TO BECOME IMMORTAL AND THEN DIE

A review requested by Ryan J, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature and declaration of war Breathless* is a curious case. In hindsight, everything that is most daring about it would be repeated to stronger effect in more interesting movies overall by the same director - most directly in Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou, though almost everything he made throughout the 1960s reworks some element of his debut - which makes it frankly a wee bit harder to regard it with the same esteem that besotted critics and cinephiles did when it was brand new.And yet, this is The One. The single movie that you need to see and grapple with if you're going to have a reckoning with Godard's first phase, and arguably with the entirety of French cinema in that decade (arguably with any of the European New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, of which the French New Wave that Breathless co-created with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows was the wellspring). It's indisputably on the shortlist (the top ten, let's say) of Movies You Need To See if you're going to have a proper conception of cinema history and the potential of cinematic form. So even while my heart says that we should care more about Band of Outsiders or Contempt or Masculin féminin, my head says not to be fucking daft.

The place: Paris in the '60s. The time: America during Prohibition. Here we meet self-identified bastard Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young man who has certainly built most of his personality from a steady diet of B-grade Hollywood crime pictures, not unlike the writer-director who created him. He's apparently some kind of a real criminal, though you could be forgiven for supposing it's all an overbaked fantasy in his noir-soaked head, and he's also a loudmouth given to braggadocio and toxic sexism. Who's to say if we're supposed to admire him or find him absurdly hateful: the camera insinuates us right along side him, Belmondo's prickly acting and the relentlessly, self-consciously disagreeable things he keeps saying repel us, and the editing by Cécile Decugis, famously, doesn't much intend that we regard him as a real character at all: he's a dude in a movie with the misfortune to somewhat suspect that's the case, which leads him to act far too much like a movie character. And this is partially to blame for why he shoots a cop during a drive in the country.

I hope it says more about the film than my inattentiveness when I declare that, having seen Breathless God knows how many times now (I went to film school, and I'm a self-professed Godard fan - that's good for at least six viewings right there), and remembering with great fondness that it's the first of Godard's gangster movie riffs, I am infallibly surprised to remember that the entire plot hinges on Michel's murder of a cop. It's just not that kind of movie, except that of course it very much is - the rest of the film down to the last scene all revolves around the detectives hunting Michel down and ultimately getting their hooks into visiting American student Patricia (Jean Seberg), possibly the most important of his current paramours; she's the co-lead of the film, but at the same time they don't really seem to like each other very much, the evidence of the signature bedroom scene notwithstanding. But I'm going all out of order.

It is so deeply tempting and dangerously easy to lock in and adore Breathless for all its little flair: the popular introduction of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous technique of the jump cut, which I think we typically remember as showing up during a car ride that gets propelled ahead in an attempt to make it seem artificially exciting and tense, with the full aid and comfort of Martial Solal's pounding jazz-influenced score. But that's at least the third major scene involving jump cutting, and the other two are both conversations, one between Michel and another one of his girlfriends (it just so happens to be right after Michel mentions his recent work at famed movie studio Cinécitta), one between Patricia and the editor nudging her journalism career forward, both relatively banal. I wouldn't suggest anything so trite as to say that the jump cutting is the film's attempt to hurry us through the dully quotidian scenes that shouldn't even be in a nervy gangster thriller in the first place, but I wouldn't tell you not to make that claim for them.

Or there's the brilliant way that the killing of the cop is shot, with close-ups of the gun and the unsynchronised sound of an gunshot, immediately followed by a scene moments later - the jarring image editing and discontinuous sound standing in as surrogates for the act of violence instead of that act being depicted (both times a human being is murdered with a gun in Breathless, the sound of the gunshot does not match the onscreen imagery. Just a fun thing to be aware of). Which would easily lead us to the film's bravura use of sound editing, which for my money is the far bolder aspect of Breathless's aesthetic developments, though the film editing was more quickly, more widely copied. And then I would talk about the floating, ghostly voices in the scene with a great, famous author (played by New Wave progenitor Jean-Pierre Melville) being peppered with high-minded but insipid philosophical questions leading to purposefully shitty answers ("Rilke was a great poet, so undoubtedly right" is his considered response to some journalist's "look how I did my research!" moment), and maybe the way that the score keeps jolting its way into the movie, mostly but not always motivated by the onscreen action.

The mistake I have personally had in the past with doing that is to lose the forest for the trees: Breathless is not just the sum of Godard's aesthetic. And it is here, I think, that something on the order of Masculin féminin argues for itself as an improvement over Godard's debut, since that film more clearly demonstrates the reason for its aesthetic rather than simply wandering, as Breathless occasionally does, into "look at me, I can be formally outrageous for the sake of it!" territory.

So let's not indulge that limited reading, huh? Step back from the jump cutting and the sound, from Seberg's stiff French and Belmondo's posing for the camera, from the litany of Hollywood genre film references and in-jokes, and Breathless does in fact take on quite a distinctive shape. It's not just Godard's riff on gangster movies of both the American and French tradition, and not even just his riff on the kind of young people so infatuated with pop culture that they'd fall into the trap of defining their identity in terms of the movies they enjoy most. Though that's getting us closer.

It's really nothing else but the first in a chain of films where Godard is interested in youth itself, the issue of how young, or at least young-ish individuals manage to find their way around a quickly globalising world whose values are evolving at a startling rate. For Michel, this means retrenching to an archly conservative, performance-based notion of masculinity, and the whole movie bends itself around him - though by no means does it do so uncritically - and eschewing the real world in favor of the fantastic one he thinks of in movies.

Reality, in the form of aesthetic realism, insists on pushing its way through; I return us to that bedroom scene, in which a film constructed out of three- and four-minute blasts of narrative propulsion jams on the brakes for 23 minutes as Michel surprises Patricia in her hotel, they have sex, they discuss art insofar as his dickish, petulant refusal to take her questions seriously permits. The editing slows down, the lighting (from cinematographer Raoul Coutard) turns ragged and rough, the setting becomes almost sublimely unexceptional and devoid of storytelling momentum. It's like the "other" New Wave, the one by Truffaut (who co-wrote this film) and Rohmer, based in languid humanistic moments of unadorned conversation pushes its way into Godard's more manic, formalist New Wave for the duration of a whole act. But for the most part, the film permits Michel his fantasy, even though it requires him to be betrayed by a woman who seems a little perplexed herself why she's been obliged to be a femme fatale in the film's glorious final shot, a deeply ambivalent close-up on Seberg's face that ends with her turning her back on us.

The jarring and groundbreaking post-modernism of the filmmaking - Breathless is not the first movie that is aware that it's a movie and which acts to make sure we're aware that it's a movie (that's not even an invention of the sound era), but it's the film that kickstarted that as a tradition that has never since gone fully into hibernation - isn't, then, simply a radical response to the hidebound aesthetics of the bulk of post-war French cinema. Of course it's partly that. To assert otherwise would be to deny the volumes of Godard's own writing at this time, when he was still a critic at the legendary Cahiers du cinéma. But the aesthetic violence of the film is also an attempt to encapsulate the rage of its characters, whose youthful energy is given no functional outlet, and so must explode somehow. Within the world of the film, that means destroying the traditional structures of cinema. In the real world, that meant the increasing unrest of the '60s that resulted in the May 1968 protests across Europe - and while I'll not be such a Godardian as to claim that he could predict those protests were coming, any quick glance at his films in '67 - Week End, La chinoise - and their continued development of the self-destruction begun with Breathless suggests that the nascent youthful resentment of this film had continued festering and growing ever bolder, more radical, and more intense. As much as they're any one thing, Godard's films are deliberate diagnoses of the era in which he made them, and Breathless is as precise an identification of the culture of the '60s-to-come as I have seen in the movies.

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COOL, CLEAR WATER

A review requested by Tim Van Autreve, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Director Claude Berri's Manon of the Spring from 1986 is maybe the best kind of sequel. It is greatly deepened in its emotional impact if you've seen Jean de Florette, its predecessor from earlier in 1986 (they were released in France about three months apart), and can fully appreciate the weight of history leaning down on the characters. But it works tremendously well as a standalone narrative (in fact, it does so better than Jean de Florette, which ends on something of a cliffhanger): the backstory is woven into character-building moments so fluidly that it doesn't register that we're having and entirely different film recapped, and having seen the original film, it doesn't register that we're having stuff we already know spit back at us.

