Trouble Every Day

TROUBLE EVERY DAY                    B                     

France  Germany  Japan  (101 mi)  2001  d:  Claire Denis

Following the unanimous acclaim for Beau Travail (1999), arguably the director’s most erotic and deeply romantic work, this boldly challenges viewers with what must be what is described as an adult film, as it’s certainly not for everyone, revealing far more than the eye can see, significant as the only Claire Denis film that dabbles in the horror genre, something of a modern era vampire film, a graphically violent and thoroughly disturbing vision of carnal desire as a form of cannibalism. becoming something exquisitely revolting and truly frightening by the end, equating sex with death, and not like anything else out there.  Panned at Cannes and critically dismissed in America, the film has undergone a certain revival among cinephiles who recognize rarity when they see it, but the slow and languid pace of the film will likely turn off horror lovers, while the excruciating blood-letting will turn off art film devotees.  Despite the raw and graphic subject matter, this remains a Claire Denis film, expressed with an artful flourish and filled with poetic ambiguity throughout.  Only a more recent film like Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) conveys a similar attention to detail when it comes to flesh-eating monsters starved for blood, while at the same time offering a haunting sensuality behind the camera.  Beautifully filmed by Agnès Godard, this must be viewed as one of her triumphs, as this is a visually stunning film that operates out of its own unique conception, where it lives by its uncompromising rules even as it references vintage horror films.  At heart, this is a FRANKENSTEIN (1931) movie, where the tropical experiments of Doctor Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) went awry while researching experimental brain medicine and have now altered the human gene pool, creating vampire-like creatures with a ravenous need not only for blood, but for human flesh. 

The film may also be traced to THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1977) and CAT PEOPLE (1982), both films with earlier Black and White versions, as the first deals with the grotesque and disfigured effects of medical experimentation gone wrong, while the second deals with erotic transformation, where the sex urge turns humans into blood devouring, flesh eating beasts, returning to human form only after feeding.  However, in the hands of Denis, a consummate artist known for her poetic subtleties, much of what’s displayed onscreen is graphically disconcerting.  Opening with the music of Tendersticks, it’s one of their better scores, especially the hauntingly beautiful funeral dirge that opens and closes the film and has a way of burrowing under your skin, Trouble Every Day Opening Song Tindersticks - YouTube (3:13), while it’s also extremely effective the way Denis opens with a darkened kiss that fades to black for a lengthy period of time, leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation.  Once the picture returns, the familiar face of actress Béatrice Dalle is seen as Coré, flagging down truckers on the side of the road, where all we see is the bloody aftermath, where her husband (Sémeneau) tracks her down and brings her home, tenderly washing the blood off of her, then locking her into a boarded up room in their mansion.  Simultaneous to this event, an American couple on their honeymoon are flying to Paris, medical researcher Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his overly delicate wife June (Tricia Vessey), where Shane is inflicted with the same disease, having to continually hide from her every time he’s aroused.  While he’s using the honeymoon as a pretext to track down the infamous doctor, June only knows he’s hiding some deep, dark secret, and when she hears him violently masturbating in the bathroom, her pounds on the door evoke sheer terror. 

While this is a thoroughly confounding film, one that makes great use of Béatrice Dalle's physical features, giving her an animal-like presence, the film pushes the boundaries of cinema, much of it without dialogue, but using screams of hysteria, reflective of the Silent era, where it weaves in and out of dream states seemingly at will, and where half of this French-language film, including the title, is spoken in English, contributing to an otherworldy effect, like something out of Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).  When a young man’s (Nicolas Duvauchelle) curiosity leads him to Coré’s door, words can’t describe the sense of grim bewilderment overcoming the audience when they realize she is incredulously eating him before our eyes, smearing his blood all over the walls afterwards.  While the audience is aware something is not right with Shane as well, none of the people he meets have a clue, as he spends most of the film popping pills and hallucinating his blood-drenched wife, searching for a cure, but to no avail.  A seemingly innocuous event leads to the savage finale, as the maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) lingers in their room after making the bed, leaving her scent on the bedcovers.  Throughout the film this scene has been set up by shots of the back of the young maid’s neck, which Shane has obviously been tracking, like wild prey on the loose, eventually unleashing a wild, animalistic hunger that will not be denied.  It is this exploration of man’s basest rape instincts that prove to be the most deeply unsettling images of the film, like the horrors of IRREVERSIBLE (2002), complete with blood curdling screams and graphic sexual bloodletting that are among the most difficult scenes to endure in a supremely grotesque finale, as Shane finally gives in to his bloodlust, Claire Denis - Trouble Every Day...  YouTube (5:39).  A haunting shadow of doom overwhelms the senses along with a Tendersticks refrain, sending the audience out the door in a shivering fright.      

