Recently in France Category
"Three fingers on the trigger and the mind is on the plan. I got my prescription, and every citizen got his." One of the most blatantly Dylanesque ditties to appear in a crime saga since QT popularized Stealer's Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle with You" in Reservoir Dogs, Turner Cody's "Corner of my Room" delivers a jaunty kick to the middle-going of Jacques Audiard's otherwise somber and compelling prison tale A Prophet (Un prophète). And, speaking lyrically, it's a very good choice.
For even as our main character Malik (Tahar Rahim) wiles away years in "the corner of his room" in a French prison, he's always watching, his mind's always whirring. A Prophet is possessed of that same quiet, impressive, and inexorable intelligence. Audiard's movie feels a bit on the long side, and, as you might expect from any movie about life in the Big House (even a French Maison Grande where everyone has separate cells and au bon pain is served on the regular) it can be hard to sit through at times. But it's also a film that keeps making clever choices, lingering on a small detail or adding that little extra flourish that really makes various scenes resonate.
As A Prophet begins, our young prisoner is being processed for a six-year-stint in the joint for crimes unknown, although it sounds like roughing up a cop was involved. With no family or friends to speak of and a lousy public defender (Rabah Loucif) who just wants the paperwork cleared so he can get paid, Malik enters jail with nothing to his name except a desiccated cigarette and one 50-franc note. How could things get worse? Well, for starters, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) -- the head of the Corsican gang who are the reigning ethnic power in Malik's prison -- may decide he wants an Arab prisoner (Hichem Yacoubi) murdered, and that Malik is just the fresh meat who can get into the Muslim block and get the job done. Hey, everybody's got to start somewhere.
After wrestling with this dirty deed and its consequences, and picking up an unorthodox roommate, Malik goes from working in the prison's blue jean factory to being the Corsicans' new cook, maid, and whipping boy. He starts to make more friends, like Ryad (Adel Bencherif), the testicular cancer survivor who teaches him to read, and Jordi the Gypsy (Reda Kateb), the guy to go to for the quality hash. He starts to understand the prison's racial fissures, like the great divide between the Corsicans (who treat like him an Arab, and who happen to have the guards in their pocket) and the Muslims (who treat him like a Corsican, and whose numbers are growing.) And, particularly after he establishes some friends on the outside, he starts seeing some angles to make some real money...if his Corsican masters will let him and live.
As critics go, I'm not usually a fan of the NYT's Manohla Dargis, but her blurb in this trailer -- "precisely observed" -- is a very good way of putting this movie's main strength. Time and again, A Prophet colors in its margins with small, wordless, and often devastating details. We watch Malik slice up his mouth over and over again as he tries to learn how to squirrel a razor blade in his cheek. After a day-long furlough that brings him to the beach, we see him slowly run the sand from his shoe through his fingers. When Malik one day gets on a flight, he initiates his full-cavity-search rigamarole in the security line, expecting no different from the French TSA that what he gets in prison every night.
Like I said, there are some scenes in A Prophet that can be hard to watch, and a few of the usual arthouse types at my Saturday afternoon viewing walked out. This is prison after all, and no Green Mile Oscar-bait prison either. Still, while I don't think I'd want to see it again anytime soon, the movie definitely has moments of real grace, beauty, and haunting power. (Along with the aforementioned penchant for great novelistic details, I especially liked some of the deliriously creepy "dream" sequences in Malik's prison cell, and particularly as they become normalized to him over the years.)
Did I like A Prophet better than Terribly Happy? Hmm, hard to say -- they're very different kinds of films, this one as sprawling and Scorsesean as Happy was lean and Coen-y. But, of the Best Foreign Film nominees in 2010, this was a much more worthwhile flick than The White Ribbon, and if The Secret in Their Eyes is better, it must be really something.
"The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault's farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one."
Five to one? One in five? Nobody here gets out alive? Well, perhaps not. Further research into the Battle of Agincourt suggests the fight was fairer than Shakespeare would have us believe. "The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study."
"[W]ith Reagan, the prophecy appreciation part of his brain functioned quite independently of the part that started wars (there's nothing in the Old Testament about Nicaragua or even Grenada). Bush seems to have taken the threat of Gog and Magog to Israel quite literally, and, if this story can be believed, to have launched a war to stop them."
One rather frightening story from a few days ago: As if the recent "Onward Christian Soldiers" war reports in GQ weren't Crusadery enough, it appears that Dubya explictly invoked the End of Days to convince Jacques Chirac to get involved in the Iraq War, making his appeal Christian-to-Christian about the unholy dangers of Gog & Magog. Uh, really? (Apparently, Chirac has confirmed it.)
We are its leaders. We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's give a trillion. "Mr. Brown, who organized the meeting in a hangarlike conference center in London, said: 'This is the day the world came together to fight against the global recession. Our message today is clear and certain: we believe that global problems require global solutions.'"
In the meantime, Slate's Fred Kaplan applauds the return of real, honest-to-goodness American statecraft in London. "Vast multinational conferences, like the G20 summit...are useful mainly for the 'bilaterals' -- the one-on-one side-room conversations -- and, in these forums, President Barack Obama is living up to high expectations. Which is to say, the United States seems to be returning to diplomatic basics -- a development that in the wake of the last eight years is practically revolutionary."