This isn't actually all that much of an accident: Manon of the Spring began life as a 1952 film of the same name written and directed by the multi-talented Marcel Pagnol, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. As I understand it, the film was carved down so severely from Pagnol's original vision that he decided to turn it into a novel. And since he was already turning it into a novel, he went ahead and turned into a massive two-volume novel, so he could flesh out the film's backstory in its own full narrative. The hefty The Water of the Hills, or L'eau des collines, since everything is sexier in French (though I admit, I prefer the way Manon of the Spring feels in my mouth compared to Manon des sources) was published in 1963, and it was cyclically re-adapted by Berri and Gérard Brach, and so the overall point is, anyway, that if Manon of the Spring feels like it was worked out to stand on its own two feet, while Jean de Florette has an absence of resolution that gives it a kind of tacked-on feel, that's because that is precisely what happened.

I prefer Jean de Florette even so, but it's not worth being a dick about it: both movies are sort of terrific, much better than it seems like they should be on paper. They are relentlessly commercial 1980s French films - so 1980s French, right from the font used in the opening credits - designed for maximum international appeal in the period setting (the late '20s, approximately) and the casting, and shot by Bruno Nuytten (his last work as a cinematographer, before he shifted to directing) to shamelessly make Provence look as beautiful and tourist-friendly in its endlessly golden, sun-kissed fields and hills as any corner of God's earth ever has. The first time I watched the dyad, I approached with an undiluted suspicion verging on hostility, but it's simply too intelligently written and assembled not to overcome that. This is kind of the Gallic version of peak Merchant Ivory: it really seems like the thing that it is can't help but be awful, and instead it's really great.

Back to Manon itself, since that's the theoretical focus here. Some years ago, César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) contrived to block a spring that fed the neighboring property, to force Jean Cadoret, the owner, to sell; his conspiracy ended up getting out of hand and Jean died. Now César and his idiot manchild nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) own the property and use it to grow carnations, with the water from that very same spring. Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), who witnessed the Soubeyrans' treachery, now lives in the countryside as a goatherd, having come to accept her lot in life, though not forgetting the wrong done to her. This situation explodes because of three events: first, Ugolin watches Manon dancing nude in the hills to dry herself off after bathing, and grows obsessed with her. Later, on a trip to town, she overhears a pair of villagers talking about the wrong done to Jean all those years ago, and realises to her horror that the whole community knew about César's villainy, and did nothing to stop him, since he was such a prominent citizen. She'd be without any recourse, except that quite by accident one day, she discovered the small cave housing the spring that provides the village with all its water. Quicker than you can say "karma sucks, bitches", Manon blocks off the spring, forcing the villagers to come to reckoning with the past sins; they presume the dried-up water must be a sign of divine wrath. While this plays out, César grows increasingly obsessed with the idea that his inept, childless nephew is the last member of the line, and he feeds Ugolin's motivation for starting a family, which turns into an increasingly morbid obsession with Manon that, in turn, intensifies her desire to extract vengeance.

The title positions Manon as the protagonist, but in the actual film it's nothing of the sort: this is much more César's story and therefore a study in how past sins nag at the present, whether those are the sins of Jean de Florette's plot, or the history behind even that history. In the scene that most directly sets up the themes and stakes of his arc, he explains to Ugolin that the Soubeyran fortunes were done in by the family's greed and wretchedness in trying to wall out the rest of the world. "Interbreeding! It's bad for rabbits, and it's bad for people" he grouses to nephew, clearly a victim of that interbreeding.

In this context, Manon is an agent of fate more than a character in her own right, and Berri encourages us to think of that by keeping her dialogue and even her action to a minimum for the early parts of the movie. Casting Béart went a great deal of the way towards making that work: her incongruous beauty is absolutely never convincing as a rural shepherd girl, but it helps to make her seem like a nymph more than a person, something that the way she's filmed reinforces: our first glimpse of her is as a quick burst of motion that we can just make out as a human figure before it darts up a tree. When she's finally brought into the film as a proper character, we learn that she's articulate and inordinately intelligent for that place (a legacy from her intellectual father), and her behavior, coupled with Béart's deeply thoughtful expressions - it's not a very speech-dependent role - allows us to appreciate Manon as a fully-formed individual in her own right, and not just a prop for César's downfall and reckoning; but those early scenes cast a long shadow, and there's always a lingering feeling that she's an embodiment of nature's own revenge, and that the villagers' assumption that the blocked-up spring is a spiritual punishment is exactly right.

It is, in all ways, a film about the relationship of the land and the people who live on it, something accomplished especially well in wide shots that present human beings and their habitations as elements in the landscape, and not even the most important among those elements, sometimes. Even the postcard-appropriate photography contributes to this, focusing our attention on the scenery, which is given so much emphasis and liveliness that it becomes a character, if I may run headlong into a cliché. But clichés wouldn't be clichés if they didn't have some truth to them, and the sheer presence of the beautiful earth with its lush foliage and imposing rocky hills has much to do with how Manon of the Spring works at presenting its characters' place in the world.

In fairness, I don't know that anything that happens here could be honestly described as surprising; the film's themes are not new, and while its execution of them is especially handsome and well-tethered to its characters, it's not in any way challenging. If the film were American, I could describe it as "really good Oscarbait", I think you'd know exactly what I had in mind, and how hard that "really good" had to work. But the point is, that work happened: distinctly bourgeois art film sensibilities and all, Manon is smart and persuasive and very, very lovely to look at. It's not daring, but that's true of much of French cinema in the 1980s, and this film and its sibling are clearly among the strongest highlights in that country and decade.

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THE RULES OF THE GAMINE

A second review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Concision is nice and all, but it's hard not to be jealous that in 2001, those of us in the English-speaking world got a movie with the blunt, sensible title Amélie, while in France, where the film was born out of the fertile mind of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, they had the enthusiastic The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain. Which is absolutely more in line with the movie as it exists out in the wild.

The movie marked Jeunet's return to France after his abortive one-movie layover in Hollywood, where he caused the frantic, kaleidoscopic Alien: Resurrection to happen into the world. That experience, of course,didn't go well for anybody (least of all the audience), but it seems to have been of some use to Jeunet, for his next feature is a pretty perfect hybrid of the delirious fantasies he directed with Marc Caro in the 1990s, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and the glossy high-tech sensibility of a Hollywood production. Amélie is impossible to have without CGI, which meant something a lot different in 2001 than it means now.

It's also true that, compared to Delicatessen (a vicious dark comedy) and The City of Lost Children (a demented Surrealist nightmare), Amélie is vastly more audience-friendly, though I cannot say whether this is because Jeunet was infected by the American film industry, or simply because everything dark and warped in the firs two movies was the responsibility of Caro. At any rate, it is effervescent and cheery; maddeningly, toxically cheery, if you're not on its wavelength, and I've always been surprised by the number of people I've met who were absolutely not on that wavelength.Certainly, I can see where the film would become thoroughly enervating if you don't find a way into its style: everything about the design, the dialogue, the acting, and especially the cinematography (by my beloved Bruno Delbonnel; this is the movie that put him on the map) and score (by Yann Tiersen) is utterly artificial and unrelenting. In fact, I should underline that again: especially especially the score. Tiersen's music, which I find utterly beguiling, is jolly, robust, and feels like it belongs under a circus tent in some overheated Epcot Center version of France as foreigners imagine it. It hits the ground running before even the puckish, detached narration delivered plummily by André Dussolier has found its footing, and it tells us all we ever need to know about Amélie: you're about to watch a carnival in the guise of a romantic comedy about a young Parisian woman doing good deeds.

"Carnivalesque" is a lazy word to describe Jeunet's aesthetic, but it has the benefit of being exactly correct. The thing unifying all of his films made without Caro is that they're populated by elaborately fanciful and quirky characters who nevertheless feel like they could somehow manage to exist in the real world (something that's certainly not true of the fanciful cast of City of Lost Children), they move through brightly colored spaces at a high energy, and they and the movie containing them always feels profoundly giddy and delighted at the raw possibilities of moviedom. They are garish celebrations of vitality. Now, in a science-fiction/horror movie about biological nightmares, or a romantic drama about World War I, that's not the most natural fit in the world, which is why neither Alien: Resurrection nor A Very Long Engagement can necessarily be defended as unambiguously great cinema (though I've always very much liked the latter film and have come around a great deal on the former). The reason Amélie is such a great triumph - the best film of Jeunet's career, solo or as part of a team, and one of the most deeply pleasurable French films of the 2000s - is that it's the perfect marriage of aesthetic to narrative content. For the script itself is exactly the same kind of celebration of life in all its kooky back alleys that the director's style turns itself towards regardless of what story is being told.

