Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 5 No. 30, October 2001
Martha P. Nochimson
New York Film Festival 2001
The New York Film Festival 2001 took
place against a background of the horror and beauty, fear
and hope, anger and love released into the air along with
noxious columns of smoking dust and ash by the attack on the
World Trade Center on September 11 by a group of terrorists.
It was an inauspicious time to ask people to travel anywhere
by air, and certainly to New York City. But, oddly, the
festival was not marked by a sense of absence, but rather a
consolidated presence. Many who were stranded at the Toronto
Film Festival, in progress while the attack took place, did
not let that experience stop them from attending the
screenings in New York. The same was true of a large number
of the directors represented. The organizers of the festival
told us that, contrary to expectations, the directors
asserted their absolute determination to attend *because* of
the attack. They were moreover unusually eloquent and
forthcoming in their responses to questions about their
films at their Press Conferences. Sentimental it is not to
assert that the onslaught of the preceding weeks brought out
a counter response, a need to assert in the face of a
horrible chasm of human remains, wrecked steel, and sharded
glass the integrity of the human bond. In the words
addressed to the terrorists by of one of the survivors of
the agonizing flight down tens of flights of stairs in the
World Trade Center: if you want to kill us, leave us alone;
we will do that for ourselves. But if you want to make us
stronger, attack us and we will band together. By some ineffable serendipity, many of
the entries in the festival themselves celebrated that
spirit of human solidarity, which may be, as the
above-quoted survivor implies, a flower of adversity. I will
report here on a selection of ten of the Festival films,
all, to use the title of Jean-Luc Godard's entry this year,
in praise of love. None of the ten is predictable in its
approach to love, a few are cold and skewed on the subject,
and some are seriously troubling in the liberties they take
for the sake of expression, but each is intensely centered
on the fate of those energies that seek the other, either
sensually and sexually, as a connection wrought by blood, or
in the pride of fellowship or art. The sweetness of love, its power to
augment us and defy the limitations created by social
conditions, is emphasized by four of the films I have chosen
to highlight: _I'm Going Home_, directed by Manoel de
Oliveira; _Warm Water Under a Red Bridge_, directed by
Shohei Imamura; _Italian for Beginners_, directed by Lone
Scherfig; and _Va Savoir_, directed by Jacques Rivette. With
the exception of Scherfig, these are the visions of
directors ripe with years of life and filmmaking, in their
seventies and nineties. Scherfig, in her forties, is the
first woman to produce a film certified by Dogme
95. _I'm Going Home_ is the story of
Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli), an actor of advancing
years whose wife, daughter, and son-in-law are killed in an
automobile accident, leaving him as the caretaker of his six
year-old grandson, Serge (Jean Koeltgen). Despite the
pathetic possibilities of this plot, _I'm Going Home_
dispenses with melodrama, and indeed drama. It is centered
on Valence's relationship to time, rather than on the
incidents in the story which are almost peripheral, showing
up on the flow of moments that the old actor lives fully.
The film is shot in the time-frame of an old man for whom
neither the past nor the future is as central as the
present. Unlike most portraits of old age, this one does not
reference nostalgia for time past, lyrical close-ups of the
eyes melting into flashbacks. Neither does it take Dylan
Thomas's tack of fighting against the approach of death with
fierce noise. Rather, it conveys a highly unusual,
extraordinarily gratifying model of maturity as a ripeness
that does indeed crown all. Gilbert Valence is a man of the old
school who confronts a culture hyped on drugs, almost
meaningless in its storytelling, and ruled by an adolescent
definition of manhood that substitutes kicks for experience.
In contrast, Valence steadfastly refuses to be detoured from
his immediate encounter with life itself. He learns of the
tragic death of his beloved family as he comes off the stage
from a performance of Ionesco's _Exit the King_, itself an
(absurdist) portrayal of the death not only of a patriarch,
but of the solipsistic power-hunger of patriarchy itself. By
contrast, Valence validates the position of the patriarch as
a true source of dignity and the kind of power that seeks
not to dominate but to hold fast to integrity. Valence turns
the tables on cliches about masculinity by rejecting the
solipsism of the youth culture. He laughs off his agent's
ridiculously earnest attempts to set him up in an affair
with a woman young enough to be a granddaughter, making
mockery of this callow understanding of what it means to
continue to get fun out of life. He similarly rejects the
agent's plan to star him in an action film completely
inappropriate to his age or talents. Rather, he savors, and
we do along with him, the fullness of earthly life sitting
in a cafe with a newspaper and an expresso, playing with his
grandson, and purchasing a beautiful new pair of shoes. He
even plays own brief, real-life action drama when a stoned
addict mugs him with a knife. But both Valence and the film
maintain a clarity about the difference between fiction and
life. There are neither heroics nor atrocity here. The
violence is only a blip on Valence's screen, oddly flat when
we think of how commercial film usually depicts the mayhem
caused by narcotics. This pathetic, crazed young criminal
astonishes Valence with his savagery but departs without
inflicting injury once he is given money and the new
shoes. Valence gives in somewhat when he
agrees to act the role of Buck Mulligan in an American
production of a film of _Ulysses_, directed by John
Crawford, a trendy American director played hilariously by
John Malkovitch. Valence is three times the age of James
Joyce's Buck Mulligan and can barely speak English, let
alone with the requisite Irish accent, but Crawford is
confidant that this can all be remedied with make-up and a
wig. The disaster on the soundstage, as Valence attempts to
follow Crawford's directions, is terminated abruptly when
the old actor informs everyone that he is going home. As he
stumbles through the streets back to his house, it is clear
that Valence is dying, as his very young grandson realizes
when he arrives. Yet the mood is radiantly elegiac, rather
than somber. The filmic rhythms have taken us into Valence's
sensibility and we have had the world in his time. Character
at the most profound level, rather than action, has
structured this film both by the director and by Michel
Piccoli, who renders Valence with a depth of feeling that
dispenses with surface pyrotechnics. He radiates the mellow
joy of being alive that embraces both tragedy and happiness.
