Arnaud Desplechin’s Spectateurs!
would provide a most engaging introduction to the director’s oeuvre, despite
(detractors might say because of) being a somewhat atypical project for him; it’s
a largely academic observation though given that like all Desplechin’s recent
work, it’s hardly been seen outside France. The film is a personal journey
through cinema, including a few montages that wouldn’t be out of place in an
Oscar broadcast (Die Hard!), but also spending extended time on memories
of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and most unexpectedly, the late Misty Upham
(with whom Desplechin worked on Jimmy P). Desplechin intersperses sweet-natured
recreations of key moments in his cinematic growth, including being taken by
his grandmother to see a sixties remake of Fantomas but then having to
leave when his sister got scared, and screening Vera Chytilova’s Daisies
for a school film club and in the process having a girl develop a heightened
interest in him. Despite some moments of gravity, the film’s prevailing sense
is of lightness and openness to possibility; one feels that on another day
Desplechin might have gone in this or that different direction (the film
includes a montage of diverse people talking about memorable cinematic
experiences, including such quirky choices as a woman recalling that she went
to see Train to Busan, and didn’t like it). The film’s final moments are
suitably and delectably diverse, contrasting a chance glimpsing of Desplechin
stalwart Mathieu Amalric at a screening of 400 Blows, an aspiring
director talking in awestruck terms about his transcendent experience of that
film, and Desplechin himself, alone in a room, sitting and typing, muttering a
final maxim in a manner that lovingly (and is it more self-deprecatingly or
self-regardingly?) evokes Godard, an impression immediately cemented by playing
Tom Waits’ Ruby’s Eyes under the final credits (just as in Godard did in
Prenom Carmen).