The narrative is so straightforward that it's hard to imagine it can get all the way to two hours, let alone two hours that never feel even a bit laggy: Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is a waitress at a café in Montmarte, and on the day of Princess Diana's death in August, 1997, she finds a small chunk of tile on her wall that can be pulled out, revealing a cubbyhole with a tin of various scraps of paper and toys that a boy in the 1950s might have considered his most important treasures. She tracks down the owner of this box, and he's so moved by this injection of his past life, he immediately sets to reconnecting with his estranged daughter. This gives Amélie such a rush that she immediately sets herself to the task of doing good for as many people as she can find, be they strangers, friends, or family. And one particular recipient of her care, Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), catches her fancy as more than just a charity case. But on top of all her very lovely characteristics, Amélie is cripplingly shy, and it's easier for her to construct an elaborate game to flirt with Nino than to come anywhere close to letting him know who she is.

There's a lot to say about Amélie, but what trumps everything is that this is a really fucking nice motion picture. It's trite to say, but most movies that can be described as "great" - those made with high levels of craftsmanship and artistry, anxious to demand a lot from the audience, and polished at every level of their production - are usually about grave topics. There really aren't all that many movies made at Amélie's level of achievement whose subject matter and tone both support the idea that the world and the people in it are basically good, and it's possible for a driven, dedicated individual to make everybody's lives better, including her own. It's shocking how little actual conflict exists in the movie: two male characters are presented as abrasive and unpleasant, but one is generally redeemed over the course of the movie, and neither of them represent any kind of block to Amélie herself. The only tension that actually exists in the film's two hours are whether or not this endlessly upbeat character will be able to overcome her retiring personality to do something actively nice for herself. Which is a conflict, to be sure, but so internalised and abstract as to be almost totally non-cinematic.

So instead of being driven by story, Amélie is driven by its light tone, and its abiding love of its characters, whom it happily spends long, lingering moments with. It largely abates in the film's second half, but a very large amount of the running time is given over to parenthetical moments and asides dedicated to fleshing out the characters, including Amélie herself - even including her mother (Lorella Cravotta), who dies in a freak accident before the movie has even really gotten around to starting. In one respect, this is a straightforward evolution from City of Lost Children, which sketches out its profoundly bizarre cast at the level of attitude and imagery; Amélie backs off slightly from that film's storybook grotesquerie, but uses much the same technique to quickly establish characters while digging much deeper into their hearts and minds.

Meanwhile, it's style is bulbous and bright, with lots of wide-angle lenses used to make the main character literally wide-eyed. Jeunet and editor Hervé Schneid trot out a great many fun tricks for colliding and overlapping shots to suggest the characters' thoughts spilling out into the world; Delbonnel's heavily processed cinematography (over-reachingly declared the best of the decade by American Cinematographer in 2010; I'm not even certain that I'd call it Delbonnel's own best work in that span of time, but it's undeniably lovely and came with a high degree of difficulty) bathes the whole movie in a warm coating of yellows and occasional greens that give it an unabashedly nostalgic glow - the film exactly sets itself to the late summer of 1997, but it has the faraway visual texture of something set at least before World War II - and ramp up the friendly, happy energy. It's sunshiney, that's what it is, with a great many bright exteriors shot in a cartoony register to make them seem even lighter.

The result is a movie that's extraordinarily likable and overwhelmingly generous. It's not blatantly unrealistic - suffering and exploitation exist in the world. But it's one of the great cinematic depictions of optimism that we are capable of beating those things down. And it's a remarkable, tender, and entirely honest (despite all the cartoon borders) portrayal of crippling introversion being gently, steadily massaged into something more productive and rewarding. This is one of the most uplifting movies of the 21st Century in every way, and certainly one of the most artistically complex and intelligent movies on such apparently simplistic, cheery themes. It's a happy, guileless masterpiece, and there simply aren't enough of those to go around.

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CHILDHOOD DREAMS

A review requested by Vianney B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. This was the opening film of the 48th Cannes International Film Festival, on 17 May, 1995 - more on the 1995 Cannes Festival project.

The two biggest problems with 1995's The City of Lost Children are that Delicatessen came out before it, and Amélie came out after it. And I concede that this is the least-fair way to go about the business of film criticism, but it's still hard to shake the sense that everything the film does well - and it does many things well - other films by the members of its directing team also do, as well or better (it's also heavily indebted to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but if we're going to start shitting on all the movies that crib from Brazil, we might as well not even bother having movies with production design).

The film is the second and last movie directed by Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, before the lure of Hollywood's Alien: Resurrection drew Jeunet to America and broke up the team (though Caro did help with the visual design of that film). And while the thinness of animator & comic book artist Caro's film career in the 20 years since leads a lot of us into the habit of acting like there's a straight line between this and the rest of Jeunet's career, that's a mistake, particularly in this case. There's a profound tonal difference between Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children on the one hand, and everything Jeunet made by himself on the other. A kind of nightmare veneer covers the first two, not in the sense that the films are horrifying or disturbing, but that they present places which feel mean and dangerous in ways that can be neither predicted nor redirected. While Jeunet's solo work is more boisterous, carnivalesque, and sentimental; even his Alien film is more chipper and upbeat than Delicatessen, a pitch black comedy about cannibalism, or City of Lost Children, a movie about a child kidnapping ring whose plot leaps around in such arbitrary bursts that it comes close to Surrealism, the aggressive sort where we're meant to be in a constant state of mental disarray while we're watching it.

What can never be said is that it's not exactly the film that Caro and Jeunet intended for it to be, or at least so I assume. There are no moments in The City of Lost Children that feel accidental, and the film's mise en scène is so hermetically sealed off that every single thing we see onscreen has to be regarded as a deliberate choice. The result is a movie that is first and foremost an exercise in design. Not just the production design, by Caro and Jean Rabasse, though it is impossible to see the movie and not first notice this; nor the character design, and it does seem that "character design" is the more correct term to use than "costumes and makeup", given how much the film starts from the ground and goes up in making its human figures feel like extensions of the world they inhabit, with Jean-Paul Gaultier's striking costumes defining the shape of the wearers as line objects, growing out of the lines of the set design and erupting in the comic grotesques of the faces of all the characters in the story. I swear it's not just knowing Caro's background in cartooning that leads me to suggest that The City of Lost Children resembles French comics come to life; not the soft, kid-friendly kind like Asterix, but the more graphically sleek and otherworldly sort drawn by artists like Moebius.

It's this sense, that the film has been assembled according to the principles of graphic art rather than movie directing, that most sets The City of Lost Children apart from all the movies I started off by comparing it to, and makes it a genuinely important film to hunt out and watch. It feels like concept art come to life, in way that's arresting and genuinely exciting to look at. But you'll notice that other than the phrase"kidnapping ring", I haven't said a word about the plot, and other than vague handwaving about the way it subscribes the narrative logic of a nightmare, nothing about the way it feels. Which is exactly "the problem", though I don't know that the movie labors on believing that this is something it's doing wrong. Still, it's the reason that I prefer Delicatessen, with its clear command of tone throughout, and its straightforward narrative development, or Amélie, which in some ways is just as self-contained as The City of Lost Children, but is light and sweet-natured enough that it doesn't seem so locked away from us as viewers. There's a story here, written by the directors & Gilles Adrien, and it's even a bit of a complicated one that's interesting to follow with, even though it doesn't really make sense until the last thirty minutes or so start to provide the whys behind all these weird beings we've been following. The approximate shape of it is that there's an oil rig outside of a port town, and on this rig lives Krank (Daniel Emilfork), a balding mad scientist who's all lab coat and gangly limbs, the little woman Mlle. Bismuth (Mireille Mossé), six dimwitted clones (all played by Dominique Pinon, who has been in every one of Jeunet's films), and Uncle Irving, a brain in a tank (voiced by Jean-Louis Trintignant). Krank has been kidnappign children from the town to steal their dreams, and one of his latest acquisitions is the adopted brother of One (Ron Perlman, speaking French phonetically), a strongman who sets himself to the task of finding the lost children, aided by the little girl Miette (Judith Vittet), an escapee from a ring of orphan thieves controlled by a cruel pair of conjoined twins (Geneviève Brunet and Odile Mallet).

Straightforward enough, though the way the story develops is so heavily based in innuendo and mysteries that don't pay off for half the running time that it's all much more of a "just go along for the ride" experience than it sounds. It's the kind of film that doesn't make the smallest attempt to win you over to its side; if you aren't immediately grabbed by the demented look of its world, there's nothing in the first ten minutes that's going to convince you to stick with it. And this is by no means a world that tries to be inviting: it's made up suffocatingly close buildings that all feel like they're about to collapse and villains who are queasily bio-mechanical, like the abandoned concepts from a David Cronenberg children's film. Darius Khondji shoots all of it in a patina of mouldering greens that makes even the decayed look of his other 1995 film, Se7en, seem cheery. Now, I happen to find the look of the film utterly captivating, even as I wish that the film attached to that look had a bit more oxygen. If the visuals don't work for the individual, then the whole thing is done: Delicatessen is a better nightmare, even if it's less audaciously visual, and the visceral reactions it provokes are more sustained. Still, there are so many utterly unforgettable images here - the storybook illustration feeling of the sea and the oil rig, the flea's-eye view of the damp alleys of the town, the opening scene in which the clones stage a travesty of Christmas to attempt to cheer up the child they're kidnapping - that I'd still have to urge the movie on everybody I could. It's not always successful at being a thoroughly sui generis demented dreamscape and bedtime story bone dark, but it always tries to be, and that kind of unrestrained commitment is a precious thing.

