Wild Hearts

Laurence Anyways
2012, Canada/France
Xavier Dolan

Keep the Lights On
2012, USA
Ira Sachs

Laurence Anyways is Xavier Dolan's third and certainly most ambitious film to date, notably so in the fact that he took himself out of the equation this time. In stepping away from the autobiographical, he examines an adult relationship between Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and Fred (Suzanne Clément) and the ways in which Laurence's desire to live life as a woman affects it. As an actor himself, Dolan has a knack for eliciting great performances, especially from Clément, who won a best actress prize from the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes last year, and the always reliable Nathalie Baye as Laurence's mother. While Dolan's characters have matured and his scope has broadened, he still employs some of his iffy stylized characteristics that were more forgivable when he used them for angsty young love in Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats).

Perhaps the biggest strikes against him are the misguided, clumsy bookends to the film. Someone should have advised him against every decision involved in the opening scene, a brooding montage set to Fever Ray's "If I Had a Heart." I'm not certain if fault should be given to Dolan for choosing a song any one of his fans would have already created so many associations with prior (note the spectacular, nightmarish music video by director Andreas Nilsson), but I am certain that the choice was wrong. It looks like a music video, creates a mood that the film never matches, and takes place in an fuzzy, uncertain time in Laurence and the film's timeline. This is a mistake that is repeated a few times during the film. The worst scene in Laurence Anyways could effectively be the best scene in a totally different movie, but as it stands, in this particular film, it feels wholly out-of-place. In what's possibly a fantasy sequence (possibly not), Fred puts on her sexiest gown and floats into a fancy ballroom, all cut to Visage's "Fade to Grey." These out-of-place music video montages don't advance the film in any way or tell the audience anything useful about the characters; instead, they're just mere reminders that Dolan has exceptionally good taste and unfortunate indications of the director's level of maturity as a filmmaker and his inability to self-edit. The film's final scene is a misfire as well, closing a long, vibrant journey on a humdrum note.

However, what Laurence Anyways does best is illustrating Laurence and Fred's explosive relationship. The film itself bares a number of similarities with another of 2012's notable queer films, Ira Sachs' Keep the Lights On (both won the top prize for queer cinema at the Berlinale (Teddy) and Cannes (Queer Palm)). Both films chronicle a turbulent relationship over the course of a decade in a fashion that feels almost fragmented and elliptical, though they're mostly told chronologically. Laurence Anyways effectively loses some of its power and intrigue when the narrative splits midway through the film. Keep the Lights On, on the other hand, restricts its perspective to one half of the couple, Erik (Thure Lindhardt), and we see the relationship between him and Paul (Zachary Booth) through Erik's eyes. The sort of dramatic strengths Dolan reaches in Laurence Anyways can best be chalked up to his decision to step away from autobiography, and on the flipside, clinging to autobiography is where Keep the Lights On seems to get lost. Basing the screenplay on his own long-term rocky relationship with a drug addict, Sachs fails to depict the sort of intensity and obsession that could possibly lead someone to carry on a relationship as destructive as Erik and Paul's. During a conversation Erik and Paul have near the end of the film, one of them smiles and says, "Well, we had some good times," to which a friend of mine leaned over to me during the screening and whispered, "Did we miss that part?"

Keep the Lights On has a few other problems, not least of which the flatness of the supporting characters played by Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen, and Souleymane Sy Savane, but it does a commendable job creating and maintaining a mood and tone, beautifully lensed by Thimios Bakatakis (Dogtooth, Attenberg) and featuring just the right amount of Arthur Russell songs for the film's score. As I mentioned before, Laurence Anyways is all over the map visually and tonally, and its near-three-hour running time doesn't do Dolan any favors (though I'd never describe the film as boring). If only Laurence Anyways and Keep the Lights On could borrow each other's strengths and abandon their weaknesses, you'd have two spectacular films instead of two pretty messes.

Laurence Anyways
With: Melvil Poupaud, Suzanne Clément, Nathalie Baye, Monia Chokri, Yves Jacques, Catherine Bégin, Sophie Faucher, Guylaine Tremblay, Patricia Tulasne, Mario Geoffrey, Jacob Tierney, Susan Almgren, Magalie Lépine Blondeau, Emmanuel Schwartz, Jacques Lavallée, Perrette Souplex, David Savard, Monique Spaziani, Mylène Jampanoï, Gilles Renaud, Anne-Élisabeth Bossé, Anne Dorval, Pierre Chagnon, Éric Bruneau, Alexis Lefebvre, Denys Paris, Vincent Davy, Vincent Plouffe, Alexandre Goyette