At the very least, the president's diplomatic mojo seemed to work on Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. "'Yesterday I spoke about this with my new comrade President Barack Obama,' Medvedev told reporters travelling with him to the London summit...'I liked the talks. It is easy to talk to him. He can listen. The start of this relationship is good,' he said, adding: 'Today it's a totally different situation (compared to Bush).'"
"It's really a generation that we've been looking forward to this moment, and the moments that will come after it in particular. September 10 is a demarcation between finishing the construction and starting to turn it on, but the excitement will only continue to grow." A Quantum Leap Forward, or the End of Days? (Answer: The former.) Over on the border of France and Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider --- the giant, multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator decades in the making -- gets ready for its first big test on Wednesday (as does its accompanying "Grid".) "The collider will recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when there was a hot 'soup' of tiny particles called quarks and gluons, to look at how the universe evolved, said John Harris, U.S. coordinator for ALICE, a detector specialized to analyze that question."
"Euh ess ahh err eee enn teh veh, ell, oh..." Suffice to say, I'm so glad I'm not writing this entry letter-by-letter (and in French to boot.) The first half of a powerful Saturday afternoon double-feature at the Angelika, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, from the painstakingly-crafted memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, is an impressive and heartfelt depiction of how one man's personal Hell becomes, through love, will, memory, and imagination, at least a barely endurable purgatory. At first glance, a film about being almost completely immobilized in a hospital bed for months and years on end may not seem like your cup of tea -- I wasn't sure it would be mine. But, despite the inherent sadness to Bauby's story, Diving Bell is in fact overflowing with humor and even joie de vivre in the face of horrific tragedy. Yes, it says, you don't know what you've got until it's gone. But, even if you've lost everything, including basic motor function...well, all you have to do is dream.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly begins in a blur. Blue-gray blobs fade in and out of vision, ultimately rectifying into institutional decor and men in white coats. We're in a hospital room, but we, and our narrator Jean-Do Bauby (Mathieu Almaric, of Munich) don't know why or how we got there. Worse, while we hear our narrator perfectly fine, nobody else can. It seems Bauby can no longer speak. Nor can he do anything else for that matter, except look around the room in abject horror and blink. Eventually, one of the doctors explains that Bauby has had a stroke, is emerging from a coma after several weeks, and now suffers from a rare medical condition known as "locked-in syndrome," for which there may not be any cure. If this sounds like a fate worse than death, well, it seems so to Bauby at first too. But, when trapped in yourself, body your holding cell, it definitely helps to have a bevy of French beauties around to look after you, including the estranged mother of Bauby's children (Emanuelle Seigner) and two therapists at the hospital (One, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, is Schnabel's real-life wife. The other, Marie Josee-Croze (also of Munich), is the spitting image of Naomi Watts and, needless to say, also very easy on the one working eye.)
With the latter's help, Bauby eventually grows used to a lengthy but workable system of communication whereby he blinks when the letter he wants to employ is named from a list (from most-used to least-used), thus piecing together words, sentences, and paragraphs after long hours of toil. As he becomes accustomed to his condition and this new system, Bauby, formerly an editor at Elle magazine, dwells on his recent past -- say, shaving his elderly father (Max Von Sydow) the week before the incident, or taking a trip to Lourdes with his most recent love (Marina Hands), who is now afraid to visit him. In addition, he starts taking imaginative flights of fancy from his bodily prison (Enter Emma de Caunes of The Science of Sleep), and ultimately decides he's going to write a book about the entire experience, blink by painstaking blink (thus bringing another beautiful woman into the equation, his new assistant (Anne Consigny). I mean, I know being a completely paralyzed invalid in any hospital is a horrible, horrible experience...but really, aren't there any unattractive orderlies or assistants in France?)
If you've taken an art or film theory class in the past thirty years, somewhere amid viewings of Metropolis, 8 1/2, and/or Blade Runner you more than likely came across the concept of the "male gaze." Diving Bell's clever conceit is to make that concept literal: For much of the film, the camera is Bauby's POV. We are trapped in Jean-Do's body for at least the first thirty minutes of the movie and experience everything from his perspective, from the grisly horror of having one's eye sewn shut to the tantalizing triangle of exposed neck revealed by his lovely therapists. (At one point, around twenty minutes in, I turned to look at the audience, and everybody in the theater (also) had their head cocked uncomfortably to the left.) It is testament to Schnabel's skill here that this effect, while assuredly feeling claustrophobic, never becomes oppressive to the point of being unwatchable. (There are some great, humorous touches to leaven things, such as when Jean-Do's new winter cap ends up obscuring some of his/our view.) And, when the camera later forsakes the diving bell world of flesh and frailty for the butterfly realm of memory and imagination, we feel the same exhilarating sense of liberation Bauby describes in voiceover. By finally soaring out of the confines of Bauby's body and roaming the world with abandon, Diving Bell offers a visceral reminder of the power of film, and of imagination.
