Com’era, dov’era : Claire Denis and L'intrus (2004)

This is a response to L’intrus (The Intruder) (2004)

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This is a response to L’intrus (The Intruder) (2004)

Watching L'intrus (2004), one immediately has to ask who this intruder is¹ – in the opening titles, the word itself is introduced with visuals that connote suspicious questioning [personne qui s'introduit dans un lieu ou un groupe sans y être invitée] :

Although there are other candidates², one is a male who is inexplicably seen killed at night and, in daylight, his body concealed, whereas another – who, as the film proceeds, certainly seems to intrude – is the perpetrator of these actions. On this question and many others, the film's largely non-directive approach chooses not to give an answer. However, this style of presentation does not wholly leave viewers to make what they will of that which director Claire Denis and her co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau do show, because they still, at least, follow such conventions as signalling that the preceding sequence has been a dream³ by cutting to the sleeper (Louis), awakening in bed.

It is hardly uniquely true fact of Claire Denis' film that it leaves viewers to piece together what even the events consist in, let alone what they might signify, since a fairly arbitrary list of relevant film-references (i.e. a non-exhaustive one) would have to include the following (in order of date of release) :

* Mirror (1975) ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

* Eraserhead (1977) ~ David Lynch

* The Lost Highway (1997) ~ Lynch

* Mother and Son (1997) ~ Aleksandr Sokurov

* Code unknown (Code inconnu : Récit incomplet de divers voyages) (2000) ~ Michael Haneke


After the opening scenes², which serve to ‘leap-frog’ us to him, the film broadly follows Louis (played by Michel Subor), but, despite our seeing him engaged in his semi-naturist activities, and with his seeming delight in the company of his huskies, we cannot easily understand his living as he does, let alone why or for how long he has done so. In the film’s terms, he just is – depicted as he is, and how he is.

However, just as Denis does not always expressly delineate moving the location to another territory (or where it is – there are no captions, which in conventional films tell audiences ‘where they are’), so she does not leave more than partial clues as to matters such as : the passing of time (again, mainstream films often employ captions with the date and / or time) ; why we might be in that place now ; and what motivates the actions that we see. (As with the mise-en-scène, Louis Trebor is depicted in situ, and we derive any context in an incidental way.) Other continents are simply seen to be where Louis has travelled to, without the narrative contrivance of showing airport departure-boards as other films usually would (or planes taking off or landing), because that is all implicit in the change in what is in front of the camera.

Unlike in the case of Mirror, where Tarkovsky also has the same actor play mother and daughter, and so we must therefore concentrate to discern past from present, memory from scenes that have been imagined, Claire Denis may appear not to deviate significantly from time being seen in a linear way. Instead, in this film, time is rooted in the places to which Louis journeys - as a force from which the past emanates ? Yet, as part of Denis’ directorial telescoping of time, Louis has an operation without our knowing quite how, when or where, quite as if those things both do not matter and will not be allowed to matter to us – because we cannot ‘get behind’ what her fellow screenwriter and she choose to give to us in the artefact that is the film. Even so, Louis’ evident ill-health and a visit to the bank link us to his being away, and to the procedure, before all of which we had hardly heard speak.

We learn his desire for the future, and – in a scene with more dialogue than at any other point – of a ludicrous attempt to satisfy it, a moment that is not only a bizarre 'beauty parade', just between those holding it and taking part and us, but also a connection with the substitutionary universe of the early work of Yorgos Lanthimos. Louis seems satisfied with what happens, and we may accordingly surmise that he cannot be affected by what he does not know – we cannot escape the symbolism that we have seen the scars that the operation gave him now mirrored.


The film has a poetry to it, and there is a release of vibrant colour when a ship is launched, but there is nothing intrinsic to the film that still needs to be found : the act of creation is – engaging with it – in and through us. What would it be to search for greater meaning than this ? (Self-referentially, regardless of what Louis most wants, he almost certainly does not get what he decided that he was seeking.)

What Denis hints at is that, if it is seen as an observer, all life has a quality of mysteriousness – and therefore, perhaps, she suggests the fragmentary nature (or even obliquity) of what, even when we are actual participants, we understand of what is taking place ?


End-notes :

¹ With its title, a film can have us on edge, waiting to see how much (or little) relevance it will have to our interpreting what we will see / have seen : it may be pinned on when, at some telling moment, a character names the word or phrase (as, sensationally, in the closing line of Chinatown (1974)).

