Render unto Resnais... : and a homerun.

Resnais committed one undisputable masterpiece. It stands precariously on the brink of this blog scope : film tells the final hours in a writer’s life, it is called " Providence ", in French, even more so in English ; there are doubts about its French passport.

French-British production is based on a British script by David Mercer, shot in English and England ; cast is led by John Gielguld, Dirk Bogarde and Ellen Burstyn. Nationality aside, movie received seven, for once smartly awarded, French Cesars.

With « Providence », Resnais delivers the goods as an author : he deserves credit not only for his direction work, but for bringing together all of the film ingredients (outline, script, dialogues, cast, location, music...) and blending them into one seamless, harmonious whole.

Film triggers many questions : was Resnais meant to be a British filmmaker ?

Produced in a British environment, would " Hiroshima, mon amour " have been an endurable film ? Or would Great Britain have successfully removed the project from the director's mind ? Would « Muriel » have been different on the other side of the channel ?

In this art of the moving image, may it all come down to the language the actors speak ? Would English have been a better vehicle for Resnais ? In English, he would not have been able to work with Duras, nor possibly Robbe-Grillet ; would he have found local writers possessed with the same dreary self-consciousness ?

Is such dreary self-consciousness even possible in English or strictly French ? Would English have peppered Resnais’s intellectual games with welcome humour ?

Is it the actors ? Would the sparkle in John Gielgud’s eye have reminded Resnais that « It’s only a film » and have prevented so many of his characters throughout his career to take themselves so seriously ?

Is it the countryside, the weather, the food even ?

Maybe it was just a matter of " Providence " or British beginner's luck, and we should be grateful the experiment was not replicated.

Maybe it was successful miscommunication : Resnais did not get what he wished from his British partners and the film was not the Hiroshima or Marienbad clone it promised to be.

It could be even worse : a British film for the French only, in which British writer, actors, crew, accomodated Resnais’s whims, while smiling at his back, as packed with Gallic clichés on the Brits as a Hollywood film shot in France with « baguettes », « bérets » and « vive la différence ».
Alain Resnais expressed many times his wish to make a film about Mandrake the magician ; the project shall probably never be and we shall not know if we missed a great English-langage film or were spared another bad French movie.

Render unto Resnais : three singles...

Not all Resnais's films are Everests of boredom.

The director also made nearly mainstream films. Most of his admirers regard them as sub-par by the filmmaker's very high standards : though towering far above average movie entertainment, they are not unique, or boring, enough.

Critics and scholars agree that memory is the unifying theme of Resnais's work. What is more memorable than pain and boredom ? Certainly not pleasure and excitement.

Inflicting a boredom so painful that he can stop the clock and turn every frame into an eternity of nothingness is arguably the shortest cut to making a film memorable.

In this respect, " Stavisky " (1974), " Mon oncle d'Amérique " (1980) and « Mélo » (1988) are not truly memorable : they may even entertain a general audience.

" Stavisky " tells the true story of the eponymous and brilliant con man, so intimate with the French political circles that the final collapse of his financial exploits and his suicide/murder in 1933 threatened the very survival of Third Republic.

Film is a beautifully crafted, acted and directed period piece. Like a middle-of-the-road governement, it faced a two-sided opposition : Resnais fans thought the film academic ; docudrama lovers mourned the insipid masterpiece which a self-effaced director (Henri Verneuil ?) would no doubt have produced.

" Melo " too is set during French " Années folles ", the adaptation by Resnais of a long forgotten play by long forgotten Henri Bernstein. ( Resnais films are either based on original scripts by hired hands -Robbe-Grillet : " L'année dernière à Marienbad " ; Duras : " Hiroshima, mon amour " ; Jorge Semprun : " Stavisky "...- or adaptations of existing material ; a unique situation among French-style « auteurs ».)

As a play, " Mélo " belongs in " Théâtre de Boulevard ", commercial theater closer to sitcom fare than a Samuel Becket play : one more romantic triangle ; one suicide ; two lives go on ; selective memory blurs the pain.