Keep the Lights On
With: Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen, Souleymane Sy Savane, Miguel del Toro, Justin Reinsilber, Sebastian La Cause, Maria Dizzia, Ed Vassallo, Chris Lenk

The Decade List: Le temps qui reste (2005)

Le temps qui reste [Time to Leave] – dir. François Ozon

Fans of François Ozon, once dubbed the garçon terrible of French cinema in the late ‘90s, seem to diminish with each passing film. Though few will argue that the year 2000 marked the highest point of his career (with Under the Sand and Water Drops on Burning Rocks both bowing in that year), I haven’t fallen off the bandwagon, despite a number of reservations I have toward his two most widely-seen films, 8 Women [8 femmes] and Swimming Pool, both blissfully entertaining but severely lacking beneath their polished veneer. Ozon’s thematic sequel to Under the Sand, Le temps qui reste (correctly translated as The Time That Remains), shares the same traits that bothered me about 8 Women and Swimming Pool, but they feel like less of a disguise here.

Le temps qui reste, 8 Women and Swimming Pool all follow closely to their own genre allusions; more than its predecessor, Le temps qui reste pays tribute to melodrama, a genre which Ozon has always toiled with in smaller doses. In the film, Ozon gives himself completely over to the idea, dislodging the tongue-in-cheek sensibilities of his previous flirtations with his Sirkian tendencies. While much of the film relies on artifice, I sense a peculiar, refreshing honesty in what Ozon’s trying to do.

While he situates an attractive gay male in central role, a position often held for women in the genre, Ozon doesn’t set his sights on redefining or updating the genre. While spotted with bits of superficiality (Melvil Poupaud seems to get more handsome the closer he gets to death), the moments of beautiful clarity truly resonate. From the point early in the film when Romain (Poupaud) discovers he’s a few months away from death as a result of a spreading tumor, the film follows his grief process through the designed closures Romain concocts for the people closest to him, some successful, others not. For his unhappy, older sister Sophie (Louise-Anne Hippeau) and his younger, German boyfriend (Christian Sengewald), Romain uses his remaining time to sabotage these relationships, while finding a solitary comfort in his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau), the person in the film he finds the closest bond, both in personality and in approximation to death.

While Ozon does strive on some level to avoid overt sentimentality, it’s more accurate to say that he keeps his drama on a low flame. I hope my friend Tom doesn’t mind, but he highlighted one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about Le temps qui reste in an e-mail exchange earlier this year. He said, “Ozon's formal restraint may have suited his subject matter, but… I thought a showier technique wouldn't be so much inappropriate as less bland.” Perhaps it’s in Le temps qui reste’s blandness that I find the “honesty” I think Ozon is producing. In keeping the film on the subtle(r) side, Ozon delivers a number of rich moments, especially when Moreau is onscreen, that the showiness he painted 8 Women and Swimming Pool with would have only clouded. Le temps qui reste isn’t a grand triumph for the director, but it’s one that has always lingered for me, whether I can successfully defend my feelings or not (likely the latter).

With: Melvil Poupaud, Jeanne Moreau, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Daniel Duval, Marie Rivière, Louise-Anne Hippeau, Christian Sengewald, Henri Le Lorme, Walter Pagano, Ugo Soussan Trabelsi
Screenplay: François Ozon
Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: Strand Releasing

Premiere: 16 May 2005 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 14 July 2006

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.

Considerations

The Oscar nominations are coming soon, so I thought I'd run down a few of my dark horses -- likely none of which will get nominated. I'm not mentioning some of the more probable nominations that would please me, like Abigail Breslin and Steve Carell for Little Miss Sunshine, Mark Wahlberg for The Departed, Jackie Earle Haley for Little Children, Penélope Cruz for Volver, Sergi López for Pan's Labyrinth, etc.

Best Picture & Director
Alfonso Cuarón - Children of MenPaul Greengrass - United 93Best Actor
Nick Nolte - CleanMelvil Poupaud - Time to Leave (Le temps qui reste)Nolte reminded us that he was a good actor and perfectly complimented Maggie Cheung's instability with a surprising tenderness. Clean wouldn't have worked without him or Cheung. Le Temps qui reste also owes its success to Poupaud, who wonderfully expresses the confusion and denial of a man diagnosed with terminal cancer. It would have been easy for Ozon to cast someone just as attractive, but likely with lesser results.

Best Actress
Maggie Cheung - CleanAbbie Cornish - SomersaultBryce Dallas Howard - ManderlayCheung already won the Best Actress prize at Cannes two years ago (yes, that's how long it took Clean to come stateside), so an Academy Award nomination would probably mean less. Cornish is dazzling as a runaway teenage girl, and Howard made the difficult decision to fill Nicole Kidman's shoes as Grace in Lars von Trier's sequel to Dogville.