In Frances Ha (2012), it proves to be a quirky note that is sounded right at the end (in a visual joke) ; in Lady Bird (2017), it is what Christine insists on calling herself at high school (even if we might not unhelpfully delve into why, and think of the children’s rhyme) ; whereas Aquarius (2016) is named for the featured apartment-block, and its water symbolism.

² Is, for example, 'the intruder' the man whose vehicle has been waved through, on the other side, but who (indicated to stop once he has crossed) a much-congratulated sniffer-dog finds to have something hidden in a container of wipes ? (This man seems to play no further part in the film, but, later, other people are seen disappearing off, into the undergrowth and away from the headlights, during a drive along dark roads at night - are they intruders, too ?)

The customs officer who fêtes the sniffer-dog also proves not to be the film's concern, but is our link to what follows, after a slightly fetishistic sex-scene with her partner that centres on her uniform – might we not equally feel, at that moment, that it is we who intrude ?


³ Or, at the film’s outset (and after a medium shot of a border control), the national flags that we are shown establish that we are on the Swiss side.

Query : in the case of the last shot that we last see, which is followed by the closing credits (and so which cannot be announced in this way), can we even meaningfully ask whether is it 'real', or a dream / fantasy ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Am I my brother’s keeper ?

This is a pre-Festival review of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)

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1 September

This is a pre-Festival review of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)

As with the version of pool being played in Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), one does not need to know about the winning moves of chess to watch this film : one is not required to understand them, although it features chess.

The film invites comparison with Good Will Hunting (1997) (where, as a viewer, one does not need to understand mathematics) for a relationship that is at its centre, that between Nico (Nicholas Albert), played by David Solans, and Julio Beltrán (Julio Manrique), even down to the fact that the motives of both participants in the therapy are mixed : Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is effectively blackmailed into it, and his client, passed to him in desperation, is hardly what Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) had been seeking from Dr Lambeau’s contact.

This is an adaptation of Ignacio García-Valiño’s novel, and its evocation of Cain, the first murderer and the one who gave his name to a mark, deceptively plunges us into what apparently concerns us, some mistake with a contract, and attending a posh business party, where the daggers (or the excuses) may be out.

Dream-laden footage of gently curving wide roads in the suburbs have already given us a notion of this sort of milieu (as against the narrow streets where Beltrán’s practice is located), yet it is really about coming home to the shock and uncertainty of an apparently bloody incident, and with a trail downstairs and into the very heart of the grand cliff-top property where the family lives. Nico’s seeming lack of care, and even taunting of his distressed father Carlos Albert (José Coronado), ends up with the latter calling a chance contact for whatever help there is, short of putting Nico in the reformatory.

We see greater evidence of Nico’s provocations of and angry outbursts at his father, not softened by the Mahler adagietto playing in the car during the scene, and we sense that his mother Coral (Maria Molins) thinks him the more and more lost, if he does not get help. Contrariwise, everything – including what Andrew, a respected former colleague, has to say – has been telling Beltrán not to commit himself to the approaches that the family are making, and to say no.

Yet, in his effort to see how he can assist, he is as driven as J. J. Gittes in Chinatown (1974), and takes the chance of even involving Andrew against the latter’s better judgement – as for Gittes, does it also represent a challenge that, for reasons of his own, Beltrán cannot resist ?

Seeing his interactions with others, such as the staff at school or even his own sister (Patrícia), who manages the practice, it is clear both that he dispenses with the formalities, and that he does not suffer fools gladly : he has time for Nico for those same qualities, and for having a very high IQ, as well an ability for chess…

Classifying this film as ‘a thriller’ misses the richness of chess as a metaphor, not least how Andrew’s (Jack Taylor’s) lavish premises with a covert entrance are fully enlivened by Jesús Monllaó’s direction, where Alice’s sense of another world (through the looking-glass, and with its own rules), and of competition on equal terms, are evoked again and again*. (Here, there is even a little twinkle of Hogwart’s, as of the magically gifted…)

There is also a competitive gesture that makes Will Hunting’s therapy a challenge to Maguire, and which figures in Beltrán fascination for trying to fathom Nico. As Son of Cain unfolds, with its deliberate play of light and dark spaces, we will find that, in this sense, it aspires to what we most admire about Hitchcock’s best suspense, that of a taut unwinding, as of a spring.


