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)

The Decade List: Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000)

Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes [Water Drops on Burning Rocks] - dir. François Ozon

Water Drops on Burning Rocks was the first of François Ozon's bountiful offerings in 2000, the year in which he presented the two best films of his career (I have yet to see Ricky, however). Adapting the film from an unpublished play written by a nineteen-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon mapped out his own career, in both his finer and weaker points. Unlike fellow second generation Douglas Sirk admirers like Todd Haynes or Pedro Almodóvar, Ozon's fascination with the melodrama could be attributed best to Fassbinder. While Haynes took a more direct approach, Ozon drew inspiration through the filtration of Sirk's legacy in Fassbinder, acknowledging his own (intended) similarities to the director with Water Drops on Burning Rocks and later Sous le sable, Le temps qui reste and Angel. The film, then, would showcase the talents of both artists before Ozon ventured on his own later in the year.

For Fassbinder, the play wonderfully embodies the sinister humor of his notable early works, like Katzelmacher and Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, but it's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant where the most similarities can be found. With all the action confined within the walls of a single apartment, the single set piece transforms into the carefully adorned fighting ring for the four characters. It could be suggested that the claustrophobic restriction of the set would be the catalyst for the uncoiling misery in Franz's (Malik Zidi) life in the same way Catherine Deneuve's apartment in Repulsion would trigger her own demons. However, the apartment better represents the incubation chamber of Franz's despair, being left alone for weeks while his older lover Léopold (Bernard Giraudeau) travels on business. The key to Franz's unhappiness, like Petra von Kant's, lies within him as he becomes unable to extinguish the fact that he's fallen in love with someone who (likely) doesn't love him; the walls just amplify the anguish. Also like Petra (Margit Carstensen), he finds the outlet for its release in other people, spitting malice in the face of his former fiancée Anna (Ludivine Sagnier) just as Petra would to her secretary Marelene (Irm Hermann). Anna, though, is hardly the innocent witness to Franz's transformation. Between the two films (Petra von Kant was released nine years after Fassbinder would have written Water Drops), the most noticeable difference can be seen in the reversal of roles between the two central pairs of lovers, pegging the older Léopold as the predator in contrast to the younger Karin (Hanna Schygulla), whose involvement with Petra suggests self-advancing manipulation.

For Ozon, traces of Water Drops on Burning Rocks can be found in almost all of his subsequent works. Divided into four acts, the film moves from the playfully sexy to the dreadfully bleak, though the path isn't as straightforward as one might assume. Water Drops on Burning Rocks doesn't descend into the austere with each passing act; in fact, it retains its borderline misanthropic humor even after things get hopeless for Franz and Véra (Anna Thomson), Léopold's former lover who had a sex change in order to rekindle the spark in their dying relationship. The moment where Léopold phones Franz's mother at the end of the film painfully recalls the final moments of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?; this coldness is shared by both of Franz's lovers, with Anna's line "Who's going to father my children now?" placing her on the same careless plane as Léopold.

In terms of characterization, Véra becomes the film's most tragic figure. Officially entering the film in the fourth act after showing up earlier at Léopold's door twice, she is subjected to Léopold's cruelty within her first steps into the apartment. Despite these initial signs of hostility from Léopold (he purposefully refers to Véra as an old "copaine" in order to correct himself with the masculine form of the word to insult her), she plays along with his game of sexual manipulation until it becomes clear that she's only being used to hurt Franz and to seduce Anna. For Franz, Véra's return gives him a glimpse of his own doomed future; however, he succumbs to the hopelessness before Véra even reveals her own inability to stop loving Léopold. Véra emerges as the tragic figure when the film lets her humanity surface. Unlike Franz, she didn't succumb to the unbearable mimicry that occurs in Franz during the third act. She retains the sad hope Franz holds in the second act, when his awareness of Léopold's nature is still balanced by attempts to reconcile his lover's terminal dissatisfaction. Thomson, who enjoyed a wave of popularity in France after the starring in Amos Kollek's Sue and Fiona, gives Véra the perfect amount of compassion and sorrow, which makes the film's final shot, in which the audience learns all they need to know about her future, ever so desolate.

