NZIFF 2021: L’Événement (Happening, 2021)

In New Zealand, plenty of the films that make it to the film festival New Zealand International Film Festival are ones that elsewhere in the world would go straight to cinemas and get all kinds of rave reviews, but foreign language films generally have to be quite middlebrow and forgettable to get distribution, so I can only hope that Happening manages to do so, because it’s an excellent period drama.

This isn’t the first film at this film festival I’ve seen which deals with women seeking an abortion, but this one is set in 1960s France, not the most tolerant place to be looking for such a service. However, the film makes a clear case for why it should be accessible, given the struggle our central character Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) goes through. She’s young, inexperienced and clearly ill-equipped to have a child, but puts herself through all kinds of trauma in order to try to have a normal life, while naturally the deadbeat dad (well, a fellow student) has practically no worries about the situation at all. Given the subject matter though, this film strikes a rather dreamy and detached tone, unlike say the grim existential angst of say 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Never Rarely Sometimes Always, or even the period chiaroscuro of Vera Drake, It makes some of the darker material easier to take in a way, this aesthetic care taken over the look of the piece, without dwelling on flashy period details (the era its set in is picked up from tangential clues mostly, rather than people striding around in silly wigs and fashion). Plus it has a great performance from the young actor at its heart.

CREDITS
Director Audrey Diwan; Writers Diwan, Marcia Romano and Anne Berest (based on the novel/memoir by Annie Ernaux); Cinematographer Laurent Tangy; Starring Anamaria Vartolomei, Kacey Mottet Klein, Sandrine Bonnaire; Length 100 minutes. Seen at Embassy, Wellington, Friday 19 November 2021.

Criterion Sunday 337: À nos amours (1983)

Maurice Pialat had something of an outsider’s relationship to mainstream cinema, it feels at times, a bit like Cassavetes or similar filmmakers who thrived on improvisation and documenting raw emotional states. This film focuses on Sandrine Bonnaire’s Suzanne, a fantastic debut performance and very much the heart of the film, whose coming of age blends with a sense of rebellion against her dysfunctional family and also, it’s hinted, deriving from depression (perhaps something to do with her family situation). The family, sadly, are the weakest part of the film, at least from an acting point of view (both the mother and the brother are frustrating to watch and come across as particularly and screechingly one note; Pialat himself plays the dad). It certainly is close to the surface, these growing pains that Suzanne is going through, her flings with men and her aimlessness, but for all that the dramas are evident, her own feelings are buried and largely inaccessible to any of those around her. She is a steely mystery at the heart of a messy film, and one that I suspect will grow if I revisit it, but another fine film in Pialat’s oeuvre.

CREDITS
Director Maurice Pialat; Writers Arlette Langmann and Pialat; Cinematographer Jacques Loiseleux; Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Dominique Besnehard, Evelyne Ker; Length 95 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 18 July 2020.

Une saison en France (A Season in France, 2017)

A warm, human story about an excellent father (Eriq Ebouaney) and his kids trying to make a new life in Paris after fleeing civil war in the Central African Republic. It moves slowly, showing the father’s life working in the markets (having been a French teacher back home), and that of his brother, who’s a former philosophy professor, still dressed up snappily in a suit and tweed jacket as, dispiritingly, we realise he’s heading towards a shop where he’s working on security. All of them have new connections, new relationships, they have jobs and places to live, and yet ultimately no security, and the film is absolutely focused on just how tenuous everyone’s hold on security is in this kind of place, especially as we move towards the end, surveying the bleakness that awaits, the systemic deracination that Western nations (and Europe specifically) have effected on those who are in this desperate situation.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Mahamat-Saleh Haroun محمد الصالح هارون; Cinematographer Mathieu Giombini; Starring Eriq Ebouaney, Sandrine Bonnaire; Length 100 minutes. Seen at the ICA, London, Thursday 20 June 2019.

Criterion Sunday 74: Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985)

After a period working on documentaries, particularly in the USA (some of these have been released on Criterion’s Eclipse sub-label), Varda had one of her biggest commercial successes with this story of a drifter called Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) found dead in the south of France. As is typical of her filmmaking style, Vagabond (the French title translates as “Neither roof nor law”) has a powerful documentary quality, being structured around a series of interviews with those whose path Mona crossed, sometimes breaking the fourth wall by looking directly at the camera.