End-notes

* Just as Scorsese did, as his film built to The Nine Ball Classic in Atlantic City : the epitome of The American Dream.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Vertiginous Hitch

This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)

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22 September

This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)

* Contains spoilers *

When the Jimmy Stewart / Alfred Hitchcock collaborations that had been quickly taken out of circulation were released again in the mid-1980s, I went to see two or three, certainly Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). I remember not being much struck by either, the former because I found its device - as it assuredly is meant to be - so limiting, the latter because I just did not get it, and the suddenness with which some films from that era ended, with the words 'THE END' and the studio logo coming up, did not help.

Yesterday, watching Vertigo for the first time since then, I found myself coming at it with the eye of someone who loved Chinatown (1974), and found much that links the two, including a way of viewing that had me questioning who was the client and what had Stewart John 'Scottie' Ferguson been engaged to do and why. The key scene, for this way of thinking, was not at Gavin Elster's office, but the next one, at Ernie's, and questioning for whose benefit it was that Scottie was there, in terms of who was identifying whom.

Thereafter, having postulated that Scottie was the one to be seen by Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), it was easy enough to see him being led a dance, even to the extent of her, more than once, taking a parking-space that left him pulling in where no space existed. When she threw herself into San Francisco Bay, she then did so knowing that Scottie was there. (How all this connects with the foundation novel, D'Entre les Morts, I do not know, but research may tell me without having to look it out.)

In the meantime, it is the way of thinking that relates to Chinatown that interests me. Both films have secrets, a crime, someone pretending to be someone else and in whom a third someone should not fall in love, and all end with the death of that someone. In Vertigo, the private investigator (or PI) as a means to an end not known to him is hardly new*, but we are immersed in his pursuit such that we can be blinded to the fact that he has been blinded and bought a story.


To be continued


End-notes

* In a way it goes all the way at least back to Jonah, with texts such as Sir Gawain, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday in between.


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Philip French rides (roughshod) again!

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5 February

Not for the first time (By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (2)), I find Philip French's reviewing not just perverse, but wilfully at odds with the nature of the matter about which he is meant to be informing me. In the case that I shall go on to discuss, I think that it is, actually, just plain laziness.

In his review of In Glorious Technicolor, the book that Francine Stock brought out last year, in The Guardian, French takes much time in seven paragraphs not talking about the book at all (or, at any rate, telling us where Stock and her collaborator Stephen Hughes, both on The Film Programme (on Radio 4), and on the idea for the book and its content, are wrong to think that their book is needed):

* Paragraph 1 - Responses to films from Gorky and Kipling - both affected by, and writing about, films

* Paragraph 2 - Reminding us first, perhaps unnecessarily (and maybe even in a snobbish way!), that Stock is 'a former BBC TV current affairs reporter' (well, yes, but she left Newsnight in 1993, and people such as Paxman and she were by no means just reporters), French sets out his stall about what he thinks the book to be, and brings in Hughes*, before a quotation of more than thirty words** - this paragraph is where, as I will go on to say, French misses what Stock says that the book is

* Paragraph 3 - An exposition of the structure of the book (after French seems to have taken trouble to pin down another connection (this time in the Prologue), that of the evacuation of a cinema during Stock seeing Chinatown (1974), to the Guildford pub bombings, whereas Stock just mentions, to give necessary context, that she was sixteen when there was a bomb in 'an adjacent pub' (Prologue, p. 3), French has seemingly gone overdrive on being detective) - Stock takes three key films per decade for ten decades (and French cannot help reminding us, in comparison, how many films he has seen: 'a total of 30 pictures, the number shown nowadays in an average month to the London critics', but surely not pulling rank?)***

* Paragraphs 4 and 5 - An opening statement that Stock and Hughes are wrong, but nothing more about the book, just two paragraphs about what others have thought and written (surely not showing off learning, though!)

* Paragraph 6 - A continuation of this digression halfway down this paragraph eventually brings us back to the book, or, rather, how it appears and what is shown on the dust-jacket****), and some anecdote that Stock appears to have related about being at a screening of Avatar with James Cameron***** (although, flicking through the section under that title, I could not find it ('2000s Turning Inwards' , pp. 304 - 311))

* Paragraph 7 - A closing paragraph (complete with a terminal joke about the proof copy - how 'protagonist' became 'photagonist', but, to French's disappointment, was corrected, as it redeemed this: 'Stock does, however, repeat the canard that Clark Gable had a catastrophic effect on the underwear industry during the depression, when he appeared without a vest in It Happened One Night******), which otherwise imparts a little damning with faint praise:

Still, there is much to enjoy in this book, and nuggets of information on recent cinematic developments to be mined.

