Monthly Archives: December 2015

  • The Kid with a Bike

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le gamin au vélo

    Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2011)

    The eponymous kid, twelve-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), has been put in care by his father, Guy (Jérémie Renier).  Cyril is nearly always running somewhere – trying to escape from the care home, or heading to the apartment block in Val Potet (part of the town of Seraing in the Province of Liège).  Cyril is convinced he’ll find Guy there, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary.  The boy’s perpetual motion is fervent but ambiguous.  He’s running away from and in pursuit of something at the same time.  (It’s his restlessness that makes affecting a brief shot of Cyril asleep.)  The boy will not believe that his father has deserted him or made himself incommunicado or sold the bike that’s so vital to his son.   In the opening scene of The Kid with a Bike, Cyril tells one of the counsellors at the care home, who’s made a call to Guy’s number and gets a ‘number unavailable’ message, that he’s dialled it wrong.  When he gets to the door of his father’s apartment, Cyril keeps knocking on it even when a neighbour insists that Guy moved out a month ago.  Cyril has already shown how desperately resourceful he is.  Having been given the same message by the concierge over the apartment block entryphone, the boy buzzes the adjoining doctor’s surgery and tells them he fell off the bike he no longer has and hurt his leg.  He is let into the block.  After the irritated neighbour has sent him away from the vacant apartment, Cyril – still trying for something – goes into the surgery.  His counsellors arrive (they know perfectly well where he’ll have headed) and Cyril, trying to evade capture, crashes into a woman waiting in the surgery and knocks her to the ground.   He clings on to her – ‘You can hold on to me’, says the startled woman, ‘but not so tight!’  Her name is Samantha (Cécile de France); she looks to be in her mid-thirties and she’s a hairdresser.  Samantha turns up at the care home a few screen minutes later:  she’s tracked down Cyril’s bike and bought it off one of the kids in the neighbourhood.   As Samantha drives away from the home, Cyril pedals furiously after her.  He asks if he can spend weekends with her in Val Potet.   It’s another way of tracking down his father.

    Cyril, once he’s reunited with his bike, feels that he’s partly got Guy back too.  The bike also gives the boy a new physical purchase on his quest.  (The Dardenne brothers – with the help of their DoP, Alain Marcoen, and their editor, Marie-Hélène Dozo – capture easily but powerfully the intensity of Cyril’s relentless forward movement, on foot or on the bike.)  He refuses to accept that his father sold the bike until he sees the proof of it – a postcard in a local shop window.  On his two subsequent brief meetings with Guy, who works as a chef in a local eatery, Cyril has to accept the larger and harder truth that his father doesn’t want to see him again.  Guy can’t cope with the responsibility but lack of funds is his main excuse on the first meeting with his son.  Cyril gets involved with a young drug dealer (Egon Di Mateo), who calls himself Wes (after a character in the movies/computer game Resident Evil).  On Wes’s instructions, Cyril commits robbery with violence.  He then goes to the restaurant where Guy works to present his father – in a gesture as clueless as it’s impassioned – with the proceeds of the crime that Wes has given him.   Guy rejects the money, along with Cyril.

    The robbery – Cyril knocks out a newsagent (Fabrizio Rongione) and his son before taking money from the older man – is dismaying.  You assume that, despite Samantha’s ardent efforts to make Cyril feel loved and wanted, he’s condemned himself to an institution for juvenile offenders – and perhaps a lifetime of crime and punishment.   On the evidence of The Kid with a Bike, however, the Belgian legal system is very enlightened.  The money is recovered.  Samantha signs up to paying compensation, in instalments, to the newsagent and his family, for hospital bills and loss of earnings.  Cyril apologises in the presence of a lawyer, and goes to live with Samantha weekdays as well as weekends.  This seems too good to be true and it is.   The newsagent’s son isn’t as ready as his father to accept Cyril’s apology and the damages.   The three bump into each other accidentally when Cyril goes to a garage to buy some charcoal for a barbecue that Samantha is hosting that evening.  The newsagent’s son chases Cyril.  When Cyril climbs up a tree, the son throws stones at him.  One hits the target; Cyril falls from a great height and lies on the ground – certainly unconscious, possibly dead.  You fear that the Dardennes, in spite of the compelling nuance of what has gone before, are going to deliver a bleak, comfortless ending to the film.  In fact, they judge this last scene as perfectly as all the rest.  Cyril comes to and gets up.  The newsagent tells him he should go to hospital – he must be concussed.  Always inclined to disagree, Cyril says no.   He gets up and back on his bike and cycles off slowly, back to Samantha’s with the bag of charcoal.  He may be dazed but he knows where he’s going.