Varda’s fluidly moving camera tracks Mona in her movement from one place to another, as she finds temporary respite or shelter, and occasionally even a companion (though she is as likely to shuck these people off without any apology as the opportunity arises; scenes sometimes start with her walking beside someone, and then just leaving them, unprompted and unremarked upon). It’s a master class in filmmaking style, accomplished in framing and movement without being show-offy, but it’s also a deeply empathetic portrait of an often unlikeable central character, whose direction is largely her own choice—at least within the limits of the harsh wintery environment, not to mention those forces of authority she meets.

Bonnaire is riveting in the central role, as she becomes ever dirtier (contrasted with other female characters, who are sometimes seen bathing to emphasise the contrast) and is gradually divested of her possessions as her shoes inexorably wear down, though she never loses her dignity or desire to keep moving. There are so many little moments of good humour, fleeting portraits of people living with what they have (but more often have not) got, that the film is never boring, and it’s certainly never condescending.

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CRITERION EXTRAS:

• The director has filmed some excellent extras to this disc, which given her strength in the documentary format, are all well worth watching. The most significant is Remembrances (2003), in which Varda looks back on the film and its impact and talks to her star Sandrine Bonnaire as well as other people who appeared in the film, revisiting some of them and asking what they remember about the film (in much the way their characters recall Mona within the film). She also amusingly reveals that in fact trees were central to her original idea, hence the long digression about canker in the film and the presence of Macha Méril’s character, who looks after dying plane trees.
• The Story of an Old Lady is meanwhile a shorter piece she shot at the time of making the film, about the rich old woman played by Marthe Jarnias (herself far from rich), though the film is presented as it survives, rotten with mould.
• There’s a short contemporary radio interview with novelist Nathalie Sarraute (to whom the film is dedicated), prefaced by Varda, though as the interview makes clear, Varda isn’t exactly sure where the inspiration lies exactly.
• There’s also an informative conversation between Varda and the film’s composer in Music and Dolly Shots (2003), where she talks a bit more about the key lateral tracking shots which structure the film and how these were combined with the musical score.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Agnès Varda; Cinematographer Patrick Blossier; Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril; Length 105 minutes. Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 10 January 2016.

Jeanne la Pucelle (Joan the Maid, 1994)

I’m on holiday in France this week, so I’m re-posting some reviews (of French films, naturally) that I wrote many years ago when I was on LiveJournal, back when I was watching a lot more arthouse films. In fact, I saw this film during a retrospective of the work of Jacques Rivette, so I have several other reviews of his films from the same time. I’ve picked one that’s (slightly) more widely available than some of the others I saw, such as the 12-hour Out 1.

Over the course of his career, Rivette has more and more adopted a stripped-down visual style. Often there will be empty frames, clear contrasts and frontal lighting, and a smoothly-gliding camera, all offset by very basic black titles and baroque music. This is very much evident here as well, over both parts of this lengthy film (and even this seems to be slightly shortened from its length on the original French release).

Of course, a filmic portrait of Joan of Arc was always going to measured in relation to earlier efforts by Bresson and Dreyer, both of whose films focus on the trial and burning of Joan as a heretic. Rivette’s film also features her final moments, though perhaps unsurprisingly given its illustrious cinematic forebears, it replaces the trial with a titlecard. This kind of elision isn’t unusual in Rivette; what isn’t elided are the long sequences of questioning doubt and loneliness. There are some battle scenes, but so depopulated as to seem absurd, as if the director were just making a gesture towards the existence of people by having more than one or two. This again is a conscious strategy—a stylised presentation of a time far removed from our own, with very different customs and only tentatively grounded in historically verifiable fact—and as such is not entirely inappropriate.

Despite being in her 30s, Sandrine Bonnaire seems like the right choice for Jeanne, and brings something of a monomania to the part, without subsuming it in a haloed divine grace. This is very much a human protagonist confronted by political chicanery and human cynicism.

For a film of over four hours in length, it sustains the dramatic momentum admirably. However, it achieves an odd alienation effect, as if it were not transcendent enough to fit with the cinematic archetype as created by Bresson and Dreyer. It may be hard for the character of Jeanne to escape the forces of history, but it is just as difficult for this film to escape its own cinematic history.

(Originally written on 17 May 2006; reposted here with slight amendments.)

CREDITS
Director Jacques Rivette; Writers Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent and Jacques Rivette; Cinematographer William Lubtchansky; Starring Sandrine Bonnaire; Length 280 minutes [in two parts: Les Batailles and Les Prisons]. Seen at the National Film Theatre, London, Tuesday 16 May 2006.