Film confirms that Resnais is a talented director and that a talented director alone does not make a good movie. " Mélo " is as much a success for Resnais, the director, as a failure for Resnais, the author : a beautiful, but cold and unengaging, object which does not convey to the audience what the filmmaker saw in the original play that made it worth adapting.

A Resnais zealot, Claude Bouniq-Mercier, marvels at the film « très grande modernité » (« outstanding modernity »), but explains the praise no further. What is modern in the film except that it was shot in 1988 when the play was written in 1926 ?

In a different kind of adaptation, " Mon oncle d'Amérique " stems from Professeur Henri Laborit's scientific research about the behavorial impact of unconscious impulses ; Professor Laborit works with rats, but eyes at the human race.

Film moves back and forth between rats, scientific speech and the lives of several drab characters.

Final product is as heavy-handed as certain Zola chapters when in demonstrative mood. No doubt on purpose, a dreary naturalism permeates the locations, sets, costumes, every line of dialogue of the movie fictional elements. Professeur Laborit dos not come through as a great pedagogue and is no Garbo or John Wayne for screen presence. The concept of Depardieu as lab rat is physiologically intriguing.

But, for the director, if not the audience, the real point is elsewhere. Resnais was attracted to the project by its " dramatic construction ", how he could " shape " the movie. Hence, the film is no mere " adaptation " or illustration of Professor Laborit’s research, but rather its replica in, and tranfer to, the field of filmmaking.

More than traditional cinema, film becomes a formal experiment in conceptual art, with the viewer being the lab rat and paying for the privilege.

Françoise & Jean-Paul go to Rio.

We left Jean-Paul Belmondo camping on the beach at Zuidcoote in 1964. We met Françoise Dorléac singing with sister Catherine in Rochefort in 1967.

Earlier, in 1963, they shared a trip to Rio, or rather Jean-Paul chased Françoise, his fiancée, to Brazil, where she had been kidnapped.

Much has been written about Philippe de Broca’s « L’homme de Rio ». That Hergé’s « Tintin » albums inspired the film. That, when Spielberg wanted to adapt « Tintin » to the big screen, it was because of « L’Homme de Rio » in mind ; that, when he created Indiana Jones instead, he was again inspired by « L’Homme de Rio ».

« L’Homme de Rio » is a blessed movie : the perfect blend of adventure and comedy ; so much chemistry between the two lead actors that it works even when the script tears them apart, i.e. during most of the film ; great pacing, only surpassed by nearly miraculous sense of timing.

Movie was released on 1963, therefore probably shot in 1962. Brazil still was a land of wonders on the other side of the world. The sights of Copacabana and Corcovado were not worn out postcards. Rio was no poster-city for drugs, violence and « favelas ». Jean-Paul Belmondo could befriend a young boy without suspicions of pedophilia.

Niemeyer’s Brasilia had been inaugurated in 1960. The Amazonian forest was a new frontier and not an ecological disaster. Brazil was pulsing with creative energy : those were the days of Bossa Nova and Cinema Novo (Glauber Rocha’ « Deus e o diabo na terra do sol » is also a 1963 film).

The country was coming out of the Joscelino Kubitschek years with a young, glamourous president, Joao Goulart, « Jango ». Despite Pele’s injury, its soccer team repeated its Swedish triumph in Chile and won a second world cup.

Brazil was looking forward to the years ahead and did not expect that it would soon look back on those behind with « saudade », nostalgia : in 1964, an Army coup ushered the country into twenty years of military rule ; even today Brazilians remember the late 50’s and early 60’s with such fondness that TV Globo recently produced a « telenovela » about the man who personnified them best : President Joscelino Kubitschek, « JK ».

« L’Homme de Rio » was shot in a window of opportunity, soon to be slammed shut with violence and without notice. The film bathes in an atmosphere of sweet euphoria and offered the ultimate escapist fare from De Gaulle’s rule, as, back home, France was struggling through the end and after effects of war in Algeria.

