THE PAST - LFF 2013 - Day Ten

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's THE PAST is a movie that is in desperate need of Harvey "Scissorhands" Weinstein to cut down its over two hour running time into something less frustrating. But even then, one suspects that it's contrived and ultimately uninteresting plot would remain problematic. And of all the performances in this tense relationship drama, I am flabbergasted that the Cannes Jury chose to reward Berenice Bejo, who I found to be ordinary in the extreme.

The movie is about guilt and the complexity of modern relationships.  As it opens general all-round nice guy Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) arrives in Paris to finally divorce Marie (Bejo). He arrives in a cluttered ramshackle house, symbolic of the cluttered ramshackle relationships. There are assorted children - it takes us a while to figure out who their parents are.  It turns out that the elder daughters, Lucie and Lea belong to Marie by a marriage previous to Ahmad, and the little boy Fouad, belongs to Marie's new lover Samir (Tahar Rahim).  But Samir is not yet free - his wife is in a coma.  

The resulting movie is full of bitterness, guilt and recrimination.  Who is responsible for failed relationships?  How are the children fairing?  Only Ahmad provides a still moral centre as the other characters whirl around him.  He tries to unpick the source of the tension and the final hour of the film plays a bit like a he-said-she-said mystery of the most melodramatic kind. It tends to melodrama, and after so many twists and turns we begin to lose sympathy, undermining all the good realistic acting and camerawork in the first hour.   Ultimately, the movie becomes so entangled in itself, and Samir and Marie so self-involved that the experience becomes alienating - and a far less engrossing and artistically pure work that Farhadi's beautiful A SEPARATION.

THE PAST has a running time of 130 minutes.

THE PAST played Cannes 2013 where Berenice Bejo won Best Actress and Asghar Farhadi won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.  It also played Toronto and London 2013. It opened earlier this year in Iran, the Netherlands, Poland and Greece. It opens on November 29th in Finland, on December 5th in Serbia, on December 19th in Italy, on December 20th in the USA, on December 25th in Norway and on February 7th in Sweden. 

London Film Fest 2011 Day 7 - THE ARTIST

Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, the stars of
THE ARTIST, at the UK premiere at the
BFI London Film Festival 2011.

Michael Hazanavicius’ charming silent movie about the end of silent movie-making stars Bérénice Bejo and Jean Dujardin (of the recent secret-agent spoofs OSS 117) as actors Peppy Miller and George Valentin, who fall in love against the dreamy backdrop of an early golden-age Hollywood. When the talkies take off, George, the go-to man of the silent picture, finds himself outcast by a determined and winning Peppy, a role in which Bejo dazzles, and where THE ARTIST might have kept up with her singular energy it slows to the nostalgic time spent by George in relative poverty and obscurity. Nonetheless, Dujardin's performance remains a broad and irresistible focus, and there may be no modern leading man better suited to the demands of the silent movie genre. Rare in any case does it seem to enjoy watching actors watching themselves on screen.

THE ARTIST played Cannes, where Jean Dujardin won Best Actor; Toronto and London 2011. It is on release in France. It opens in the US on November 23rd; in Italy on December 9th; in Spain on December 16th; in Greece on December 22nd; in Germany on January 26th and in Hong Kong on February 9th.

HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO - great footage, great choices, but no context

LOST IN LA MANCHA was a wonderfully tragicomic documentary about Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to make a film about Don Quixote. With the charismatic Gilliam railing against the Gods, it was marvelously entertaining and very accessible. The fact that the film-makers were documenting events as they happened made it feel immediate and communicated the sense of a film unraveling before our very eyes. By contrast, HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO is a rather dry restoration project, of interest to people who love cinema-history and the technical aspects of film-making. I doubt it will hold the attention of anyone who hasn't already heard of the mid-century French auteur.

