Best of 2013: #4. Bastards (Claire Denis)

#4. Bastards (Les salauds). d. Claire Denis. France/Germany.

While there are a number of trends and themes running through this list, the thing that truly unifies at least the top 7 was their ability to haunt and resonate with me long after the credits. Claire Denis’ latest benefits the most from this sensation. Like many of her films, Bastards doesn’t offer much immediate satisfaction. The way Denis delivers information to the audience can tend to be rather obtuse or, in some cases, puzzling or, in most cases, disconcerting. For me, the word “puzzling” comes to mind with Denis’ work more than any other filmmaker because an unfinished puzzle offers the best visual analogy for many of her films. With carefully chosen pieces, she allows for us as the audience to imagine what lies in the empty spaces, and that isn’t a task that I imagine a lot of people enjoy having asked of them at the cinema.

With Bastards, the puzzle takes the form of a film noir, offering us glimpses of familiar traits of the genre. A wounded man (Vincent Lindon) reluctantly returns to Paris after his brother-in-law commits suicide in order to help his sister (Julie Bataille) settle the sizable debts and shady affairs that have brought the family and its company to ruin. Something’s fucked up with his niece (Lola Créton) who was hospitalized after being found walking the streets naked the night of her father’s death. And things get shaken up when he starts to get involved with a woman (Chiara Mastroianni) in the building where he’s living. There’s an unsettling air to nearly every scene, made all the eerier by the amazing synth-y score from Denis’ longtime musical collaborator, Stuart Staples of Tindersticks ("Put Your Love in Me"). And like two of her best films, Beau travail and The Intruder, Bastards has a wallop of an ending that’s nearly impossible to shake.

Bastards is available to rent on Amazon in the U.S. via Sundance Selects, and is currently on DVD in France via Wild Side Vidéo.

With: Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Michel Subor, Julie Bataille, Lola Créton, Grégoire Colin, Christophe Miossec, Alex Descas, Florence Loiret Caille, Hélène Fillières, Eric Dupond-Moretti, Sharunas Bartas, Nicole Dogué, Élise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson, Laurent Grévill

White Material, Making Plans for Lena and Rompecabezas at IFC

Though I didn't find any official announcements of such, it looks as if Claire Denis' White Material and Christophe Honoré's Making Plans for Lena [Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser] have landed at IFC Films. BAMcinématek is presenting a three-day spotlight on IFC Films beginning 19 March, and both films are on the line-up along with Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, Elia Suleiman's The Time That Remains, Kim Ji-woon's The Good, the Bad, the Weird, Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch, Johnnie To's Vengeance and Tales from the Golden Age. For those in NYC, both Honoré and star Chiara Mastroianni will be present for a Q&A following the 20 March screening of Making Plans for Lena; this will be the fourth Honoré film that IFC has released following Dans Paris, Les chansons d'amour and La belle personne. More information here. In addition to the films above, IFC did officially announce their acquisition of Puzzle [Rompecabezas], the directorial debut of Natalie Smirnoff who previously worked as an assistant director on Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga and The Holy Girl and casting director on The Headless Woman. Starring the amazing María Onetto, Puzzle was the sole Latin American film in competition at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.

The Decade List: Les chansons d'amour (2007)

Les chansons d’amour [Love Songs] – dir. Christophe Honoré

Approaching the films of Christophe Honoré is a lot like walking along a tightrope. The odds always seem to be against you making it to the finish line without a gust of wind (or, in Honoré’s case, of bullshit) blowing you off. Even the worst of his films have glimmers of effulgence, but in most cases, they’re buried so deep in self-indulgence and shallow affronts that those moments are quickly forgotten. In every one of his films, Honoré “borrows” from considerably better pieces of French cinema, namely Godard and Truffaut, but in Love Songs, he takes on Jacques Demy, and the results are the most fruitful and satisfying of his career, even if you do still have to scrape a little shit off the bottom of your shoe afterward.

Love Songs exists in a magical, musical world of pliable sexuality during the winter months in Paris. The cold does provide more fashionable attire for the cast of beautiful people, does it not? It’s also the sort of world in which love and despair are grossly exalted, a world in which people can actually die of a broken heart. The ever-charming Ismaël (Honoré’s favorite actor, Louis Garrel) and the ever-lovely Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) have what would seem to be a harmonious love affair together… and with Ismaël’s pretty coworker Alice (Clotilde Hesme), but something’s awry. Ismaël feels like the third wheel, even though he’s a hit with Julie’s family, and Julie appears unsatisfied with both of her partners, though she only shows it when pressed by her mother (Brigitte Roüan) or sister Jeanne (Chiara Mastroianni). Quickly, we begin to realize that this particular ménage à trois isn’t a progressive way of looking at romance, but a last resort to keep a once bright flame from extinguishing.

Honoré hasn’t fully allowed himself to step away from his lame visual quirks, from a title sequence where the entire cast and crew are identified by last name only to a stupid moment where the camera pans across the titles of the books the three love birds are reading in bed. His grasp of sequencing, cause-and-effect and timing is off, especially in the convenient, lazy ways he threads characters into the film. But dammit if Love Songs isn’t kinda wonderful in spite all that. The songs, composed by Alex Beaupain who makes a cameo in the film as a musician whose show the lovers attend, are almost uniformly superb, even if Roüan and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet’s singing voices are truly unremarkable (I still can't decide how I feel about Hesme's). It’s as if Honoré wanted to alert his audience to which of the characters hold the most weight in the film based on the quality of the actors’ serenades (it says a lot about the youngest of Julie's sisters, who only exists as an inconvenient plot contrivance).