Looking back at Water Drops on Burning Rocks, you can almost see Ozon's entire career up to now inside of it. Between the amazing fourth-act dance number to Tony Holiday's "Tanze Samba mit Mir" (8 femmes), the crippling aspects of a relationship gone sour (5x2), the knowing touches of melodrama (Le temps qui reste), the pop music cues of Françoise Hardy's version of "Träume" (Une robe d'été) and a character's inability to accept the end of a relationship (Sous le sable), all of his films appear to have stemmed from this one film. Although his body of work may vary as much in quality as it does thematically, the same can't be said for Water Drops on Burning Rocks.

With: Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi, Ludivine Sagnier, Anna Thomson
Screenplay: François Ozon, based on play Tropfen auf heiße Steine by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: Zeitgeist Films

Premiere: 13 February 2000 (Berlin International Film Festival)
US Premiere: June 2000 (New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival)

Awards: Teddy Award: Feature Film (Berlin); Best Feature Film (New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival)

Bad News, Tennis Shoes!

Well, not really, but a friend of mine told me that his favorite video store clerk once referred to the lovely Ludivine Sagnier as "bad news in tennis shoes." While I hardly agree, the phrase has stuck. I digress, it looks as if Sagnier has become a mother once again, delivering a baby girl with director Kim Chapiron (Sheitan, below), which I suppose means that she's no longer with actor Nicolas Duvauchelle (Inside, Trouble Every Day, Le petit voleur), the father of her other daughter. Congratulations.

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.

Paris je t'aime... moi non plus

[This is intended as an introduction to the Short Film Week Blog-a-thon hosted by Seul le cinema and Culture Snob.]

“Short film” is such a broad term that, really, no rules do or should apply to them, yet we can all agree that the same rules for feature-length films or documentaries need not be the same. The general ideas of storytelling, character arc, rising- and falling-action, climax, and whatnot limit vision in a feature, so why try to infuse them into a smaller frame of time? In fact, “short film” is the perfect method for experimentation with mood and even tonality. With Paris je t’aime, it appears as if most of the directors, typically known for the features, forgot the possibilities and, perhaps, limitations of the format, leaving us with a bunch of filler and one of the least impressive assemblies of unrelated short films to be seen by a wide audience.

Paris je t’aime sounded like an ambitious project. The creators had designed the film to cover each of the twenty arrondissements of Paris, but directors Christophe Boe (Reconstruction) and Raphaël Nadjari (Tehilim) backed out, and what we’re left with, quite literally, is an unfinished, misstructured vision of the City of Lights with most of its directors seriously under- or over-estimating the medium of the short film. [Note: New York, je t’aime is on its way, in case you were wondering, though it will likely change names to something like I Heart NY]

What ends up problematic about most of the shorts is the directors’ inability to adhere to their time limitations. In Gurinder Chadha’s “Quais de Seine,” she examines similar themes as she had in feature-length Bend It Like Beckham and Bride & Prejudice, namely the assimilation of Indian and western European culture, yet here, she packs the yawn-inducing culture clash and subsequent tolerance into five minutes, instead of a more watered-down version that would stretch throughout an hour and a half or so. Her motives and message in both features were apparent, even without having to watch the films, but in five minutes, she fails to capture slice-of-life and depicts racial fantasy, in which a young French boy abandons his crude buddies to help a young French-Indian girl stand up after tripping. The moment she falls becomes effectively startling, as her veil comes off revealing long, beautiful black pearl hair, but the moment is quickly ruined by a comic scene with the French boy attempting to put the veil back on her. Had Chadha focused on the small, revelatory moments instead of the overbearingly “meaningful” ones, she might have accomplished what I can only believe the creators of the project wanted: small moments in the lives of those on the streets of the most romantic city in the world.

In “Parc Monceau,“ Alfonso Cuarón also fumbles in his endeavor, relying poorly on a five-minute excursion in cinematic deceit. He uses his now-famous single-take as smoking American (Nick Nolte) makes a rendez-vous with a young French girl (Ludivine Sagnier), crudely not mentioning the reason for their meeting. He ends up being her father, in Paris to babysit her baby, though they speak of the baby as if it were Sagnier’s lover. The deception is juvenile storytelling, providing the cheap surprise at the finish. It’s been twenty-five years since Cuarón last directed a short film (Cuarterto para el fin del tiempo, available on the Criterion disc for Sólo con tu pareja), and he appears to have forgotten how to use time.