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THE ART OF LYING

A review requested by Robert Lovejoy, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

In all the annals of unclassifiable films, I can't think of anything quite as unclassifiable as 1973's F for Fake, the penultimate completed feature of Orson Welles's directorial career (only Filming 'Othello' followed it). It's customarily identified as a documentary, and then customarily the hedging begins to the effect that, whatever the hell it is, "documentary" is a misleading word. It's part of the vaguely-defined tradition of the "essay film", movies which are ruminations on themes divorced from storytelling and intoxicated with using the medium itself to build an argument; but inherent to the notion of the essay film is that all of the best ones (and F for Fake is, I think, easily one of the best) don't resemble anything but themselves. They are sui generis.

The ingredients that go into F for Fake are, already, rather twisted up to the point that it's a matter of some controversy as to what existed at what point, and who's responsible for assembling it. But the basic shape of the thing is that French director François Reichenbach was preparing a documentary about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger who had just been the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving, published in 1969, with the monolithic title Fake. This was shaping up to be an intimate but stylistically conventional work of cinéma vérité, based on the footage that pops up in F for Fake, and that's when the bomb dropped: Irving's follow-up to Fake, an "as told to" autobiography of the legendary recluse Howard Hughes published in 1971, was discovered to be a complete fabrication. Around the time that this was discovered - one of the controversies concerns in exactly what order things happened - Reichenbach gave his de Hory footage to Welles, and signed on as cinematographer for the new project that the American filmmaker was going to build out of that foundation.

That new project was a treatise on the concept of fakery in multiple guises, including the act of making F for Fake itself; although Welles, narrating in full raconteur mode, promises us at the three-minute mark that everything we're told in the next sixty minutes of film is going to be the simple, pure truth, the editing and implications of his film are at the very least misleading, if not patently untrue. But then, by the two-minute mark, he's already freely owned up to being a charlatan. And that means laying claim to footage directed by others (Reichenbach and Oja Kodar, Welles's partner for the last quarter century of his life), re-assembling that and his own footage into mixtures whose implicit meaning is quite different from unadorned reality, and generally letting his subjects and himself spin a good story and worry about of the details lining up perfectly only as a tertiary concern.

Nor, really, does the film ever pretend otherwise. Welles clearly learned a lot from the Godardian Wing of the French New Wave that was still quite fresh in memory in the early '70s; by the third shot of F for Fake, in which we openly see the film crew making the movie we're watching, it's clear that this will be an enthusiastic participant in the trend of self-aware formalism by which a movie spends its entire running time reminding us that it's a movie, and that it was assembled by people with some kind of agenda. And still before that spurious "the next sixty minutes" claim, we've already heard Welles describe fakery, fraud, and lies under the affectionate umbrella of "hanky panky", the phrase cropping up at exactly the moment that the editing ramps up into a whirlwind of shortened attention and confusing jumps between unconnected images.

The rest of the film blasts through fragments of the de Hory and Irving stories, blended with snippets of Welles sharing anecdotes about them, himself, and other people he's known, the director appearing as a garrulous spectre all in black with a bushy beard to dominate the foggy empty spaces where he talks directly to us or the fancy restaurant table where he entertains a group of hangers-on with his theatrically-scaled way of talking. From the opening, which finds Welles on a train platform dazzling a child with magic tricks - the editing working double-time to make sure we can't tell if the little boy is truly seeing the marvels Welles is playing, or if he's just an actor responding to the most boring kind of cinematic sleight-of-hand - the topic of the film is at least as much Welles as a showman, desperate to please and keep us off-balance with the twists and turns of his tale-telling. "Sorry, I've been jumping around like this because that's how it was", he apologises at one point, but of course that's a lie too. He's jumping around because it delights him to do so, and it gives the film the frenzied patter of a magician who lets himself appear to be sloppy and confusing because that's the actual way he keeps us from looking. For among all its other charms, F for Fake is, essentially, structured as a feature-length magic trick with a single punchline that has nothing to do with Elmyr de Hory or Clifford Irving.

It's a hellaciously daunting movie, throwing curveball after curveball at high speed throughout, bragging about the lies its tells and inviting us to enjoy being lied to; for that is, ultimately, the real theme of F for Fake. Not that liars exist because people like de Hory, Irving, Welles, or Oja Kodar's grandfather, another art forger, can monetise tricking people; liars exist because people like to be tricked. It is the amateur magician Welles who recognises that, not the world-class filmmaker Welles, which perhaps explains why this is so unlike anything else in his career. But it's the filmmaker who translates that observation into purely cinematic terms, using some of the canniest editing I've ever seen to misdirect and guide the viewer to exactly the responses that Welles wants, while telling such colorful true and somewhat less-true stories that it's a delight to be manipulated.

Everything about the film is densely packed and even a bit wearying; 89 minutes is as long as this could dare to be, though it has the decency to end with a nice cool-down to ease us out of it. The filmmaking throughout is giddy and self-infatuated, and I will concede that of all the movies I've ever firmly believed to rank among the very best ever made, F for Fake is one of the most absolutely frivolous; its demolition of filmmaking technique is intellectually stimulating but not, ultimately, very complex in the annals of self-aware cinema. But very great it nevertheless is: a bold, brazen movie that could only have been made because a top-notch talent decided to show off for a little bit. Sure, it's indulgent, but indulgence is rarely this captivating.

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INTO THE WOODS, AND OUT OF THE WOODS

A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

As I write these words in the spring of 2015, the 2012 French animated feature The Day of the Crows has no distribution plans in North America, nor even an announced distributor (and that despite being a Canadian co-production, and based on an award-winning book by Québécois author Jean-François Beauchemin). This is both weird and infuriating. Weird, because releasing films like this and goosing them into Oscar nominations is, like, the whole thing that GKIDS exists for. Infuriating, because The Day of the Crows presents a strong case for itself as being the best animated feature in any Western aesthetic style in the 2010s so far.

Things start out with a wonderful few minutes of distraction and sleight-of-hand, beginning with a thoroughly uncertain opening that finds a mountain of a man tearing ass through a forest at night, and dropping a baby in his hurry; that baby spends the night being kept safe by a mother animal of some kind (I'm sure they have them all over Europe, but it looks not quite exactly like any of a half-dozen cat-size mammals I can come up with), before his father comes back to retrieve him. That, then, is our first introduction to the less-than-functional relationship of Courge (voiced by Jean Reno), the father, and the boy (Lorànt Deutsch), who never does quite end up with a name. When next we see them, they're living in a hut of sticks and the walls of a shallow cave, eking out a hunter-gatherer existence and wasting no time on niceties like love or familial affection; to Courge, the boy is only an obligation that must be taught how to hunt and survive.

After a few minutes of this, two things happen in very short order that blow away what has already proven to be a visually excellent, appealingly no-frills story of life in a primeval European wood. One is that the boy crosses paths with a human body topped by a ginger cat head, wearing a heavy coat, and communicating with gestures and knowing looks. The other is that the boy, hunting a stork, comes all the way up to the edge of The Outer World, which his father has very angrily forbidden him from ever entering, and the boundary is marked by high-voltage power lines. And just like that, the film announces without even raising its voice that it's going to be much less straightforward and explicit than the opening implied.

As it turns out, Courge and the boy have been living just a few miles from a small town in the French countryside in a period that's never marked, but it's surely well after the end of World War II, to judge from the clothes and general attitudes. The boy learns this quite by accident, when his father is wounded and the silent animal-people inhabiting the wood guide him out of it; in town, he finds a kind doctor (legendary director Claude Chabrol, in the final work of his professional life; he died two years before the film opened), and his daughter Manon (Isabelle Carré), no older than the boy himself, and they take the wildmen in to heal the unconscious Courge and give the boy food and shelter. The townsfolk, meanwhile, remember Courge from the as-yet unspecified history that sent him into the woods a decade ago. and they are not happy to see him back; one old woman, Mme. Ronce (Chantal Neuwirth), is convinced that he kidnapped her niece and murdered her, and she whips up the whole town into a frenzy against the newcomers, in a fashion most reminiscent of that other small-town French drama with a corvid in its name, Henri-George Clouzot's Le corbeau.

