Monthly Archives: December 2015

  • Let’s Talk About the Rain

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Parlez-moi de la pluie

    Agnès Jaoui (2008)

    Agathe Villanova is a feminist writer now running for political office.  With her boyfriend Antoine, she returns from Paris for a few days to her home town in the South of France, to help her sister Florence set their late mother’s affairs in order.  The family house is occupied by Florence and her husband, Stéphane.  The family’s Algerian housekeeper, Mimouna, who’s been with the Villlanovas for many years, lives in a kind of shack in the grounds of the house and, since funds are low, is now working for free.  Michel Ronsard is a freelance documentary film-maker and a friend (it’s not clear from when) of Mimouna’s son, Karim.  The two men want to make a film, as part of a series about successful women.  Agathe is the only successful woman they (through Karim) know.   Karim, who is married to Séverine, has a job at the reception desk of an unprepossessing local hotel (the Hotel Terminus), where he alternates shifts with a girl called Aurélie.  It’s summer but the weather has been dire and mostly stays that way throughout the film.

    The Agnès Jaoui-Jean-Pierre Bacri partnership (they’re a married couple as well as a film-making duo) is admired for wry, unaggressive observation of human desires and frailties.  As well as directing here, Jaoui plays Agathe and, as usual, co-wrote the screenplay with Bacri, who plays Michel.  It might therefore seem harsh to accuse the Bacris of laziness, as well as complacency, but I think it’s right to do so.  The political dimension which supplies the framework for the story is hollow.  We understand that Agathe is at best ambivalent about a political career but her involvement in the campaign doesn’t seem to amount to more than the odd call on her cell phone and a brief outburst when she misses a big rally – because she’s agreed to a filming session with Michel and Karim, in the middle of nowhere, only an hour or so before the rally starts.   It’s hard to see that the incredibly minimal extent of her political activity is making any point.  I suspect that Jaoui and Bacri simply aren’t interested in writing more detail into this aspect of proceedings because they prefer to concentrate on the mildly comic interactions between the characters.  It makes no sense either that Agathe continues to give up and waste time on the comedy-of-errors documentary.  It’s not as if she’s portrayed as a woman who’s so vain or egocentric that any opportunity to be in the limelight is irresistible.   The documentary too is being used merely as a narrative convenience.

    Although the storytelling is assured, the pacing is soporifically gentle – except when Jaoui occasionally injects a bit of relatively broad comedy to keep you awake.   Some of these sequences fit into the scheme of things easily enough – like the first session of filming and when Karim accompanies Aurélie to a friend’s baby’s christening:  Michel turns up for the occasion as the officially professional but actually inept photographer.  Other episodes are more artificial – for example, the pre-rally shooting session (Michel and Karim march Agathe to the top of a hill, the filming is abandoned due to a noisy flock of sheep, they march down the hill to find Michel’s car in a ditch, the rain pours, they try to flag down a car, they take shelter in a farmhouse etc etc).  It may be that Jaoui-Bacri fans will enjoy these interruptions to the usual tone and tempo as a witty convergence with the theme of characters jolted out of their civilised way of life.  They just looked a bit desperate to me.

    What little there is of interest is at most implicit in the material and may even be inadvertent.   There’s a sequence in which Karim angrily (by the standards of this film anyway) complains to Agathe about the condescending racism which he and his mother are on the receiving end of – and which he says that Agathe’s family epitomises.   There’s nothing remarkable about the way this is developed in the film – nothing more than a vague sense that Agathe’s liberal conscience may be sensitive to this kind of criticism.  Jaoui and Bacri don’t use this element to give substance to the narrative (it could, for example, have been the reason that Agathe feels she should stick with the documentary project) or tension to the characters (Karim might have been presented as using this line because he knows it hits a nerve with Agathe).  What’s interesting is the film-makers’ relative distance from the Algerian characters (and in spite of the fact that Jaoui is of Tunisian descent).  If this isn’t condescension, it’s at least striking that Jaoui and Bacri seem less ready to present Karim and Mimouna – although they are very well played by, respectively, Jamel Debbouze and Mimouna Hadji – as having weaknesses, compared with the white middle-class characters.

    Jaoui and Bacri have a knack for creating characters economically – a few quick strokes and they register – and for orchestrating incisive but relaxed performances from their cast.  It’s frustrating here that, once people have made their mark, there’s nowhere for them to go.   As in I’ve Loved You So Long, Frédéric Pierrot – here in the role of Agathe’s boyfriend – creates a strong, extremely likeable impression but is then wasted.   It wasn’t clear to me what line of work (if any?) Stéphane was in but Guillaume de Tonquedec has an amusing childish pedantry (especially in a moment when Antoine stops Stéphane’s child from choking and is then reprimanded by the latter for his life-saving method being technically incorrect).  Stéphane too then virtually disappears, as does Séverine.  As Florence, Pascale Arbillot, compared with most of the others here, seems to be working rather hard – but this could be an expression of the actress’s anxiety that her part is thin and she needs to make the most of it.  The outrageous egocentricity of the characters he plays is now Jean-Pierre Bacri’s trademark.  Although it’s becoming too familiar, I must admit that, by the end of this film, I was wondering if I would miss Bacri’s idiosyncrasies (the dry delivery, the infuriatingly raised eyebrows) if it was someone else in his roles – rather as Woody Allen could get tiresome but you felt the loss when his alter ego really was a different actor (like John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway).