It is no coincidence that Jean-Paul Belmondo’s couple with Françoise Dorléac insinuates itself between his with Jean Seberg in « A bout de souffle » and Anna Karina in « Pierrot le fou ».

De Broca was too happy to turn his back on a reality which Godard depicted in its grimmier colors.

Is Jean-Luc Godard Korean ?

Is Godard French ? Of course not : listen to his accent ; no need to understand what he says to know that he is Swiss. If he were French, he would be far more obnoxious.

Some French are nevertheless reluctant to give him up. In his dictionary of filmmakers, Jean Tulard, a Napoléon scholar who has extended his personal empire to world cinema, describes Jean-Luc Godard as a « director of Swiss origin » ; could Mr. Tulard mean that he is not actually Swiss ? That he is stateless and therefore available for annexion by France ?

This is quite possible, as Jean Tulard appears in favour of enforcing a strong French imperial policy in the field of cinema. In the next edition of his dictionary, Jean-Luc Godard may thus become a « French director of Swiss origin » : in Mr. Tulard’s similar reference book on actors, Michel Simon has already completed his naturalization process and is a « French actor of Swiss origin ». Expect the « Swiss origin » to be dropped soon.

More surprisingly, the British too seem ready to concede Godard to France, may be because they are not among his more enthusiastic admirers. According to the British Film Institute site, Jean-Luc Godard is the son of a « wealthy Swiss family » -a shocking revelation that there may exist poor Swiss families- but « born in France ». Could it be that the key to the director’s at times disconcerting work should be found in the conjunction of these two inconsistent facts : Swiss wealth and French birth ? Or that France should be held accountable for Godard’s films, as his career would certainly have developed in more traditional fashion, were he born on the right side of the Swiss-French border ?

Let us be fair : Godard is as Swiss as cuckoo clocks, numbered accounts, the Pope’s guards and, unfortunately, Roger Federer -at least until he wins at Roland Garros-.

Meanwhile, Godard’s films are as French as Champagne wine or Roquefort cheese, though sometimes less sparkling and tasty. Why ? :

-because Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg amble up Champs-Elysées and not Genève main street ; because Jean-Paul Belmondo again and Anna Karina drive around Côte d’Azur and not Lac Léman,

-because, despite a commandable taste for Nordic-type actresses (see above, or Maruschka Detmers in « Prénom Carmen »), the casts of Godard’s films are mostly French, from Jean-Paul Belmondo to Alain Delon, Isabelle Huppert to Bruno Putzulu...

-because France has invested so much into Godard’s movie that the country deserves, as a tribute to and a return on its investment, that they be labelled French : Gallic audiences dozed, screamed, applauded, booed, walked out of Godard’s films more than any other ones ; French critics and media controvery, the Cannes film festival -with Godard at the forefront of the « coup » to cancel it in 1968- forced them on the world ; French journalists coined the expression « un mauvais Godard raté », « a bad, failed Godard film », to pay homage to the panache of unsuccessful experiments ; Godard’s films has been financed mainly by French money. For over forty years, willy-nilly, France has been the director’s number one sponsor : the unofficial Godard Foundation,

-because Godard’s films have become to epitomize French cinema at its -make your pick- worst, best, most irritating or hilarious,

-because French arrogance would not have it otherwise,

-because Jean Tulard would not have it otherwise : in another product of his many reference books, the « Guide des Films », « A bout de souffle », « Pierrot le Fou », « Le Mépris » too, despite Moravia, Capri Island, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang -Bardot prevails- are nothing but French. With respect to more recent fare, situation is a bit hazier : « Sauve qui peut la vie » and « Eloge de l’amour » are French-Swiss, but France comes first : at worst, the films may claim dual French-Swiss citizenship.

But nothing is ever settled with Godard : it now appears that the more serious challenge to the director’s Swiss citizenship comes from unexpected quarters : could it be that Jean-Luc Godard is Korean ?