The story, adapted by Amandine Taffin, deftly combines that kind of parable of social conflict with the essentialism of a fairy tale, and surprisingly naturalistic psychology, given the other two things. It's unexpectedly eager to plumb some dark, nasty depths of human behavior in the form of Courge, a wicked father straight out of Grimm, who does not have any of the soft edges of most kid-friendly films about poor parenting; even when we start to see the shape of his tragic backstory, it merely makes him an explicable asshole instead of an inexplicable one. The same is true of Ronce, a brittle and brutal woman whose character design makes her look like a gleefully angry skull perched upon a human body - but the character design throughout the film is divine. Let me hold off on that for just a second longer. For I was not done praising The Day of the Crows for being absolutely willing to own up to the fact that there are some bad and nasty things that happen in life, and even when they're survivable, that doesn't make them less horrible. The film gets quite a lot of mileage from something as simple as the repeated way that the boy responds with confusion and some mistrust to any attempt to show him affection or kindness - without having to spell it our or dwell on it, the animation consistently shows how the boy's upbringing has left him entirely ill-equipped for even the slightest human interaction that isn't based in control and desperation.

It is, that's as much to say, a perfect exercise in character animation as performance, despite the visual style containing not a speck of Disney-style realism (it is traditional cel-style animation, of a sort that remains common in Europe - think the beautiful Ernest & Célestine - even as it is largely extinct in North American theatrical animation). Director Jean-Christophe Dessaint - whose most important work till now has been as assistant director on The Rabbi's Cat, though I will remain breathlessly hopeful that he gets to do another feature of his own - and his team of animators and designers have made a film based clearly in the charming grotesque of European cartooning, with the characters all rounded line drawings with few details (ol' Skull-Face Ronce is the primary if not indeed only exception), whose basic "two ovals and a line" faces stuck inside squishy-shaped heads are capable of an enormous range of the subtlest emotions; Manon especially is a masterwork of communicating volumes of unspoken thoughts through the tiniest beats of "acting". Despite looking broadly simple and comic, these characters are run through an enormous range of serious emotions, and the fact that such complex loss and need play out in the caricatured cartoon shapes we see onscreen gives those feelings more impact simply as a function of how unexpected they are.

These characters are set loose in one of the most beautiful worlds in animation in a generation. To begin with, the film establishes a division between the woods and the town that serves it well: namely, the town is largely realistic, fully detailed backrounds, while the forest is laid out as a series of Impressionistic paintings. There is, for the most part, the insinuation of trees and earth rather than the clear depiction of them in crisp, steady lines; it is more a spectrum of colors melded together and treated to terrific lighting design and effects animation; the film boasts the best animated rainstorm in an age, and the whole thing is lousy with dappled lighting rolling over arms and faces.

It's as gorgeous and insinuating as animation gets, the kind of film where the raw beauty of the artwork would be worthy of acclaim even if it didn't add the layers of meaning it does to an already complex, smart story about family and social dynamics. It is, admittedly, easy for me to go nuts in extolling the merits of a film that most of my readership will probably never be able to see, but The Day of the Crows is exactly the kind of movie that drive a love of animation: the hope that one will get to see a film where everything comes together so perfectly justifies wading through a lot of halfway-decent trivialities. Not particularly insisting on a family audience nor deliberately rejecting one, and exploring a range of themes that would be impressive in any live-action film, The Day of the Crows is great moviemaking and storytelling of a sort that plainly demonstrates why the medium of animation is as artistically significant as anything else in modern cinema.

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UNSPEAKABLE FILTH

A review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

L'âge d'or, an hour-long 1930 feature, is the second of the two collaborations between France-based Spanish surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and it is certainly less jam-packed with iconic "every film buff alive knows this shot" shots than their 1929 short Un chien andalou. But it also better - oh, fuck me. "Better" is a word that has no place in this conversation at all. Buñuel and Dalí were, quite specifically, not looking to do things that would get them praise for being "good". Using "better" is exactly missing the point. L'âge d'or is, let us say, the more complex of the two, and the more thematically probing, which is probably inevitable given that it's four times as long. It is absolutely the more naked political film - Dalí was an iconoclast who just wanted to up-end people's expectations, Buñuel a committed radical who wanted to tear down the Catholic Church and and the right-wing European governments of that period with all the force and rage he could muster. In its combination of rabid left-wing politics and vigorous surrealism, L'âge d'or is the first truly "Buñuelian" film, then, and it is not surprising to learn that the relationship between the two artists had deteriorated to the point that Dalí had virtually nothing to do with the film's production once the screenplay was completed - according to a deliciously tawdry but hard-to-verify legend, Buñuel chased Dalí off the set on the first day with a hammer.

The film has a scenario that starts to reveal itself more and more explicitly as it moves along, but for a healthy span of the beginning, it doesn't seem that way. Instead, L'âge d'or picks up right where Un chien andalou left off, as a series of seemingly disconnected visual gags, though "gag" is in the eye of the beholder. Violent shocks of aggressive absurdity is probably closer to the mark. The first of these is a series of images of scorpions, taken from a nature documentary, stitched together with large blocks of intertitles - the movie is a sound/silent hybrid, but more on that later - which pretty neatly sets up the mood of the film as a series of lashing, defensive attacks by venomous arthropods. Which is about as nice a sentiment as anything Buñuel and Dalí have to spare for the twin targets of their ensuing satiric broadside, the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church.

The nature of that attack is two-fold: first in the accumulation of random startling and blasphemous imagery, second in the details of its story - perhaps surprisingly, given how cozily L'âge d'or fits into even the most proscriptive definition of Surrealism. But for as madcap and what-the-almighty-fuck-is-going-on the film's barrage of visual non sequiturs no doubt is, L'âge d'or actually tells a rather clear, straightforward story: they want to have sex (they are played by Gaston Modot and Lya Lys), and circumstances keep preventing. At first they can't because the city of Rome is founded on the exact muddy patch where they were trysting. Afterwards, they can't because of the censoriousness of Rome's most noteworthy export, Catholic morality. Finally, they can't because of psychological symbolism. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ (Lionel Salem) is raping young girls in a monastery. Only it's possible he's just a man who look as and acts uncannily like Christ. It's also probably not the case that Rome was founded in 1930. But that is when it was foundered, anyway.

So, fair is fair, it gets less clear the closer you look at it, but at the broadest possible respect, the film is first and above all about the importance of openly and honestly engaging with one's libido, and the way that all of Polite Western Upper-Middle Class society is structured to make that engagement specifically impossible. It's a randy film, with seductive blow-jobs delivered to the toes of statues, and the man feverishly imagining that advertisements are depicting abstract, disembodied vaginas, and all that good stuff; and while it presents sex as the stuff of loopy comedy, it also presents it with good-natured humor. The rest of the film, though, is pure, rage-filled mockery of the stifling rules of society, opening with a bleak joke against a quartet of bishops, ending with a nasty attack on Christ as a hero-villain out of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and middling with a stuffy bourgeois party that's pelted by absurdities and anti-social provocations like something from a more sexually-charged Marx brothers movie. For anti-social behavior is presented in L'âge d'or as an aphrodisiac; both in a nod to the erotic nature of the taboo, and a clear implication that everything about this society is worth being anti.

The film is confusing and densely packed, but one thing it's surely not is subtle: there's no way to watch it without being repeatedly hit in the face by the filmmakers' disgust with the puritanical conformist urges that are linked through bizarre staging, crafty editing, and ironic sound cues with cruel exploitation of a working class that the wealthy ignore completely, with sublimated violence, with feces - much like the then eight-year-old Ulysses, another work of art to fearlessly confound social satire with pornographic depictions, L'âge d'or wants us to see and hear and think about shit, the great unifying element of all humanity and animals, that Nice People Never Talk About, and can be made to look ridiculous simply by placing them in its metaphorical proximity.

Is it all a bit puerile? Aye, undoubtedly - the 26-year-old Dalí and 30-year-old Buñuel weren't kids but they were close enough anyway to have the enraged snottiness of youth, and that's the clear animating force underneath L'âge d'or: the young person's snarl of contempt to an older generation that has massively ruined everything, "fuck you for this, and fuck you for that, and just fuck you". By drifting from boldly authoritative documentary footage and narration to cheap visual and audio gags to startling, often upsetting weirdness that seems to come from no place but a chaotic dream, the film connects the real, tangible world (the documentary) to a frolicking hell of random nonsense (the rest), and it does this with the unchecked, self-confident gusto of untried, undisciplined youth. I freely admit that it's largely for this reason that, as easily as I find myself whipped along in the film's frenzies, I can't find it in me to regard it as top-level Buñuel; most of his career later, the director would revisit much of the same ideas (the need for sexual openness, the totalitarian hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, parodic religious iconography) in Viridiana, a film as controlled and clear as L'âge d'or is freewheeling, and directly because of its greater maturity and more precise presentation, it's a far nastier and more piercing satiric assault.