I Can't Sleep (J’ai pas sommeil)

I CAN’T SLEEP (J’ai pas sommeil)       A-   
France  Switzerland  Germany  (110 mi)  1994  d:  Claire Denis 

A witty and sophisticated drama of interconnectedness, much of this feels like a choreography of missed connections, where even well past an hour or so into the film the viewer still has no idea where this film is heading, and may still be wondering even after the final credits roll, as this is an oddball, character driven story where the characters take on greater significance than any story developments themselves, many of which simply disappear into thin air.  A perfect example is the opening sequence, where two helicopter policemen are seen enjoying a joke, including extensive laughter that continues at length, yet the viewer never hears the original joke.  Moreover, these two policemen are never seen again in the film and don’t at all figure into the action.  Nonetheless, they are the opening shot, flying high above the city of Paris and the connecting highways leading into the city.  From one of these random highways, we see an old beat-up car with foreign license plates, presumably Russian Cyrillic letters, where an attractive young (as it turns out Lithuanian) woman named Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva) has a cigarette dangling out of her mouth as she approaches town, where the radio cuts to a breaking news story about the latest victim of the so-called “granny killer,” a string of murders targeting elderly women, presumably for petty cash.  However, another pair of clearly inept policemen *do* figure prominently into the storyline, as they keep popping up unexpectedly, usually in the development of some plot detail.  A seemingly disconnected shot reveals a young black man wearing a white suit, who turns out to be Camille (Richard Courcet), getting into a fight with a car passenger, who scrambles back into the car as it quickly drives away, as Camille’s white suit is a stark contrast to the two black garbage men who then pull into the frame, all staring at one another as if each is an alien from another planet.  

As Daiga gets her life sorted out, where there is a game of musical chairs played in the Lithuanian community to determine just where she will stay, much of this plays out in exaggerated caricature, comic portrayals rarely seen in any Denis film, where this actually more resembles the strange visit from the Hungarian cousin who arrives unexpectedly in America in Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984), one of the directors Denis worked with before making her own films.  Daiga ends up staying with an elderly Latvian hotel owner, Line Renaud (who can be heard singing with Dean Martin in the opening song heard on the car radio) where as it happens, Camille has a room at the same hotel with his boyfriend.  Daiga, who speaks little to no French, was led to believe she’d have a job in Paris, but when she sees the theater producer, he’s just been stringing her along in hopes he might get into her pants.  Completely in passing, Béatrice Dalle, who appeared in the Paris episode of Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), is initially seen sitting at an outdoor café, where her character is not even introduced.  Instead we meet Camille and his brother Théo (Alex Descas) with his young son Harry in another apartment, seen talking through a thin wall separating their beds.  Dalle turns out to be Mona, the child’s mother who has a hard time spending any extended time with her husband Théo,  who doesn’t appear to want anything to do with her.  He plays violin in a Caribbean band, seen here to Kali’s song “Racines” Kali-Racines-JaiPasSommeil - YouTube (4:03), and dreams of returning to live on the beach in Martinique, which completely leaves Mona out of the picture.  In a nearby apartment, there are loud cries in the night, presumably from domestic violence, but when Théo goes to investigate, they all look suspiciously at one another. 