Best Supporting Actor
William Hurt - The KingDanny Huston - The PropositionHurt's performance in The King is probably his finest to date, a direct counter to last year's Oscar nomination for his tongue-in-cheek role in A History of Violence. When the plot of The King takes a turn from expectations, it's really Hurt that allows you to stick with the film. Huston, as Guy Pearce's outlaw brother, gives one of the more haunting performances I've seen this year.

Best Supporting Actress
Vera Farmiga - The DepartedGong Li - Miami ViceFarmiga, also wonderful in Down to the Bone, somehow emerges as the most fascinating character in The Departed. As the sole female in the main cast, she's fully believable as a professional woman on the exterior with a taste for bad boys outside of the office. Gong Li, despite not knowing how to speak English or Spanish, is both sexy as hell and genuinely effective. Both Farmiga and Li redeem their unnecessary love interest characters by proving more interesting than their male counterparts.

What's Cookin'?

Allow me to be completely shallow for (at least) one post. I'm hopped up on cold medication, can't sleep, and have been listening to too much Vincent Gallo - so I decided to dedicate a post to twenty-five cinema-type people that tickle my fancy. I've browsed endlessly for suitable photos and hope that you can find out that - hey - we have a crush or two in common. Naturally, I didn't include people who are just simply easy on the eyes as that would be boring. I have varying degrees of admiration for these people and not just aesthetically. So enjoy my first blog where I finally just shut up (or, shut up more than usual).

Melvil Poupaud

(Time to Leave, Time Regained, Le divorce)

Chloë Sevigny
(The Brown Bunny, Boys Don't Cry, Dogville)

Rossy de Palma
(Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Kika)

Maggie Cheung
(In the Mood for Love, Irma Vep, Clean)

Lior Ashkenazi
(Walk on Water, Late Marriage)

Liv Ullmann
(Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, The Passion of Anna)

Takeshi Kaneshiro
(Chungking Express, House of Flying Daggers, Returner)

Eduardo Noriega
(Open Your Eyes, Novo, Burnt Money)

Eloy Azorín
(All About My Mother, Warriors, Juana la loca)

Michelle Reis
(Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls, Flowers of Shanghai)

Sook-yin Lee
(Shortbus, Hedwig and the Angry Inch)


Justin Theroux
(Mulholland Drive, The Baxter, Six Feet Under)

Bryce Dallas Howard
(Manderlay, The Village, Lady in the Water)

Alain Delon
(Purple Noon, L'eclisse, Le samouraï)

Jennifer Connelly
(Little Children, Dark City, House of Sand and Fog)

Samantha Morton
(Morvern Callar, Sweet and Lowdown, In America)

Tilda Swinton
(Orlando, Teknolust, Female Perversions)

Jason Statham

(The Transporter, The Transporter 2, The Italian Job)

Monica Vitti
(L'avventura, Red Desert, L'eclisse)

Nicolas Duvauchelle
(Trouble Every Day, À tout de suite, Eager Bodies)

Asia Argento
(The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Scarlet Diva, Queen Margot)

Isabelle Huppert
(The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf, Madame Bovary)

Romain Duris
(The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Exiles, The Crazy Stranger)

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi
(Cote d'Azur, Time to Leave, It's Easier for a Camel)

Béatrice Dalle
(Betty Blue, Clean, Trouble Every Day)

Short Cuts - 2 December 2007

As December is my busy month of film viewing, I figured I'd just post a few sentences and such on the films I viewed within the past two days. I may flesh some of these out at a later date, but I have a stack of DVDs sitting next to me that won't quit yelling at me.

Sorry, Haters - dir. Jeff Stanzler - 2005 - USA

Allow me to introduce you to the 9/11 exploitation film. Unfortunately, it’s not as exciting as it sounds; it has yet to include a deeply offensive gore-fest about a man who goes on a killing/raping spree as the planes hit the towers. Instead, we’re stuck with unnecessary films like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and, here, Sorry, Haters. Don’t get this confused with World Trade Center though, as the only good thing about Sorry, Haters is that it never once tries to milk your sympathy or emotions; it’s an admirably mean-spirited and clunky film that isn’t sure if it’s meant to be an important statement on racism post-9/11 or a ludicrous comedy about the psychological effects on a woman in the corporate world. Robin Wright Penn stars as an emotionally unstable woman who deceives and manipulated a poor Muslim cab driver (Abdel Kechiche) whose brother has been deported to Syria. The film begins promisingly exploring the deep-seeded guilt of a woman whose television programming has just amplified the self-hatred in the youth of America (this is where the silly title comes from), yet Stanzler is more concerned with surprises and obnoxious deceit instead of any honest character study. Stanzler justifies Wright Penn's actions with a stupid connection the 9/11 attacks, and you can't help but think he's trying to say something powerful there. I wish I could give away the ending, but that would just ruin the only joyous moment in Sorry, Haters, but trust me, it’s a doozy, even if I have no idea what Stanlzer wanted to say with it. I also wish I could recommend Sorry, Haters in the same way I did with Shadowboxer, but unfortunately you have to sit through the rest of the annoying film to truly appreciate the hilarious explosion of an ending.