But by no conceivable means does the existence of that later film mean that L'âge d'or is redundant: it has a vitality and insane level of visual creativity that are all the justification it could possibly require. As a document of capricious madness turning the world into a pile of steaming shit and then declaring things a Golden Age, the films' unpredictable shifts in tone and content, and the inexplicable content of its various jokes, could not have been bettered. It was the film that 1930 needed, and decades upon decades later, it still has potency to shock the squares like almost nothing else out of entire generations of the avant-garde.

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PARTLY CLOUDY

Clouds of Sils Maria is essentially three different films, and each one in order is a little bit less interesting. But for a while there, for maybe the first 25 minutes or so, it seems that Olivier Assayas has done it again, knocking out a fascinating character study of life in a constantly plugged-in, celebrity-addicted world, and he does it in what I'd call the most unexpected way possible: by putting his whole first act on the shoulders of Kristen Stewart, late of the Twilight franchise and unlikely to ever outlive the memories of all of us who in those days thought she was just the worst thing.

Unlikely, but it's not impossible, not if she keeps up to at this level of ambition with directors and scripts. Her performance in Sils Maria is the best work she's ever done, and better still, a top-shelf performance by the standards of any actor in any movie. She plays Valentine, the highly-competent twenty-something assistant to middle-aged international movie star Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), and for that first 25 minutes, the movie is all about her: the juggling of phone calls and calendars, the emotional massaging, the steely mama bear attitude she adopts in relationship to the much older but also much more tetchy and destructible Maria. It's vintage Assayas, anatomising the behaviors and attitudes of technology-driven life, just abstract enough and set in a series of heightened, unreal locations (a seemingly endless train, a glamorous but oddly empty hotel in the Swiss Alps) to avoid seeming like blunt docudrama. And Stewart is our marvelous host through this world, storming through the plot while letting her character's unexpressed emotions linger there, for us to engage with or not as we see fit.

Unfortunately, it becomes clear before too long that this is not the actual film that Sils Maria wants to be. In Switzerland, reeling from the death of her onetime mentor and most beloved author Wilhelm Melchior - she was in town to accept an award on his behalf, before suddenly forced to serve as centerpiece of a memorial service instead - Maria is approached by ambitious pan-European theater director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger) with a gimmicky offer: he wants her to play the part of the older woman in Melchior's psychological drama about female homoeroticism that was, 20 years ago, the starmaking role for Maria on both stage and screen, when she played the younger woman. Appealing to her vanity, her sense of history, and her sense of obligation to the newly deceased author, Klaus convinces her to take the part opposite self-destructive, scandal-prone Hollywood starlet Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz). And so Maria and Valentine head off to the Swiss valley of Sils Maria, there to study the play in Melchior's own home.

The film that Sils Maria becomes with this development is a hell of a lot less interesting, on account of being a hell of a lot more conventional in its themes about a middle-aged actress confronting herself aging. But even more because, completely uncharacteristically, Assayas's screenplay decides right about now that we are incredible idiots who need to have things explained to us, and so for more than an hour as Maria and Valentine run lines, and Maria hates herself and the universe while Valentine explains, with increasingly little patience, why Maria is beautiful and a genius, the film just plain starts grinding.

It is built on a series of metaphors, mostly in the script but some in the way that Assayas and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux film the Alps and the beautiful home where Maria tries to find her character. And these are not, in the main, very complicated metaphors, nor very original metaphors, neither of which is really all that big of a problem. No, the problem is when Assayas rumbles along and then has his characters deconstruct those metaphors right before our eyes, explaining in small words, and a lot of them, that playing the character she's always thought was a pathetic and weak forty-year-old waste of flesh is making Maria confront her fear of being pathetic, weak, and forty. And the even bigger problem is that Assayas doesn't just do this once; he does it over and over and over. If all you did was remove the scenes explicitly telling us things that other scenes already explicitly told us, you'd cut out 20 minutes of the film in the blink of an eye. There are even meta-layers of this same problem: the script to the play Maria's rehearsing is hard for her to play because it's so overt with its themes. And then she and Valentine start to discuss how those too-overt themes are also the themes of Maria's life, which makes it even harder for her to deal with how overt they are.

It's still better than the aneurysm that the film has when it enters its protracted epilogue, around the day of the final dress rehearsal, and it ceases to be about anything at all but protracting itself out to ruinous, suffocating lengths. But I would not want to spoil things. There's plenty to feel disappointed in throughout that whole middle (the ending, meanwhile, makes me feel outright hate more than simple disappointment).

Stewart and Binoche are both good enough (Binoche less so: when the script is that specific about what's going on in the character's head, it makes it harder for the actor to do much discovery on her own) that the film is still worth seeing, though I concede that it's more an obligation than a pleasure at that point. And while Assayas's visual storytelling isn't here at the level it is in, say, Summer Hours, where camera movement is a function of character psychology and the visual representation of places trumps the screenplay in communicating the meanings of the film, he still shows some of the old talent for crafting leading images; the positioning of Valentine and Maria in the frame does better work of indicating the slithery conflict between the two women's psychologies more craftily and convincingly than anything in the lumpy script. Still, "there are reasons this isn't bad" is hardly a ringing endorsement, and for all its intermittent strengths, it's hard to think of Clouds of Sils Maria anything better than a compelling failure.

5/10

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BDSM WEEK: SEXUAL POLITICS

To the best of my knowledge, at the time of this writing, 1976's In the Realm of the Senses has never been shown uncensored in its home country of Japan. The easy gag is to go for the "ye gods, it's too explicit for the country that invented tentacle porn?" angle, except that glosses over the social complexity that explains not merely why ITROTS - oh, we're going to have to work on finding a better abbreviation, aren't we - was so unprecedentedly controversial when it was made, but also why it was made to begin with. It is not merely a sexual film; it is a critique and deconstruction of Japanese sexual mores constructed into a film-shaped object.

To be a bit more specific, Realm of the Senses is that great theoretical ideal that all of the filmmaking intelligentsia of the 1970s kept driving itself: it is the great example of Artistic Porno. There have been attempts, as long as the film has existed, to somehow reclaim it from the category of pornography, often with the assumption that "art" and "porn" are mutually exclusive categories. But trying to redeem Realm of the Senses from the shameful genre of porn is, I think, to completely misunderstand what it is, what it's doing, and why writer-director Oshima Nagisa made it. The film shows, almost to the exclusion of any anything else, unsimulated sex scenes; the mechanics and fluids involved in sexual intercourse are depicted with unabashed physicality in close-ups and wide shots; and the really important part is that, unlike virtually every other artistically nuanced film containing explicit sex that I can think of, Realm of the Senses has no obvious interest in circumventing our proclivity to finding its sex scenes pleasurable and arousing. It's not prurient, and the grimly transactional feeling that characterises what most of us probably think of as "pornographic" is absent. But it is erotic, and even given the brutal place it winds up, it never feels for a nanosecond that sexual ecstasy is something for which its character or its audience deserve to be punished. That's far, far rarer in cinema throughout the world than explicit onscreen sex itself.

If I understand things correctly, the idealised Japanese audience that has never been able to see the film in the form Oshima wanted would have known exactly where things were going from the start, so allow me to give away the ending: Realm of the Senses is based on the true story of Abe Sada (Matsuda Eiko), who in 1936 killed her lover Ishida "Kichi" Kichizo (Fuji Tatsuya) by strangling him during sex, and cutting of his genitals to take with her as a memento. Oshima's movie trades, heavily, on our knowledge that things are heading in that direction (there's at least one moment of explicit foreshadowing that is, honestly, a bit more corny and leering than a film of such sensitivity and subtlety deserves), but only for purposes of strictly sex-positive humanism. In fact, that In the Realm of the Senses never seems to struggle with balancing self-positivity and a narrative it knows in advance ends with death and dismemberment is, in and of itself, one of the most impressive things about a movie that's basically 102 straight minutes of immaculately controlled filmmaking.