    Thomas Doret’s performance as Cyril makes the acting of the youngsters in American films that I’ve recently seen – in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, let alone Hugo and We Bought a Zoo – look crude and shallow.  He has a documentary realness but he’s fluently and dramatically expressive too.  With the possible exception of the sequence in which Cyril goes to Wes’s place and sits playing on his PlayStation, the Dardennes in this movie are never merely observational.  Cécile de France is wonderful as Samantha.  This actress can clearly be glamorous but here she’s utterly natural as a still young woman whose beauty is shadowed by unexplained disappointments.  Samantha is decent and determined.  She also realises that Cyril is capable of changing her life in a way that her boyfriend Gilles (Laurent Caron) can’t – you get the sense he’s the latest of a series of relationships that haven’t quite worked out.   The gradual tracking down of Cyril’s father means that, by the time he first appears, you’ve built up considerable interest in what he’s like.  Jérémie Renier is extraordinarily good in the role.  You see the weakness of Guy’s character but you also see his charm and why Cyril might idolise him.  Guy is so feeble that he asks Samantha to tell Cyril he doesn’t want to see him again; the father’s cruelty is more powerful because it’s obviously the result of cowardice rather than malice aforethought but Renier doesn’t overdo Guy’s invertebracy.  In this case too, the character is more impressive and fascinating for being somewhat opaque – there are no neat backstory explanations of how Samantha and Guy got to be how they are.  But you don’t experience this opacity as an evasion on the Dardennes’ part.

    I think foreign language movies are often unfairly and excessively praised in comparison with American ones treating the same subject but The Kid with a Bike is a genuine instance of European film-makers handling material with more subtlety and less sentimentality than would be likely in mainstream (or indie) American cinema.   I didn’t like the Dardennes’ The Son and although Rosetta is in many ways strong, The Kid with a Bike seems to me a much suppler piece of cinema.  The severely rationed use of music – the same bit of Beethoven virtually dividing the film into chapters – seems arty at the start but, by the end, its insistent brevity is eloquent.  The Kid with a Bike may not be as poetic as the distinguished predecessors to which it evidently nods – Bicycle Thieves and The Four Hundred Blows – but it’s a very good film and a highly engaging piece of social realism.

    24 March 2012

     

  • Carol

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Haynes (2015)

    Todd Haynes can’t have personal recollections of the 1950s – he was born in 1961 – but he’s clearly drawn to the period.  His feelings about the decade are no less evidently divided:  Haynes deplores the social prejudices and benighted views of sexuality that prevailed but he’s in love with the American cinema and the accoutrements of the period.  Carol takes place, mainly in New York City and its environs, in the winter of 1952-53, a few years earlier than Haynes’s previous fifties foray-paean Far from Heaven.  The latter had what was technically an original screenplay by Haynes although the writer-director was at pains to highlight his debt to Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film, All That Heaven Allows.  The screenplay for Carol is definitely an adaptation – by Phyllis Nagy, from The Price of Salt, a semi-autobiographical novel which Patricia Highsmith completed in 1951 and which was published the following year, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.  Carol is the story of a lesbian relationship between the title character, Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a glamorous, fortyish New Jersey wife and mother, on the verge of divorce from her angrily possessive husband; and Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), who wants to be a photographer but who has a temporary Christmas job as a shopgirl in a Manhattan store called Frankenberg’s, when she and Carol first clap eyes on each other in the store’s toy department,

