The Hedgehog (Le hérisson) (Director: Mona Achache): Based on the best-selling novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, this 2009 film is finally getting a theatrical release on this side of the world. Alas, it’s only in the US for now, but I figure that I have at least a few readers outside of the Toronto area.

Precocious and bored, 11-year-old Paloma decides that on her 12th birthday, she will end her life. She’s sick of her parents and older sister and their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle. She compulsively films them with a hand-me-down video camera and protests that she doesn’t want to live like a goldfish in a fishbowl. She’s incredibly bright and wants more from life, but doesn’t see a way to get it.

Ms. Michel, the widowed janitor of the luxury building where she lives, seems like she might be a kindred spirit, but she’s extremely private. Everything changes on the day that Mr. Ozu moves into the building. This cultured older Japanese man pays no attention to the class differences and petty jealousies of the other tenants, striking up conversations with both Paloma and Ms. Michel within days of his arrival.

An offhand remark involving a quote from Tolstoy (Mr. Ozu begins the quote and Ms. Michel finishes it) kindles a deeper curiosity and before long he has asked her to dinner. If you haven’t guessed already, Renée (as we discover is Ms. Michel’s first name) is the hedgehog of the title. As described by Paloma, she is prickly on the outside, but only to hide her inner elegance. No, I’m not sure how a hedgehog could be described as elegant, either, but it’s a memorable description. Paloma begins to spend more time with Renée and tells her that as a janitor, she has found a “perfect hiding place,” as if the older woman had simply chosen to be a building janitor out of a panoply of other career options.

Our trio of characters are all highly intelligent and lonely outsiders, and so naturally they come together, but everything seems just a bit too neat. An 11-year-old like Paloma, who draws and paints at a high level, plays Go and speaks some Japanese could really only exist in a novel (or a movie). Renée is another variation on the crusty character who really has a heart of gold. Worst of all, Mr. Ozu is the Franco-Asian equivalent of the “magical negro,” an exotic character who dispenses wisdom and brings the other characters together while we really know nothing about his own motivations.

But while the film is schematic and (mostly) predictable, it remains enjoyable, mostly for me due to Josiane Balasko’s performance as Renée. A veteran comic actor (she played the Jennifer Saunders’ part in the French version of Absolutely Fabulous) and an accomplished director in her own right, she portrays a lonely woman’s bewilderment at being desired with subtlety and grace. I also loved the occasional use of animation to illustrate some of Paloma’s inner struggles.

As someone who has not read the source novel, I can’t comment on whether it is a faithful adaptation, but based upon the amount of voiceover narration by Paloma, I expect that the novel would allow us similar access to the inner lives of both Renée and of Mr. Ozu. As well, because Paloma’s story seems to be the central thread, I wasn’t certain whether I was watching a film aimed more at the adolescent set than at a more general audience.

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The Hedgehog (Le hérisson)

While browsing a downtown used book emporium this afternoon, I chanced upon and scooped up the first two issues of Faber & Faber’s film annual Projections. Founded by film director John Boorman and Faber Film editorial director Walter Donohue as a “forum for practitioners of the cinema to write about their work,” Projections began in 1992 and ran for 15 volumes. It now appears to have moved online in a truncated form, hosted by Focus Features.

I’m sure I’ll be boring you soon with some of my discoveries. Just check out the table of contents for Projections 1:

• Bright Dreams, Hard Knocks: A Journal, John Boorman on the year 1991
• Film Fiction: More Factual than Facts, Sam Fuller
• The Early Life of a Screenwriter, Emeric Pressburger
• Demme on Demme, Jonathan Demme
• Masters of Photogenics, Nestor Almendros
• My Director and I, River Phoenix and Gus Van Sant on My Own Private Idaho
• Surviving Desire, a script by Hal Hartley
• Losing Touch, a poem by Tony Harrison on George Cukor
• Making Some Light, Michael Mann on the making of Last of the Mohicans

Projections 2 might be even better:

• Shadow and Substance, George Miller
• Movie Lessons, Jaco van Dormael
• Searching for the Serpent, Alison Maclean
• Freewheelin’, Gus Van Sant and Derek Jarman
• Acting on Impulse, Willem Dafoe on his craft
• The Early Life of a Screenwriter II, Sydney Gilliat
• Altman on Altman, Robert Altman
• Bob Roberts, a script by Tim Robbins
• I Wake Up, Dreaming, a journal by Bertrand Tavernier on the making of L.627

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Projections

Paris 1919 (Director: Paul Cowan): Having read the book by Margaret MacMillan on which this documentary is based, I was a little dubious upon hearing that director Cowan would be using re-enactments to create the atmosphere of the Versailles Peace Conference. But wisely, he chose to use these strictly as atmosphere, letting the archival footage and especially the strong narration by Canadian actor R.H. Thomson carry the weight of the story.

In the early months of 1919, the world, weary of fighting, gathered in Paris to hammer out a peace accord. But the Great War ended in an armistice, not a surrender, and so there was much at stake for all the parties. The old empires had collapsed and into the vacuum stepped a man promising self-determination for all the peoples of the world. US president Woodrow Wilson offered his own version of Obama-like hope, especially to the smaller nations of the world who had heretofore been the pawns of imperial powers. The defeated Germans also hoped that Wilson’s steady hand would deliver peace with justice. Alas, it was not to be.