The film's narrative focus is conscribed to the point that it feels like fine lace, defined more by the holes it leaves than what's present. Starting right around the time that former prostitute and current maid Sada meets Kichi while cleaning his home, and the rest of the film consists of virtually nothing other than scenes of them having sex, or the time immediately before and after. Whatever domestic narrative passes between these events is alluded to but never shown; the tense political situation in Japan (the film takes place in the shadow of a failed coup d'etat by certain military leaders, less than three months before Ishida's death; war with China was just a year in the future) at the time is occasionally visible in the background, but it's never the focus. We have, in effect, just enough of a sense of everything that's not Sada and Kichi's increasingly intense sexual assignations to be particularly aware of how much the film isn't paying attention to that everything.

In the context of a culture with as defensive and repressive a relationship to sexuality as Japan - Oshima not only couldn't screen the film there, he couldn't even make it, legally, meaning that the negative had to be brought to France to be developed and edited - this focus on sex as a mutually satisfying and empowering act that requires no kind of narrative or social grounding was itself a bold social statement. Oshima being a reliably, perhaps even exclusively political filmmaker (I've seen only a small handful of his films, but that's the clear connective tissue between them all), it's unsurprising that for him, depicting explicit sex would be a primarily political consideration, and particularly considering its production and distribution woes, In the Realm of the Senses proves to be a uniquely powerful swipe against the culture it depicts. As Sada and Kichi's relationship grows increasingly isolated, it too grows less ashamed and mannered, finding more extreme limits of ecstatic violence and what would be called "aberrant" behavior, if it weren't for the fact that the sex itself is, in a sense, considered "aberrant" in context.

The film isn't exclusively driven by social concerns, though that is its primary focus. It's equally driven by character; and if there's any way in which this explicit, erotic film made almost solely out of sex scenes can rightfully be described as non-pornographic, or even anti-pornographic, it's in the way that it uses sex as a means of building character. Considering how little we actually see them do, we get a strong sense of the two leads, Sada especially (and how much more still can be said about the way that this taboo-busting indictment of Japanese sexual morality fixes specifically on an empowered woman in full ownership of her own desire, contrary to the norms of an especially male-dominated culture?). Part of what the film achieves for itself with all of that nudity and unfaked intercourse is a degree of relaxation and closeness with the characters. When Sada playfully bats at Kichi's penis, we're seeing two people who are totally comfortable with each other enjoying a quiet moment as much as we're seeing sex play (and, for that matter, Matsuda and Fuji have to have been fairly at ease with each other and the crew to be so guilelessly naked for such long stretches). Oshima and cinematographer Ito Hideo's strategy of close-ups and acute angles means that our focus is as much on whole bodies as on genitalia, and we're encouraged to think of the two characters relating to each other as people in love and lust, not just as thrusting, penetrating body parts interacting.

The visual scheme of the film is, overall, quite particular and intentional. It subscribes fully to a very Japanese-specific geometric language with its costumes and sets deliberately suggesting a more archaic time period than the one in which the story takes place; though I am sure it wasn't Oshima's intention (regardless of the film's subsequent history, it's hard to imagine his hope was ever for this to be renowned internationally and unseen in his native country), the overall effect to Western eyes, trained to anticipate a certain kind of Japanese cinema, is that it looks very characteristic of that nation's most important cinematic imports. There's a squared off "room as frame" technique used fairly often that immediately recalls the work of Ozu Yasujiro; the more emphatic cut-ins and sharp angles tend to accentuate the same and depth of cubed spaces, rather than work against them. Take any given frame, and it reads as "Japanese"; except that most of those frames have copious nudity. There's no inoculation against the intellectual disjunction that causes, no matter how much cinematic nudity one has seen. The visual language it subscribes to is almost exclusively used (especially in Ozu, but in plenty of other filmmakers of that generation), to insist on a kind of formalism and mediated approach to drama; In the Realm of the Senses explodes that formalism by virtue of what it depicts.

There is, essentially no distinction between form and content here. The way it depicts the actions it shows and the thoughts it has about what those actions mean are indivisible. It is all about the frank appreciation of sexual behavior in all its extremes, and the firm belief that what brings mutual pleasure to the participants cannot possibly be obscene or licentious or unworthy of visual depiction. The way it moves through its story is so minimalistic that it's almost easier to think of it as an experimental film than as a narrative; but a tremendously successful experiment it is, staged with beauty and complexity and psychological thoughtfulness that I have, personally, seen in no other film on anything resembling the same subject.

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BDSM WEEK: O NO YOU DIDN'T

Take my hand - or whatever other body part you prefer - and walk with my back to the 1970s, and the Golden Age of Eurosmut. It was a time when the boundary between the glaciated art films developed from the mid-'50s onward and the new world of pornography was as thin and porous as it could be, and filmmakers in Italy, Germany, and especially France dove headfirst into serious, psychologically and culturally-oriented stories of unbelievably gorgeous women wandering around naked as sleazy older men stared at them. They are damn weird pictures to watch, is what I'm saying: plainly exploitative and tawdry, yet with non-erotic and even anti-erotic fixations on story elements that forestall any real sense that this is actually pornographic. It's what happens when you apply intellectualism to sex, basically, only it's not very intellectual, and sometimes, not all that sexy.

The Citizen Kane of this particular genre was 1974's Emmanuelle, which I guess makes 1975's Story of O its approximate equivalent to The Magnificent Ambersons: the director's follow-up, based on a literary classic, even more ambitious and complex than his enthusiastically-received debut, but ultimately compromised and hobbled in ways that leave it somewhat dissatisfying in comparison. The difference is that Orson Welles's first two features both belong in any sensible conversation about the greatest films of all time, and Just Jaeckin's films don't. Not in a sensible conversation, anyway.

But anyway, Story of O. It is an adaptation of the 1954 novel by Pauline Réage (a pen name of Anne Desclos) that served as ground zero for BDSM culture in the latter half of the 20th Century, and arguably the watershed moment in the artistic treatment of explicit sex. As the new representational freedoms started to roll around at the dawn of the '70s, it was a no-brainer pick for adaptation, and Jaeckin was, all things considered, pretty much a no-brainer as well (though he wasn't the first director to sniff around the project). For Jaeckin, he got to solidify his position as the leading light in the Tony Erotica genre that showed no signs of how incredibly short-lived it would turn out to be; for the producers, they got to have the assurance of a filmmaker who had already worked with disreputable fare right in line with Story of O - Emmanuelle ends with something very like a summary of the original novel - without making something in the least ways disreputable.

Sure enough, Story of O is pretty damn classy; about the classiest version of the material that could possibly be summed up. The simple version of things is that a woman identified only as O (Corinne Cléry) has been taken by her lover, René (Udo Kier), to Château Roissy. Unless, as a perplexing alternate opening puts it, a shadowy second man is behind it all. How O finds herself at Roissy is less important than what happens there: it turns out to be a veritable school for sadomasochism, in which gorgeous women are taught obedience and submissiveness to every whim of the males in their lives, the more violent the better. After she's been properly tamed, O meets René's dear friend, almost a brother, Sir Stephen (Anthony Steel), with the apparent intention that René is in fact pawning her off, to make room in his own life for the bisexual blonde model Jacqueline (Li Sellgren). But in order to get at Jacqueline, René must ask O to serve as a honeypot.

That's not much plot, and if your assumption is that Story of O fills up the bulk of its running time with scenes of O's training and subsequently her use as sex slave to René and Stephen, congratulations on being well aware of what kind of experience this intended to be. It is quite a sexed-up movie, much more than Emmanuelle, which found Jaeckin at least as interested in lingering on notions of white Europeans in the third world as on perfectly-formed breasts. The Story of O script, adapted by Sébastien Japrisot, simply doesn't have an interest in any such external topics; it starts with considered interest in how BDSM works, and it stops there as well.

Notionally, the idea of a movie whose entire purpose is to uncritically depict a process by which women are whipped and chained into absolute submission for men's pleasure ought to seem inordinately offensive, but such is not the case with Story of O. It's not because it does a fine job of exploring what O herself gets out of the whole deal, as I gather is true of the novel. In fact, the psychological element of the film is almost totally lacking, thanks to perfectly flat performances by virtually everyone in it - Steel alone seems to have put any effort into expressing what his character feels through his expressions, and Kier manages to be the most wooden, dis-invested of all, which is a bizarre thing to say of an Udo Kier performance - and thanks to a boring screenplay that tells far more than it shows, and even what it tells isn't that useful. The film is addicted to voice-over narration, drily recapping what's going on in the characters' minds without pausing to see if it appears to be matched by their faces.

The result is the absolute worst-case scenario: a film about the effect that being turned into a willing sex slave has on the woman so turned. By all appearances, O is perfectly satisfied with the state of things - the ending in particular emphasises that - but Story of O never manages to dig into why; it blandly rolls through sexual activity without bothering to make things sexy, or making it clear that O, at least, is erotically stimulated by all of this. It's a clinical treatment of its subject, which makes for a boring, repetitive film, one in which the trace of a real plot doesn't show up until almost halfway through. You can only show so many staged scenes of whipping and burning, all shot in mostly the same angles, with mostly the same performances, before they start to blend into each other, no matter how jaw-dropping the physical perfection of the naked women in question (which, to be fair, is a lot of perfection).