    Parlez-moi de la pluie is not a million miles away from non-vintage Woody Allen.  A group of skilful actors are evidently enjoying playing together, speaking moderately witty lines, as intelligent people, in mostly agreeable settings.   And, to be fair, this is non-vintage Jaoui-Bacri too:  Le goût des autres had a more robust eccentricity and Comme une image, although there were funny bits, was pretty bleak – certainly the unhappiness of the aspiring singer played by Marilou Berry mattered.  But Parlez-moi de la pluie is enervated; worse, it exudes an awareness on the Bacris’ part of the secret of their success.  It’s innocuous and rather self-satisfied about being innocuous.  The irony is that it’s quite powerfully annoying as a consequence.

    16 November 2008

  • Bullhead

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rundskop

    Michaël R Roskam (2011)

    Some of the humour and the conflicts between the characters in the Belgian writer-director Michaël R Roskam’s first feature depend on an understanding that I don’t have of the cultural differences between the Dutch- and French-speaking communities of Belgium and, I guess, on a national joke that the Flemish are unsophisticated beside the Walloons.  There’s a mixture of languages in evidence:  French, Dutch, the Limburg dialect and occasionally English (especially ‘fuck’).  I never quite got the hang of the criminal activities which propel Bullhead.  Put simply:  ‘young Limburg cattle farmer Jacky Vanmarsenille is approached by an unscrupulous veterinarian to make a shady deal with a notorious West-Flemish beef trader’ (IMDB);  injecting cattle illegally with growth hormones is central to the story; and the murder of the senior policeman trying to stamp out the practice among the farmers of Flanders is an important plot catalyst.

    The playing of a woman police officer and of the various shady dealers is energetic but pretty broad:  the vividly disreputable faces of the dealers can make the actors seem like animated mug shots.  The experience of watching Bullhead (which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) is very different from how you feel it ought to be.  In theory, the cartoonish aspect of the crime story is a bridge to the crunching violence for which Jacky Vanmarsenille is responsible and his colossal bulk is all of a piece with those elements.  On paper, Jacky’s biography sounds garishly contrived (even though, according to Calum Grant, it’s based on a newspaper article[1]).  As a ten-year-old, he was on the receiving end of a vicious attack by an older boy.  This left Jacky’s testicles crushed and useless.  The doctor prescribed compensatory testosterone.  Twenty years later, Jacky is still injecting not only his cattle but himself with male hormones.  They fill a fridge in his room.  The coarse comedy and the tribal wit of Bullhead don’t mesh with Jacky’s story; but that story, thanks to Matthias Schoenaerts, is powerfully affecting.

    Schoenaerts put on 27 kilos for the role of Jacky – around the same weight gain as Robert De Niro’s for Raging Bull.   The proportional increase is smaller:  Schoenaerts is a big man anyway whereas De Niro’s natural weight was only 145 pounds before he played Jake La Motta; while De Niro’s extra poundage took the form of flab, Schoenaerts’s is pure muscle.   Jacky Vanmarsenille’s grotesquely overdeveloped physique has made his gait unbalanced; his regime of injections has left him with a permanently zonked look (his right eye seems always to be on the verge of closing).  But not only zonked.  There’s a hurt in his eyes which, although private, is unignorable – and perhaps not entirely private either:  perhaps wanting not to be ignored at the same time as wanting to stay hidden.  The adult Jacky is unrecognisable from the slender, limber child who was attacked.   Yet there’s a connecting beauty between the boy (Robin Valvekens) and the man:  it’s a sequence showing the birth of a calf on the farm, with (the adult) Jacky present, that somehow expresses this connection most poignantly and, in doing so, amplifies the theme of kinship between Jacky and his animals.

    Matthias Schoenaerts put on, as well as weight, a prosthetic nose:  it’s obviously false, in profile at least, but it gives Schoenaerts another layer to go behind and may have helped him enrich his portrait of a man who’s both protected and imprisoned by his body.  In a brief excursion to another world, Jacky visits the parfumerie owned by the Schepers family, whose son maimed him and whose daughter runs the cosmetics shop:  Schoenaerts gets over a fine mixture of Jacky’s shyness in the presence of a pretty young woman and his ulterior motive.  (As Lucia Schepers, Jeanne Dandoy nails the unwarranted bright condescension of girls who sell expensive perfume although her acting later on is predictable.)   Strung out on male hormones, Jacky is primed for aggression:  he’s easily roused to physically violent anger and Michaël R Roskam several times shows him, in the shadows of his room, squaring up for a fight.  Schoenaerts makes you root for Jacky to such an extent that I wanted him to take revenge for what happened to him as a child – even though I didn’t want to see acts of violence and knew such acts were the only way that Jacky could take his revenge.

    The men in and on the fringes of the Flanders underworld provide a context of unprepossessing macho insensitivity in which the hugely imposing Jacky’s compromised masculinity is anomalous.  So too is the repressed homosexuality of the police informer Diederik, Jacky’s childhood friend who witnessed the attack on him.  Jeroen Perceval is good as Diederik but this supplementary misfit is a lame idea.  Roskam’s script as a whole leaves a lot to be desired.  I didn’t understand how Jacky got into the apartment where his assailant now lives a wordless, vegetative existence.  I was never clear how many people outside Jacky’s family knew about his misfortune.  The film takes it as a given that Jacky is bound to be lonely for the rest of his life.  His boanthropic connection with the bulked-up bulls in his herd, expressed in the film’s title, is serviceable but when Jacky describes his situation and compares it to that of the bulls, the lines that Roskam supplies are overexplicit and out of character for Jacky.  (The birth of the calf is such a poetic contrast to this crudeness.)   Nicolas Karakatsanis’s photography of the melancholy rural landscape not only expresses Jacky’s bleak outlook but also suggests the essential but now inaccessible mildness of his spirit.  The effective score is by Raf Keunen.

    7 February 2013

    [1] http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/bullhead/6058

     

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