Not (only) a dead men's blog : daring Ozon.

« Sous le sable » (2000) : A woman -Charlotte Rampling- whose husband -Bruno Cremer- mysteriously disappears at sea during a swim, keeps behaving as if he were still around.

Film lives up to the tricky challenge of its intriguing premise through low key, subtle approach, Charlotte Rampling’s understated performance and sensual attention to material life.

Unlike the showroom flats and designer’s condos of most US mainstream films, the country house in the Landes forest and Parisian flats seem lived in.

Food looks home-cooked and appetizing, rather than right out of the caterer’s microwave oven.

Film does not seem to have been shot in an aseptic tank (or California) : a viewer in the right mood will feel the forest dampness, taste the ocean salty wind and smell the pines.

Film avoids freefall into StephenKingisms, in your face outrageousness, psychological mishmash and mystical silliness. Ending is moving and tactful..

« Huit femmes » (2001) : the owner of an isolated manor house is discovered stabbed ; the eight women in his close entourage voice their mutual suspicions and set to settle accounts.

Second-rate stage material gets the mishandling it deserves ; whodunit pretext results in pleasant and light entertainment, with no claim to realism.

Visual treatment in comic book style and bright colours is striking. Appealing sense of artificiality is compounded by the insertion of musical numbers : characters perform in turn mostly sentimental standards of French popular music.

While the prospect of spending a full film with an all female cast may seem both seductive and intimidating (ten minutes in the company of Cukor’s « Women » left you yearning to take refuge in the silence of a Trappist monastery), result is overwhelmingly charming.

Actresses have fun and it shows. The film breathes a surprising -and possibly deceptive- sense of « camaraderie ». Beyond the « clichés » and cynical veneer of the original material, each character is given their chance to shine and defend themselves, particularly through the pathos of the song they perform.

Nearly forty years after « Les parapluies de Cherbourg », Catherine Deneuve sings in her own voice, and so does Danielle Darrieux, again her mother, as in the 1967 « Demoiselles de Rochefort ».

Performances are particularly enjoyable as most actresses are cast against the grain of their traditional parts. Isabelle Huppert, notorious for her high brow bias, displays a delightful flair for comedy. Even Fanny Ardant forgets to be annoying ; Emmanuelle Béart tries not to pout, but does not quite succeed.

What have these two films in common ? Very little, if not their director : François Ozon (« osons » : let’s dare). He may be a rarity : a versatile filmmaker, who adapts his style to a variety of material rather than rehashes the same film ad libitum.

Not a high-brow blog: Max Pecas.

Max Pexas was born in Lyon, on April, 25 1925 ; he died somewhere sometime in 2003.

« Pope of the Z serie », « Eisenstein of the trash movie »... Clichés about him abound : they are the collective voice of academic ignorance.

French TV channel M6 must be praised for introducing the director’s work to a wide audience : France is now home to legions of Max Pecas fans.

One anonymous scholar builds a strong on line case for the recognition of Mr. Pecas’s talent. Tracking the director’s thirty year career, he delineates three phases in his esthetic development : -a black, or « film noir », period,-a pink, or « sotf porn », period,-a « golden » (like the sands of Saint-Tropez, a location that inspired him as much as Monument Valley did John Ford), or comedy, period, when his artistry reached full blossom.

The casts of Mr Pecas’s films include such luminaries as Brigitte Lahaie, the once vicious daughter and now grandmother of French pornography, new wave « égérie » Bernadette Lafont, French « nanar » Great Jean Lefebvre and Almodovar muse Victoria Abril ; not bad for the « pope of the Z serie ».

Max Pecas retired in 1988 due to lack of box office success : hardly the common fate of exploitation directors ; sad conclusion rather hints at the trials of a misunderstood creator.
On line comprehensive study and in-depth analysis of the director’s work are presently only available in French, but a robust increase in foreign-language visitors may convince their author to translate them, for a start, into English.