Together de Oliveira and Piccoli explode Hollywood truisms
about the natural subject of cinema being external rather
than internal, young rather than old, plot rather than
character-centered. Unfortunately this masterpiece by a
master did not have a distributor by the time the press
screenings at Lincoln Center were finished. One can only
hope that this woeful situation has been or soon will be
remedied. _Warm Water Under a Red Bridge_ by
Shohei Imamura is another work by a master, though not among
his best. It is certainly a departure for this member of the
Japanese New Wave whose previous films have tended toward
the suffering realism of _Black Rain_, a story about
survivors of Hiroshima, and _Vengeance is Mine_, sometimes
compared with _In Cold Blood_. _Warm Water_ is a comedy of
magic realism about Yosuke (Koji Yakusho), a man trapped in
a dead-end marriage who meets Saeko (Misa Shimizu), a woman
whose orgasms are every bit as ejaculatory as a man's, and
then some. Based on a novel by Yo Henmi, _Warm
Water_ is apparently intended by Imamura to be a tribute to
women; he believes that the 21st century will be the era of
women. Imamura says he is fascinated by women's strength,
what he calls their (our) 'repulsive power', but was not in
New York to clarify this usage. My guess is that it refers
to the power to repel rather than the condition of being
repellent. In any case, Imamura's self-proclaimed feminist
concerns don't hold up. The film recalls the question of the
feminists of the 1980's: 'Is there a woman on this screen?'
(Or a male fantasy?) Yosuke is that familiar protagonist
alienated by an inhumane materialist society obsessed by
profit and loss, and it's all the fault of his wife. He has
travelled away from his home to find a job, because his wife
continually nags him about not having any money. This isn't
a terrible loss to either of them since it is clearly an
unhappy marriage. However, while the film clearly wants us
to think of the wife as a shrew, it makes her guilty of
nothing more than wanting a roof and food for the family,
desires that are hard to repudiate on reflection.
Nevertheless, the desire that permeates the film is Yosuke's
desire to escape her, which he does to a town on the Noto
Peninsula near the Sea of Japan. Seeking the golden treasure
he has heard of in the ramblings of Taro (Kazuo Kitramura),
a Falstaffian street person who dies sending Yosuke on his
mission to find the treasure, he finds Saeko living near the
red bridge, Taro's landmark that marks the spot for what
Yosuke seeks. Yosuke doesn't find any golden lucre, but he
hits paydirt when he finds Saeko, in the form of her unusual
sexuality. Saeko's sexual urges hit her without regard to
circumstances, driving her to kleptomania and to the
forceful expulsion of gallons of water, dousing her and
whatever is around her, running into the water under the red
bridge outside her home and attracting schools of fish from
the ocean. Ordinary women, who need food and lodging for
their children need not apply; this is a male fantasy come
true with bells and whistles. Saeko is the answer to the
question, 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?', but not
as Henry Higgins imagined it. There are a number of plot
complications which involve Saeko with some criminals and
suggest to Yosuke that she may be quite promiscuous (mais
non!). But after Yosuke dusts off his corporate, big city
inauthenticity by working at sea with a crew of fishermen
with basic needs, he is able to regain his faith in Saeko
and in her mysterious orgasms. While the film is beautiful
to look at and masterfully directed, it suggests anything
but Imamura's 'era of the woman'. Rather it suggests an
adolescent masturbatory fantasy, the inverse of de
Oliveira's vision. It would have been fascinating to hear
Imamura discuss Saeko, but he was unable to attend, leaving
the audience with only his press notes about female
repulsive power. What power was he associating with Saeko?
She is the hapless victim of everything: her urges, a gang
of criminals, and circumstantial evidence. She whines,
oozes, and sprays until Yosuke makes up his mind to take
control of her. This is somewhat irritating from a director
so accomplished, particularly in the wake of social and
cinematic dialogue that we keep hoping will lead our crafts
people and artists to question such fantasies as they follow
them through to their logical conclusions. It is, needless
to say, being distributed -- by Cowboy. _Italian for Beginners_ is a film of
genuine sweetness, which envisions male and female along a
rich spectrum of difference, with love as a natural glue,
and connection as a mixed but necessary bag. It is so free
of gender cliches -- scrambling traits mistakenly linked to
sex among both men and women, like passivity and
aggressiveness, selfishness and nurture, sexual activity and
sexual receptivity -- that it is tempting to evoke the
dreaded P-F word: post- feminist. Scherfig was not present
at the Festival, but in her production notes distributed at
the press screenings she claims identity with one of the
important male characters. However, she says she loves them
all, and it shows in the great tenderness for each one of
them with which the film is suffused, despite their flaws
and insufficiencies. Nor does the film really cry out to be
understood in terms of the Dogme Manifesto, despite the
prominent display of the Dogme certificate at the beginning
of the film. One needs no manifesto to understand a
real-world comedy, depicting its events in terms of the
small, eccentric details of which all lives are
made. _Italian for Beginners_ is a
multi-plot story, gathering its strands from what Scherfig
calls a group of insecure singles who, as they embrace
adulthood, form a family among friends, rather than from
blood relations. In each case, the family connection is
severely compromised by blood antagonisms. At the same time
that the characters form a familial group, they are also in
the process of separating into couples. Scherfig handles the
multi-plot film with ease and fluidity, which she attributes
to her background as a television writer. Each of these young adults is at a
difficult junction in life. Andeas (Anders W. Berthelsen) is
a pastor who expects to shepherd a Copenhagen parish only
briefly as it searches for a permanent replacement for the
old pastor, who is in the process of having a nervous
breakdown. He has just lost his wife to cancer. Olympia
(Anette Stovelbaek) is a lonely, pretty woman who works in a
bakery shop; she has a mild form of brain damage that causes
her to be clumsy, probably because of foetal alcoholic
syndrome caused by a self-centered mother who continues to
dominate her life. Jorgen Mortensen (Peter Gantzler) is the
manager of a local hotel who harbors a lonely crush on the
charming, young Italian cook Guila (Sara Indrio Jensen) whom
he is afraid to approach, but who also is attracted to him.
Hal-Finn (Lars Kaalund) is a hyper-macho manager of the
hotel restaurant. Handsome but manically overly aggressive
in maintaining order in the restaurant, he has no problems
with sex, but has had little luck maintaining relationships.
Finally, Karen (Ann Eleonara Jorgensen) is a sensual,
beautiful hairdresser who owns her own reasonably successful
beauty shop, but has also been luckless in relationships,
especially with her father who humiliates her
constantly. All six wind up in an Italian class at
the local community center, only to have the teacher die
suddenly of a heart attack. Unwilling to let go of what each
intuitively feels is an important place to be, they
stubbornly dig in their heels until Hal-Finn loses his job
for yelling once too many times at the customers.