Instead, Britain and France were determined to bleed Germany dry for war reparations. Both countries had suffered enormously, especially France, and they had little regard for the sufferings of Germany. Voters in both countries were putting enormous pressure on their leaders, David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France, to bankrupt Germany as punishment for her guilt in starting the war. In contrast, Wilson was obsessed with the idea of establishing a League of Nations, a body that would arbitrate disputes between nations in the hope of preventing war. His idealism and naivete were soon challenged, and gradually he made many compromises in order to secure support from the other leaders for the League.

The end result was disastrous for Germany and ultimately for Europe and the world. Maps were redrawn displacing millions of people, assets were seized and monetary damages demanded. The German delegation went home angry and humiliated. In the years that followed, the German people’s resentment was ripe for exploitation and rising nationalism soon engulfed the whole country, leading to Nazism and another world war.

Cowan’s film couldn’t have encompassed all the various negotiations that went on at Versailles, and huge chunks of MacMillan’s book are simply passed over, including the fate of countries like Poland and Turkey. But he captures the essence of the power struggle between the leaders, and makes some great choices in the re-enactments. By focusing on minor characters like Harold Nicolson and especially economist John Maynard Keynes, we get a real feel for what it was like for the bureaucrats labouring in smoky rooms to untie the Gordian knot of European grievances, especially when they felt their leaders were pursuing the wrong course.

I think the best compliment I can pay to Cowan’s film is to say that it left me wanting more, and for that, I will return to Margaret MacMillan’s excellent book, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World.

Official web site of the film

(8/10)

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Paris 1919

I’ve been dipping into Pauline Kael’s Deeper Into Movies lately and came across this delicious quote:

There’s a good deal to be said for finding your way to moviemaking—as most of the early directors did—after living for some years in the world and gaining some knowledge of life outside show business. We are beginning to spawn teen-age filmmakers who at twenty-five may have a brilliant technique but are as empty-headed as a Hollywood hack, and they will become the next generation of hacks, because they don’t know anything except moviemaking.

She said that in 1969 in the context of reviewing documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s High School. Wiseman had come to film after a career as a law professor and urban planner, and definitely came to his films with some ideas about the world. Kael would probably have a lot to say about some of today’s young directors, many of whom grew up comfortable with the tools of filmmaking but who have yet to find anything distinctive to actually say about anything.

What do you think? Can you give me some examples and counter-examples of young filmmakers with nothing (or something) to say?

UPDATE: Oh wait, there’s more! From a rather unfavourable review of Canada’s own Alan King’s A Married Couple:

[Y]oung filmmakers, who are rarely writers but are hooked on technology, love an approach in which the thinking out in advance is minimal—an approach in which you shoot a lot of footage and then try to find your film in it. Young filmmakers generally know almost nothing about how to handle actors, but probably all filmmakers have unhappy or “unfulfilled” friends eager to have a movie made of their lives; fame is probably the cure they seek.

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Pauline Kael on Young Filmmakers

I came across the writing of indie director Alex Cox about a year ago in Film Comment magazine, where he writes a regular column. I’d only seen a couple of his films and had no real idea of what his filmmaking principles were, so to speak. But reading his writing about what films he liked made me want to know more about him. He is also a fine writer, so I knew reading a full-length book from him would be a pleasure, no matter what the topic. But another event occurred recently that made me want to read this even more.

In early 2008, Criterion released his film Walker in a packed special edition DVD. Though I’ve still not seen it, this project fascinated me for many years. Made in Nicaragua with the full support of the Sandinista government in 1987, Walker was about an American who, in 1855, invaded Nicaragua with the intention of annexing it for the US. Considering the political climate of the time, with American-backed “contras” trying to overthrow the Sandinistas, Walker was never going to be a commercial success. But something about Cox’s steadfast and sometimes quixotic support of left-wing causes made us kindred spirits and so it was always on my list of films to see.

In X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, he recounts stories from the making of ten feature films, including Walker. Beginning with his film school days at UCLA, Cox talks about how he acquired his lifelong resistance to the big studio way of making films. I especially love that in true indie style he draws inspiration nowadays not so much from filmmakers but from hackers and other culture jammers:

Today, an independent filmmaker is a revolutionary fighter, in a prolonged popular war. This is the same war that Free Software and GNU/Linux activists fight against Microsoft; that the Slow Food movement fights against McDonald’s; that independent musicians fight against the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the Apple Music Store; that Fairtrade activists fight against WalMart and the WTO; that the Zapatistas fight against patriarchal systems of control in Mexico. There are no spoils to be had on this battlefield, and no prospect of a quick and easy victory. Yet, buoyed by belief, and by the lack of a sustainable or sane alternative, the guerrilla soldiers on. In the case of feature films, the battle for an independent, personal art form is already won (thanks to the Mini DV tape and the DVD), lost (thanks to the studios and their admirers), but irrelevant anyway.

Irrelevant because the feature film was the original art form of the twentieth century. It can’t be the original art form of the twenty-first as well. Something that goes beyond it will displace it—some medium equally visual and visceral, but interactive, with multiple narrative possibilities. It’s already being born: out in the same uncharted territory as the computer game, the “readjusted” corporate web site, and the home-made CD of “illegal” MP3s. But the birth won’t be easy, and the new form is destined for a long and hard-fought war.

It’s not all quite that provocative, but I like where he’s coming from. And in his anecdotes from a lifetime making films, you can see how he’s come to embrace the new technologies while continuing to believe in the power of a good story.

Liverpool-born Alex Cox’s directorial credits include Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, and Walker. He also wrote the script for Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and has acted in many of his own and other directors’ films.

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X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker