Daily Archives: Tuesday, January 26, 2016

  • Vivre sa vie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Luc Godard (1962)

    The full French title of Godard’s fourth film is Vivre sa vie:  film en douze tableaux.  The title’s English translations include To Live Her Life, My Life to Live and It’s My Life.   The first of those is awkwardly literal – it sounds like a translation.  The second and third misrepresent the picture’s style and mood, not least because of their similarity to the 1958 Hollywood melodrama I Want to Live!  This note will stick with Vivre sa vie.

    In the first of the twelve tableaux or episodes, all of them set in Paris, a young woman called Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina) breaks up with her husband.  She has ambitions to be an actress but what follows largely describes how she starts working as a prostitute in order to support herself.  (Godard’s title can thus be interpreted either as a straightforward description of what he shows on screen or as an ironic comment on the limited options open to Nana for how she’ll survive on her own.)  The imaginative variety of form of the tableaux is a large part of what makes Vivre sa vie so bracing and absorbing – in conjunction with the remarkable combination of limited camera movement and visual dynamism that characterises several of the tableaux.   (Raoul Coutard did the black-and-white cinematography; the editor was Agnès Guillemot.)   In one episode, Nana sits in a cinema, watching Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc:  tears roll down the cheeks of both Falconetti’s Joan, as she prepares for death, and Nana, as she gazes at her.  Nana weeps as noiselessly as Falconetti in the silent film on the screen.  In subsequent tableaux, Nana talks with Raoul (Sady Rebbot), the man who’ll become her pimp:  first, at a table in a cafeteria high in a building with a window looking out on the expanse of Paris beyond and below; then, in a conversation in which he dispassionately recites the rules and regulations for working as a prostitute and she occasionally requests clarification.  A later episode consists of Nana’s writing a letter of application to a brothel madam:  Godard’s camera stays throughout on the initially blank page on which the letter is being composed.

    Each episode is prefaced by an intertitle.  The introduction to the last but two describes how Nana ‘fait la philosophie sans le savoir’.  (Nana has already shown a repeated tendency to aphorise:  non-French viewers may therefore be surprised to see her labelled as ‘the unwitting philosopher’ but will likely realise her verbal style is only to be expected in a French movie.)  She strikes up a conversation in a café-bar with an elderly man – about speech and silence, the dependence of thinking on the words whereby thoughts are formed, and so on.  It’s clear that her interlocutor here – and he does most of the talking – is either a superb naturalistic actor or a real-life intellectual.  He turns out to be the latter – a philosopher and essayist called Brice Parain (who was Godard’s philosophy tutor:  his surname is one ‘r’ short of being the French for ‘godfather’).  What Parain says has such precision and momentum that it’s completely absorbing.  It almost removes you from the world of the film – until Nana looks into the camera, as if to remind the audience that this is still her story and that Parain needs to be kept in context.  In the final episode Nana is sold by Raoul to another pimp.  An argument breaks out among the men at the exchange.  Shots are fired.  Nana is killed.  Her fall to the ground and body lying in the street naturally bring to mind the death of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel in Breathless but the killing of Nana is more shocking in that it happens so abruptly and arbitrarily.  Belmondo’s Michel is consciously – he says daily – preoccupied with thoughts of death:  Joan of Arc’s agony and gunfire earlier in the film, in the street outside a bar in which Nana is drinking, foreshadow but don’t obviously signal her eventual fate.

