Showing posts with label Léa Seydoux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Léa Seydoux. Show all posts

Friday, 9 September 2022

Four Theses after dutifully watching the whole of Crimes of The Future (2022) : Crimes against remotely being cinematic (work in progress ?)

Four Theses after watching the whole of Crimes of The Future (2022) : Crimes against cinema ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 September

Four Theses after dutifully watching the whole of Crimes of The Future (2022) : Crimes against remotely being cinematic (work in progress ?)


Preamble :


This is about as cinematic as the whole film gets - and as much daylight
(From the opening shot, with Sotiris Sozos (as Brecken))


In preparing what follows for publication (e.g. checking such things as release-dates), it has become apparent that IMDb has been told to call Crimes of The Future (2022) Drama / Horror / Sci-Fi. (It obediently calls The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017) Drama / Horror / Mystery.)

In fact, it is an indigestible, plasticized stew of (in chronological order*) such elements as :

* Doctor Who (1963 – 1989) [Especially The Troughton / Pertwee / Baker I years]

* Delicatessen (1991)

* Shadows and Fog (1991)

* Crash (1996) [Cronenberg's own, far superior film]

* Kinetta (2005)

* Raw (2016)

* The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017)

* Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019)
* The French Dispatch (2021)



Four Theses (Review points proper)

(1) Only restrained by someone's recent Tweet** that one cannot justifiably comment on a film, if one walked out, it can now be said that, at 15-20 mins of 107, the impulse to leave Crimes of the Future then should have been taken.

(2) Without the names Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, etc., Crimes would be indistinguishable from an undistinguished film-festival submission, whose 'screener' one would keep pausing to shout incredulous injunctions or obscenity (as if one's dutifully tortured watch were the real drama ?).

(3) A film that is over-reliant on speech - rather than juxtaposition of scenes or narrative-jumps - as exposition, and (inter alia) shabby interiors*** in low light-levels against which to set Lanthimos-like conversations.

(4) It helpfully used up a free ticket at The Arts Picturehouse.


Courtesy of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart (as The Eurythmics), there is, now, a synopsis [Eurythmics, Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart - Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) (Official Video)], to which #UCFF links here !







More to come... ?






Afterword :



End-notes :

* Titles with underscoring will, in due course, have links to #UCFF reviews - the film-references are not necessarily to films rated well.

** Obviously, as it was in the last week, not this Tweet, but it will do... :

*** As of, if not in, the derelict buildings in Athens that we see in establishing shots. (Occasionally, we are en plain air)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 28 November 2013

In yer face II

This is a follow-up to a review of Blue is The Warmest Colour (2013)

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

28 November

This is a follow-up to a review of Blue is The Warmest Colour (2013)

* Full of spoilers about Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) - linked from the review here *


* Introduction to Adèle’s family and school life (Pasteur, Lille)

* (We learn that she is ‘a junior’, but her age is hard to place, and the French terminology does not mean very much)

* Her female friends urge her that Thomas is interested in her

* When she meets him on the bus, they talk, and he turns out to be ‘a senior’, reading science

* They have a date, but his advances in the cinema seem to cause her problems

* He confronts her with avoiding him, and they sleep together (not very convincingly, she claims that it was good)

* Alongside all this, she has passed Emma in the street (‘love at first sight’, as one of the teachers twice refers to ?), and then has a confused masturbatory dream in which Emma and others feature, from which she awakes aroused and disturbed

* At this stage, it remains open whether Emma and she had been lovers before, and seeing each other in the street has sparked something off

* Valentin, a male friend, has seemed understanding, and reassured her about her appearance (be behaves as if, contradicted by the family set-up, he might be an older sibling)

* Later, after upset regarding telling Thomas that she is breaking up with him, Valentin takes her out of school, and they end up, that evening, at a gay bar

* Adèle tires of watching same-sex kissing and the dancing, and wanders out, and into another bar