    Aided by his usual, brilliant cinematographer and production designer – Edward Lachman and Judy Becker respectively – Todd Haynes revels in the visual possibilities of the time and place:  Christmas displays and decorations, Carol’s fur coat, falling snow.  Some of the beautiful visual effects are imaginative.  I liked a sequence in which Therese – at what appears to be the end of the affair – rides in a taxi on a cold, rainy evening and starts to think about Carol.  Therese can make out people in the street through the steamed-up window of the cab but Haynes makes clear that she sees and doesn’t see them – her mind’s eye is on someone else.  It would be wrong to see this film (as some reviewers have seen it) as repeating the Technicolor lushness of Far from Heaven.   Carol has a visual texture different from its predecessor’s; the new film was shot on Super 16.  As Haynes explained in an interview with Ryan Gilbey in this month’s Sight and Sound, ‘The speed of film stocks and the speed of lenses today are so sophisticated, the grain content has basically vanished. … [Edward Lachman] and I were like, “Oh, let’s degrade and let’s force that grain back into it.”‘  This doesn’t mean, however, that Carol is less stylised than Far from Heaven.  As in the earlier film, the stylisation has such a starring role that it verges on smothering the drama.  Even if you don’t get Todd Haynes’s specific references to other movies, you can’t fail to be aware that his film-making is steeped in cinema history, and this tends to infect your reception of his work:  for example, Carter Burwell’s music for Carol is supple and effective but it often comes across as a pastiche of the Philip Glass score for The Hours.  It’s jarring too when something anomalous (rarely) occurs.  The fluency of Phyllis Nagy’s dialogue here is interrupted only once, when Carol says to her ex-lover Abby (Sarah Paulson), ‘Don’t be daft’.   This may be a direct quote from the novel but you stub your ears on ‘daft’ – it sticks out as an Anglicism.

    As I watched the film, I couldn’t understand why it took so long for Carol and Therese to sleep together.  They – Carol, especially – didn’t seem to be holding back in other respects.  My immediate thought was that the love-making had been artificially delayed by Todd Haynes to place the bed scene at just the point he wanted it, and to give it a salience there wouldn’t have been with repeated sexual episodes.  Then I saw Margaret Talbot’s piece on The Price of Salt in the New Yorker[1], which suggested that both the deferral and the realisation of sex in the film were faithful to the Highsmith novel, in which:

    ‘The two women embark on a road trip, and the descriptions of it read like a noirish dream—stiff drinks, wood-panelled motel rooms, a gun in a suitcase. A detective hired by Carol’s husband pursues the couple, and you can feel Highsmith’s thriller muscles twitching to life.  … The love story is at once hijacked and heightened by the chase story. … When the women at last make love, Highsmith describes it with a sacramental intensity …’

    Todd Haynes, with his fetish for beautification, plays down this narrative strand: he doesn’t have ‘thriller muscles’.  The private detective hired by Carol’s husband Harge does appear in the film (and is well played by Cory Michael Smith) but there’s little sense of his pursuing Carol and Therese – and no sense of the ‘chase story’ delaying the consummation of Carol’s and Therese’s feelings for each other..  The women meet the detective at the motel where they’re staying and he’s another guest; he passes himself off as a travelling salesman and is only later unmasked by Carol.  By de-emphasising the chase, Todd Haynes dissipates the rationale for postponing the sex.  Elsewhere in the same issue of the New Yorker in which Margaret Talbot’s article appeared (30 November 2015), Anthony Lane commends the film of Carol, with some reservations.  He thinks insufficient attention is paid to Carol’s relationship with her daughter, to the social gap between Carol and Therese, and to Therese’s ambitions to be a photographer.  This isn’t fair criticism in terms of the screen time given to any of these elements yet I can see why Lane felt this way:  their subjugation to the aesthetic scheme of the movie means that none of them has much impact.

    The age difference between Carol and Therese doesn’t count for much either.  According to Margaret Talbot, Therese is nineteen and Carol ‘in her thirties’ in The Price of Salt.  Patricia Highsmith herself was twenty-seven when the incident that planted the seed of the novel in her mind occurred (Highsmith was working as a store assistant at Bloomingdale’s at the time).  Rooney Mara, twenty-nine when Carol was in production, is convincing as someone in her very early twenties or even younger – she certainly seems young enough to be the daughter of forty-five-year-old Cate Blanchett.  The ‘road trip’ in Carol has been compared with the one in Lolita, as Humbert Humbert drives urgently, with the major-minor object of his desire, from one place to the next.  Anthony Lane mentions this; a piece on the back page of the Times Literary Supplement last month described, even though it also pooh-poohed, a school of thought that this element of Nabokov’s novel was inspired by Highsmith’s.  Even if the generation gap between Carol and Therese isn’t necessarily crucial, it seems odd that Carol’s husband (Kyle Chandler), given how censorious he is about his wife’s friendship with her near-contemporary Abby, doesn’t more aggressively see Therese as beyond the pale, for reasons of youth as well as gender.