There are moments I might quibble with in Diving Bell -- The recap of his accident comes rather late in the movie, and feels slightly unnecessary there (I assume this is where it might have fallen in the book -- I haven't read it, although I more than likely will now.) And the film is undeniably slow at times. (But that's by design, of course. Given the sheer amount of effort Bauby must expend to compose a single word, a faster-moving film would have been untrue and unfair to the proceedings.) Nevertheless, particularly for a film about something as nightmarish as locked-in syndrome, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is truly transporting. It reminds us that there's a certain miraculous magic to the power of sight, and that experiencing even the daily mundanities of the world is something we shouldn't ever take for granted.
"If you're really worried about Iran, do you want to put your faith in the United States, the country that bungled Iraq? If you really care about Islamic fundamentalism, do you want to be led by the country that, distracted by Iraq, failed to predict the return of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan?" Why has the world soured on America of late? The real reason, argues Slate's Anne Applebaum and the data she surveys, is that, thanks to seven years of Dubya, we're starting to look incompetent. "And even if the surge works, even if the roadside bombs vanish, inept is a word that will always be used about the Iraqi invasion."
"Within the next few weeks I won't be the prime minister of this country. In all probability a Scot will become prime minister of this country and that's someone who built one of the strongest economies in the world and who I've always said would make a great prime minister." With recent tough defeats for Labor in Scotland punctuating his closing weeks, Tony Blair announces he will make an announcement tomorrow concerning his forthcoming resignation and likely replacement by Chancellor Gordon Brown. And, across the channel, France elects Nicolas Sarkozy as its new president, a conservative who's seen as both US-friendly and Dubya-friendly. Meanwhile, E.J. Dionne wonders what recent events mean for European -- and American -- progressives. Update: Tony Blair announces his last day: June 27.
The second half of last night's double-feature, Michael Haneke's Cache, offered a moral universe in many ways diametrical to that of Match Point -- here, even the long-buried sins of the upper crust are eventually exposed before the Great Eye. As I said in the 2005 round-up, last year was a banner year for politically-minded movies, and Cache, both an unsettling thriller of personal surveillance and a timely rumination on First World comforts and complicity in an age of terror, definitely ranks among them. With its inordinately protracted (and sometimes intentionally confusing) shots and its refusal to answer many of the questions it poses (including the plot device driving the film), Cache isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and I'm sure some will write it off as just a pretentious and inscrutable foreign film. Nevertheless, I thought Cache was well worth seeing. It's a film that, both visually and politically, will put you ill at ease.
Cache begins with a long, steady image of a Parisian street, held throughout the very slowly typed-out credits and beyond. Well after the normal amount of time our movie-conditioned eye allots for a basic establishing shot (by now, Tony Scott would have had an embolism), the image is suddenly paused, and then rewound. As it turns out, we've been viewing a tape, one featuring --and sent to -- the home of the Laurents, along with a scrawled picture of a child vomiting blood. (Yes, it starts like Lost Highway, but they're very different movies.) Georges (Daniel Auteuil), the host of his own popular Charlie Rose-ish television show, is nonplussed by this bizarre tape, and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), a successful book agent, is driven to distraction, particularly as more cassettes (with more information) arrive, and it becomes increasingly clear that Georges has some sense of why this is happening. Soon, for the sake of his wife and 12-year-old son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), Georges is forced to follow the path prescribed by these strange missives, and to confront a dark moment in his past that he, his parents, and arguably his nation have purposefully forgotten.
What that dark moment is is for you to discover, although it's one that (as political analogy -- it doesn't work quite as well in terms of straight narrative) hearkens to the French-Algerian conflict and, more broadly, the war on terror and the hidden costs and benefits of colonialism. Georges rages and fumes throughout the movie, insisting over and over that he and his family are being terrorized. But by whom, and for what? Is Georges really blameless, and, that question aside, are his responses appropriate? Some very brief flashes of didacticism aside (for example, the scene involving CNN), Cache generally posits troubling questions about national memory, the dividends of empire, and the state of the world today without telling us how to feel about them.
Another layer of unease in the film involves the aforementioned camerawork. Cache returns to that exterior view of the Laurents' home several times, and we never know if we're watching "just" an establishing shot or indulging in the stalker's-eye-view. (The likely answer, a la Rear Window, is that we're doing both.) This goes for almost every scene in the film, and the cumulative experience of "stalking" the Laurents for two hours adds to the apprehension and foreboding of Cache. We begin to feel complicit in this crime of surveillance, just as, in time, we come to feel complicit in the Laurents' sins. (Sure, the question of "the gaze" is a hoary staple of any Film 101 class -- still, Haneke manages here to move past arthouse histrionics and create something that feels genuinely creepy.)
Finally, as I said above, Cache is disarmingly open-ended, particularly by the "explain-everything-several-times" standard we're used to. Yes, one character's arc is made clear, I think, by his/her womb-like retreat from the world, and that maddening last shot, if you caught the action (screenshot spoilers here), does suggest a possible answer to the cassette issue. But, ultimately, the bullet-points of the thriller story aren't all that important. The plot mechanics of Cache may remain hidden, but the unsettling impressions of guilt and complicity it leaves linger in plain sight.
