A less-than-divine comedy ?

This is a review of Amour Fou (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 September

This is a review of Amour Fou (2014), which had its UK premiere at

Cambridge Film Festival

According to one who also struggled with Amour Fou (2014), but not in Screen 1 at Festival Central (The Arts Picturehouse : @Campicturehouse), but at Cannes, the film had been billed as a comedy.

Admittedly, a few people did laugh occasionally, but laughing at the manners of the early nineteenth century from the perspective of two hundred years later, and (not necessarily the same thing) seeing the film not as in earnest, but as pastiche, was clearly – if it was one – a conceit that seemed to have been largely lost on the Festival audience (this was the first Festival screening, the UK premiere) :

Yet watch this film as if it were a serious portrayal of the times and miens of the age, and it is literally tedious, i.e. one could not wait for its long-winded vacuum to be refreshed by the buzz and tang of reality in the Picturehouse bar, or on St Andrew’s Street – anywhere, really, but the world of director Jessica Hausner.

-> Under the Skin (2013), for example, one might not enjoy, but think good, @TakeOneCFF - neither was Amour Fou found good, nor enjoyed.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 10, 2014

From this perspective, it is a lifeless piece about love and death – which soon leaves one craving the relative complexity, affectionate Russian (versus German) lampoonery, and tears of joy of Woody Allen’s own Love and Death (1975). Maybe that was the springboard for this pale story, about a man (Heinrich), who is to and fro between two women with his indecent proposal and a ludicrous – even if period – hat.

Except that the word ‘ludicrous’ connotes laughter, not cringing at the notion that such a whining bore, let alone a poet of talent, should be entertained by any except the most pretentious family : melancholy may still have been the fashion (despite a good work-out in places such as England from the mid-sixteenth to early-seventeenth centuries, with Richard Burton even publishing his guide-book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, in 1621), but this Heinrich seems to be almost feigning it as a bargaining tool for what seems, through notoriety, to be a way – if an extreme one – to gain attention for his works.

God forbid, but maybe we were meant to relish Friedrich and Henriette’s implausible patronage, even if, because clearly strained financially, they are lesser nobility / land-owners. Not that one has gone to research the social interaction, the salon life, of Germany in this age (when, in England, Austen would have been preparing Pride and Prejudice for the press), but it seems scarcely likely that any but a Goethe (active at this time) or a Schiller (who died in 1805) might be revered as a person, not just for his or her works, and treated as an equal.

For patronage has ever been an uneasy relationship, but the derogatory opinion of scribbling, and the desire to prove that Shakespeare’s poetry and plays are enobled by really having been produced by such a one as the Earl of Oxford (as beyond the ken of a grammar-school boy from Stratford-on-Avon), have been ever with us, and they linger. Exceptions may lie in real aristocratic patronage, such as what – for him – appear to have been the taxing times for René Descartes (and other scholars and thinkers), at the beck and call of Christina, Queen of Sweden (as Beckettt alludes to in his early prize-winning poem ‘Whoroscope’).

Or, in tribute to the great director, his account of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725 – 1798) in Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976) through the medium of Donald Sutherland – let alone Josef Haydn, languishing first at Schloß Esterházy, then at Esterháza (broadly 1761 to 1790), Johann Sebastian Bach, restricted at the court of Cöthen (1717 to 1723), or Wolfgang Amadeus, running away from service to the Prince-Bishop of Salzburg (1773 to 1777) to Vienna.

In film terms, at any rate, we have another Sleeping Beauty (2011), which defies us to stay awake, and taunts us if we do so and hate it : there, as a student waitressing to pay her way through some course (as part of which she is required to study games theory), Lucy / Melissa (Emily Browning) is short of money. Yet that film is not one about how she is trapped into a form of (or what is little better than) prostitution.

At best, it is her acknowledging to herself what she must have known all along (there have been clues enough) : she is not special, nor is she, though, a Sonmi-451 (in Doona Bae), coming to consciousness (in the visualization of Cloud Atlas (2012)) and stirring up a movement with consequences, any more than Heinrich has an original bone in his body, with his longing for one woman (or the other – it does not matter much to him) to accompany him in his quest for immortality.

In relation to this film, we have scant notion of what Heinrich’s writing might be like – unless the text of the two songs to which we are ‘treated’ (fortepiano and voice, twice each) might be inferred to be his (see below). And many a celebrated Lied has started as an unremarkable poem, from which a musical talent has crafted a finer creation (although also ones by Goethe (Heidenröslein*) or Heine (the settings in Schwanengesang, D. 957) have also been not unequal to being set well).

Those who are acquainted with the plot of Die Marquise von O. (The Marquise of O), but forget that its author was Heinrich von Kleist (to whom our Heinrich does turn out to bear a striking resemblance, physically at least), may be surprised to find Heinrich appearing to pass it off as his own… But would it, any more than if we had been confronted with, say, William in Love, add anything that a version of the real story of Kleist is being told here in semi-disguise (although aspects of Kleist’s life and work have appeared in at least a dozen other films) ?

Well, try comparing this with Jules et Jim (1962), Truffaut’s film based on a novel, with a woman in between the two title-characters, and there is no knowingness, no depth, in Heinrich’s wheedling**. Even on the best interpretation of Amour Fou, namely that it wishes to depict for our amusement the foibles of the bourgeois classes and their dangerous flirt with the arts, it has nothing much to say, least of all with its – apparently hypothetical – suggestion about the facts at the end (which, given the preceding confusion and implausible sudden certainty, does not actually surprise, because one had surmised the position to be quite arbitrary).

