2021 #6 Film of the Year Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades, Paris 13e)

 

Director Jacques Audiard

Audiard with his ensemble cast

Audiard with Noémie Merlant

Audiard with Lucie Zhang

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades, Paris 13e)                    B+                                           France  (105 mi)  2021  d: Jacques Audiard

Probably one of the strangest love stories ever, where the cool, overly detached attitude never seems to be about love, or so we’re led to believe through all the strange detours and plot twists, becoming a moody, self-absorbed experience about living in the computer age where everything is at your fingertips, featuring more nudity than any film seen in years, delving into the hateful and misogynistic aspects of the porn sex industry, yet also introducing a true screen star, Lucie Zhang, whose brash, contemporary attitudes couldn’t be more flamboyantly in-your-face, as free-spirited as any character that has graced the screen in years, while Audiard is an uncompromising director, making this an exhilarating experience, constructing a fascinating exposé on contemporary multicultural attitudes in Paris today.  A bit like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), where Los Angeles is transported to Paris, given a literary feel, set in the suburban sprawl of contemporary Parisian life, the motif of the film is built around the growing chaos of intermingled lives who all appear shattered by circumstances, featuring broken characters who spend the film trying to heal.  It lacks the subversive humor of Altman, but it owes a lot to that film.  Audiard transfers to France three stories by graphic novelist and New Yorker cartoonist Adrian Tomine, adapted by Léa Mysius, Céline Sciamma, and the director himself, the power of black and white photography from cinematographer Paul Guilhaume is immediately apparent, offering a gorgeous landscape of the sleek, high-rise modern architecture in the 13th arrondissement, situated on the left bank of the River Seine, home to Paris’s principal Asian community, the Quartier Asiatique, located in the southeast of the arrondissement in an area that includes Les Olympiades, a diverse neighborhood of high-rise apartments that evolved out of an Olympic-themed renovation project in the 1970’s built to attract young multi-ethnic professionals, a prominent undercurrent of the film, capturing the intersecting lives of Émilie (Lucie Zhang), a Chinese immigrant from Taiwan, Camille (Makita Samba), an African immigrant, and Nora (Noémie Merlant), fresh off her role in 2019 Top Ten List #2 Portrait of a Lady On Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), a recent arrival from the Bordeaux region.  Almost immediately, this film offers a wide panorama of love and desire mixed into the everyday survival in a racially, culturally, and sexually diverse contemporary city landscape, taking the abstract documentary film genre of the City-symphony and expanding it into a fictional film about educated but disillusioned young people of today trying to find their way, where the interest is in things happening simultaneously.  Audiard, an ardent social realist who won the Palme d’Or with Dheepan (2015), a film about Tamil refugees in France, finds it troubling that so many French films lack multi-racial representation, acknowledging “In (François) Truffaut’s films, you could see a real estate agent too, or a lover that passes out, but there is no Black person, no Chinese person.”  Premiering at Cannes, in what could easily be one of the best edited and best photographed films of the year, the film won the Cannes Soundtrack Award, featuring a throbbing urban musical design scored by Rone, perfectly synchronized and punctuating the opening shot (and trailer), LES OLYMPIADES Bandes Annonce (2021) Jacques Audiard YouTube (1:43), as the camera peers into high-rise apartment windows where we immediately discover Émilie completely naked singing a French song in Chinese, which is among the more provocative openings, as it certainly grabs the attention and lures viewers into this film.  Émilie is a graduate of the prestigious Sciences Po School, yet works at a call center in some sort of telemarketing campaign, where the floor is a jumbled conglomeration of low-entry temp workers all squeezed into their cramped spaces, yet she walks down the street with an air of casual abandon and nonchalance, totally into herself, representing a new breed of openness.  A knock at her door reveals a prospective roommate, Camille, confusing her at first as she was looking for a girl, yet he persists, a literary postgraduate teacher who has put his academic career on hold, as the conversation immediately turns to sex, another key element of the film, he openly acknowledges that he “channels professional frustration into intense sexual activity,” a revelation she finds immensely appealing, reminding her of an old Chinese proverb, “Fuck first, ask later,” where sex has replaced the idea of getting to know someone first, inverting the social dynamic in relationships, where in no time the two are fuck buddies, developing a steamy relationship, but it all changes when he brings a girlfriend home, as Émilie is not amused, and is more than a little bit ticked off, feeling openly betrayed. 

