Spectateurs! (Arnaud Desplechin, 2024)

 

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).