And one doubts that, ready to laugh, the clumsy consummation of something that was meant to be beautiful (and to transcend the misery of life) either has one laugh – or, if what is felt seems an inappropriate reaction, choke it back.


End-notes

* To which Das Veilchen, a setting of which (twice) we hear, is Goethe’s companion piece : to judge from Wikipedia®, it appears that Mozart's is the most celebrated setting...

** The film is set, if only in static words, in the era of post-Revolutionary France, and amongst the chatter of those who stand to lose concerning the changes to make taxation general, but even that background feels unimportant, if the film wanted to say something to us about our own times. Nothing, in any terms, seems to amplify (by taking us beyond it, in a running-time of what felt much longer than the advertised 96 minutes) the general description given in the Festival’s printed programme…


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

Just sheltering ?

This is a review of The Sheltering Sky (1990)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 August

This is a review of The Sheltering Sky (1990) in a 70mm print

* Contains spoilers *

Magnificent 70mm The Sheltering Sky (1990) at @CamPicturehouse : brilliant conception, luminous photography, attuned music, JM & DW superb.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2013

Not least through the experience of being seen in 70mm, with JM being Malkovich, DW Winger, and co-written and directed by Bertolucci.


Another in the Festival Central audience (and from the team at TAKE ONE) gave us:

Plenty to ponder about The Sheltering Sky: gloriously beautiful (and a great 70mm print), occasionally impenetrable, fascinating yet remote.
— Gavin Midgley (@GavinMidgley) August 26, 2013

I am unsure where the impenetrability crept in (if that is what impenetrability does, rather than suddenly shutting the door - or window), but, because I did not experience it, I would be de facto.

I also did not find myself at a remove, that anything was remote : unlike the fascination of, say, the very different Only God Forgives (2013), which comes from the other side of something much more substantial than a bamboo curtain.


Moving on, though in a sense not, there is a strong feeling of Pirandello at a crucial moment, where much more unravels that has gone before - I am thinking, needless to say, of Six Characters, as his best-known work (drama or otherwise) in the UK. Suddenly, the sporadic narrator, who seemed located when first we heard his voice, has a significance that we failed to grasp.

Does everything dissolve back to the point where we have nothing ? No, I still do not think so, hours later, though it might be worth at the original novel by Paul Bowles - I cannot see myself doing more than flicking through to have a feel for the narrative effect. I am left more with a feeling of benevolence, not that what I have engaged with has been insubstantial, the stuff of dreams.

That said, I do believe that there is a point, when Kit (Winger) leaves Port(er) (Malkovich) - and we have been greeted with a shot from then at the start of the film, after some sort of establishing of era and class has been effected by stock footage - and goes off with her little case, where the status of what we then see divides / departs from 'reality'. After all, it does not seem very likely that she would simply abandon him, and what she does is hardly the best way to cope with her position.

The scene in the market, where the flies are back*, the people, into whom or whose culture she has scarcely integrated, throng around her - this becomes the stuff of nightmare from which she wishes, unlike Joyce's Stephen, to escape into her own history.

Probably as long as we will ever know, we have had emperors dreaming that they were butterflies who might be dreaming the emperors, the King in Alice who is dreaming her, and Borges conjuring up a man who does conjuring himself only to find that he is another's creation. At the level of the narrative, Bertolucci's film gives us Port seeming to flee himself (or, at any rate, Tunner**) to take Kit to 'the pass', the view from which explains the title : he describes how it seems to protect, as if like a mantle, whereas she wants to know from what, and what is beyond.

On their initial arrival in the port town, Kit storms off at Port persisting in telling his dream to Tunner. This is where the occasional narration, and the appearance of the narrator, begin. However, beforehand, Port gestures at a white car arriving outside, and says to Tunner that Kit cannot have the white car just be a white car, but it has to mean something - which, in the film that follows, it does.

That impulse as describes by Port to Tunner is there again in Kit's unsettled response to being told about the sky (a half-empty one, not a half-full one), and the anxiety, the jealousy, the guilt surface as they are making love at that spot, and then deny them of a climax, whereas we most want that they should give themselves to each other and shakes off negative impulses. It becomes another such impulse in its own right.


And, finally, Port's sickness, which draws Kit to him : is it, in any sense, real or is it symbolic ? Does it represent the decay of their relationship (Port has been off for the night***, and she has woken from the train journey to find Tunner), which only, when Kit is properly afraid of losing Port, brings her back to him, and is there not quite a strong feel of, for example, Truffaut in Jules et Jim (1962) ?

If seeking to join a camel-train does not also operate on the level of some sort of psychological coping-mechanism, some projection of the self out of the situation into the fantasy of becoming an Arabic man's wife (or mistress), I am misreading this film and what I see it suggesting about these characters.

I do not think so, for, as with that scene on the edge of the cliff, the scenery - shot with real flair and a sense of grandeur by Vittorio Storaro) - feels there not merely for the purpose of telling a story, but is the story, or in inseparable from the story, or the story from it. The grotesqueries of travelling companions (includingly the lovingly obnoxious Timothy Spall), the purgatorial conditions, all of these things operate multiply, and make that quick flick through Bowles' original seem more likely...



End-notes

* Were we, at some level, reminded of the Biblical plague of flies (and / or of such tones in Days of Heaven (1978)) ? Do the weevils in the flour with which the soup has been made likewise say something to us ? (Port and Kit play oblivious to them just to banish Tunner, with his incessant spraying !)

** Played by Campbell Scott, he is George Tunner, irritating, ingratiating, even seductive (but kept at arm's length by his surname ?). He could be all men / suitors / rivals - or none, and just a cipher.

*** Self-destructively, he is not content just to get away with his wallet, but has to show that he has done so.


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