Amour

4:26 AM | Labels:

Amour
Directed Michael Haneke
Written by Michael Haneke
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert
2012 

Obviously if Michael Haneke is going to do a love story, it’s going to be the most intellectually piercing and downbeat love story you can imagine. This is no sentimental tale of a blossoming relationship full of promise, but a twilit romance defined by a complete lack of hope for the future. Having said this, it’s still very much a romance, and all the more touching for its portrayal of love’s persistence in spite of a looming exit.

Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are an elderly couple leading the type of quiet, pleasant life you kind of hope your own retirement will resemble. They’re still mobile, still loving, and are watching their offspring and protégés enjoy success in pursuits they themselves have loved. However, when Anne suffers a stroke, Georges struggles to find ways to care for her, and their life becomes ever more insular and limited. Praise and condolences from outside their unit become meaningless, and the opinions of friends and family become background noise. Their commitment to each other is never cast in the least doubt; rather, this particular love story addresses how Georges’ love for Anne is manifested, and what it will permit him to do.

In terms of style, and to a certain degree even in tone, this is recognisable as the work of the same man who produced such joys as Funny Games and The White Ribbon. There’s the same detachment, similar moments of blood-freezing realisation, and the all-too-familiar feel for the uncanny and uneasiness in the inhuman sounds and appearance of a person in distress. But there’s none of the viciousness, and the detachment here is that not of a dispassionate voyeur but of one refusing to stand in judgment. It’s fairly clear right from the opening scene the path events will set out for the couple, and when the climax arrives I’m sure there are people who will find it as tragic as I found it relieving. The point is that the film doesn’t excuse or condemn anything. Making characters sympathetic or hateful is no kind of challenge compared to making them admirable regardless of how you feel about their actual conduct, but this is what Haneke, Trintignant and Riva achieve here with Georges and Anne. Amour is endlessly sad, but there’s a sweetness that couldn’t be there in any other circumstances.
Tom

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Rust and Bone

4:38 AM | Labels:

Rust and Bone
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Written by Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain
with Matthais Shoenaerts, Marion Cotillard, Bouli Lanners
2012

High hopes for this one after A Prophet (Audiard’s excellent 2009 crime epic), and though it doesn’t quite reach those heights, it by no means disappoints. It’s a sprawling yet intense tale of love, loss and dependencies of all kinds, full of striking images and repeating visual motifs, and articulating the extremes of emotion without ever breaking into melodrama.

We meet Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hulking whale of a man of inconsistent responsibility, as he struggles to travel with no money and Sam, his young son. He’s moving in with his sister and her husband so they can help look after the child while he finds work. There’s a suggestion that his son was being mistreated while he was living with his mother, and the love and care Ali feels towards him is obvious, though it doesn’t always manifest itself in the best behaviour. While Sam is enrolled in a local school, Ali finds work as a bouncer at a nightclub, where he meets Steph (Marion Cotillard), after she gets in a fight. He takes her home and makes sure she’s OK, leaves his number in case she needs anything, and goes. He hears from her again months later after she is involved in a life-changing accident, and ends up helping her more than he ever could have foreseen.

A battle between self-reliance and responsibility runs through this film, as the two leads learn to trust and rely on each other, and to accept the extent they each need to do so. Audiard deals with both abject tragedy and touching emotion with the same calm, distant, yet sympathetic air, and it makes for a powerful drama. He can do this because he can place so much of the story in the hands of the two lead performances; Cotillard and Schoenaerts work together beautifully, both flawed and broken in their own ways, and both crying out for help while refusing to be remotely needy. Schoenaerts in particular charms with an unwieldy gentleness, behind which lurks a capacity for anger and violence that occasionally gets pointed in the wrong direction.