Surprisingly he knows enough Italian to take over as the
instructor. The class serves as a life-line for all of them;
clearly they would not be able to hold on to each other any
other way. When the plot threads of Karen and Olympia
converge to reveal (to their mutual embarrassment) that they
are sisters, and their mother dies, they use the money she
has left to finance a trip to Italy for the class. There,
the group comes together as a unit and a series of erotic
encounters take place that will replace the loneliness of
each character with a rich set of affiliations even after
they return home. Most affecting about this weaving and
interweaving of lives is how clearly we understand that we
are not watching fated connections, but the stumbling,
haphazard, inadvertence of life. False starts and false
stops punctuate the events as the characters move blindly
and hesitantly along, motivated by desires that may or may
not be fulfilled. Anyone who has read a Barbara Pym
novel may find that _Italian for Beginners_ is very
reminiscent of the Pym landscape of lonely, sweet
eccentrics. But Scherfig creates what is very much a
cinematic experience, with her fluid camera, her tender
regard for the human face, and her innate sense of light and
darkness in both the exterior and interior levels of human
existence. _Va Savoir_ is the masterpiece of this
group of sweet tales of love. Like _I'm Going Home_, it
charts the boundary between life and art, focusing on
artists as the central protagonists, rather than the
ordinary people we find in _Warm Water Under a Red Bridge_
and _Italian for Beginners_. But, unlike de Oliveira,
Rivette envisions a very thin boundary indeed between
illusion and reality. As he said at his press conference:
'Life is theatre and theatre is life'. All the characters in
_Va Savoir_ (officially translated as 'Who Knows?' but
perhaps better understood in spirit as 'Go Figure!') are
poseurs playing out (funny, delightful) stock scenes with
each other as they vie for love and money. Yet despite the
confusion between illusion and reality, particularly when it
comes to love, there is a great deal more to life than our
personal and social stratagems. The film leaves the audience
with a belief in the immanence of love, which takes us by
surprise and will not let us control it. This faith is
represented in the film by an inscription carved onto a ring
that ironically is the focus of a scam being perpetrated by
one of the characters who uses love for pecuniary gain:
'tempus fugit; amor manet'. Time flies, love
remains. The story of _Va Savoir_ smacks of
French farce. Camille (Jean Balibar) and her lover Ugo
(Sergio Castellitto) are acting in a production of
Pirandello's _As You Desire Me_, of which Ugo is also the
director. The production design is evocative of art nouveau
and of Fascist Italy; Pirandello was, of course, a
noteworthy self-proclaimed Fascist. The play is a dark
mirror image of the film, a nasty blend of love, death, and
money, while the film is a tender mixture of the same
ingredients such that death is no more than a farcical
alternative with a missed cue. There's a lot of desire
running rampant in both _As You Desire Me_ and _Va Savoir_,
but the film empties out the entire concept of the
machinations of strategically motivated lust. During the run of the play Camille and
Ugo, a forty-ish couple, meet up with Camille's former lover
Pierre (Jacques Bonaffe) and his new wife, Sonia (Marianne
Basler). While Camille and Pierre threaten to relive old
times, Ugo, searching for a lost Goldoni play called
_Destiny of Venice_, meets up with a twenty-something named
Do (Helene De Fougerolles), short for Dominique, the
attractive young daughter of the woman in whose library the
lost volume may be hidden. While she and Ugo skirt the
suburbs of an affair, her brother Arthur, also
twenty-something, who has an incestuous yen for her, makes
sexual advances to Pierre's wife, Sonia, from whom he wants
to steal a very valuable ring. As in French farces, the
people combine and recombine with the mechanical rhythms of
the permutations playing themselves out obsessively. By the
end, it would seem that nobody wants what they think they
want, they just want to want it. The major example of this
is Ugo's refusal to take the original text of _Destiny of
Venice_, offered to him by Do when they find it, covered
with flour, lying around Do's kitchen. Similarly, Arthur,
for all his scheming does not get Sonia's ring, even though
it first appears that he has born it away. He doesn't care.
There is a riotously funny/sinister duel between Ugo and
Pierre over Camille that ends with no one either a winner or
a loser. Conscious desire is almost the sign of delusion in
this film. The real force of connection is mysterious,
silent, and unawares, as it binds people together despite
their frantic searches elsewhere with others. The face of love can be picked out
somewhere in the subtext of this light yet potent
confection, which has an enduring faith in love and a
mocking chuckle for infatuation. Can we know the difference?
Yes, over time, which dissipates the chaff on the wings of
false desire. What abides is composed of freedom,
appropriateness, and simplicity. Although it looks like
anything goes, in fact none of the apparently intense
dalliances is what it seems. Pierre's desire for Camille
implodes because it is too possessive. In one of the most
comically compelling scenes of the movie, Pierre locks
Camille in a closet to keep her from running away from him
again. But, cela ne marche pas. She escapes from the closet
with the inevitability of warm air rising, which is pretty
much what she has to do to get away from Pierre's clutches.
Arthur's desire for Sonia dissipates; it is too closely
associated with larceny. Do's infatuation with Ugo is just
that. She is a little girl yearning for the unattainable,
older, already attached man. Ugo lusts for an unattainable
work of art, that he releases instantly on finding it. At
the end of all the potentially devastating 'fun and games',
the couples are intact. Camille and Ugo and Sophia and
Pierre remain. Go figure! The bitterness of love compromised by
false social values is emphasized in another group of three
films from the festival: _Time Out_, directed by Laurent
Cantet; _La Cienaga_, directed by Lucrezia Martel; and _Fat
Girl_, directed by Catherine Breillat. These three all move
their characters outside of the daily grind to impress on us
the impossibility of escape. Alienating values have been
marbled by society into the core of our being and
re-circulate with a vengeance at precisely those times when
we feel most free. _Time Out_ and _La Cienaga_ are the work
of young directors in their thirties, _Fat Girl_ the work of
a director in her early fifties. Each promises much in the
way of artistry, but, in two of the three, less in the way
of integrity. _Time Out_ is the story of Vincent
(Aurelian Recoing), a man who can neither make a place for
himself in society nor live outside it. At the beginning of
the film, we see Vincent calling his wife from a cell phone
while he is on the road. Recoing, mildly reminiscent of
James Gandolfini, the star of _The Sopranos_, with his
receding hairline and paunch, presents Vincent as an
equivocal figure, both personally dishevelled and
professionally slick. He manipulates his wife into believing
that business is keeping him from returning home, but
clearly he is not at work. Rather he is at a rest stop on
the highway observing children playing. The scene is set for
child abuse, perhaps murder. But that is not what happens.
Director Laurent Cantet plays with audience expectation in
this manner throughout the film, creating in us an
experience of the uncanny which pays off in unpredictable
ways. This is Cantet's second feature film and it bodes well
for the future. He may well be a master in the
making. Vincent has been fired, as we later
discover, from a job that was clearly in middle corporate
management, but the substance of his former employment never
emerges. Ultimately, Vincent becomes a scam artist, creating
the illusion that he represents major investment
possibilities in Africa. He is remarkably successful in
stimulating his friends and their friends to force large
sums of money on him, money that will never see a return.