While it’s a long, novelesque set up introducing all the central characters, working with more than thirteen characters, none of whom would typically figure in films we’re used to seeing, as they would be marginal characters relegated to secondary roles, but here it’s an interesting portrait of the alienating aspects of cultural diversity, something later explored in greater detail in Michael Haneke’s CODE UNKNOWN (2000).  In Denis’s film, however, these fragmented, often interconnecting episodes are largely unresolved, perhaps reaching a climax when Camille performs at a nightclub in drag, an intensely powerful performance where the audience stands transfixed, all standing just a few feet away, at his anguished “cry of love,” perhaps the theme of the film, but he never once returns their look, eventually turning his back, hiding the inner secrets to his soul, seen here to Jean Louis Murat’s “Le Lien Défait (The Broken Bond)” (J'ai Pas Sommeil - Claire Denis -1994 ), which casts a strangely mystifying aura over the rest of the film.  Camille has a volatile relationship with his own blond-haired boyfriend, mirroring the instability of his brother’s relationship, while the two brothers themselves rarely even speak to one another.  There’s a telling scene at their own mother’s birthday party, where each brother vies for their mother’s attention on the dance floor.  Everyone leads solitary lives, perfectly expressed by the largely unseen, lonely existences of the elderly who are victims of prey, all just part of the isolated lives of outsiders, where the difficulty to be accepted by the mainstream places particular pressures on this group, as they all appear to be drifters leading aimless lives. 

Instead of actions driving the narrative of the film, what’s more intriguing here is what isn’t revealed, what’s clouded under the layers of silences, especially between the two brothers who remain strangers to one another.  Camille arrives at Théo’s door with something to tell him, but then leaves without a word, earlier seen at a hospital clinic, where there is a noticeable mark on his cheek, but nothing more is revealed, where one might surmise he is HIV positive, but the director leaves this intentionally ambiguous, adding a brief sequence of Camille dancing in a darkly lit gay nightclub.  Daiga, who eventually finds work as a hotel cleaning woman, and who couldn’t be less interested in her work, appears to be the observing eyes behind the film, as we get telling glimpses of what she sees, like clues unraveling the mysteries of the film, where she sees behind the hidden lives, being near invisible herself.  This is a film of marginalized lives told through a recent headlines grabbing incident where there was an actual serial killer of elderly women in Paris.  While the killer is revealed, rather than deriving pleasure or enjoyment from committing acts of murder, the murderer kills with the same boredom and disconnection that plagues the rest of their life.  Denis provides a highly impressionistic, richly textured look at the hidden layers lurking underneath the incident, examining issues of immigration, disconnection, race, and urban alienation, where characters are often asked by authorities to see their papers, but the viewer can be overwhelmed by the loss of intimacy reflected in the film, and how easily the grief and sorrows of the marginalized remain forever invisible to the larger mainstream society at large.  

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.   

HHH – A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien

HHH – A PORTRAIT OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN – made for TV     B    
aka:  Cinéma, de Notre Temps – TV series

France  Taiwan  (91 mi)  1997  d:  Olivier Assayas

France is known for its Cinéma de Notre Temps television interview series of famous directors, where for decades they’ve been following various filmmakers, including the groundbreaking Jacques Rivette interview with legendary French director Jean Renoir, while one of the best ever American interviews is with a young John Cassavetes as he’s filming Faces (1968), an interview that’s included in the Criterion Collection edition of his 5-films.  What’s unique here is that the interviewer is French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, who is obviously as fascinated by what Hou Hsiao-hsien contributed to the Taiwanese New Wave in the 80’s and 90’s, which are still in full swing at the time this film is being made, along with Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kuo-fu, and screenwriters Wu Nien-jen, and novelist Chu Tien-wen, where Chu, often interviewed alongside the director, collaborated on all of Hou’s screenplays for over twenty years.  Filmed in the late 1990’s, this serves as a time capsule into the still young life of the Taiwanese director.  At 50 years of age, he’s in fine form throughout, often seen chewing gum and recalling what a recalcitrant child he was, often getting himself into trouble by hanging out with the street gangs, but he matured after entering the army and performing his military service, where he decided he was interested in film, something he attributes to his childhood vantage point spending time in trees, which both stimulated and altered his spatial conception.   After directing a couple of successful comedies starring pop stars, he collaborated with two other directors on THE SANDWICH MAN (1983), generally regarded as the first film of the Taiwanese New Wave, where the intent was to alter the uninspired direction of the nation’s old-fashioned cinema, making it connect more with real life people and their situations.  But it was Hou’s THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983), the only film of Hou to use Western classical music, a remarkable story of the director’s own awkwardly troubled adolescence, where he is searching for a distinctly Chinese way of telling the story, the first to display what has become the traditional Hou style, minimalist dramas with extended long takes and a fixed-camera angle that heightens the sense of real time. 