Shem - dir. Caroline Roboh - 2004 - UK/Israel

I hate to criticize a film on its financial limitations, but that hardly excuses the awfulness that is Shem. Not only is the film ugly to look at, which is surprising considering its handsome pan-European settings, but the entire production feels amateurish. The writing is bland, the dialogue horrible, the premise absurd, and the acting painful. Ash Newman plays Daniel, a sort of devious Casanova, minus the charm, who has been sent on a mission by his Jewish grandmother to find the grave of her estranged father. This adventure, of course, serves as a lesson-learning, self-examination for the supercilious Daniel, who begins to question his heritage all while bedding numerous English-speaking women and men throughout Europe. As if Roboh doesn’t trust her audience or, most likely, herself, she feels the need to scream the word “Jew” all over the screenplay, nearly getting the point of having a line like, “Hi, I’m Daniel, arrogant Brit who denies his Jewish heritage and fucks both men and women.” There is a rather humorous scene where a woman who looks like Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous as played by Chiara Mastroianni cruises Daniel in a Jewish museum. The woman reeks of parody, a hush-voiced Eurotrash vixen with a hideous pastel skirt seeking out her prey like a wild boar. Like Sorry, Haters, moments like this are agonizingly few and only exist because they come from a wildly untrained and inept “writer/director.”

The Double Life of Véronique (La double vie de Véronique / Podwójne zycie Weroniki)- dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski - 1991 - France/Poland/Norway

The first of a string of masterworks by the late Kieslowski (if you forget about White), The Double Life of Véronique is his first trek outside of Poland, where he seemed stuck making mostly uninteresting films with no cross over-potential (The Decalogue being the exception). Likely due to the influence of the French financers or Kieslowski's own artistic experimentation, The Double Life of Véronique is blissfully cinematic, with a haunting, gorgeous score by Zbigniew Preisner and innovative, impressive cinematography from Slawomir Idziak. Starring Irène Jacob as both Polish opera singer Weronika and French music teacher Véronique, the film explores the inner workings of the universe between these two women, emotionally bound together though never actually meeting. The structure is fascinating as it never really follows a formula you’d expect from a film like this, but most importantly, it’s a beautifully executed examination on metaphysics and fate, so infinitely more resonant and effective that tripe like Amèlie. Expect my own further examination on this film at a later date.

Time to Leave (Le temps qui reste) - dir. François Ozon - 2005 - France

Would it surprise you that a respected French filmmaker, like Ozon, would reinterpret a genre like women’s melodramas of the 1950s into a quiet, gentle character study filled with static close-ups? Probably not, though it’s likely if you’re basing your opinion of Ozon on his successful, over-the-top 8 Women (8 femmes), but to a French film nerd like myself, I expected no less. Sort of a sequel to his ravishing Under the Sand (Sous le sable), Le temps qui reste (literally, The Time that Remains) follows thirty-one-year-old fashion photographer Romain (Melvil Poupaud) in the final stage of his life after finding out he has terminal cancer. While I enjoyed Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me which followed Sarah Polley through a similar grief process, Ozon’s film is softer and more restrained. Romain coasts through the film in a series of conflicting epiphanies with his family, his boyfriend, career, and, naturally, himself. The legendary Jeanne Moreau is effective as his aging grandmother, the only person he feels comfortable telling about his imminent fatality. Maybe it was the Benadryl that I took in the middle of the film, but after a rather standard, expected first half, Le temps qui reste eventually blossoms into something truly remarkable. With a schizophrenic filmography, Ozon has made a welcome return to the style that he did best with Under the Sand, stepping far away from the vivacious, but insincere 8 femmes and Swimming Pool or the gimmicky, unsuccessful 5x2. Expect further writings at a later date.

As for which DVDs are yelling at me: I've got Pandora's Box, The Proposition, The Spirit of the Beehive, Three Times, and The Third Generation staring at me now, but you can also expect me to get around to The Conformist, 1900, The Beales of Grey Gardens, Miami Vice, Idlewild, and others in the near future. Wish me luck. Oh, and I hope you wished Woody Allen a happy birthday yesterday.