But this is not simply a jolly adventure comparable to the
caper films of the 1970s (_The Sting_, for example). Cantet
has used his ability to create suspense toward a political
end. The uncanny mood he creates renders frightening the
economic structure of capitalism, as the insubstantiality of
both the job Vincent has lost and the imaginary consulting
business he has created reflect back on each other. If
Vincent is lost in illusion, there is no rock on which
society is built either. The film is based on a true story, but
it is altered significantly in one major and fascinating
respect. In the true story, the man on whose character
Vincent was based posed as a doctor for twenty years.
Despite his lack of medical training he performed all the
necessary medical duties and went undetected for two decades
by his colleagues and his family. When he was unmasked, he
killed himself, his wife and children, and his parents. In
his press conference, Cantet explained that he had no
interest in Vincent as a monster of that sort. Rather, he
was taken with the idea of ordinary life, the man who cannot
moor himself to ordinary expectations, but at the same time
cannot cut free from them either. Vincent is also finally
caught, but if his capture involves a kind of death, it is
not the sensationalistic bloodbath of the real-life
impostor. It is a kind of spiritual immolation caused by the
power love has over the ordinary man. Vincent loves his family: wife,
children, and parents. Although he is absolutely miserable
playing the paternal role, he allows himself to be
rehabilitated once he is caught. For a while, his scam
enterprises relieved his dread of not being able to live up
to familial expectations, but at the end of the film Vincent
is going to endure that terror for love. The final scene is
a piece of impressive understatement that comprehends the
uncanny situation of the ordinary working man. Vincent's
influential father has gotten him an interview for an
important, high paying job, which the Personnel Director
describes for Vincent with the air of a man handing out gold
bullion. Vincent makes all the right gestures, and gives all
the right answers: he will get the job. But, as the camera
moves into extreme close-up of his eyes, an aching deadness
betrays the anguish of men behaving well. The feeling of
fear generated by the film as Vincent takes us on a tour of
his complex intentions to be free and connected at the same
time is intended by Cantet to dynamite this supposedly
'happy ending'. This closure is a stunning minimalist
achievement. Of course, a reading of the larger meaning in
something so subtle as an expression in the eyes demands a
sophistication from audiences that generally comes either
from several viewings or from a willingness to follow
directorial promptings, rather than the habits induced by a
long history of ordinary suspense films that culminate in
murder of the body rather than of the human
spirit. _La Cienaga_ is the story of two
middle class Argentinian families also taking time out, here
on vacation during the humid month of February in an ample
but slovenly country house in a swampy area near the border
of Bolivia. La Cienaga means swamp, and though Lucrecia
Martel insisted at her press conference that in her film it
had the connotation less of decay than of abundant life,
decay is rampant in her film: in nature, in the house, in
the family dynamics, and in the social situation, which is
riddled with hardhearted prejudice toward Indians in general
and in particular toward their servant girl. The center of the decay is Mecha
(Graciela Borges), the fifty-ish mother of the film's main
family. Played by an actress associated by Argentinian
audiences with elegance and sophistication, Borges confounds
expectations as she turns in a bravura performance as a
blowsy, sodden, alcoholic wreck of a woman married to a man
who is her masculine counterpart. Between the two of them
they neglect their teenage sons and daughter and their
pre-pubescent son whose eye, wounded in a hunting accident,
desperately needs an operation that Mecha in her continually
drunken stupor cannot organize herself to arrange for.
Mecha's cousin Tali (Mercedes Moran) is staying with Mecha
and her family in the country house, along with her husband
and children. Tali is a loving and responsible wife whose
husband is equally committed to the family, but she is
caught in the morass of Mecha's life by her family feeling
for her cousin. The two of them endlessly discuss a trip to
Bolivia where they believe they can buy clothes and school
things for the children at much reduced prices. The trip
never takes place. Nor does anyone but Mecha's daughter, a
decent thoughtful girl, ever go to where there is supposed
to be a sighting of the Virgin Mary that they endlessly
speak of. Primarily, the families slothfully lie in their
beds, or drink as they recline around a swimming pool filled
with filthy water. The exception is Mecha's youngest son,
who with his friend, runs around a swamp with a gun,
shooting at virtually everything he sees, and sometimes
setting his gun sights on his sister. The foreboding of the disaster that
eventually takes place at the end of the film comes from the
wild gunplay and from the opening scene of the film in which
an inebriated Mecha careens around the edge of the swimming
pool retrieving glasses with red liquid in them but falls,
as she is 'tidying up', pulverizing the glasses as she lands
on top of them. He chest is lacerated by the shards.
Dripping blood, she is too disoriented to allow herself to
be taken to the hospital without causing all kinds of absurd
delay, as for example, when she excoriates her Indian maid
of all work in racist terms for bringing the wrong dress
with which to cover her bathing suit. The chaos in which
these characters are vacationing is delineated immediately
in this opening poolside scene where recreation turns into
degeneration. A fluid camera moves fitfully around the
vacation space creating disorientation for the audience. The
ugliness of the situation is emphasized by the camera's
unstinting look at the stretch marks and flab of the women,
and the skin imperfections of all the characters. There is
further definition of impending calamity through the drum
rolls of thunder that sound over the action of this
grotesque pool party. But the atmosphere of self-indulgence
and irresponsibility is never directly connected to the
final scene in which an innocent dies. Rather Mecha and her
crew stumble on while the youngest and most innocent of all
the people in the house, Tali's baby son, breaks his neck in
broad daylight, with nothing particular happening, as his
responsible mother turns her back for a minute. He is in
some way a casualty of the swamp, but Martel is unwilling to
depict his demise in terms of ordinary, motivated narrative
structure. Martel paints an ugly picture of
contemporary Argentinian family life in a society of lost
traditions, as she writes in her presskit notes. She does so
with cinematic virtuosity, but also by means of a number of
cliches. Despite her innovative and accomplished camera and
editing style, she has loaded Mecha and her family with a
set of predictable characteristics. Of course, they will be
not only lost but racist and ugly. Defining bad people
through physical ugliness intrudes a startlingly shallow
stereotype into what is clearly intended as a hip portrayal
of social problems. The shallowness of this cliche is
compounded by the complementary stereotype, the physical
beauty of the 'good' people: Mecha's daughter and Tali's
innocent little boy. Tali and her husband, who are much
better people than Mecha and her husband are also, not
co-incidentally, better looking. Moreover, the director
herself evidences a certain callous disregard that smacks of
Mecha's abuses in her use of animals in this film. During
Martel's press conference, she casually narrated a
production anecdote about how, for a scene in which several
children are running around with guns, she and her crew
pushed a live cow into the mud so that it could be trapped
there as the children shoot at it. This is a dubious way to
make a point about the disregard for life in these people.