On the other hand, Gus Van Sant’s “Le Marais” uses its closing “surprise” expertly, not just by contrast to Cuarón’s (Van Sant’s film actually comes before Cuarón’s sequentially). The revelation that the boy in the factory (Elias McConnell) doesn’t understand the questions that the French boy (Gaspard Ulliel) asks him does embody that knee-jerk “ha!” that seems to have plagued many of the shorts featured within Paris je t’aime, yet Van Sant’s vision is more clear. The set-up (boy comes as translator for Marianne Faithfull to sell some sort of artwork) never introduces the possibility for suspicious cinematic deception, instead unfolding beautifully in probably the most “romantic” of the segments. There’s an afterthought of “well, why didn’t the American boy just tell the French one he didn’t speak English,” which ultimately doesn’t hinder too harsh a judgment as Van Sant’s vision of disconnect and romanticism is so controlled and uncompromised.

Similarly balanced is Olivier Assayas’ “Quartier des Enfants Rouges,” in which American actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal) leaves a party to buy some drugs from her dealer (Lionel Dray). Though it’s hard to step away from Assayas possibly making fun of Kirsten Dunst (Gyllenhaal is working on a film that looks not-so-coincidentally like Marie Antoinette), yet he never feels compelled to make his short more than it needs to be. Unlike Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ “Loin de 16ème,” in which Catalina Sandino Moreno drops off her baby to babysit a rich woman’s, “Quartier des Enfants Rouges” uses foreshadowing dialogue/scenes more effectively cryptically. The line, “attention, il est fort” (or “be careful, it’s strong”) eventually conjures up dual meanings, particularly though Gyllenhaal’s face as the second drug dealer finishes the line with, “mais, tu le connais” (“but you know that”). Salles and Thomas’ repeating of the Spanish lullaby Moreno sings to the babies feels heavy-handed, socially important. The drug dealers’ warnings to Gyllenhaal work more effectively in their, perhaps, simplicity.

Alexander Payne’s “14ème Arrondissement” is the pick of the lot (though a lot of people viewed it as terribly condescending and anti-American… ha!). It works, possibly, because it’s the only film that doesn’t feel like a “short feature” or “fragment,” but a wholly realized five-minute film. Carol (the amazing Margo Martindale) clumsily recites a paper she wrote for a French class about her first trip to Paris. It’s charming, beautiful, and surprisingly touching without condensation or unnecessary expansion. “14ème Arrondissement” ends Paris je t’aime, blazing past all the other shorts in every regard and unfairly making the audience wonder, “shit, maybe this wasn’t a total waste of time.” The creators knew what they were doing with its placement, but botch the project further with the end montage to Feist’s “We’re All in the Dance,” in which Paris je t’aime becomes less a collection of shorts as it does fucking Crash. It’s almost worth it to see Juliette Binoche raise her glass to Gena Rowlands, but not really.

I don’t really care to research the filmmaking history of the directors who participated in Paris je t’aime to see if they began their careers in the realms of the “short film,” because it really doesn’t excuse most of the missteps therein. What remains (other than the inevitable sour taste) is a fine example of successful feature directors’ inability to adhere to limitations (I remember Lumière et compagnie, in which a bunch of directors like Peter Greenaway and Spike Lee made shorts with the camera the Lumière brothers used in the 19th century, to be a bit more fascinating). With the short film week blog-a-thon, I doubt I’m going to (or anyone else, really) establish any truths about short format filmmaking, but let Paris je t’aime be your cautionary tale of unfortunate missed opportunity.

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

Paris je t’aime - dir. Various - 2006 - France

Here's problem presented in the anthology, Paris je t’aime. The short film format is something that either these famed directors have never truly worked in before or that feature-length narratives have clouded their memory of. Most of the directors here have decided to spoil their five minutes with a cheap gimmick, presenting something in one way, only to “surprise” us with a totally different understanding of what we just saw. Alfonso Cuarón is the most guilty, using his now signature single-take to show a dialogue between Nick Nolte and Ludivine Sagnier where Mademoiselle Sagnier discusses how “Bruno” is holding her back and she’s wanted Nolte to “do this” for a really long time. Much to our relief, they aren’t planning on fucking, and Bruno isn’t her boyfriend. Instead, Nolte is her father, and he’s finally going to babysit baby Bruno. Nolte has become strangely typecast as the crusty father or father-in-law of the French (see Four Days in September and Clean), solidified now with Cuarón’s nice-looking but dumb “Parc Monceau.” On the flipside of this, Richard LaGravenese’s (A Decade Under the Influence, Living Out Loud) “Pigalle” (those who know Paris will recognize this as the “red light district”) plays with the same elements of false presentation in a surprisingly effective manner as married actors Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant add some spice into their romantic life.