    Cate Blanchett’s portrait of Carol is an immaculate expression of Todd Haynes’s approach.  Each line reading, gesture, look and movement is technically accomplished – you repeatedly register the actress’s achievement of perfection, just as you register the succession of faultlessly composed images in the film.  Haynes seems to have wanted Blanchett to evoke old-style Hollywood portrayals of lesbians and she obliges.  In her Village Voice review, Stephanie Zacharek wittily describes Blanchett’s presence as ‘like a waft of perfume with a woman attached’.  What she and Haynes do in Carol also reminded me of fine dining menus that offer ‘textures’ (of mushrooms or cauliflower or whatever):  Cate Blanchett serves up textures of screen lesbian.  Many people watching Carol will likely find this entirely satisfying – film students for whom it’s more than enough for a movie to be relatable to other movies, those who (like me) get plenty of interest and pleasure from watching an outstanding actor demonstrate their skills.  Blanchett’s playing comes, though, at the cost of dramatic sense.  It’s fundamental to the story that Haynes tells that Carol has much greater sexual experience than Therese; and the nature of her former relationship with Abby is presented as a main reason for the disintegration of Carol’s marriage, even though Abby’s openness about her sexuality is contrasted with Carol’s troubled uncertainty.  Cate Blanchett goes further, however, and to confusing effect.  She suggests – from the moment that Carol appears in the department store and sees Therese behind the counter – a practised seducer sizing up her next prey.  Blanchett does create remarkable contrasts between the superbly assured shopper and the tense, regretful Carol at home, with the suspicious husband and the young daughter (Sadie and Kk Heim) she’s about to lose.  But her smouldering lesbian quintessence is so dominant that it’s hard to believe that Carol can wait as long as she does to bed Therese.

    Therese, who seems to have no female friends, is rather detached from her unexciting boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy) from an early stage, although he doesn’t appear to notice.  Even if Todd Haynes is thereby be making a point about how young men of Richard’s generation automatically saw young women, it still means that Therese’s developing relationship with Carol doesn’t involve the dismantling of a substantial one with Richard.  Rooney Mara’s fine portrait of Therese mines an interesting element of the material, though.  Carol’s and Therese’s first look at each other in Frankenberg’s has a coup de foudre quality but this doesn’t mean that Therese naturally infers that she finds Carol physically attractive.  In the early stages of the relationship, Mara implies rather that Therese finds herself increasingly drawn to Carol and would think herself in love if Carol were not a woman.  In the world that Therese inhabits, women don’t fall in love with each other sexually.  She can therefore hardly make sense of her feelings.  (Although the setting is very different, the collision of sexual imperative and social impossibility recalls Ennis Del Mar’s predicament in Brokeback Mountain.)  And because Rooney Mara’s Therese isn’t – compared with Cate Blanchett’s Carol – a flawlessly finished piece of work, her character retains a greater human interest.  Among the men in the story, none is presented more unsympathetically than Harge but Kyle Chandler, so good in The Wolf of Wall Street, is excellent again in this unenviable role.

    If you were to criticise the dramatis personae in a Haynes film for not being likeable or engaging you’d be missing the point.  Their qualities as people are subsidiary to the part they have to play as figures in a finely-woven tapestry.  This isn’t to say that Haynes’s characters are lifeless but he turns them – to my mind, reduces them – to design components.  The very end of Carol is highly effective precisely because it seems a departure from this.  The concluding across-a-crowded-room eye contact between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara is affecting.  As a result, it’s invigorating too; besides, we weren’t expecting things to turn out as well for the two women as it appears they do.  The impact of this finale may even deceive the viewer into thinking that the drama that preceded it had similar heft.  Todd Haynes takes you by surprise in this moment yet it’s fitting that a stylist like him should end things with a kind of emotional trompe l’oeil.

    3 December 2015

    [1]  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/forbidden-love

     

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