This, along with the following, is all that French wants to say that is positive:

[... D]iscursive discussions of her three chosen films, which are never less than intelligent, though rarely more than perfunctory until the last couple of decades

'Never less than intelligent' - what is that? Irony?


Right at the outset, French had tried to pin on Stock 'borrowing the title from Martin Scorsese's film centenary documentary and book, "a personal journey"', but, as ever (never judge a book by its cover, I mean dust-jacket), he is ascribing to her what does not appear in the book itself.

Even if there were anything distinctive (which there is not) about the phrase that he means, he is quoting from the inside front of the dust-jacket again:

In this fascinating, entertaining and illuminating book Francine Stock takes us on a personal journey through a glorious century of cinema, showing in vivid detail how film both reflects and makes our world.

A 'personal journey' with which French beats her is not even Stock's claim. Yes, she does say 'This book is an attempt to record snatches of the conversation that has been taking place between us and film for the past hundred years. It is also a very personal contribution to that discussion', and she does also say 'The reason for taking this idiosyncratic journey through a century of film is precisely to provoke argument and further exploration' (both from Prologue, p. 5), but that is nothing to do with Scorsese.

French, who too much limits himself to the contents of this Prologue, when not studying the design and wording of the dust-jacket (matters that, rather naively, he imputes to Stock), wants to say (in his third paragraph) 'In the event, it is not a deeply personal book' (before being personal and delving into where and when Stock saw Chinatown, as mentioned above), and 'And there is little that is idiosyncratic about her choice of films'. So he missed the paragraph above, where she wrote:

This book is neither a comprehensive history of cinema nor an attempt to extend the sometimes daunting territory of film studies. [...] The films selected here may not necessarily be the best of their kind or even personal favourites, although many are. Rather, they are films that exert a particular power [...]


So, no claim that the choice of film was idiosyncratic, no claim that this was a personal journey, and a supposed review that spends at least half of our time in reading it in talking about what French thinks that the book should have been. Others must judge how much he actually read, but he's certainly pretty familiar with that dust-jacket and the book's five-page Prologue at least...


For those whose attention span isn't up to Dickensian convolution*******, here is a summary of the above...


End-notes

* Whom he says is 'named as co-author on the title page but not on the cover', whereas the copy that I have, a first edition (not a proof copy), quite clearly states 'with Stephen Hughes' under Stock's name and in a type-size, even if the words already were not, that is inconsistent with an acknowledgement of co-authorship (and which is not claimed in the usual assertion on the imprint-page).

** The quotation is 'We had both searched without much luck for writing on the way cinema intersects with what you might distinguish separately as life: to us it seemed an endlessly fascinating and important aspect of cinema's history'.

Except that those exact words do not seem to appear in the book, unless I am mistaken, but rather 'How could something as patently artificial as film seem so real? We all know that what we see on a screen is not real and yet we experience it so intensely that it provokes a physical response. Might there be particular effects on our behaviour - both public and private? Ways in which we had become indoctrinated by this most seductive medium? Researching for a series on film some years ago, we hunted in vain for a book that tackled these ideas' (Prologue, p. 4).

*** However, she talks about much else, because the two-column index runs to fifteen pages, and talks about other films and their actors, directors, cinematographers and the like in relation to them.

**** With the issue of Hughes being co-author, French was talking about 'the cover', but he has now found the right word.

***** With what accuracy I do not know, French asserts that 'There are more references to James Cameron than to any other moviemaker'. (In the index, The Terminator (1984), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009) are all referenced, but only the last of these has its own titled section.)

****** Whether French took that point of criticism just from the inside front of the dust-jacket is open to question (and how a typo, for which Stock would have no responsibility, could make up for the offence to French's sensibilities is unclear), because it appears in context, in the section on Annie Hall (1977), in paragraphs about fashion and films ('1970s Just when you thought it was safe...', pp. 223 - 227).

******* In other words, a reference to the posting Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News).


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