While both make appealing fresh faces gracing the screen, Émilie’s unabashed freedom to say and do whatever she damn pleases is an utter revelation, cute and sassy, with an acid-sharp tongue, yet she’s shaped by the Asian cultural dynamic, receiving repeated calls from her mother to go visit her grandmother in a retirement home, scolding her for not visiting enough, while also calling her sister whenever she needs help, which exasperates her sister, working in a hospital with more emergent needs, but Émilie is a character living in the here and now.  Camille has surprised her with his declaration of independence, claiming he’s tied to no one and made no promises, yet the presence of new girlfriends in her home is leaving her infuriated, made even worse when she loses her job for being overly outspoken, violating some rule of polite conversation.  Apparently unable to reach a compromise on everchanging rules and agendas, Camille moves out as well, learning Émilie lives there rent-free, as it’s her grandmother’s apartment, making it an easy source of income.  A visit to her grandmother is another shock to the system, a sad sight, rambling incoherently, incapable of recognizing who she is from her worsening dementia, while receiving substandard care at the facility where she is largely ignored.  In finding a new roommate, a young Chinese woman, Émilie amusingly treads new territory, offering rental reduction if she visits her grandmother once a week, as she’s not recognizable anyway, and the experience is just too painful for her to deal with on a regular basis, yet this also reveals the utter selfishness of the character, and the depths of her own apathy.  When she attends a wild and raucous party, she over-indulges in ecstasy, calls her sister in a state of distress, but her sister is tired of her antics and has more pressing matters.  When she accidentally runs into Camille, she feigns indifference, as does he, but it’s clear they have unfinished business between them.  Both engage in a contentious, yet often endearing and sarcastic, love/hate relationship as Émilie struggles with her attraction to Camille, while he does his level-headed best to remain connected yet uncommitted.  A new character is introduced, Nora, a Sorbonne postgraduate seen thrilled at the view from her new apartment with a balcony overlooking the Seine, moving to Paris to attend law school, yet her introduction turns awkward and ugly, as she’s mistaken for a porn star named Amber Alert (Jehnny Beth, from the English rock band Savages), with text messages sent back and forth between students revealing her supposed sexual identity, with guys openly demeaning her with cyber bullying and sexist taunts, while women are more than eager to play along, where in one class session the phones light up like a Christmas tree with instant messaging associating her with salacious sexual promiscuity, where just a flick of her name opens files of porn activity.  She is so humiliated and her reputation so damaged that she flees in dismay, having never heard of this porn star before, but her self-esteem plunges to new depths.  She makes a fresh start and takes a job working for a small real estate company currently run by Camille, who’s filling in for a friend, knowing nothing about the real estate market, so Nora sets him straight, offering warning signs about any unwelcome come-ons, as she’s strictly professional, having worked in real estate in the Bordeaux region.  She turns the business around almost immediately, both seemingly happy, so as it happens they jump into the sack as well, but Nora is among the more deeply confused and overly repressed characters seen in a while, exhibiting signs of trauma that she keeps concealed, so their sexual activity is usually fraught with unanticipated problems, as she’s clearly got issues, but Camille tries to be patient and understanding.  While each of the three main characters have strong personalities, coming from a much more sexually liberated generation, but they also have exposed awkwardness and vulnerabilities, making them easy to relate to, where their crossed paths only heighten the human interest, yet it’s their unique inner dynamic that couldn’t be more fascinating, as the interweaving tapestry of stories highlights the intelligence, cynicism, and relative aimlessness these characters come to represent.    