The cow is later seen as a corpse. Was it an effect created
for the camera, or was the cow really killed in order that
Martel might cast her stones? While many countries have
enforced strict prohibitions against the capricious taking
of animal life for such purposes, Argentina has not, and
this will be an issue for many viewers. Martel makes it an
issue herself by taking a harsh, uncompromising position in
the depiction of her characters while permitting herself
disturbingly unselfcritical selfindulgence. Similarly, _Fat Girl_ is the work of a
highly skilled director who takes a chillingly harsh stance
on human imperfections and limitations while cutting a lot
of slack for her own. In _Fat Girl_, two sisters, Anais
(Anais Reboux), 12 years old, and Elena (Roxane Mesquida),
15 years old, are on vacation with their affluent parents.
Anais is chubby, on the verge of sexuality, but somewhat
daunted by its mysteries and keenly aware that boys do not
find her as attractive as they do her exquisitely beautiful
sister. Elena is already quite sexually active, but a virgin
until she meets a handsome law student, Fernando (Libero De
Rienzo). The sisters are very attached to each other despite
their frequent bouts of annoyance and impatience, but Elena
shows almost no sensitivity to her sister's awkward position
as she conducts her sexual explorations, with Anais as the
onlooker. True, the need to hide her behavior from her
parents, and her parents' insistence that Elena take care of
Anais, contributes to this situation, but this does not
fully exonerate Elena who is aware of how painfully hard
Anais takes being a captive audience of Elena's sexual
exploits. Anais sobs as she is forced into the position of
voyeur in her own bedroom or builds solacing fantasies. One
of the most touching moments of Anais's fantasy life opens
the film, when to escape from her sister's flirtations at a
pool she speaks seductively to the railings as she swims in
the pool, treating them as lovers competing for her favors.
This charming sequence, according to Breillat's remarks
during her press conference, was inspired by a real incident
in Taormina, when the director witnessed a chubby little
girl talking to herself in a swimming pool. Indeed, she
credits this as the seed from which _Fat Girl_
germinated. For three-quarters of the film, it
seems to be an account of a summer of adolescent angst and
discovery. Peripherally, we glimpse the girls'
unsympathetic, too materialistic parents. But little is made
of their self-centered behavior as they are deflected by
their own concerns from noticing what is going on in the
lives of their daughters. This is the kind of oblivion so
commonly experienced by teenage children that it remains
unremarkable until the father (Romain Goupil) becomes
verbally abusive and stalks out of the summer house to
return to his work in the city. Nevertheless, the parental
behavior remains within the bounds of normal family
dysfunction. Even when Elena foolishly gets involved too
deeply with Fernando, who is clearly manipulating her for
his own pleasure through the most obvious forms of sweet
talk, which even Anais understands is completely
inauthentic, the film retains the tone of a familiar, if
cleverly produced, family comedy/drama. When the girls's
mother (Arsinee Khanjian) discovers Elena's brief affair
with Fernando, she packs up the girls abruptly and angrily
drives them home, and the film turns toward the sinister
with such force that it is as if someone had spliced the
terminal segment of another film onto _Fat Girl_. On the homeward trip, stylish shots of
huge trucks create a visual sense of menace to the little
car in which Anais, Elena, and their mother drive, as does
the mother's increasing fatigue: an accident looms in their
future. But instead, the mother pulls into a rest stop where
she and the girls go to sleep in the car. A truck driver
(Albert Goldberg) who pulls into the stop spots them, and
before we know it he has slaughtered Elena and her mother
with a hatchet and dragged Anais into the woods to rape her.
There is an elliptical cut that suddenly produces a swarm of
police with the murderer already in custody as Anais is
escorted from the woods insisting that she was not raped.
This sudden, discontinuous closure eclipses the odd,
insightful previous scenes about growing up in the new
millennium and thereby effectively destroys the film as an
organic work. In her press conference, Breillat shed
light on her intentions, a disclosure that did nothing to
resurrect her film out of the fragments to which it had been
reduced, but rather intensified the sense of arbitrary
ugliness with which she ended her film. Breillat contended
that her work was metaphoric, a highly problematic claim
given the realism of her presentation of characters and
events. The only sense of metaphor, barely noticeable in the
film, though clear in the press notes, is conveyed by the
identification of everyone in the film, with the exception
of the three principal young people, by their roles: mother,
father, killer. But wait. The attack, according to Breillat,
also has metaphoric motivation. With the exception of Anais,
she said, the rest of the family is already dead, lost as
they are in false feelings and false behavior. There is
nothing true about them in Breillat's mind and the attack is
only the realization of what is already the case. Moreover,
to her way of thinking, Fernando's exploitation of Elena, by
virtue of its falsehoods and betrayal of Elena's trust, is
more of a rape than the truck driver's sexual attack on
Anais, which is why Anais says, with justice as Breillat
would have it, that she wasn't raped. She has already seen
what real sexual deviance is. Or so the director
says. Breillat's position verges on the
indefensible; it virtually aligns her reading of her work
with the psychosis of Raskolnikov, the protagonist of _Crime
and Punishment_, and with all other delusional claims for
the *ubermensch*, complicit as she is with the image of
savage murder of characters that she created because she
finds them too materialistic and hypocritical. By these
standards, how many of us deserve to live? Maybe not
Breillat either, considering her hypocrisy. Her own less
than honorable way of using at least one underage actor
leaves her with much to answer for. According to Breillat,
Anais Reboux, the child she used as her protagonist, is
thirteen years old. In response to questions, the director
denied that there was any problem in her exhibition in one
humiliating scene after another of a chubby child who is
unmercifully teased for being fat. She disclaimed any
problem, even when it was pointed out that the actress has
the same name as the scapegoated little girl. Breillat also
brushed off the possibility of exploitation in using a child
actor to play scenes confronting sexual issues that the
actual child has only begun to deal with in her personal
life. In addition, Breillat defended her use of Roxane
Mesquida in extremely explicit sexual scenes, claiming that
she is eighteen years old, and asserting that, although
Mesquida was initially terrified of doing the scenes,
afterward she told Breillat that 'it was the best day of her
life'. Possibly, despite her much younger appearance,
Mesquida was eighteen at the time the film was made, as the
