(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)
This is the third of Jack Hughes’ reports
from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.
La
fille coupee en deux (Claude Chabrol)
Chabrol is probably the least
intellectually esteemed of the three French New Wave veterans who brought films
to this year’s festival, having spent much of his efforts (and he’s been
amazingly prolific) on melodramatic material of somewhat uncertain thematic
value. Inevitably, the precision that marked classics like Le Boucher has eased off now, to be replaced by a sense of relative
effortlessness that might yield either grace or fuzziness (based, it sometimes
seems, on little more than how the wind blows). The new film is another
unwieldy concoction, with Ludivine Sagnier as a TV weather girl who has an
affair with an esteemed, much older author, while being pursued by the more
age-appropriate but unstable heir to a chemical fortune (played, bizarrely
ripely, by Benoit Magimel). The film mostly bumps along, with a confusing sense
of time and psychology; some of its more interesting avenues are barely
explored, whereas much of the plot turns on some “depraved” actions presented
here with a rather doddery-seeming discretion. None of it is dull, but it again
carries a sense of near-randomness, with the different tones and structures
never coalescing. It just doesn’t feel as if Chabrol tried very hard to think
his way into these people and situations, which leads here to overall
hollowness, rather than masterly transcendence.
Les
amours d’Astree et de Celadon (Eric Rohmer)
87-year old Rohmer has said this may be his
last film, and if so he may have chosen an almost perfect parting note. Adapted
from a 17th century novel and set who knows when, this is a simple
tale of love lost and regained between two shepherds, apparently shot in
extremely modest circumstances, and for a little while it seems perhaps too
flighty for this great director. But we soon see how this might all along have
been the blueprint for almost all his wonderful comedies and proverbs, turning
on another moral dilemma which gives rise to delicious plot complications. The
film involves some suspension of disbelief, or at least the ability to think
oneself into a different frame of reference. But since the opening titles
gently caution us that this has been shot in an alternate location because the
true setting is now inadequately preserved, we’re clearly compelled to bring
our contemporary sensibility to the table. The closing sequences are some of
Rohmer’s most unrestrained celebrations of love, not to mention being unusually
erotic for him. Overall, if it’s not as complex or completely fulfilling as his
very best work, there’s no doubt that Rohmer’s vision for the film, and for its
place in his wonderful career, has been completely achieved.
Ne
touchez pas la hache (Jacques Rivette)
A mere 80 years old, Rivette’s film by
contrast doesn’t feel at all like a wrapping up work (unless one counts the
presence of several key past collaborators in supporting roles), but rather
like a quite surprising new direction. As concentrated as anything he’s ever
done, this is an adaptation of Balzac’s novel The Duchess of Langeais, about what we would nowadays call a
distinctly passive-aggressive relationship between the duchess and her military
suitor. He obsessively devotes himself to her, winning only minor concessions;
when he turns the table and starts to ignore her, she becomes obsessed with
regaining his devotion. The film is superbly controlled and well acted by
Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu, but I must confess it strikes me as
second-tier Rivette. In his best films, which are just about as good as
anyone’s, he’s constructed a unique cinematic universe: elegant, literate,
mystical, playful. It’s only at the very end, when the officer and his friends
set out on a seafaring quest, that Ne
touchez pas la hache really works in that classic vein. But as with just
about every Rivette movie I’ve ever seen, I suspect it will take multiple
viewings to open up all the rewards here.
Before
the Devil Knows you’re Dead (Sidney Lumet)
83-year-old Sidney Lumet is perhaps the
oldest working American director (you can see there’s a theme to how I make
many of my selections – I call it “always buy brand names”). Never recognized
as an auteur, Lumet’s best work nevertheless exhibits a terrific fusion of form
and content, a great feel for the contemporary pulse, and of course
often-brilliant acting. The glory days of Serpico,
Dog Day Afternoon et al are a while ago now, although his last film Find Me Guilty (which I haven’t yet
managed to see) reportedly recaptured some of the old flair for atmospheric
logistics. The new film certainly does so in spades. Philip Seymour Hoffman and
Ethan Hawke are brothers (which as imaginative casting goes, works way better
than Lumet’s casting of Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman as father and son in Family Business), both suffering major
money problems, which they aim to solve by knocking off their parents’ jewelry
store. Needless to say, things go wrong, but if some of the plot mechanics are
broadly predictable, Lumet’s masterly handling of the steadily darkening tone
certainly isn’t. The film does some jumping around in time, which seems
obligatory of all thrillers now, but never becomes a prisoner of its structure:
the director has a great feeling for the lives and the settings and coaxes
several of the actors (Hoffman, and the magnificent Albert Finney as their
slowly tuning-in father) to an Oscar-worthy level. Amazing to say, but this
might ultimately rank as one of the best of Lumet’s fifty or so pictures.
And here’s one I caught up with in its current commercial release
Across
the Universe (Julie Taymor)
This is certainly a film of very high
imagination and quality of execution, weaving thirty or forty Beatles songs
into a narrative about young people in the 60’s, against the backdrop of
Vietnam, the draft, and the evolving counterculture; glamorously turbulent
America is contrasted with drab industrial Liverpool. Certain sequences are
breathtaking in their surreal vision, and Taymor – who ascended to major fame
with the stage production of The Lion
King – unleashes the entire range of her gifts here. But you may detect a
certain stiffness to this praise, and unfortunately the film is hardly as
galvanizing as you’d want. Structurally ingenious as the narrative may be, it
brings as much fresh insight to its period and characters as The Lion King did to the serious study
of African ecosystems. The acting and musicianship are mostly bland, the
premise soon gets tired (the lead character is called Jude…the women around him
are called Lucy and Sadie and Prudence…eventually you can’t help rolling your
eyes), and even Taymor’s virtuosity sometimes seems merely like undisciplined
fiddling at the digital keyboard. All you
Need is Love, of course, provides the finale. As they say, if a thing’s not
worth doing, it’s not worth doing well.
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