When we visit Camille’s family, reeling from the recent death of his mother, we discover his 16-year sister Eponine (Camille Léon-Fucien) has designs of being a stand-up comic, yet this discovery is met with mock sarcasm by Camille who belittles the entire comedy profession with a healthy amount of arrogant disdain, suggesting comics only vent their own psychological frustrations, which is enough to send his sister to her room slamming the door in his face, with his father chewing him out for being so arrogantly cocky and unsupportive, claiming it’s hard enough being a teenager.  Later Camille introduces Nora as his girlfriend to Eponine, who can see right away that something’s off.  One stunning revelation is that Nora worked for her uncle in the real estate business, and was married to him as well, which didn’t generate any red flags, but apparently he became overly controlling in their relationship and never wanted her to leave.  There’s a kind of musical chairs of changing plot twists where the characters occasionally intersect, yet among the stranger developments is Nora’s interest in contacting Amber Alert on her porn site, paying the money like any visiting customer, but simply wanting to talk.  This seems to go on a while, with Nora wanting more personal information, the kind of thing never revealed on porn sites, as it could damage your reputation, stunned to realize the naiveté of her own stupidity, as she’s been using her own name when visiting the site.  At the end of one session Amber Alert blurts out that her name is Louise, provides an email address indicating how to hook up on a Zoom conference call, and the two of them become fast friends, spending hours staring at their screens, revealing their innermost secrets, where sex-abuse is never openly discussed, but seems to be a common underlying connection they both share, as it would explain Nora’s sexual reticence, her attempts to fight through it through even more brazen sexuality, but eventually she calls it off with Camille as it obviously isn’t working.  The tell-tale sign that something is up happens when a Taiwanese businessmen is interested in buying property, with Camille bringing in Émilie to translate, where Nora could immediately see sparks between them, demonstrated further at a celebratory party afterwards, which is enough for Nora to call it quits.  Émilie, on the other hand, seems to be flirting with men on dating apps in an attempt to make Camille jealous and test his seriousness, sending him text messages of her dates.  In what is perhaps the most boldly audacious sequence in the film, Émilie is alone playing the piano, as if preparing for a class of young ballerinas, playing Schubert, Schubert: Piano Sonata No.17 in D, D.850 - 2. Con moto YouTube (11:53), which is juxtaposed against another scene where she’s working as a waitress at an upscale restaurant, seen receiving a call, taking a break from work, merging into a sex scene with a random date, continuing in silence and slow motion as she returns to the restaurant gliding through the aisles with exquisite grace in a series of leaping ballet moves to the applause of the customers.  When Émilie’s grandmother dies, she’s racked with guilt for not visiting more, but the entire family is flying in for the funeral.  When Camille asks is he should show up, Émilie insists she doesn’t want him around unless he’s willing to make a lifelong commitment, and walks away.  With her family interested in selling her grandmother’s apartment, Émilie is seen on the morning of the funeral in the empty apartment dressed in her black funeral attire.  When it’s time to leave, the phone rings, receiving a last-minute reprieve from Camille who has arrived to escort her to the funeral.  Considering the amount of baggage on display at the beginning of the film, that’s a long way for the two of them to come before finally reconciling their differences to take the next step.  It’s like an old-fashioned, Hollywood ending.  In yet another scene, Nora arrives to the tranquil setting of a gorgeously landscaped public park, looking around, obviously awaiting someone with great anticipation, as we see Louise emerging from a crowd, with her short cropped hair, happy to finally meet her in person.  Nora faints, dropping to the ground, but a kiss resuscitates a binding love between them.  In each instance, out of nowhere, it’s like a fairy tale ending, like the arrival of Prince Charming, an unlikely possibility anywhere else in the world but here.     

The Piano Teacher (La pianiste)

THE PIANO TEACHER (La pianiste)                      A-                   

Austria  France  Germany  (131 mi)  2001  d:  Michael Haneke

I have no feelings, get that into your head.  If I ever do, they won’t defeat my intelligence. 

—Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert)