director claims, but even if this is true, such scenes are
extremely difficult for older, more experienced actors and
Breillat's insistence on what may be a more graphic display
of sex acts than was needed is dubious indeed. Many may feel
that, ironically, Breillat's exploitation of Reboux and
Mesquida, as well as Libero de Rienzo, in the name of her
own cinematic obsessions, places her rather explicitly as a
confrere of the inauthentic middle class, against whom the
director exacted such cruel revenge. In contrast to the ruthless pillaging
of life in order to make films, I offer the third and final
group of films from the Festival that I am highlighting,
four films expressing a love for making cinema as a mode of
re-enforcing the core of our humanity: _Mulholland Drive_,
directed by David Lynch; _Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm_,
directed by Claude Lanzmann; _Il Mio Viaggio in Italia_,
directed by Martin Scorsese; and _Eloge de L'Amour_,
directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Substantially different in
their directions and aesthetics, they each praise love as a
part of the process of filmic storytelling and they each
grapple with the difficulties of insuring that it will
remain a part of the process. In _Mulholland Drive_, the centerpiece
of the festival, director David Lynch shuttles the audience
among numerous planes of reality in order to spare us the
fate of the characters in the film, who are stripped of
their hopes and dreams by being locked into a dehumanizing
system of power relations. _Mulholland Drive_ is a multiplot
narrative, the trajectory of which is determined by the
failure of a crucial connection between two of the three
primary narrative threads. Lynch mobilizes the distancing
effects of comedy, dreamscapes, and visionary locations to
help us to understand the nature of the crucial missed
connection and how it is sabotaged by a monomaniacal power
structure. Two of the three primary narratives
concern the multiple identities of two women. There is
blonde and perky aspiring actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts)
-- who also appears in the film as a washed out depressive
named Diane Selwyn. And there is 'Rita', the assumed name of
a beautiful, dark, disoriented and shy amnesiac woman (Laura
Elena Harring) -- whose second identity is a vampiric
actress known as Camilla Rhodes. The third narrative
concerns a man named Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), a
director whose name stays the same throughout, while his
character alters considerably as the women change names and
destinies. At first, Adam is a comic character, a likeable,
earnest film director struggling to do his job according to
his own lights; later in the film, after he capitulates to
an intimidating criminal cartel, Adam is transformed into a
hollow man, false as his feigned laughter, and coldly
calculating in relationship to his films and personal
life. At the beginning of the film, Betty
and 'Rita' meet soon after Betty arrives in Los Angeles to
pursue a movie career and 'Rita' survives a terrible
automobile accident. As Betty tries to help 'Rita' regain
her identity, Adam battles a crew of seemingly comic Mafiosi
types, whom he suddenly becomes aware are trying to control
his film, for no discernible reason except to impose their
power on him. They appear to know nothing about filmmaking
but violently and persistently insist on the casting as the
leading lady of this film one Camilla Rhodes, an actress who
has no discernibly special talents. Comedy reveals its dark
side when Adam is broken by the substantial intimidation he
faces from the cartel, and that is the beginning of the
end. In the early stages of the film,
Rhodes is blonde (Melissa George) and visible only on a
photograph and on a soundstage as she auditions for Adam.
(Yes, Camilla Rhodes too has two incarnations, a situation
that leaves mysteriously and tantalizingly open whether
Camilla is an alternate version of 'Rita' or 'Rita' is an
alternate version of Rhodes.) Though Adam meets both
versions of Rhodes, Adam never actually meets either 'Rita'
or Betty, but there is a moment when he almost meets Betty,
a moment that jumps out of _Mulholland Drive_ because it is
depicted by a shot pattern of jump cuts and close-ups of
their eyes as they feel the connection that they do not
permit to happen. This is the visual and emotional core of
the film. But it is about the death of emotion. Betty walks
onto Adam's soundstage unexpectedly, just as his spirit is
being crushed by the cartel as he submits to their casting
choice. This is the moment when something full of promise
becomes possible, the moment of true contact in a world of
false relations that is part of every David Lynch film.
Early in his career, Lynch celebrated the spontaneous,
unforeseen arrival of that moment and the wonder of how his
protagonists made themselves open to it (think of Sandy's
arrival in Jeffrey's life in _Blue Velvet_). But in _Lost
Highway_, and now in _Mulholland Drive_, the path evoked by
the films' titles leads somewhere else, to the missed
encounter or the embrace of a false moment. In Lynch's
latest film, it is the failure to take the opportunity that
is portrayed. Betty leaves and Adam sinks deeper into the
morass of a bad choices. The result of this 'un-moment',
stymied by Adam's distracted attention to cartel pressure,
is the identity transformations of Betty, 'Rita', and Adam.
It is as though the film itself is conveying the process of
disintegration wrought by Adam's fall through a stunning
inversion of time and space. Such corruption as Adam has
participated in is not one act but the seed of massive
degeneration. After Adam and Betty don't meet (though we
never know whether that meeting would have provoked
important, fruitful personal or professional energy or
both), the film's color desaturates producing rotted space,
time turns in on itself, and all the characters become
debased forms of their earlier selves. The axel of the turn
is a sweetly funny sexual encounter between Betty and
'Rita'. It re-emerges when the degeneration of the world in
which they live begins to pick up speed as a very nasty
lesbian form of sado-masochism. Rita/Camilla plainly enjoys
rejecting Betty/Diane by forcing her to deal with the 'new
love', Adam, who in his new form seems to serve
Rita/Camilla's penchant for causing pain and little
else. Also key to the transition is a
strange, after hours dive called Club Silencio to which Rita
takes Betty after they have sex. Club Silencio features the
billowing red curtains of the Red Room that Lynch created
while he worked on the Twin Peaks television series and his
film _Fire Walk With Me_, and that are his sign of visionary
space, here the toxic aspect of vision. The show presented
at Club Silencio reveals the illusory nature of film,
including the film we are in the process of watching. Sound
seems to be emitted by the characters, but it is actually
from another source; it is tape recorded. Character seem to
be people, but in fact they are hollow constructs. After
such knowledge, both the audience and Betty and 'Rita' lose
the illusion, and Betty and 'Rita' disappear into a black
void. Inauthentic creation is unstable and poisonous.