Not helping matters is how utterly bland the filmmaking is, dominated by arch-'70s brown and beige and white interiors, and hobbled by an insipid Pierre Bachelet score (he was the only major behind-the-scenes talent other than Jaeckin who logged time on Emmanuelle). While Jaeckin's previous movie boasted some genuinely lovely shots of rooms and lawns, which provided a painterly backdrop for its sexual shenanigans, Story of O has an unyieldingly generic, suburban look, which makes its insufficiently vital sex scenes feel even more rote. Which feels like a tremendous failure for one of the very first films to depict BDSM with such unblinking interest and so little snickering.

In effect it's art-porn that tries so hard to be art that it loses sight of what it means to be porn, while simultaneously lacking the strong writing or well-crafted visuals to succeed at being art. It neither makes its sex seem exciting, nor does it investigate what that sex means to its characters. Basically, it's just a drab failure all around, and a bit of a chore to watch. How that could be true of a film that opens at a dreamlike, Eyes Wide Shut-style sex château is beyond me, but there you have it.

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THE 2014 LIVE-ACTION OSCAR SHORTS

Oscar season means many things to many people, but one of the best is that, thanks to the folks at Shorts HD, it's the only time all year that most of us have even the smallest opportunity to see short films on the big screen And that is something I look forward to every year with enormous enthusiasm. So without further ado, allow me to dive right into the matter of the five films nominated for Best Live-Action Short, and now screening here and there throughout the country, in advance of a VOD run sometime soon.

"But Tim," you are undoubtedly about to ask (irrespective of the fact that I do not live in your computer & cannot hear you), "you're such an animation buff. Why aren't you reviewing the animated shorts?" Well, don't forget, while I'm merely a lusty, amateur animation buff over here, I'm actually a professional animation buff over at the Film Experience. And that's where you can find my thoughts on the other slate.

Aya (Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis, Israel / France)

If I have it right, this is the current frontrunner to win in the eyes of most pundits. And I won't claim that I feel unmixedly good about that - it's one of the weaker films of a generally strong slate. That's less because of anything specific it does wrong, and more because it's simply not very focused or thoughtful about how it wants to tell its story: at 40 minutes, it's not only the longest of the nominees, it's also brushing against the Academy's definition of "short film" rather recklessly. Nor are all 40 of those minutes used to equally good effect. There's a lot of time spent on conversations that are a bit more indulgent than they frankly need to be.

The titular Aya (Sarah Adler) is waiting to pick someone up at the airport when she's mistaken by a Danish scholar named Overby (Ulrich Thomsen) as his driver; she refuses to correct him until miles into their drive to Jerusalem, at which point he doesn't seem to care much. The film eventually reveals itself as a parable of dissatisfied people seeking new connections, but it relies an awful lot on a kind-of twist ending to make most of that clear, which leaves a lot of scenes of talking about nothing in particular, all set in the front seat of a car. There's goodness and insight within the film, though it needs to be ferreted out of the bloat, and the characters who always feel a bit more like screenwriting conceits than psychologies. 6/10

* * *

Boogaloo and Graham (Michael Lennox and Ronan Blaney, UK)

Can't have the Oscars without darling children getting into light scrapes while something serious burbles on unseen in the background. "Something serious", in this case, is the Troubles; the 1970s Belfast-set film manages to wedge in a late scene involving a political prisoner and the violence of the region that is all the more garish for how much the film otherwise has not the smallest interest in the political or social ramifications of its setting. And boy, was I ever ready to go harsh on it.

But then, as darling children movies go, Boogaloo and Graham - named for the pet chickens given to a pair of young brothers (Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch) by their father (Martin McCann) in a fit of poor judgment - has the benefit of actual darlings, with just enough snarky spike in their personalities that it's not just the cloying sitcom nonsense it so readily could have been. Its insights into human behavior are trite, and the punchline at the end - if that's the word for something so calm and subdued and philosophically Irish - suggests that the film doesn't really know what it's trying to be about, either. But as a snapshot of a quirky family, it has its pleasures, even if it is undoubtedly the weakest thing here. 6/10

* * *

Butter Lamp (Hu Wei and Julien Féret, France / China)

Okay, we're starting to get to the really good stuff. Once again, we have here a film that doesn't announce its meaning until the final moments of the final shot, but in this case, it's a much more effective strategy, allowing the film to build up a sense of mystery along with its rather effective charm. We find a rarely-seen, but constantly chatting photographer (Genden Punstock) positioning groups and individuals from a Tibetan village in front of his portable backdrops (the film camera adopts the perspective of his still camera throughout: nothing but static frames with people staring into the lens, and it gains a weird energy as a result as it goes along), creating touristy snapshots of these people in towns, at religious sites, standing atop the Great Wall of China, and at Hong Kong Disneyland.

The latter two examples specifically foreshadow the film's ideas about the forcible homogenization of the Tibetan people into whatever the Chinese government says they have to be, but the bulk of that work is done by the modestly ominous suggestions of the final shot, which lands with a thud in the silent space left by the chatting and laughter of the rest of the film. For it is awfully funny, looking with its unforced observational candor at people being uncontainable messes no matter how badly the photographer tries to choreograph them. In truth, the whole thing is a bit concepty and editorially heavy-handed in the last moments, but the implicit humanism of the whole thing is so affecting that I can't really complain. 8/10

* * *

Parvaneh (Talkhon Hamzavi and Stefan Eichenberger, Switzerland)

I have a suspicion that I should find this to be corny bullshit, and yet somehow, it really works. Teenager Parvaneh (Nissa Kashani) is an Afghan refugee living in Switzerland, and she needs to send some money back home. The trip to Zurich to find a place to wire the money is daunting, but it's the easy part - Parvaneh's papers and age mean that she can do no such thing, which means she must hunt around for a kind stranger. The only one she finds is a slightly older punk, Emely (Cheryl Graf), who agrees to help for a small fee, but the store is closed by the time the girls get back there. On the spot, Emely proposes that Parvaneh should pal around with her and they can go back in the morning. In the meantime, it's a night of music, clubs, flirting with boys, and finding out that the two have a lot in common.

Clichés don't come any mustier, but the Euro-realist style and incredibly laid-back naturalistic acting on display help enormously to make Parvaneh seem more insightful and raw than it sounds. There's no sweetie-pie fun going on; the whole time, Parvaneh seems slightly dazed and alarmed at the speed and danger of life in the urban West, compared to her safe, rural enclave of fellow refugees, and though the connection she makes with Emely is clearly important and unprecedented, the film doesn't pretend to have solved The Immigrant Problem. Bless it for that.

Anyway, the acting is sharp, Kashani especially, and while the style is a bit Dardennes-light, director Hamzavi wields it with canny discipline for when it can heighten the narrative vs. when it can serve to accentuate the moments in between narrative. I would never want to see this as a feature, but it's a pretty thoughtful 25 minutes. 8/10

* * *

The Phone Call (Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, UK)

The other frontrunner, and I rather think the best of the five (though Parvaneh comes close). It's a sterling example of something that could never work so well except as a snug, 20-minute short: set up a single situation, play it out, get the hell out of there. Heather (Sally Hawkins) works at a virtually empty crisis call center, and she picks up early one shift to hear a very sad man identifying himself as Stan (Jim Broadbent, never seen). At first trying simply to cheer Stan up, Heather teases out after a few minutes that he's just taken a lethal dose of pills, having wanted to kill himself ever since his wife died. And he's not calling for help, but simply to have company while he drifts off into death.

It's an acting showcase: director Kikby rather sensibly understands that a film which consists of almost nothing other than a phone conversation in which we never see one of the two participants needs to have an immovable rock on the visible end of the line. The Phone Call would wither and die without having somebody that Kirkby could point his camera at for minutes, confident that whatever is happening on her face is bound to be interesting, and Hawkins is that somebody. She has to build a character using hardly any backstory, and then communicate a desire to be sympathetic, a steely determination to save Stan from himself, and flustered panic that she is by no means equipped to deal with this situation, and she does all of this so well that it doesn't even register as acting; the film gets to skip right ahead to the part where it asks us to consider what it would be like to be Heather, tossed into this horrible situation; but also to be Stan, that sad and empty. It's a lovely portrait of mental states in turmoil, concise and streamlined and driven enough that the lack of flash doesn't register till it's all over. 8/10

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