* There, she is the subject of interest of various women, Emma (who is on a balcony) and she see each other, and Emma, calling her Sophie, claims to be her cousin : it is soon apparent that they do not, in fact, know each other

* Again, Adèle ends up leaving, but Emma waits at the school gates, and they go off together

* Valentin indiscreetly (though innocently) reveals where Adèle and he went, and she is then taunted for associating with a ‘dyke’ (Emma) and accused of ‘eating pussy’

* She then meets Emma again and does so – full, intimate, unhesitating sex-acts from someone who has never slept with a woman before

* Unclear where (need not be Lille), but a LGBT march, where Emma and Adèle are prominent marchers and kiss publicly


Significant other events :

* Introduction of Adèle to Emma’s parents (who accept her sexuality) – the parents question the solid nature of Adèle’s intention of doing a master’s course and going into teaching, as against taking more of a risk on the job market

* Seemingly on her return from this visit, a surprise eighteenth-birthday celebration (so we learn her age)

* Likewise with Adèle’s parents (but Emma goes along with saying that she helps Adèle with her philosophy, and even that she has a boyfriend) – her parents stress the precarious nature of being an artist, and Emma claims to be a graphic artist, too, and to get work from it

* Huge jump in time (unless it is teaching practice) to Adèle taking primary classes, and a male teacher urging her so come drinking after work

* Big party for Emma’s art career, where she meets Lise, and Adèle talks to and dances with Joachim, eyeing Emma and Lise suspiciously – pitting Egon Schiele against Gustav Klimt, etc., does not convince as the height of intellectual conversation

* The male teacher drops Adèle off, and Emma, who is watching and sees them kiss passionately, confronts Adèle, who admits sleeping with him when lonely (because Lise was helping Emma with her art, which makes Adèle suspicious)

* Emma calling Adèle ashamed of her and a whore and a slut, given that, later, Emma has a relationship with Lise, makes one wonder whether Adèle’s supicions of Emma were right, and Emma was just covering falling out of love with Adèle (as she had been with a girl for two years when she slept with Adèle)


And so on...




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

This is a review of Blue is The Warmest Colour (2013)

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

28 November (updated 30 November)

* May contain spoilers *

This is a review of Blue is The Warmest Colour (2013)

This film does not drag, largely because one urges the development of the story between the two principals, but, at the same time, because the film is only incidentally 'about' them, it also feels somewhat hollow : at 105 minutes in, that seemed OK, and about right (when one knew that a screening that went in at 4.15 p.m. was not due out until around a titanic 7.35 p.m.), but then one was tempted to keep an eye on the time to guess how it would end.

When it ends, not with the flagged-up possibility (at which, even as a misdirection, one cringes), but just with a departing figure and a black-out, the next thing on the screen, in white on the black, is :

La vie d’Adèle

Chapitres 1 et 2

It felt like a mid-air ending, and this credit almost confirms that, as with the 600-page novel La Vie de Marianne (Pierre de Marivaux’s unfinished book) that Thomas tries to read, this could be just part of a long story.

What is that story so far ? Roughly chronologically, it is set out here (for those who wish to see it), but there are various themes that emerge from the film in general :


Adèle makes a habit of walking out of social situations, and we see her at what seems her most relaxed when she is dancing (with men, largely ?), but she does confront her accusers at school in what is a scuffle. A scuffle with seemingly no consequences, although the feelings that others have about her would scarcely evaporate – director Abdellatif Keciche may think it immaterial to do more than show that such attacks exist in life, but treating it as if hostility from Adèle’s circle were a one-off that she would easily live with at school is fantasy. (Maybe we do not need to know, if she could not ride the storm, had to change schools, and her parents found out what it was about.)

