forget their true purpose, which is the observation of behavior, and insidiously substitute value judgments for research. I discovered that all the questions I was asking conveyed an ideology which didn’t correspond to actual customs but to those of yesterday, of the past. Thus I had to remain vigilant. A few random observations came to me by chance and served me as guidelines:

A philosopher is a man who pits his conscience against opinion:  To have a conscience is to be open to the world.

To be faithful is to act as if time does not exist.  Wisdom could be if one could see life, really see, that would be wisdom.  

At least part of Godard’s interest in making the film was documenting the conditions during the lead-up to the December 1965 presidential elections where de Gaulle eventually beat Mitterand in a runoff, viewed not so much through a political lens, but from the vantage point of an interested bystander gauging the interests of the public at the time, where the film has more of a sociological feel to it than most.  The mood of the nation is considered through a somewhat skewed social milieu, as Godard seems more interested in the youth voters and pop culture.  Due to the adult subject matter, however, the film was actually barred for children under age 18, probably the very audience Godard was targeting.  One should understand that any film starring Jean-Pierre Léaud at this age is going to delve into satiric foolishness, as he’s always trying to get into a girl’s pants, and will go to any extremes, where here his narcissistic persistence eventually becomes too much of a pain in the ass, though his comical lightheartedness is amusing.  While he will forever be defined by two films, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959) and Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), he pretty much plays himself in every film, a likeable and charming, yet somewhat naïve and goofy guy, where women like to have him around as much to make fun of him as to enjoy his company.  His jealousy and over possessiveness, however, usually gets the better of him.  Here he is paired against Chantal Goya as Madeleine, an attractive model attempting to get a start in the music business as one of the Yé-yé girls, where she’s hoping to gain some success as a pop singer, which at the time is her sole concern.  In doing so, she maintains a youthful innocence in her songs while being marketed and/or exploited in a sexy and deliberate way.  Throughout the film she is seen as little more than a carefully developed commodity, a child of the Pepsi generation where Paul gets lost in the fantasy aura surrounding her, failing to ever really register with the person herself.  In fact it was Truffaut who suggested to Godard that he buy his first television set in order to “discover” this young talent performing on TV while also working in the offices of several popular teen magazines, Salut les copains and Mademoiselle âge tender, giving Godard the opportunity to work her real life into his film.   

The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette  James Monaco, 2004

This was the era of James Bond and Vietnam. A great wave of hope had risen in the French left with the approach of the December [1965] elections. 

Ostensibly the film deals with the developing relationship between Paul and Madeleine who meet at a café counter and engage in flirtatious banter that she initially finds charming, where his opening line is, “What about the twenty-third?  You told me we could go out together on the twenty-third,” to which she responds, “And when you say go out, you mean go to bed?” confiding her thoughts in a voiceover, “Maybe I’ll screw him, if he isn’t a drag.” Eventually introducing him to her two attractive roommates, Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport) and Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert), women that seem to have nothing in common with him, yet the relationship blurs the boundaries and turns into a silly ménage a trois when Paul moves in.  Paul opens the film a declared radical leftist and works with another leftist journalist friend, Robert (Michel Debord), where the extent of their activism is expressed by mounting posters or political slogans on the street, uttering catchphrases like, “Kill a man and you’re a murderer.  Kill thousands and you’re a conqueror.  Kill everyone and you’re a god.”  Though you can never tell if he’s pretending or if its real life, but eventually Paul becomes a pollster (for the French Public Opinion Institute), which gives him an excuse to ask any probing question he likes, as if he’s always on duty.  No one ever asks men these kinds of sexist, air-headed questions, where most of it sounds like male pandering, where they’re just being annoying pests hovering around attractive girls.  While the women are just as superficial, they seem to be more honest and up front about it, while the guys are posers, continually pretending to be something they’re not.  Time and again Godard returns to the interview format throughout the film, with Paul trying to instill some political interest in Catherine who pretty much avoids his questions, smiling incessantly for the camera, claiming she prefers “reactionaries” as they’re somehow “against” the prevailing tide. 

No one is ever seen working, yet they somehow always have money and dress in the latest fashion, so all are likely ravenous consumers.  While there are references to revolution or leftist politics, no one is seen organizing or doing the necessary work to make these desired anti-capitalist realities happen, though there are a few humorous asides, instead it’s more of a façade of all talk with no action, mirroring the way these vacuous guys talk with girls, with the endless questioning, which sounds like the mindless kinds of questions asked of beauty contestants.  It goes from silliness, like a series of murders taking place before our eyes but nobody cares, an actual appearance by Brigitte Bardot rehearsing her lines in a café, or a scene title that says, “This film should be called ‘The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola,’” to ugly when they all go out to the movies, which turns out to be a sadistic porn film from Sweden, where Paul goes ballistics when he discovers it’s not being shown in the correct aspect ratio, reading the projectionist a lecture on the proper guidelines.  Ultimately, however, this becomes another surface level film that never sufficiently delves below the surface, punctuated by interjecting title cards, as Godard is more fascinated by style than substance, where the guys endlessly dwell on talking politics and painting slogans while the girls are continually looking at themselves in mirrors while playing with their hair and shopping for the latest styles.  Due to the non-involving nature of the characters themselves, who never generate any heat or electricity, overall the film resembles a hopeless love affair, with Godard identifying with the emptiness of the relationships, reflective of the lost idealism of the 60’s and the dilemma of being young, where the film’s real value is more as a time capsule documenting the times.  It represents a transitional stage in Godard’s career where in his late 30’s, for the first time in his life, he’s about to discover politics, where his earlier 60’s films feel so much more charming and exuberant, representing a much simpler time.