Winner of the 2nd Place Grand Prix at Cannes, Haneke’s only adapted feature, a bizarre and shockingly grotesque study of female sexuality, the dynamics of control, and losing one’s equilibrium to irrepressible forces, the film explores aspects of degradation culture, or rape culture, evolving into punitive scenes of pain and alienation, viewed from a woman’s perspective, though guided by an unmistakable male hand of a director synonymous with a cinema of cruelty, adapted from a controversial 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright and novelist who was writing a rebuke to rising Nazi influence within the current Austrian government, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, referring to her country as a “criminal nation” in her acceptance speech, though one scandalized member of the selection panel resigned over the decision, accusing the author of “whining, unenjoyable, public pornography.”  Though perhaps more obscure, this film serves as a predecessor to Haneke’s later work, THE WHITE RIBBON (2009), in showing a direct link to what would ultimately become the Nazi Third Reich, becoming a scathing critique of intellectual high-mindedness and nationalist snobbery, where culture is appropriated in the name of tyrants and political repression.  While shot in Vienna, the cast speaks entirely in French, which in itself feels like a subversive turn of events.  Isabelle Huppert turned Haneke down for Funny Games (1997), thinking it was too brutal, but she is a revelation in this film, among her greatest performances, winner of Best Actress at Cannes by unanimous consensus.  In Haneke films, there is always a malevolent force present in a comfortable bourgeois setting, and that is indisputably the case here.  As Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), she plays a middle-aged piano professor at the Vienna conservatory who in her 40’s still lives with her domineering and abusive mother (Annie Girardot), an overly critical stage mother who sees her daughter as her own personal possession, controlling her every move, viewed as a failure in her eyes in that her career is not as a performing artist, settling for something less.  In the opening scene they not only argue but fight, with her hovering mother unhappy with her behavior, questioning her fashion choices, occasionally throwing items out of her closet, even ripping them to shreds, as she does here, but then the two of them sleep in the same tiny bedroom together, literally just a few inches from one another in a claustrophobically codependent relationship, reminiscent of the self-imposed claustrophobia of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), where her home becomes her prison.  Erika inevitably apologizes in a bizarre choreography of kisses and slaps, but this unhealthy relationship spreads its seeds of contamination throughout the rest of the film.  As a piano instructor, Erika is overly stern and sadistic to the point of being bullying and self-righteous, ruling over her own dominion with piercing personal barbs that draw blood, literally ripping her students to shreds, often leaving them whimpering in tears, never dwelling on the consequences, while she shows no concern whatsoever for their broken spirits.  She is the master, while they are the student, and her domineering manner rules by intimidation.  While it may seem odd that this abusive dynamic would inhabit discussions about playing Schubert and Beethoven, but Erika’s haughty arrogance knows no bounds, believing she is intimately connected to both Schubert and Schumann, as if she knew them personally, where her expertise is renowned.  Due to her harsh and exacting style, students are willing to be belittled by her, perhaps even destroyed, as she is a heralded artist with an impeccable reputation.  Severely repressed, however, beyond our wildest imaginations, viewers have no idea what’s in store for them. 

One of the biggest pleasures of the film is how Haneke uses the musical selections, a trained classical pianist himself whose career never materialized, where his mastery is best expressed in the first half, given the most excruciatingly personal musical context, filled with classical piano segues, which are as artistically sublime as anything he’s ever done, suggesting Vienna is the capital of classical music, viewed as the extreme height of European cultural traditions, as opposed to the “lower” forms of rock or pop, yet the music can be used as an instrument of repression, where an anti-humanist vein of contempt takes over in the latter stages, shown in graphic detail, unafraid of the disgust in might generate.  Brilliantly bridging the music’s text to the themes of the film, one particular scene opens up the entire film.  Erika is performing an ensemble piece, playing piano with a cellist and violinist, the slow Andante movement from Schubert’s Piano Trio # 2, the exact same music that Kubrick featured in BARRY LYNDON (1975), Schubert / Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, D. 929: 2nd mvt - YouTube (3:07), distinctly mesmerizing and haunting, unquestionably powerful in Kubrick’s hands, which triggers our imaginations when we hear it.  In a context that is all so high brow and austere, she is briefly scolded by the cellist for not paying strict attention, so they start again to play, but à la Kubrick, the music continues on into the next scene where she is walking through a crowded shopping mall totally oblivious to the world around her, just the opposite of the heightened sensitized listening mode needed to play a Schubert Trio, which is exquisitely classical in structure, supremely crafted, instead she is lost in her own world, bumping into people, completely awkward and out of control, just like a regular geek.  All this is well and good, but then we see she has entered a porn shop (in an upscale mall, mind you!), the only woman in the shop, where the male customers are obviously perturbed, while this luscious music continues to play and all around her she is surrounded by porn magazines featuring shaved pussies, endowed breasts with clamps and chains attached to the nipples, until it leads to her own private viewing room, where her sexual appetite extends into extreme masochistic fantasies, including a prim and proper lady smelling the used Kleenex from the prior male occupant inside the sex booth.  Impossible not to guffaw out loud at this moment, as it’s amazing how funny and yet how perfectly constructed this scene is, as it totally changes the entire structure of the film, adding a theatrically entertaining human element to an otherwise dour and austere film.   