Part of the reason for its limited appeal is that the documentary film-makers give so little context to Clouzot. Yes, they name-check his films and have his co-workers praise him, but there are no film clips of those films and no potted history of French cinema to that point. The audience is meant to already know why THE WAGES OF FEAR or LE CORBEAU are signficant, and to understand who the French New Wave were and why they might be antipathetic to Clousseau's directorial style and subject-matter. The audience is expected to know why Clouzot might have been so angered by this, and jealous to top Fellini's masterpiece 8 1/2, that he drove himself to grief with the ambitious INFERNO. But no, precious little information is given here. Reductively, we are told that the French New Wave objected to his detailed story-boarding. Similarly, nowhere do we explore Clouzot's style and thematic concerns before the ill-fated INFERNO project. All we know is that he is concerned with paranoid sexual jealousy, he works his actors hard, and he is a giant of French cinema. Apparently, no one needs to make the case.

Our Gmunden correspondent and I, embarrassed to have never seen a Clouzot film between us, were somewhat surprised by the oblique nature of this documentary, and felt rather excluded by its elitist tone. Nonetheless, we were fascinated by the actual substance of what it offered - a well-edited, lovingly restored set of clips from Clouzot's test shots and experimental footage. Clouzot seems to have been obsessed with how to depict the aural and visual experience of sexual jealousy. So we have experimental footage taken from the husband's perspective: he fixates on his wife's face, body, lips, smoking, flirting....This is Serge Bromberg's coup. In addition he makes another brilliant choice. Clouzot's footage has no sound. So, rather than dub in the script, clumsily and intrusively, Bromberg has used a sensitive score by Bruno Alexiu and recreated scenes using contemporary actors Berenice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin. This has the effect of confronting the incomplete nature of the archive footage rather than trying to mask it. It is a very elegant choice, and one can't help but wonder what a remake featuring these two actors would look like!

HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERO played Cannes, Toronto and London 2009 and is on release in the UK and France. It opens on March 4th in the Netherlands and on March 10th in Belgium.

OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES - if you can't beat them....

A few years before Ian Fleming invented James Bond, Jean Bruce invented his French equivalent, Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, alias OSS 117. Both fictional spies travelled the world, fighting megalomaniacs, shagging hot chicks and generally saving the day in a manner that now seems hopelessly out of date. Both also inspired movies, although the Bond series was exponentially more successful. By 2006, both franchises faced the same problem. The classic spy thriller had fallen into self-parody - the gadgets and chicks formula had been discredited - and spoofs like AUSTIN POWERS were making more money. The Bond franchise responded by becoming more serious and stripped down and, to my mind, boxed itself into a corner with CASINO ROYALE. By contrast, the OSS 117 franchise decided to co-opt the critics, exploiting the camp, kitsch tendencies of the 60s spy flicks - essentially spoofing itself.

The resulting movie is a beautifully crafted spoof that had me laughing out loud throughout. The plot sees Agent 117 (Jean Dujardin) sent to Cairo to investigate the murder of another Agent and good friend, Jack Jefferson (Philippe Lefebvre). In addition, 117 has to bring peace to a country riven between royalists, islamists and various colonnial powers. On the way, he'll fight with chickens, shag an Egyptian princess, face-off with Nazis and generally cause offense! The movie has a lot of fun exploring the latent homo-eroticism of the relationship between agents (not least between Bond and Leiter in the novels.) But the most fun comes from the film's recreation of the shooting style of Dr No era movies: period costumes, dodgy fight scenes, rubbish back-projection, jazz-filled sound-tracks...!

Jean Dujardin is absolutely perfect as Agent 117. He looks like a young Gallic Sean Connery in his 60s suits and brilliantined hair. But he also has a real talent for physical comedy and several scenes are up there with the best of Inspector Clousseau. Just keep an eye out for a scene where he dances the twist at an Embassy ball. I can't wait till the next 117 movie. Absolutely perfect for a miserable Sunday afternoon!
CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES / OSS 117: LE CAIRE NID D'ESPIONS was released all the way back in 2006 in France, Belgium, Greece and Russia. It was released in 2007 in the Philippines. It was released earlier this yaer in Spain, the US and Brazil and is currently on release in the UK.