His next series of films, his coming-of age trilogy, each written by a different screenwriter reflecting an autobiographical segment based upon their own lives, was highly successful, especially the one written by Hou, A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (1985), which Wu Nien-jen is heard calling the greatest Taiwanese film ever made, the story of his family’s move from mainland China to Taiwan, thinking it would only be temporary before they moved back, as his elderly grandmother thought the mainland was just around the corner, where they often went searching for the (non-existent) dead ancestor’s graves.  While a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Assayas was one of the first to recognize Hou’s profound talent, meeting him for a Cahiers article in 1984, having a marked influence on his own work, so in this film he follows Hou around various locations in Taiwan, meeting in Taipei before returning to the provincial town of Fengshan where Hou grew up under the nickname Aha, recognizing a few old friends, reminiscing about how they used to be street punks and raise hell on these same streets, causing quite a commotion when he arrives with a French filmmaker’s camera following his every move, becoming something of a cause célèbre.  Assayas remains behind the camera for the most part, though occasionally we see an interpreter in his ear, but the television interview format is to observe and listen to the filmmaker, as Hou shows us the modest teahouse where he writes his screenplays, while also showing  various set locations that he used, including an old abandoned gold mine where the accompanying structures remain largely intact, preserving its original look.  For Hou, who filmed historical dramas, he was looking for sites that maintained their original look, where in outlying rural areas, people still live and dress much the same way as they did 50 years ago.  In something of a surprise, especially considering how lyrical and gently flowing his films are, Hou has something of a swagger to him, where in his youth he wanted to be a pop star before becoming a filmmaker, but developed stage fright onstage, and he also felt he was too short. 

One of the more interesting interviews was with Chen-Kuo-fu, director of THE PERSONALS (1998), but he originally worked as a film critic, and he gives an excellent appraisal of the untapped inspiration and furious energy on display at the dawn of the Taiwanese New Wave era, where everyone often met to share ideas, recalling how they’d all gather at Edward Yang’s home, an old Japanese structure, where they fed off each others rampant enthusiasm, where they all loved what they were doing.  It’s quite apparent he misses those days, that they were the best years of his life, which wonderfully comments upon an era that spawned a rebirth in Taiwanese cinema.  While Assayas doesn’t get into it, Hou remains something of an enigma.  While his films are acclaimed abroad, he has not received an enthusiastic reception at home, where theaters continue to screen primarily American films.  While Hou had a hand in actually shaping the history of his country, coming after the lifting of restrictions in 1987 imposed by martial law, which had remained in effect since 1947, making what are arguably his greatest films, a history trilogy beginning with A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989), a powerful film that traces Taiwan’s history from the Japanese defeat in World War II through the retreat of the Kuomintang to Taiwan in 1949.  The film had a major impact in Taiwan, as certain previously forbidden subjects were touched upon, very carefully Hou explains, and objectively, not criticizing anyone, followed by The Puppetmaster (Xi meng ren sheng) (1993), that examines life under the Japanese occupation covering the years 1909 to 1945, while the third, Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan hao nu) (1995), covering the period of 1949 to the present, tells the story of a small band of communist intellectuals that travel to mainland China to help fight the Japanese, only to see their leader executed later by his own countrymen.  What was never discussed was the relationship between the mainland Chinese filmmakers and the Taiwanese Chinese, once the doors opened, as these are collectively some of the best and brightest directors working anywhere in the world today, where one is curious how they felt about each other.     

Assayas describes Hou’s personality, “His manner of slipping from grown-up rationality to childish laughter is intact, as is his way of moving between intellectuals and small-time Mafiosi’s in a sort of studied uncertainty, hazy with grass, alcohol, or bin-lan (a plant-based kind of speed).  But here where only instinct matters, theory and philosophy assume a growing importance; and it isn’t simply a matter of a notion about perception—generally interesting only to filmmakers—but also the classical Chinese tradition, with the gravity and intensity peculiar to autodidacts.”  We see some of that personality emerge as he questions a local teahouse proprietor whether the watermelon seeds used for tea are fresh, then proceeds to display a ritualistic method of preparing tea, first pouring it into tiny teacups, then one by one pouring that tea over the teapot, creating a pool of tea underneath that continually gets recycled in this manner.  When Hou lets loose with a few friends in a karaoke house, he’s not kidding, as he takes this endeavor quite seriously, where he happily wails away singing old popular ballads that have a way of unleashing his soul.        

