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…


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

So great that you're quitting ? : A review of Les beaux jours (Bright Days Ahead) (2013)

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

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

24 April

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

So great that you’re quitting

Bright Days Ahead (an uneven translation of Les Beaux Jours*) (2013) is in French, but, however well made, it has more of the sensibility of Hope Springs (2012) than of the best of French cinema : when the producer of Hope came to Cambridge Film Festival, he said that Meryl Streep had suggested making the footage at the end, and, although it had not been planned, it was then found possible to do it. The ending of this film strongly reminds one of it, though with very little feeling that matters have been resolved.

The reason being that Hope shares with this film the topic of healing the damage caused by one’s partner’s behaviour – though here the damage seemed to have been skin deep**, whereas in Tommy Lee Jones’ (Arnold’s) case (and contrary to the optimism in the title’s fictitious place name) it brooded over Meryl Streep (Kay) for almost the entire film. Hope is not a great film, and one can be cynical about the motives behind making it, but it still moves Days Ahead out of the brightness, and into the shade.

Another point of contact is a coastal location. Places in New England became the title resort in Hope, and, at least when we are outside and in it (when we are inside, it could be anywhere), the Nord-Pas-de-Calais is a vivid backdrop to Days Ahead, right from the title sequence, which is made to appear written onto the black of a bascule bridge. Straightaway, it is apparent that getting around is dependent on avoiding the times when tides make it favourable for vessels to navigate the channels and the bridge swings up. In no way apparent, for all the amenity of the location, is why Caroline (Fanny Ardant) and Philippe (Patrick Chesnais) are there at all.

In any case, despite Le Week-End (2013)’s reliance on the deus ex machina of Morgan (Jeff Goldblum) to get Hanif Kureishi’s lumbering plot to go anywhere, once it has established the characters of Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick (Jim Broadbent) (but with no real prospect of development***), it shows far more about relationships and those near retirement than Days Ahead even thinks to do. For it goes straight for showing an affair, but often half-heartedly, so that one can care too little whether it survives, and too much how toxic its effects might be.

The real moment when there is everything is the illicit possibility of penetrative sex in Caroline’s car, and where, however close we seem to get, the windows are ever interposed between them and us – when that idea is shied away from, we suddenly step back and see where we had got lost from in awareness, the car in plain view and with people about their business.

Ageing the lead actress Ardant backwards is a well-worn trick, and even passionate moments seen in the store-room (to bolster up the notion of romantic rejuvenation) simply do not make for sustaining the conviction of amour fou such as KST’s in Leaving (2009) (or even of her bit-part as Virginie Rousset in Bel Ami (2012), where she, too, glows and visibly unfolds from knowing the favours of Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson)) : here, the feeling on both sides is too tepid, even to the extent of stating to one’s lover that the preference is for sleep rather than continuing the time together, and Julien (Laurent Lafitte), too, is just beautified over time to suggest his strengthening appeal.

Throw in ‘getting to know’ the members of the Les Beaux Jours club in a way that is managed hardly better than in Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of his superior stage-play as Quartet (2012). In Days Ahead, there are stock follies such as a wine-tasting where someone takes snorters or people unused to potting are let loose on a wheel and produce a deformed piece of clay, and the cheery message that we are invited to share that sniffy Caroline comes to value her new friends might give some a sense of warmth. Yet it is essentially a diversion from the fact that nothing is really going on, except at the level of cliché, and, whilst that may be fine for Fanny Chesnel’s novel, it is too thin for a film that seeks our approval.

Ultimately, the plot throws us back on Philippe and who he really is in relation to Caroline, but sadly the action has concentrated so much on her both that we do not know, and also that we cannot credit what, in the circumstances, would cause him to accommodate her needs. Hope, whatever we may think of its insights, does at least focus on that question, rather than trying to tack it on at the end.


That said, New Empress Magazine's reviewer found more going on here, and more of merit, but making none of these references


End-notes

* Surely not meant to resonate with the title that Beckettt gave to his play Happy Days when he translated it into French… ?

** And, to be susceptible to rapid repair thanks to a few jokes at the expense of a hotel run by a budget brand, and – at the cost of incredulity as to how Philippe got there, and what happened to Caroline’s car – to hitching a lift as the young Dylan or Kerouac might have done.

*** What does happen at the end smacks less of ‘going Godard’ than of the fantasy Paris of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).




If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)