Similarly there exist no foreign language versions of the several Max Pecas films released on DVD : a powerful barrier to the international recognition of the director’s works, as it limits the full appreciation of their witty dialogues to an audience fluent in colloquial French.

It is therefore essential that such US film mavens and fans of world cinema as Rialto Pictures principal Adrienne Halpern or film curators at the Moma join forces to initiate the production of English-subtitled versions of Mr. Pecas’s films with a view to their commercial release and a well-deserved full-fledged museum retrospective.

They can expect support from Tim Burton as the acclaimed director is reported to have said : « Max Pecas is to comedy what Ed Wood is to science-fiction. »

Calls to Mr Burton could not confirm his quote, but if the « Ed Wood » director did not utter these words, he should hurry to do so, as this is a shrewdest and very perceptive comparison.

Bores : take 2.

"Ma nuit chez Maud" (" My night at Maud's " - 1969) : Jean-Louis Trintignant, a catholic bachelor, and Françoise Fabian, a divorced free spirit spend the night together ; they talk, we sleep. Truly, the film would have been worse if they had traded intellectual orgasms for carnal knowledge.

"Le genou de Claire" (" Claire's knee " - 1970) : a bearded Jean-Claude Brialy is fascinated, with good reason, by a teenager's knee ; when the audience has given up on him and the film, he suddenly spurs himself to action and fondles Claire's knee. Both a happy end and a thriller, Rohmer's way. Film may also be considered French answer to Kubrick's "Lolita". Laurence de Monaghan' s beautiful name and knee were never to return to the silver screen.

" Ma nuit chez Maud ", " Le genou de Claire ", 1969, 1970 : a well-timed one-two punch to the audience patience. But there shall be no mistake : where Resnais is the master of hard-core, oppressive boredom, Rohmer applies a softer touch.

With Rohmer, boredom is educated and well-behaved, mostly gentle and lighthearted. It does not provoke you like Godard's or threatens to murder you like Resnais's. It does not leave you steaming with anger or crippled for life ; enjoyed with moderation, it is mostly harmless and without after effects.

Rohmer boredom is intimate and lowkey. It may be shared like a good joke ; you may doze peacefullly through it : Rohmer characters talk a lot, but rarely scream.
To your last day, any casual mention of " Hiroshima, mon amour " will have you simmering with hate ; a few days after watching a Rohmer film, you will agree with a smile that it could have been worse.

And you will be right : quite a few Rohmer films fail to achieve the excellence in dullness of " Ma nuit chez Maud " or " Le genou de Claire " ; and even when their dullness reaches heights that leave you dizzy, they display a quality seldom seen among boring films : they are short, rarely more than ninety minutes ; two would easily fit in many a deadly Japanese or Swedish masterpiece.

Along the coast: West and South.

If, after Boulogne and Zuydcoote, you take a sudden liking to small French seaside-towns, head West to Cherbourg on the Cotentin peninsula (quite a stretch from Boulogne), then cut through Britanny to Rochefort, in Charente-Maritime (quite another stretch ; for maniacs of geographic precision, Rochefort actually sits five miles from the seashore, on the Charente estuary).

Two cities are twinned in film history, since Jacques Demy made Cherbourg famous for its " parapluies " in 1963, then Rochefort for its " demoiselles " in 1967.

Here, we are back in " auteur " territory, with a twist : both films are musicals from France, but from a different world than " Les Miz ".

" Les Parapluies de Cherbourg " : 1958 : girl -Catherine Deneuve- loves boy ; boy is sent to war in Algeria ; girl is pregnant, marries rich man ; 1962 : boy and girl meet again, with nothing left to sing to each other.

War, love and memory, but far more palatable than in Boulogne, Hiroshima or Nevers.

Overrated, at times ridiculous,fully-sung film does not get nearly as much on your nerves as it should. Catherine Deneuve is a constant joy to the eye, if not to the ear : her voice was dubbed by Danièle Liccari.