The other problem presented here is that many of the directors figured: short time, big sentimentality. In Gurinder Chadha’s (Bend It Like Beckham) “Quais de Seine,” a teenage boy skips out on his rude friends to help a Muslim girl. Various lessons in forced tolerance follow. Even in Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ “Loin de 16ème,” the otherwise-lovely tale of Catalina Sandino Moreno’s excursion to the sixteenth arrondissement results in an unfortunate I-knew-that-was-coming moment that just about ruins the beautiful shots of Moreno running through the subway system.

To save you the trouble of having to endure the lousy entries of the eighteen, here are the ten I could handle (and I do mean "could handle," not "enjoyed"):

- Gus Van Sant’s “Le Marais” with Gaspard Ulliel, Marianne Faithfull, Elias McConnell
- The Coen brothers’ “Tuileries” with Steve Buscemi
- Christopher Doyle’s “Porte de Choisy” with Barbet Schroeder (I’m not sure this one is particularly “good,” but it’s something)
- Isabel Coixet’s “Bastille” with Miranda Richardson, Sergio Castellitto, Leonor Watling, Javier Cámara
- Nobuhiro Suwa’s “Place des Victoires” with Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Hippolyte Girardot (which is actually worth it for the shot at the end of the film of Binoche holding a glass of wine up to Gena Rowlands)
- Olivier Assayas’ “Quartier des Enfants Rouges” with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Joana Preiss
- Oliver Schmitz’s “Place des Fêtes” with Aïssa Maïga, Seydou Boro
- LaGravenese’s “Pigalle” with Hoskins, Ardant
- Wes Craven’s “Père-Lachaise” with Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell, Alexander Payne
- Alexander Payne’s “14ème Arrondissement” with Margo Martindale

“Le Marais,” “Quartier des Enfants Rouges,” and “14ème Arrondissement” are the only ones I’d say I "liked" in case you were wondering.

Okay, Miss Marple

Swimming Pool - dir. François Ozon - 2003 - France/UK

In preparation for Ozon’s latest, Le Temps qui reste, I revisited Swimming Pool and recalled what my friend Brad said about the film: “it’s too clever for it’s own good.” This is certainly the case and even more so when watching the film for a second time, knowing the “surprise twist” that baffled viewers that stumbled upon Swimming Pool expecting a saucy French thriller. In knowing the twist (which I will not give away), one can see the clues Ozon laid out throughout the rest of the film, rather meticulously. Ozon’s craft is not in question here; never did I think previously that the twist was a cop-out ending. However, in looking back, it is certainly possible for someone to be too clever, a surprising thing when you realize how shockingly unclever most Hollywood films are these days. Somehow, Swimming Pool never rises above its cleverness, and, on the surface, its tarty-French-vixen-inspires-the-sexual-awakening-of-a-crusty-old-Brit storyline fails to entice.

On the other hand, Swimming Pool is rather refreshing solely for Charlotte Rampling. In her second film with Ozon (the previous being the sublime Sous le sable), she seems to have found a welcome place in French cinema, one of the few countries where established, over-forty actresses can flourish (see Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve). Unlike Sous le sable, Ozon strips away her beauty, turning her into just the school marm, sexually-repressed English bitch you’d have imagined the character to be, making us forget that in her 50s, Rampling is still really sexy. But this is to her credit, naturally, as it elevates her above simply being the hot older woman you remember from The Night Porter. Also to his credit, Ozon immerses Swimming Pool with a steaming sexuality, with Ludivine Sagnier (whom he’d worked with twice before) as the voyeuristic object of desire. Swimming Pool may be admittedly clever to the point of distraction and noticeably without the certain moxie that so characterized his earlier films, but as a well-conceived diversion, it works.