If there’s a problem with the film it’s that there’s almost too much going on, and it sometimes becomes unclear exactly whose story is being focused on. It’s never dull by any means, but it feels much longer than two hours, and there’s definitely a section in the last act with a sensation of one incident too many. In spite of this you never stop wanting to find out what happens next to the characters even if the plot itself starts to feel a bit superfluous. And the understated revelation at the end makes it all worthwhile.
Tom


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Room 237

4:42 AM | Labels:

Room 237
Directed by Rodney Ascher
2012


The release of the uncut original of The Shining (the full-length didn’t do so well at first in the USA, so Stanley Kubrickchopped off nearly half an hour for the global release) has been given a nice accompaniment in this light-hearted collection of five fan theories of what the iconic horror film is really about. If you’ve seen The Shining more than twice you’ll probably have developed your own ideas on the film, through necessity more than anything else; there is an awful lot of sinister gazing into space and non-linear descent-into-madness editing, so you naturally have to make assumptions. Listening to the five obsessives here (harsh, but true: each of them has gone through it frame by frame multiple times), I’ve only been convinced of one thing, which is that there is no big unifying metaphor.

To give all due credit to the contributors, this is at least in part due to more than one of them pointing out some interesting details. Cataloguing the errors in a film is a noble if massively geeky tradition, but anyone who knows anything about Kubrick’s working methods will understand that it’s difficult to accept that he wouldn’t have noticed something as glaring as the shadow from the helicopter in the famous opening shots, or the way the hotel’s carpet changes underneath Danny Torrance after a tennis ball rolls out of nowhere. As such the abundance of presumably deliberate moving furniture and other inconsistencies is intriguing, as are many (though certainly not all) of the proposed visual references. In the end though it’s the very act of trying to pin down a specific message that destroys the theories, because it automatically creates an atmosphere in which only one of them can be right, yet none of them are permeating enough to convince.

Of the ideas that do make an impact, pretty much all of them can be assumed into generally accepted, less esoteric readings to do with past crimes leaving an ex-temporal stink, and the Overlook Hotel functioning as both the haunted house and the monster of the piece, in which case the inconsistencies are basically the building messing with the Torrance family. I’d put money on Kubrick intending it to be disorientating, nothing more. Then, of course, there’s some total bullshit, which is at least good for a laugh. Jack Nicholson has a “minotaur-like" expression, anyone? Or there's the priceless moment when a voiceover tries to point out the director’s face in a stubbornly abstract cloud formation. Almost as uninspiring is the regurgitation of fanboy myths, such as Kubrick having an IQ of 200 (no he didn’t, and, for the record, measurement of IQ past the 150 mark becomes exponentially vaguer than it already is, and, also for the record, the stories of him ruining everyone he played at chess are more entertaining), or faking the Apollo 11 moon landing footage for NASA. The guy working that theory has apparently seen a mockumentary called Dark Side of the Moon, and taken it seriously. He then proceeds to reveal himself as a total paranoiac. If – if – the moon landings were faked, or the footage was faked, or whatever, then the US government and NASA have clearly adopted the sensible policy of ignoring those claiming they did so as though it weren’t worth responding. Nobody’s monitoring you because of your less-than-radical ideas.

These are just cheap criticisms of harmless fan theories, though, and Rodney Ascher himself isn’t trying to convince anyone of anything. Rather, as Peter Bradshaw points out in The Guardian, Room 237 is a look at the very act of viewing a film. Slowing down a film and watching it frame by frame might seem weird, but if you have a real interest in how a film shot works it actually is a fascinating thing to do (I've done it for individual scenes, never an entire movie). The laborious detail in which Kubrick’s film is analysed reinforces its technical brilliance, and demonstrates just how much there is to look out for in cinema generally, conspiracy theories or no, good film or poor. To tell the truth, even though I didn't take the theories themselves seriously, I did find it quite inspiring. There are literally scores of films with various theories swirling around them, and a near-identical documentary could have been made about any one of them. The form this one takes, nothing but voiceovers interweaving over footage and photographs, gets a little incoherent at times, but the visuals are never dull and frequently witty. It certainly made me want to watch The Shining again, which is obviously the strategy behind releasing it alongside the re-release. 
Tom

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