Irma Vep

IRMA VEP        A-                 

France  (96 mi)  1996  d:  Olivier Assayas 

A student of art and literature who never went to film school, the son of a screenwriter, claiming he knew from an early age he would be a director, and a one-time film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, Assayas’s interest in film, largely influenced by Robert Bresson, was how to express life through a collaborative process, through the experience of making a film, much of which develops on the set with a particular set of actors.  IRMA VEP, a film about film itself, developed from a point when Assayas was questioning the value of cinema, questioning whether it was relevant at all, as at least at that point in time in his life, it appeared to be an age when a majority of people in the world could live entirely without art in their lives. 

So IRMA VEP opens when a new film is frantically getting started, complete with all the energy, animosity, and chaos flying in all directions.  Into this mayhem, the placidly beautiful Maggie Cheung arrives from China, fresh from some Hong Kong martial arts adventure.  Much of the film is spoken in the neutral English language, which just about everyone knows, as she presumably doesn’t speak French.  Jean-Pierre Léaud, a fixture in New Wave films as an adolescent, plays the grumpy, overly-plagued director, who has been forced to accept the terms of his production company which requires that he re-make Louis Feuillade’s silent film serial LES VAMPIRES (1915), one of the great glories of early French cinema and a favorite of the Surrealists, which featured a lead underworld catwoman burglar, Irma Vep, who seemed at the time to capture the mood and soul of Paris.  So immediately the director looks outside France for his lead, searching for the purity and poetry of the original, but becomes helplessly bogged down in the detailed minutiae of modern day filmmaking, where he has to deal with the incessant criticism that a Chinese actress could hardly be worthy of such an iconic French role, to which he responds definitively, “Irma Vep is France!” 

Perhaps Assayas’s only film comedy, it was written very quickly, in the space of about ten days, and filmed almost immediately after the point of conception in less than a month, where this is a film with very quick camera movements from Eric Gautier, much like painting’s brush strokes, as one might envision different images by moving your head, a short look here, a long look there, yet another glance, though in film, all could be realized in one shot, which adds a cinéma vérité, improvisational feel.  Seen mostly through the eyes of a costume designer Zoë, Jacques Rivette regular Nathalie Richard, who unexpectedly escorts Maggie around town FF_Vep-2.mov YouTube (2:38), perhaps serving as the voice of Assayas in this film, and while overall, there’s a sense that everything is spinning out of control, there are also small sequences throughout which are simply flurries of brilliance, with exquisite use of music, as they successfully transcend the impossible trap set for the film’s director. 

One thinks of a brief scene where the two female leads, French and Chinese, take a free and liberating ride through a miserably dark and forbidding Paris winter on a motorbike, while the audience hears guitar music from Mali’s Ali Farka Touré (“Soukora”) Ali Farka Toure - Soukora YouTube (6:07), or the film’s tour de force moment, a dreamlike sequence set to the music of Sonic Youth’s “Tunic” FF_Vep.mov  YouTube (7:21) where Maggie inexplicably slinks out of her hotel room one night dressed in her latex all-body catwoman outfit, actually entering the hotel room of another distraught traveler (Arsinée Khanjian) and steals her jewelry, seen later slinking along the rooftops of Paris wearing latex and heels, on the rooftops  YouTube (1:12).  Something of a perpetual mystery, both in the original and in the Assayas remake, offering considerable confusion about fantasy and reality, or the power of dreams, with uncertainty and a lack of closure lingering throughout, the film has a brilliantly ironic closing sequence, which oddly enough reminds one of Rivette’s ending in LA BELLE NOISEUSE (1991), which also comically deals with some obsessional human eccentricities involved in creating art, but also movingly combines the worlds of silent cinema with the modernistic avant-garde in a glorious finale Irma Vep final YouTube (6:06).

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.