Entries associated with the tag "Catherine Breillat":

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. —L.P. Hartley

I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple. —Jean-Luc Godard

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (now at Landmark's Century Centre) wants to tell the story of the last romantic couple too. Or is it the first romantic couple? Since in terms of literal historical period we're obviously nearer the beginning than the end—the age of capital R "Romanticism" and everything that implies, about prevailing cultural attitudes and standards of human behavior in the post-Napoleonic brave new world of 1830s France. But then why do these dandified lovers, impeccably decked out a la July Monarchy—in plush, exotic fabrics, colorful toques and mantillas, with oriental hookahs on the plein-air carpets, etc—seem so anachronistically like ourselves? Since however meticulous the period reconstructions—gilded rooms, railings and balustrades, statuary—the behavioral signals seem almost intimately familiar: could be us up there, since that's how we'd be responding right now. Which makes you wonder how foreign this country of the past can be ...

Same period,* different film. Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, which played in town a couple weeks back, seems as chilly and distant in its neoclassical reserve—Ingres contra Delacroix, the polarities of the era—as Mistress is romantically hung out. As in his earlier Joan the Maid (1993), where late medievals discuss theological dogmas like transubstantiation as if their lives depended on it (which in fact they did), Rivette's characters in Duchess seem driven by assumptions about life, behavior, ideology, etc, that we're not in a position to share. These people aren't us—if you want to "relate," be prepared to fight your way into the mind-set.

So what's to choose between them? Obviously a matter of inclination and taste, since both deliver their own brand of delectables. Whatever her merits as historian, Breillat's micromanaged attraction to the vagaries of human passion invites a complicity that Rivette, more austere and abstract, isn't inclined to give. On the other hand, Duchess fascinates out of sheer obliquity, its terse, alienating distance—everything less predictable since less familiar, a matter of epistemological cunning rather than identification strategies unleashed. Yet despite its raw immediacy, it's the Breillat that arguably wears you down and out. Too much us, not enough them. Where's negative capability when you really need it?

(*Actually it isn't, though every review I've read apparently thinks that Duchess is set in restoration France, in the early 1820s or thereabouts. But as the film's introductory title makes clear—not to mention Balzac's own source novel—the relevant "restoration" is of the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, not France's Louis XVIII. So Napoleon's empire would still be alive and kicking, if only for a short while more. No wonder everything's so neoclassical—it's exactly as it should be!)

Decided to punish myself last weekend with Judd Apatow's latest assembly-line homage to all his good-guy high school buddies, Enduring Sarah Marshall . . . whoops, fucked up the title (excuse my French, apparently it's contagious), but y'all know what I'm driving at. Just the familiar beta-male blend of regressive gender fantasies: self-pitying schlub hero (calling Mrs. Portnoy!) wins over va-voom! mannequin brunet after being dumped by equally va-voom! mannequin blond (who comes to regret the dumping, natch) and providing a couple of R-rated peeks at his bashful schlong (not to rub it in, but even the latex extender in Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy is more transgressive—not to mention a whole lot funnier). And Jonah Hill's in it too . . . like, yyyaaaaaaahhhhh!

Which is why I'm still feeling grateful for Sunday's double-feature companion, Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, as antidote to the spoiled-Hawaiian-pineapple aftertaste of Judd. Only Blueberry's been getting ho-hum reviews and Sarah mostly good ones—so why is that? Since even with its multiple glaring flaws (and the distributor's own mutilations/excisions/abridgments), Blueberry's the only one of the two I can imagine myself voluntarily—even eagerly—watching again. What could be more seductive—from the unreadable cursive lettering on the windows (which immediately put me in mind of Orson . . . I mean, Norman Foster's Journey Into Fear, all the environmental wordplay that nobody knows how to decipher) to the convertible enchantments of Natalie Portman at the wind-whipped end of her tether, as suggestively wrung out as the hardscrabble Nevada landscape that engulfs her.

Which of course I'm a born sucker for, these nonnative excursions into the Great American Vacancy—Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, Wenders's Paris, Texas and Don't Come Knocking ... even Bruno Dumont's critically thrashed and pummeled Twentynine Palms (another flawed fave of mine), with its lines of windmill generators and endlessly rolling boxcars and surreal explosions of highway detritus—auto dealerships and Tastee Freezes among the strip-mall palms, etc—set down in the Death Valley middle of nowhere. So nondescript and desperate that only a sodden romantic could love the place. Which is probably all Jean Baudrillard's fault.

