Plus que jamais (More Than Ever, 2022)

The fourth film I saw at the Europa! Europa Film Festival was the one I had heard a little about (and is from the German-French-Iranian director of 3 Days in Quiberon), but it turned out to be the one I liked the least. However! It is very much a film for Vicky Krieps to further blossom into the grand actress of European cinema that she has threatened to become the last few years. She really is one of the best.

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For a film that could easily be a disease-of-the-week mawkish tearfest made for TV, this drama about a woman dying of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis steers clear of a lot of the particular pitfalls of that genre, though it can never entirely escape it. However, it’s about the way that Hélène (Vicky Krieps) come to terms with her future, such as it is, and the way she has to hurt the ones she loves in order to protect both herself and them. Of course, it comes inbuilt with its own terrible additional layer of heartwrenching irony, in that it’s the film’s co-star Gaspard Ulliel (playing Hélène’s husband Matthieu) who died in real life shortly after this film was made. If Krieps reminds me a bit of Julianne Moore, it’s only because she’s every bit as fine an actor as Moore (who hasn’t shied away from similar roles), and indeed has become one of the more dependable European actors in recent years (whether in films like Bergman Island, Corsage or of course the fine-toned comedy Phantom Thread).

CREDITS
Director Emily Atef; Writers Atef and Lars Hubrich;  Cinematographer Yves Cape; Starring Vicky Krieps, Gaspard Ulliel, Bjørn Floberg; Length 123 minutes.
Seen at the Classic, Melbourne, Sunday 26 February 2022.

Criterion Sunday 560: White Material (2009)

Part of what I think is difficult to take in about this film, at least on a first viewing, is that so much of it happens off-screen when we aren’t (or the central character, Maria Vial, played by Isabelle Huppert, isn’t) looking. By which I mean the violence that drives it, that claims several central characters, that drives a wedge between Vial and her coffee plantation business, as well as her family (Christophe Lambert as estranged husband and Nicolas Duvauchelle as deranged son). Partly that’s because she’s never reliably looking the right way to witness it, so intent on downplaying and ignoring the rising tide of anti-colonial violence taking place, the efforts to push out white landowners; she’s too immured in a rapidly vanishing system of rule to even seem to notice the threats to her existence, because it is her home after a fashion, the only life she’s known. And so while I think this film is filled with bold contrasts and strong drama, a lot of it just seems to seep in around the edges, until eventually it starts to overwhelm even La Huppert, who as an actor — as much as a character — feels like an indomitable spirit. She’s hardly a hero, but she just keeps trying to make things happen and she doesn’t know how to relent.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s an interesting little short film made by Denis, filmed from her point of view on a camcorder of some sort, of her taking this film to the Écrans Noirs film festival in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and having to deal with the outdated technology and limited screening conditions available there. Indeed, the whole story builds to a bit of a punchline, almost.
• There’s also a short deleted scene of Maria finding a certain person (no spoilers, eh) dead near the end, but presumably this was just too direct for Denis’ method.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Claire Denis; Writers Denis and Marie NDiaye; Cinematographer Yves Cape; Starring Isabelle Huppert, Christophe Lambert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Isaach de Bankolé, Michel Subor; Length 105 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 31 July 2022.

Holy Motors (2012)

Much of my week themed around films I’ve seen on Mubi will be films, like this one, which are no longer watchable there because of their 30 day turnaround on everything (a new film every day, with only 30 films on the platform at any one time). However, I believe they give a sense of what’s available; at the end of last year for example they did a month of the decade’s classics, which is where I caught up with today’s film.

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So, undoubtedly, I slept on this one. Despite making many best-of lists (for the year and now the decade), it sounded from what I heard initially like some kind of oneiric puzzle box of a film, a state-of-the-nation type disquisition perhaps, or some kind of grand folly (in which, after all, Carax has form), but I loved Pola X (1999) so I’m surprised I put this off. It does indeed follow its own strange logic, suggesting both every filmmaker’s favourite topic — a film reflecting on its own creation and the creative impulses of art itself — and something more intangible perhaps: a sense of the world and of shifting identities within it. On a single viewing at home, I can’t really hope to make sense of it all, but it’s a film that clearly contains many readings within it, a dense allusory text (not just to Eyes Without a Face but the presence of Édith Scob and that mask is certainly the clearest of all the film’s tips of the hat) and a magisterial visual style. It could of course be empty — and there are undoubtedly flourishes in there just for he hell of it, for pure fun — but this doesn’t feel like cinematic magic for its own sake, and Denis Lavant in himself has such an expressive register that you can’t imagine the film made with anyone else.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Leos Carax; Cinematographers Caroline Champetier and Yves Cape; Starring Denis Lavant, Édith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue; Length 116 minutes.
Seen at home (Mubi streaming), London, Friday 3 January 2020.