Likewise, marching in support of LGBT causes and kissing in public – unless a distance away from Lille – is not going to be without ramifications, and, as mentioned, how long will Adèle’s parents be put off by Emma being ‘a friend’ ? Are these just dream-scenes, including the six or so graphic minutes of continuous sex, divorced from being real-life events ? If they meditate on anything, such as showing how Adèle’s parents shape what is probably an inferiority complex, they just subvert an unremittingly linear narrative and make it seem empty.

What fills it, with Emma’s face less so than with Adèle’s, are the screen-filling close-ups, so large that one is simultaneously torn, if reliant on the subtitles (maybe Keciche did not think of that), between reading them and adjusting one’s vision to the angle subtended by the large image : whereas, with a typical medium shot, specifically deployed as a departure in, amongst other places, the primary school, one can relatively easily switch between the shot and the next caption.

As against the head, or torso shots, at dinner with her parents, these vastly magnified images of Adèle (or Emma) constitute a form of immediacy, but one can hardly be unaware that the pair seems engrossing because there is nothing else to see, however winning Léa Seydoux’s smile (as Emma) may be. It does not hold up the film’s progression, but only a fluent speaker of French could have the full impact of the huge facial depictions and the dialogue.

As the film proceeds, Adèle comes in contact with Emma’s friends, seemingly, for the first time at the party that we see, where she broadly feels inadequate (as she appears to comment when undressing) – has she no way of knowing about herself (and saying to Emma) that parties are not her thing, rather than throwing herself into the catering as if she planned the whole thing ? (Whatever did happen with her one-time school-friends, Adèle does not appear to have asked anyone with whom she socializes, maybe because she does not, and Emma is all in all to her.)

Actually, she may have planned the whole thing as a way of meeting these friends, if Emma has not actually shared them – what we are shown does not give confidence that there is some thinking about the characters (which some call ‘a back story’), but one may come back to that being the point, that the situations are not doing more than drawing attention to their artificiality. (Probably not true, but this is an attempt to be charitable.)

At the end of the film, visiting Emma’s show, it is just more of the same, as if somehow Adèle thought that she would have Emma to herself – false expectations and inevitable disappointments.

A teacher in one of her classes at school had talking about Antigone, about childhood, and about tragedy being unavoidable – are we meant to recall that, and think of Adèle, being hurt and feeling outside life ? The title of the film then means that Emma, the blue-haired girl, was, she realized, all that she ever wanted.

Adèle Exarchopoulos, who plays Adèle, is hardly off the screen, and is larger than life (literally, in character, although actually very reserved and even awkward). Seydoux and she* do a very good job of bearing the weight of this film, but, in particular, the scripting of the party scenes does not persuade that these people are Beaux Arts graduates, the dialogue between the two about ‘fine’ versus ‘ugly’ arts is barely credible, and the camera does well to show little of Emma’s putative artworks, even the sketch of Adèle (which is, she says, both like and not like her).

A film that has a significant element of the art world really ought to know its material better – unless, again, this is a sort of pastiche, maybe Adèle having a nightmare about throwing a party for Emma, and then feeling quite out of place, alienated**. Blue is the Warmest Colour suggests a topsy-turvy distance on and from the world, but one can only speculate so long on what is sloppy, what intentional…


End-notes

* Interestingly, Seydoux is 28 (born 1 July 1985), Exarchopoulos 20 (born 22 November 1993).

** At least three times, we are shown the triangle of Adèle's mouth open as her head lies on the pillow, which seemed to be acknowledging that those in their teens sometimes need more sleep (Adèle tells Emma that she eats everything, except shellfish (a dislike that she conquers), and a lot), but could be suggesting that what seems to be happening is but in dream (what else is cinema ?).

The Marivaux novel, from what can be quickly judged of it, does as the film's subtitle suggests that it should, i.e. to take the central character's (inner) point of view. Forty-eight hours after the screening, thinking about what we see of Adèle's life leads to the possibility that there is some element of Belle de Jour (1967) here, and that what may appear to be straight, linear narration is actually more of a dreamscape, a projection into a future that is yet to be...




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