Huppert reaches unparalleled territory here, with Haneke shooting her in two distinctly different kinds of spaces, open-windowed practice rooms or elegant, high-ceilinged conservatory settings featuring plenty of open air, but also the cramped, constricted quarters of bathrooms or peep shows, where she’s used to rubbing elbows with complete strangers.  Haneke makes exquisite use of the Franz Schubert Song Cycle Die Winterreise D 911, as the artist was dying of syphilis when it was composed, a piece that aches of solitary loneliness and heartache, using portions of the seventeenth and eighteenth songs in a 24-song cycle, describing a lone traveler traversing an icy landscape reflecting upon his own restlessness and solitude, clearly a reflection of Erika’s own alienation.  She speaks the carefully chosen words of a song in a lesson with one of her more anxiety-ridden students, Anna Schober (Anna Sigalevitch), though the first time we hear the lyrics sung is when Erika is still in the porn shop, smelling the used Kleenex, as Schubert becomes the bridge to the next scene, with the traveler passing through a sleeping wintry village, “The dogs are barking, their chains are rattling; the men are asleep in their beds,” from “Im Dorfe (In the Village)” Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gerald Moore - Winterreise, Op ... - YouTube (3:02), suggesting the dogs should drive the weary traveler away, as he doesn’t even deserve rest.  “I am done with all dreaming.  Why should I linger among the sleepers?”  This is followed by “Der Stürmische Morgen (A Stormy Morning),” which sounds like an ominous omen, “How the storm has torn apart the gray mantle of the sky,” Schubert: Winterreise, D.911 - 18. Der stürmische Morgen - YouTube (58 seconds), perhaps a fortuitous warning of the tempests that lie ahead, suggesting the turbulence may drive all the pain and anguish away.  When Erika gives a private concert in the home of a wealthy patron, she meets Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel, who was also awarded Best Actor at Cannes), an engineer student who plays piano as a hobby, but his use of Schubert, in particular his Piano Sonata in A Major, is a direct pathway to Erika’s heart, where his playing couldn’t be more boldly ostentatious, like a peacock fluttering its tail, using the virility of his piano playing as a sign of his sexy flirtatiousness, The Piano Teacher - Schubert isn't a walk in the park - YouTube (4:59).  While she pretends not to notice, she is deeply affected, stirred in unimaginable ways, yet she keeps it all concealed behind the haughty arrogance of professorial language. 

Easily one of the more telling scenes takes place at home, where she finds a hidden razor blade, straddling the bathtub with one leg, using a small mirror as she mutilates her genitals, recalling Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972), though with a substantially different tone, blood dripping down the bathtub, when her mother yells out “Dinner’s ready.” “I’m coming,” she replies.  This kind of mordant humor comments on her sense of normalcy, as it’s not at all normal, yet she goes through the pretensions of a daily routine.  Clearly one of the intentions of the film is to suggest people with so-called “normal” characteristics (such as Erika’s mother or Walter) are capable of inflicting far more brutality and ugliness than someone suffering from twisted and depraved sexual fantasies.  Walter literally interrupts that routine, insisting upon taking her class, and passes through all the tryouts, yet in his very first class, he immediately pledges his undying love before playing a single note for her.  But his conception of love and hers are from different universes, intersecting in a blitzkrieg of violence.  Her sense of order is invaded by this overly aggressive student, who uses music as a sexually suggestive flirtatious advance, literally cornering the object of his desires.  Her retort is to remind this student that Schubert thought of himself as ugly, a social outcast, where his cruel rejection plays into the utterly enthralling music he produced, perhaps equating a diseased Schubert with her own depraved sexual desires, including her preference for hardcore pornography.  While the two pursue a mysterious game of sexual desire and humiliation that delves deeper into her own sado/masochistic mindset, her cruelty is exposed, intentionally maiming one of her students, a vengeful act that is unspeakably wicked, then blaming someone else.  It’s clear she hasn’t a care in the world for her students, but becomes lost in a labyrinth of dark desires that only become more and more grotesque and disturbing.  While Haneke’s direction is formally precise, it’s questionable whether the bizarre turn in the relationship actually elevates any drama or tension, accentuating the brutish male element as reaching obscene heights, while Huppert’s distillation of a very female sort of pain may be more in tune with a self-loathing feminist perspective than Haneke.  In this film, the repulsive Benny's Video (1992) becomes a symbol of erotica.  What this has to say about the human condition remains obscure, though abuse begets abuse, especially when tolerated as an everyday ordinary occurrence, until a neverending cycle of abuse becomes an unstoppable destructive force, especially when it becomes the accepted and conventional practice by police, military units, or governmental rule, drawing implications from an historical Austrian connection to the Nazis that still has a damaging influence, where the centerpiece of European culture is taken down a notch by cruel and insidious forces within suggesting a normalcy far uglier than any shameful sexual affliction.