Postscript: Don't everybody applaud, but this is probably the last post I'll be doing for a while. I'm having arthroscopic surgery 4/29 (right rotator cuff—oww, oww!) and won't be able to assault my computer for at least a couple of weeks. Whether any of this will affect (or, heaven forefend, improve) my writing or thinking about films remains to be seen. But at least I'll be able to throw my infamous hanging screwball again. In any case, ciao for now . . .

There hasn't been a new Bertrand Blier film in town for almost a decade—the largely forgotten Mon Homme (1996), released here in '98, was apparently the last to play commercially—so How Much Do You Love Me? (2005), at the Gene Siskel Film Center through Thursday (11/15), comes as a welcome (or maybe quasi-welcome, at least for some people) provocation. Since if not for Blier's audience-baiting example, we'd never have had Gaspar Noé to kick around with impunity ... or for that matter Catherine Breillat.

Not that Blier's any more warm and cuddly now than he was a generation ago, and if anything How Much showcases the old antinomian at full misanthropic throttle. Though maybe it's just a matter of the devil seeing things more clearly—the "delusional" fantasies of homo economicus parading under the obfuscating rubric of beauty, love, romance. Since for Blier, everything comes down to a kind of free-market free-for-all—or "Love in the Time of Capital," to borrow from Garcia Marquez—and what's usually subliminal in negotiations of "the heart," as we familiarly describe it, necessarily becomes more literal and overt, an ideological stripping of masks, of emotional bad faith. Too beautiful for you? Not if you can afford it.

The avatar of that mind-set here is Gerard Depardieu's rapacious, calculating thug, so menacingly outsize the screen goes into eclipse (nice touch!) when the camera pans across his back. Take away my "beauty," he warns—indicating Monica Bellucci, his all-too-available belle dame sans merci—and be prepared to compensate my loss. Except Bellucci's hardly more than an illusion herself—compare her iconic frozen presence to the competition's more exuberant flexibility: "not corrupted yet," she says of the call girl in question, but it's about authentic responses too. Which Blier does seem to recognize, that even these perennial stereotypes of seduction need to be deconstructed. But not refuted, which is arguably a saving strength. Since beyond the calculation and cynicism (always "unsentimental," except when it isn't), everyone's still just unpredictably wacko!

All of which seems perfectly hilarious to me ... but then I think Catherine Breillat's a gas too. 

Film comedies have always been a problem for me, since for the most part I don't find 'em "funny." (Funny: what's that? When you laugh, I guess, though Rob Zombie movies—or Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil: Extinction ... can't hardly wait for that one!—probably don't count.) And with the recent canonization of everything Judd Apatow touches, things are looking bleaker all the time, at least from my side of the aisle. Poker-faced through The 40-Year-Old Virgin, poker-faced through Knocked Up, poker-faced through Superbad (I mean, what's with the decibel count: if the characters don't immediately turn into screaming, gesticulating ferrets, does it mean the "comedy" has somehow failed?). As desolating as it undoubtedly is, Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk seems more chortlesome (now there's a word!) than anything Apatow et al have been able to cook up. Maybe it's the very numbness of it, like a whiff of nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair: cleaned out and bracing, daring you to find subliminal riffs in an open, airy void—what's not to like about that?

But still I'm not laughing, since that's not primarily what Kaurismaki's about ... so what does set me off comedywise? Probably a window to the soul in this—and maybe I should close it while the opportunity's still there—but so far this year it's been DeCillo's Delirious, Hartley's Fay Grim (two-thirds a white telephone movie elegantly skewed ... until the deplorable imploding finale), Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, Waitress if you care to count it, then ... nada, zilch, zero. What all these personal faves ultimately share is a reliance on mise-en-scene—on spatial relations and blocking, attitudes and movement, visual filigree—rather than literally "funny" lines. Obviously not into the yackety end of things, which wretched hearing partially accounts for—but only partially, since the same division holds with subtitled movies. And I do hate stand-up, the expectation to laugh's too overbearing and brutal—no Sarah Silvermans for this guy, please.

So what's the "best" comedy in the last five years? My own vote goes to—whoa, credibility alert!—Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy (2002) ... which hardly seems anyone else's idea of a good time at all. Except for me it's almost a "been there, saw that" kind of deal—just a typewriter-wielding factotum at the derriere end of the trade (apologies for the imagery)—and, my god, she's got it all down cold: yes, they do actually debate which body parts to crop out of the frame and which photogs do or don't know how to shoot breasts and schlongs, etc. It's also extremely perceptive in what it emotionally deconstructs and clarifies ... maybe even too much so. You wonder how anyone with Breillat's kind of knowledge (or for that matter Anne Parillaud's, her alter ego in the film) can sustain a "romantic" relation at all. Or maybe she doesn't: insight as the ultimate incapacitator, a life beyond all fantasy ... but who's in a position to say?