Tag Archive for 'france'

Army of Shadows (L’Armée des ombres)

Published
by
James McNally
on December 28, 2007
in DVD
. 1 Comment

Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres)

Army of Shadows (L’Armée des ombres) (1969, Director: Jean-Pierre Melville): Incredibly, this film was not released in the United States until 2006. As a result, many critics named it among their top films that year, despite it being nearly 40 years old. Army of Shadows follows a small group of French Resistance fighters in the middle of the war (1942-1943) as they try to survive in the midst of occupied France. Despite its epic length (145 minutes), it feels intimate and gripping due mostly to the sparing use of music and dialogue, and the moody cinematography that gives the impression that most of the film takes place in twilight.

The entire group display a sort of doomed heroism. We see very little of their actual resistance work, since they always seem to be on the run, hiding out, worrying about informers or getting arrested. It’s not that they’re inept, it’s just that the crushing paranoia makes it difficult to operate. The atmosphere of claustrophobia is pervasive from the first frame to the last. Even amongst themselves, there’s very little affection or humour. It’s as if their humanity has been reduced to just the instinct to survive. And to do that requires trusting other people, which is perilous.

Despite the setting, this is far from an action movie. It’s more of an anxiety movie, with every moment holding the possibility of danger. And in the end, it’s an incredibly sad film. These are good people, reduced to the simplest forms of right and wrong by a greater evil. Their physical survival is far from assured, but the hope that their humanity can remain intact makes this a very different kind of thriller.

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9/10(9/10)

Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (The Voyage of the Red Balloon)

Published
by
James McNally
on September 20, 2007
in Film Festivals and TIFF
. Closed

Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (The Voyage of the Red Balloon)

Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien): I have to admit that as much as I’m familiar with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s name, I hadn’t seen any of his previous films (Three Times (2005) and Café Lumiere (2003) being the most recent). That being said, someone I know told me that in his opinion, most of Hou’s best work was from the 80s and 90s and is actually pretty hard to find. Setting the film in Paris was admittedly a gamble, and deciding to make a sort of homage to Albert Lamarisse’s classic children’s film La Ballon Rouge (1956) an even bigger one. For me, anyway, it didn’t pay off.

We’re dropped into a story with very little exposition. Juliette Binoche plays Suzanne, a voice actor for a puppet theatre and a harried single mom. Her son, Simon, is watched by a new nanny, Song Fang, who just happens to be both Chinese and a film student making a film. So, with an obvious directorial stand-in in place, what happens? Not too much. Song uses Simon in her film project which is very much like the classic film, and we see footage scattered throughout the rest of the main film including, somewhat confusingly, at the very beginning, before we’ve even met the characters. There are also scenes where the titular orb floats outside the apartment when Song is not actually filming. I found its presence baffling most of the time, and the film, like the lives it portrays, as scattered and uneven, though well-intentioned. Suzanne’s living arrangements are messy and her relationships unclear, and by the end of the film, there’s really no sense of resolution. What I did like about the film was its wonderful use of natural light, as well as the corresponding naturalness of the dialogue, with characters repeating dialogue not heard the first time by other characters, and other realistic touches.

But in the end, I wasn’t really moved. My balloon, instead of taking flight, just slowly deflated over the film’s 113 minutes.

Trailer

6/10(6/10)

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire)

Published
by
James McNally
on September 11, 2005
in Film Festivals and TIFF
. Closed

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire)

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire) (France, director Alain Tasma): Another gut-wrenching portrayal of some of the shameful events perpetrated during the Algerian war, this film is an important document of the legacy of French colonialism.

On the night of October 17, 1961, more than 20,000 Algerians gathered in Paris for a peaceful demonstration against French rule of their homeland. It wasn’t entirely spontaneous. In fact, the FLN (the main group advocating for Algerian independence) required all Algerian men to participate. It was to be a show of solidarity to bolster the ongoing negotiations between the FLN and the French government. Instead, it turned into a massacre. The police were already living in a climate of fear and repressed anger due to the ongoing campaign of random assassinations of police officers. And the police leadership were eager for a crackdown to avoid further humiliation. As the demonstrators gathered in various districts, police immediately moved in to arrest thousands, and after some confusing reports of being fired upon, themselves fired upon and then charged the crowds. There is no official report on the number of dead, but it was somewhere between 50 and 200. More than 40 years later, there has never been an official acknowledgement of the events of that night.