Narratively and visually, entropic descent into death is the
inevitable path of false creation. As the visuals descend
into depleted colortones and the darkness of disappearance,
so in the narrative death arrives. Betty's initial bright
hopes have turned into something reprehensible, and she
becomes responsible for the death of 'Rita'/Camilla and her
own suicide. During the five years I interviewed
David Lynch for my book _The Passion of David Lynch_, he
spoke often, if obliquely, about the difference between the
higher and debased areas of the subconscious and the
spectacular differences between what is created by each. In
his press conference, although he spoke obliquely to the
audience, Lynch told the assembled the same: 'Going against
what you really believe kills many things'. Pragmatic
business decisions that mediate what must never be
compromised are routinely put to us as small compromises;
not so says Lynch. They are the drive into the toxic area of
the subconscious and toward unstable and murderous forms of
creation. There is great love in _Mulholland Drive_ for the
many things that are killed when Adam falls. As we are
distanced by the film from the slide from hope into
putrefaction because a moviemaker was co-opted, we rally
toward the ideal because Lynch impresses us, and
brilliantly, on every level of our being with the
catastrophe of betraying it. Claude Lanzmann's documentary
_Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm_ poses quite a different
challenge. If Lynch understands that one cannot fully
understand creative degeneration by means of a stable
narrative structure (since that stability is a security
blanket that smothers the shock of recognition), Lanzmann
deals with the problem of speaking of outrageous evil
through cinematic fiction or documentary. Narrative
structure and emotionally exciting characters mediate our
encounter with evil and shelter us from really confronting
it. Even documentaries provide the beauty of the frame and
the buffer of hindsight. The problem may well be insoluble,
but, in _Sobibor_, Lanzmann, who already has made stunningly
impressive attempts in _Shoah_, _Un Vivant Qui Passe_, and
_Tsahal_ to deal with this oxymoronic dilemma about the need
to express the inexpressible, tries again. Lanzmann is not interested in
sensational, gruesome, or gory details of the Holocaust, his
chosen cinematic subject. In this, he renders obscene films
like _Schindler's List_, which lick their lips over the sub
rosa erotic thrills they take from the suffering of the
millions of innocent victims of Nazism. In _Sobibor_, as in
_Shoah_, Lanzmann makes us confront the ordinariness of the
people involved, the events as the deeds of extremely
unexceptional people; we know them all. The film is an
extended interview with Yehuda Lerner, and, as in _Shoah_,
there are no images of the death camps. The interview is
rendered for the screen through the face of Lerner as he
speaks in response to Lanzmann's offscreen voice, and
pastoral landscapes of the Polish countryside where several
concentration camps, including Sobibor, were previously
located. Lanzmann seeks to elicit from Lerner details of the
one successful uprising against the Nazis in a concentration
camp. The only notable photograph contemporary to the events
spoken of by Lerner shows a memorial tribute by a group of
Nazis to the German soldiers killed by the inmates of the
death camp. Lerner is no larger-than-life Ari Ben
Canaan, the hero of _Exodus_, and certainly no Paul Newman,
who played the Jewish lion in the film. Learner is an
unassuming, pleasant-faced Israeli, with a head of hair of
which the Fonz would be proud, warm eyes, and a gentle
smile, who narrates the events of Sobibor on the 14th of
October at 4pm, in Hebrew, in tones far less dramatic than
those often used to describe a baseball game. He had never
killed anyone before he split the skull of a German officer
with a small axe, as if he had done it every day of his
life. And he has never killed anyone since, off a
battlefield. His story defies the audience's impulse to
escape into drama at the same time that it is so compelling
that one cannot take his/her eyes off the face of this man,
even though, for most viewers he speaks in an
incomprehensible language. Probably the Ben Canaan figure in
Lerner's story is the late Alexander Petchersky, the young
Russian army office who designed the plan, the details of
which I will not reveal here, that led to the successful
conquest of the camp. (I shamelessly confess my hope that
this reservation of mine will spur potential audiences to
see this remarkable film.) But I wonder whether Lanzmann
would have wanted this brilliant military personage as a
central figure, even had he been alive to interview. Likely,
Lerner is a much more useful central intelligence, with his
memories of resistance on his part that was no more and
certainly no less that the abiding desire to live. Lerner
was an adolescent at the time and not older than twenty when
he was interned at Sobibor. He and a friend, separated from
their families by Nazi deportation officers, had continually
run away from the camps to which they were deported. Before
he was sixteen, Lerner had escaped from eight concentration
camps, little more than skin and bones because of the
insufficient food given to anyone who was not performing
what the Germans considered crucial services to the Reich.
Lerner and his friend lived off the fields until they were
re-captured and re-interned. At each new death camp the
prisoners asked why they hadn't been shot or hung, which was
the norm with escapees. Lerner's inability to answer this
question, then or now, suggests again a rent in the fabric
of Holocaust tales in general circulation, the distance
between official policy and actual practice. Certainly there
is no suggestion of compassion involved here, but rather the
kind of capriciousness that led German officers to walk up
indiscriminately behind prisoners in the first camp to which
Lerner was sent and shoot them in the head, as if they were
practising on tin cans to vent fleeting aggressions. But
there is also great humanity sometimes, as when the Pole
charged with switching the tracks for the prisoner train
headed to Sobibor warned Lerner and the others in the box
car, in the seconds that he had to speak to them, to run
away, that they would be burned at the camp. The men in the
train cars did not run, although there was a hole in the
train floor that would have made it possible, because they
didn't believe that people did that to other people. That
was, for anyone who has forgotten how inconceivable the
goals of the Nazis were for those in their clutches, as
inconceivable as the intentions of hijackers who intended to
crash a plane into the World Trade Center. Lanzmann's insistence on depicting an
event from the Holocaust as a situation full of the holes
that appear in all our daily lives, rather than as the
teleological unfolding of tightly structured events that
Hollywood has made of such moments, is also inflected by the
loose weave of multiple languages in which the conversation
between Lanzmann and Lerner is carried out. Lerner speaks
only Hebrew, Lanzmann only French. The translation between
these languages is rendered for director and subject in a
female voice. English subtitles have been added for both
languages for American distribution. On occasion, the voices
overlap and Lerner adds to his statement while the
translator is working away in her melodic, precise diction.
Almost immediately, it is evident that this linguistic
scramble is part of the poetics of the film; Lanzmann could
have found a much tidier more elegant way to deal with the
language barrier. We are being asked to grapple with the
capacity of language to convey almost inconceivable
events. And indeed, as Lerner tells his story,
it is impossible to understand in any but the most detached
way the dehumanization he endured in Sobibor. How can we
really take in what it means for the German soldiers to have
been utterly incapable of imagining an uprising, as Lerner
very matter-of-factly states, because they bought into their
own propaganda and deeply believed that their prisoners were
subhuman? More importantly, we only begin to glean that
there was once a time when this centered, poised teller of
the tale could only barely hold on to enough faith in his
own humanity to resist. Lerner is so incontrovertibly a
point of our own empathy that we must begin, though we can
only begin to imagine our own vulnerability to such
circumstances. Lanzmann mentioned Sobibor in _Shoah_, but
did not include in that film narration of its story in any
detail because he felt it should not be merely an anecdote
in any larger work. He has brilliantly succeeded in the film
he has now dedicated to Sobibor, and not only because he has
aired as many of the facts as he could find. Lanzmann's love
of filmmaking has led him to eschew the easy worship of the
medium that we find in Spielberg's _Schindler's List_, to
probe its limitations, much as we saw in Lynch's passionate
attempt to speak of a subject close to his heart in
_Mulholland Drive_. Lanzmann has made us wonder at the
difficulty of telling this story. In Martin Scorsese's _Il Mio Viaggio
in Italia_, we find something close to idolatry of the
cinema. Scorsese inundates the audience with his euphoria
about Italian films, primarily of the neo-realist era.
_Viaggio_ is a very long documentary in which he quotes
extensively from the films which he credits as the
foundation of his career as a director. The title is a play
on _Viaggio in Italia_ (1953), directed by Roberto
Rossellini, starring Ingrid Bergman, one of the few films
excerpted that make one wonder why it was included. However,
I suppose he chose that title because the film is a love
story, and Scorsese's _Viaggio_ is an unexpectedly unalloyed
gush of praise from a filmmaker who has heretofore refused
to take simple positions on his characters and stories.
_Viaggio_ is an unabashed celebration of the love of
ordinary life in Italian cinema, a combination of a journal
of 'How I Became What I Am', and 'Martin Scorsese's Italian
Film 101'. Scorsese begins with, in some ways,
the best part of his film, some fascinating, recently
discovered home movies of his family shortly after they
emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. He
uses them as a springboard from which to jump into the
pleasure and ethnic pride his family took in Italian cinema,
and how he was riveted to the television set in the late
forties and early fifties watching the neo-realist
masterpieces on local New York channels. He then gives a
kind of lecture on Neo-Realism, quoting from Rossellini,
DeSica, and Visconti, as if to say, 'I cannot say anything
about their work that is as compelling as giving you a
chance to see it'. He also, at times, gives a running
commentary on what we are looking at. He begins with a
banquet of some of the most powerfully felt films ever made:
_Open City_, _Paisa_, _Umberto D_, Ossessione_, and _Senso_,
primarily. At the end of his viaggio, he moves on to Italian
films of the 1950's and 1960's, the work of Antonioni and
Fellini. Some of these films, like _Paisa_, are not
currently available in the United States, and the segment we
see in _Viaggio_ is a beautifully restored piece of film; we
are also shown the decaying film stock on which Scorsese
originally saw the film. This restoration is a real boon to
film enthusiasts. In his press conference, Scorsese spoke of
plans underway to get these films into American theatres so
we can see them again in their entirety. This documentary provides an equivocal
kind of pleasure. Most filmgoers have had little contact
with the neo-realists lately and Scorsese's insistence that
we confront them brings with it a rush of excitement. Days
after, one is still muttering 'Flike', the name of Umberto
D's little dog (anyone who has not seen this film should
rush out and find it no matter what the cost and trouble),
and shaking from the atrocities of _Open City_, and the
memory of Anna Magnani's performance. Some filmgoers will
not have had contact with Antonioni, who has been
unaccountably marginalized in recent years, but most will
have had easy access to Fellini. Still, glad as I am to have
seen scenes from _Paisa_ and to be reminded of how glorious
neo-realism is, it is hard to shake the feeling of unease
about Scorsese's cheerleading. It will be most appropriate
for audiences who know nothing about this period as a
warm-up to a neo-realist film festival or more general
revival. This is his Italian for Beginners. Finally, Jean-Luc Godard is back on
the festival circuit with _Eloge de l'amour_, and he's as
enigmatic as ever. Up front, I must say that it is really
impossible to give this film a satisfying review after only
one screening. (I was fortunate enough to have seen
_Mulholland Drive_ three times, or I would have had to say
the same about that film.) But even after one viewing it is
clear that Godard isn't praising love in any way that
Hollywood would understand, as is also the case with Lynch
and Lanzmann. In fact, in this film about a desire to make a
film, Hollywood emissaries play the role of the villains
thwarting that desire, as does the United States as a whole.
In one of the best moments in the film, which sums up what
it means to be an 'ugly' American, a tall, stunningly
gorgeous African-American woman who works for a Hollywood
studio gets out of a sports car that the protagonist tells
her his grandfather designed. 'So what?' she says, flinging
the car door shut and striding toward the house in which
they will converse about a film narrating events in the life
of a couple who were in the French resistance. Plot? Yes, sort of. Edgar (Bruno
Putzulu) wants to make a movie about the experiences of a
couple who were active in the French Resistance during World
War II. He meets many obstacles, many of them American. But
it is also about the passage of time and the difficulties
that creates, and the sustenance that comes from nature. It
is about Edgar's sensibility, in other words, which is
defined by the way he filters events and people as he goes
about attempting to achieve his goal. Through Edgar, we see
not only into the hazards of expression, but also the
difficulties of maturation. Although Godard had indicated he
would attend the Festival his work on his next film
prevented him from being in New York. But unusually
elaborate production notes were distributed at the press
screening. These notes, lavishly illustrated with frames
from _Eloge_, are almost as enigmatic as the film itself,
but they do guide us toward the elements in the film that
emphasize the complexity of becoming and representing an
adult. In Godard's words: 'I had begun with a preposterous story
and in the end I thought that I couldn't, one couldn't
describe an adult. Adults only can be dealt with in story
form. In the street, you don't say, there goes an adult. You
say there goes Paul and there goes Fabienne or there goes a
mad killer. You tell a story, with the others, young people
and old people, there's no need to.' Godard's reference point about the
United States has been Los Angeles, which he has damned by
calling it The Big Garage. Bad enough. In _Eloge_ he erases
the United States entirely as a horrible illusion of a
country. There is a set of running jokes in which the name
of the country in which I write is reduced to nothingness.
Everything is a set of united states, according to the joke;
this film will not accept a United (capital U) States
(capital S) as a place of any distinction or even existence.
So Godard renders me a citizen of a nameless country. I
can't be angry (I imagine he would prefer it if I were). The
play on words is funny within the context of the film;
though I can't help wondering what Godard would have done in
this film had the attack on the World Trade Center taken
place before he made it. It is unthinkable that Godard will
ever give up his animus against what I continue to insist is
the United States of America, but perhaps the joke might
have been rendered more complex. The film could not very
easily have been more so. I look forward to seeing it again,
and possibly again. Through his many hatreds, Godard loves
passionately and we always learn something new about
filmmaking from this filmmaker who is independent in a way
that Sundance Film Festival, the tepidly free-spirited
handmaid of Hollywood, will never fathom. The New York Film Festival 2001
exhibited some of the masters of contemporary filmmaking in
their pride and prodigiousness. It also took on its
customary role as a channel between the public and some
directors who are only starting on a path that may or may
not take them into richer and more expansive cinematic
achievement. A powerful force for independence and for
making manifest the invigorating internationalism of cinema
that Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his latest book _Movie Wars_
fiercely demands be made more accessible, especially in the
United States, the New York Film Festival continues to fill
the void left by most commercial distributors, to be the
broker for artists for whom love is more important than
money. A bas le bottom line! Mercy College, New York,
USA Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Martha P. Nochimson, 'New York Film
Festival 2001', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5 no. 30, October
2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n30nochimson>.
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