Four years later, same players -Demy, Legrand for the score, Deneuve for the lead- shoot again, in Rochefort : during the city commercial fair, twin sisters Delphine and Solange sing, dance and love ; their mother, too.

Catherine Deneuve stars with older sister Françoise Dorléac, a pepsy beauty of slightly lesser magnitude ; Gene Kelly and George Chakiris stop by, their help is most welcome..

You still will not hear Catherine Deneuve sing : she is dubbed (snubbed ?) again, by Anne Germain.

For nostalgia sake : " Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans " (1966-1992). Twenty five years later, Rochefort pays tribute to its " demoiselles " ; Agnès Varda, Demy's wife (director died in 1990), mixes the anniversary celebrations with documentary footage shot during the making of the original film.

A sobering note : today, Cherbourg is famous for its nuclear waste management factory ; city features proeminently in newsreels of Greenpeace demonstrations.

A hopeful note : Rochefort headquarters Conservatoire du littoral, a public body which acquires stretches of French coastline (over eight hundred kilometers so far) for preservation purposes.

Along the coast: North.

To recover from " Muriel "and Boulogne, travel North and stop shortly before the Belgian border for a weekend at Zuydcoote : " Un weekend à Zuydcoote " (1964).

This is a mediocre film but, after " Muriel ", a mediocre film is great news : WW2 tale of French private -Jean-Paul Belmondo- shelled on the beach by German troops while French and British retreating armies are praying for boats to England may entertain like a screwball comedy.

War : sure ; love : as required by the box-office ; memory : " Verneuil... can't remember a good movie he made... " Two minutes longer than " Muriel ", " Weekend at Zuiydcoote " proves the subjective nature of time.

Film is an adaptation of Robert Merle's eponymous novel and 1949 French Prix Goncourt, and one of the more watchable efforts by Henri Verneuil.

Filmmaker provides the ideal antidote to Alain Resnais : a champion of " US-style French cinema " and a vocal opponent of " théorie des auteurs ", his lack of talent is equally unable to bore you to death and offer you a memorable film experience.

Verneuil films can safely be watched without paying attention : nothing of more than passing interest is expected to happen on screen, even accidentally.

Some people like their steaks overcooked, Verneuil likes his cinema bland and tasteless. He died in 2002 : expect him to be soon rediscovered (even possibly at this address).

Bores : take 1.

A small piece of family folklore. During his courtship of my mother, my father took her to watch "L'année dernière à Marienbad" (" Last year at Marienbad ", 1961). He walked out (Orson Welles, too, after two reels), she stayed to the end. They later made it up or this blog would not be.

Many years afterwards, I watched the film, on my own, to the end. Boring ? Sure, what do you expect of a Resnais film from a Robbe-Grillet script (in a palatial hotel, a man tries to convince a woman -Delphine Seyrig- that they have met before) ?

But a piece of cake compared to "Hiroshima, mon amour" (1958) and " Muriel " (1962), two other critically acclaimed Resnais works.

" Hiroshima, mon amour " : French woman -Emmanuelle Riva- meets Japanese man in post-nuclear Hiroshima, after meeting German man in Nevers, a city of central France, during WW2. Love, war, memory. Lofty issues for possibly one of the 10 worst films ever ; not just boring : awful, appalling, lead-footed, so self-conscious as to become ultimately laughable.

" Muriel " : a widow -Delphine Seyrig again- resumes her acquaintance with a former lover, while her stepson is obsessed by the memory of Muriel, a young woman tortured in Algeria during the war. Again, love, war, memory... And boredom...

Boring, but also hazardous to your health : -lack of- takes place in Boulogne, a dreary harbour on the French North Sea, sporting possibly the ugliest church ever built and not destroyed by a compassionate bomb ; Delphine Seyrig's coat and hairdress will give any sensible individual the creeps.

To quote French critic Jacques Lourcelles, Alain Resnais deserves to be acknowledged as one of " his century's more boring intellectuals. "