Noted television director Alain Tasma spent two years gathering evidence and reconstructing the events leading up to the massacre, and he presents a straightforward account that manages to capture the rising tension keenly. The film is a sort of parallel to the events portrayed in the classic film The Battle of Algiers, and Tasma owes a lot to the techniques and pacing of that forty-year-old masterpiece. With the exception of that film, most “issue” films rarely rise above their sense of moral outrage, and October 17, 1961 (more evocatively entitled “Nuit Noire” in its native France) is not a masterpiece. But it does capture the feeling of a time not so long ago, a feeling which is eerily present again in the rising Islamophobia of many Western democracies.

8/10(8/10)

Les Choristes

Published
by
James McNally
on September 13, 2004
in Film Festivals and TIFF
. Closed

Les Choristes

Les Choristes (France/Switzerland, director Christophe Barratier): Les Choristes is an unabashedly sentimental film that reminded me very much of Italian films Ciao Professore! and especially Cinema Paradiso. It tells the story of a failed musician named Clement Mathieu who finds himself taking a job in desperation as the supervisor of a reform school in 1949. The school is run by an authoritarian tyrant and the students are a bunch of delinquents who taunt him immediately with shouts of “Baldie!” and “Bullet Head!”. Mathieu decides to begin a choir as a sort of project to help with discipline and soon has the respect of the students. He also discovers a boy with a remarkable voice and does his best to encourage this gift while harbouring a crush on the boy’s mother. This is not totally original stuff, but the story is told well and the performances are strong, most especially by Gérard Jugnot as the rumpled and lonely Mathieu. The resemblances to Cinema Paradiso are quite strong. Both films use a flashback structure. In Cinema Paradiso, a famous film director is called home to his village to attend the funeral of his old mentor, the projectionist at the local cinema. In Les Choristes, it’s a famous orchestra conductor, called home to bury his mother, but the event triggers a visit from an old school chum who unfolds the tale of their music teacher Mathieu. The film is a “man behind the man” tribute to those quiet souls who push others to greatness while often not feeling very successful in their own lives. As someone who studied to be a teacher, I love this kind of story, even if it is not always fashionable in “serious” cinema circles. The emotions are real and are helped tremendously by a fabulous musical score and beautiful choral pieces.

The director was proud to be presenting the film in Toronto after its huge success in France, where it sold eight million tickets and a million copies of its soundtrack CD. We were also treated to a performance after the screening of two of the songs from the film by another boy’s choir, and the standing ovation was almost inevitable.

Film’s Web Site: www.leschoristes-lefilm.com

9/10(9/10)

Breathless (À bout de souffle)

Published
by
James McNally
on August 5, 2004
in Critics and DVD
. Closed

Breathless (À bout de souffle)

Brooke and I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle) (1960) the other night. It was my first time seeing it, though Brooke has seen it several times before, and says it’s one of her favourite films. Frankly, I had mixed feelings (though I gave it an 8 on IMDB). Some people can immediately dissect a film into its parts and can expound at length on the editing, the cinematography, the sound design, and lots of other “technical” aspects of the movie. I’ve never been able to do that, at least not upon my first viewing. I guess I have to ingest the whole before I can talk about any of the parts. And for me, the whole was somewhat unsatisfying, even disturbing.

I tried to distance myself from the obvious charms of the movie: Paris in the Sixties, exciting “French New Wave” flourishes like jump-cuts, the gorgeous Jean Seberg. And what I found was a film about two people with no souls. Michel and Patricia are completely amoral and aimless, and I could find no sympathy for them. This always makes watching a film difficult for me. And even though Brooke grudgingly agreed with me, it was still clear that she loves the film and I, well, not so much.

I was struggling to figure out whether it was just me being contrary, so I grabbed Pauline Kael’s book For Keeps off our bookshelf. Imagine my relief when I read:

“What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the engagingly coy young hood with his loose, random grace and the impervious, passively butch American girl are as shallow and empty as the shiny young faces you see in sports cars and in suburban supermarkets, and in newspapers after unmotivated, pointless crimes. And you’re left with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about it or anything else…The characters in Breathless are casual, carefree moral idiots.”

I think seeing the film for the first time at the age of 39 has a lot to do with it. If I’d seen it twenty years ago, I may not have suspected that the characters are poseurs, that even the filmmaker may be a bit of a poseur. I might have mistaken their chilling soullessness for “cool” and tried to imitate it.

When I see Breathless again (and I think it is worthy of another viewing), I certainly will pay more attention to the revolutionary camerawork and editing. With the moral vacuum at the heart of the film now recognized and named, that seems to be the only place left I’d want to look.