Sagnier had already proven her vocal abilities in François Ozon’s 8 Women, and though according to the presse dossier Garrel hadn’t sang much before the film, his voice is pleasant. But it’s really all about Chiara Mastroianni, who plays Julie’s slightly uptight, certainly sheltered older sister. It would be giving Honoré too much credit to suggest that her presence is what links Love Songs to the film it aspires to, Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (which, of course, starred her mother). Not only does Mastroianni have the richest singing voice of the cast (she recorded the album Home in 2004 with then-husband Benjamin Biolay), but she delivers the moment that brings the film to its knees with the song “Au parc.” Her Jeanne is the sole character whose sorrow stretches deeper than just sulking and pouting, and it’s profoundly felt in the scene at the Parc de la Pépinière.

Andrew O’Hehir accurately points out that Honoré takes more from Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy [Jeanne et le garçon formidable] than it does Les parapluies de Cherbourg, even if he does find an excuse for placing Mastroianni beneath an umbrella as she walks Julie to the métro station. Compared to Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, a marvelous tragi-comédie musicale about a young woman (Virginie Ledoyen) who meets her dream man only to discover he has AIDS, Love Songs comes up short, but still it cast its own bittersweet spell on me. Even when it comes to Christophe Honoré, I can admit defeat.

With: Louis Garrel, Chiara Mastroianni, Ludivine Sagnier, Clotilde Hesme, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Brigitte Roüan, Jean-Marie Winling, Alice Butaud, Yannick Renier, Alex Beaupain
Screenplay: Christophe Honoré
Cinematography: Rémy Chevrin
Music: Alex Beaupain
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: IFC Films/Red Envelope Entertainment

Premiere: 18 May 2007 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 21 March 2008

Awards: Best Music (César Awards, France)

Attention Saint Louis Area Cine- and/or Francophiles

Cinema St. Louis and Washington University's Program in Film and Media Studies are presenting their first French Film Festival this coming weekend, 28-30 August. Screening this year are Rialto's restored prints of Jean-Luc Godard's Made in U.S.A. and Max Ophüls' Lola Montès, as well as a trio of contemporary films: Phlippe Ramos' Captain Ahab [Capitaine Achab], with Denis Lavant, Jacques Bonnaffé, Dominique Blanc, Jean-François Stévenin and Lou Castel; Serge Bozon's La France, with Sylvie Testud and Pascal Greggory; and Pascal Thomas' Towards Zero [L'heure zéro], with François Morel, Danielle Darrieux, Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud and Laura Smet. For full descriptions of the films, as well as screening times (they will all play at Washington University's Brown Hall Auditorium), check out Cinema St. Louis' website.

Ou, de la tristesse

Love Songs [Les chansons d’amour] – dir. Christophe Honoré – 2007 – France

Yet another example of my declining emotional wellbeing has emerged, and, if you know me, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s in the form of a French musical. I can hardly resist those bastards, and even when coming from a director I typically loathe, I’ve become infected, yet again. It began earlier this year when three films (Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, Bruce La Bruce’s Otto; or Up with Dead People and Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park) snuck up on me, finding a vulnerable, confused lad emotionally stricken with these strange tastes of melancholy and hope sufficing for a certain void within his own soul.

Christophe Honoré has been pissing me off for years. When I got a chance to see Ma mère, his misfire of an adaptation of the final novella of Georges Bataille starring Isabelle Huppert, I knew he was up to no good. I even saw it on opening night in Paris, and that didn’t even help the endeavor. And then there was Dans Paris, which solidified my disdain. But, damn him, if he didn’t hit me in the right way with Love Songs, another dually serving teaming with star Louis Garrel. Garrel has made a career out of allowing himself to be desired, particularly by gay directors (François Ozon also used him in a short called Un lever de rideau), in the shedding of clothes, the hazing of his eyes and pouting of his lips. For once though, I was able to spot what so many people find alluring about the actor in Love Songs and maybe allow the inevitable comparison to Jean-Pierre Léaud (although, shoot me if I ever allow a comparison between Honoré and Godard to subsist; you’ll know I’ve fallen over the deep then).

I suppose it best to walk into Love Songs with no idea of what to expect, other than the occasional breaking into song and dance and a chance to see the ever-charismatic Ludivine Sagnier in action. So, if you haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t recommend reading further as I guess this would be my spoiler alert. Knowing nothing of its story, the film went places I didn’t expect, placing into question the validity of its title. As one of the leads dies within the first act (it’s annoyingly divided into three and separated by title cards), the film shifts into a certain variation on a “love song,” with all the flavor of melancholy. Granted, that the character dies of unprecedented heart failure makes Honoré’s analogy a bit trite, it still fuels the film into lovely directions.

It would also mark, for once, Garrel falling into his character, as he entertains a romance with a teenage boy (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), almost as if officially giving into the gay pursuit filmmakers seem to love to take him. However, it’s really Chiara Mastroianni that’s most ravishing in the film, providing the finest musical number in the film, and probably the most effective as well. Love Songs, thus, becomes just a sign of my own times, another cinematic example of my waning existential crisis. I don’t even know if I’m of proper sound mind to actually discuss films that aren’t Mother of Tears. On vera.