    Anna Karina, who was married to Godard when they made Vivre sa vie, is increasingly appealing as Nana.  It’s remarkable how the character enlarges – and how little this depends on conventional theatrical opportunities to enlarge a character – over the course of the film.   Karina’s presence counterbalances the academic flavour of the movie that results from a plethora of literary and cinematic quotations (some more explicit than others).  The succession of scenes of Nana at work in impersonal rooms is cumulatively lowering yet there are surprising shifts in tone within these scenes.  Among the mostly faceless clients, Nana’s first (Gilles Quéant) is an arresting exception.  A sequence in which another of her johns wants to involve a third party sends Nana searching hurriedly, in nearby rooms in the brothel, for a co-worker who’ll help out:  the rapid opening and shutting of doors turns this into a singular, thirty-second French farce.  Vivre sa vie features one of Michel Legrand’s best scores.  I could have done without (a) the Jean Ferrat chanson ‘Ma môme’, which plays on a jukebox, and (b) Nana’s dance to another jukebox number, this one an instrumental.  A bit in which an acquaintance of Raoul mimes (with limited sound effects) a kid blowing up a balloon is surprisingly enjoyable, however.

    18 January 2016

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  • Date Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Shawn Levy (2010)

    Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell and Tina Fey), a fortyish couple from New Jersey with two kids, have ‘dates’ together to try and put some pep back into their marriage.   They go to local eating places, where they watch other couples and enjoy speculating about the state of their relationships.  (This is presumably meant to show the vacancy of the Fosters’ life together, although I’m not sure it does:  when Carell and Fey put on voices to imagine what the other diners are saying, they’re too inventive to be despicable.)  One night, the sexy dress Claire puts on for their outing moves Phil to impulsiveness:  he insists on taking his wife to a swanky new restaurant in Manhattan, although it’s an hour’s drive to Tribeca and Claire is sure they’ll never get a table.  They duly don’t but the snotty official at the desk tells them to wait in the bar in case there any cancellations.  When another member of staff comes round calling a table for two for ‘the Tripplehorns’, Phil claims it – a moment of dishonesty that gets the Fosters into mistaken identity territory and a tour of New York’s nocturnal underbelly they’ll never forget.   During the couple’s night on the town, they’re mixed up with a mobster, a corrupt DA and bent cops, and embroiled in a series of action-comedy set pieces, chief and worst of which is an endless car chase and pile-up.

    I went to see Date Night because of Steve Carell, whom I really like, and Tina Fey, whom I’d never seen before but wanted to see.  I didn’t expect much from the film as a whole and I got less.   The dialogue is feeble:  reasonably typical is a repeated gag – mildly funny the first time but quickly tedious – that has other characters, all criminally experienced, expressing shock that the Fosters lied to get their table in the restaurant.  Shawn (Night(s) in the Museum) Levy puts up a series of out-takes to accompany the closing credits.  Of course bloopers can be funny but a film must be a failure when they make you laugh more than the ninety-odd minutes of comedy they’re appended to.  As David Denby’s New Yorker review points out, the basic joke in Date Night is the same one as in The Out-of-Towners – made in 1970 with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, remade in 1999 with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, as suburban misadventurers in New York.  I don’t know how much non-American audiences will understand New Jersey to be a comic premise per se but Levy and the screenwriter Josh Klausner are taking no chances.  The Fosters are given quintessentially boring jobs – he’s a tax consultant, she’s an estate agent – to leave no doubt about their dreariness.

    David Denby’s review also notes, accurately, that the material seems designed for the timid non-sophisticates whom the Fosters represent:  while they may seem the butt of the joke, they end up defeating the vicious might of the bad big city and, needless to say, rediscovering how much they love each other.  There didn’t seem much wrong with their relationship to me in any case, except for the lack of any cultural conversation that might have helped ring the changes in how they fill the silence when they go out together.  At the end, Phil reveals that he always reads what Claire is reading for her book group, ‘Because they’re important to you’.  She confesses she reads only the first few pages and the last one, and we’re meant to think that Phil is a fool for love:  after all, asks Claire, ‘Who has time to read books?’   His thoughtfulness seems wasted effort not because it’s time-consuming but because he and his wife appear never to have a conversation about the books anyway.

    Except for the odd flicker of light in her eyes, Tina Fey is disappointingly impersonal – she seems to have got a type of character down pat rather than created an individual.   The part of Claire is poorly written, it’s true, but no more so than the part of Phil, which Steve Carell does much more with.  It’s his lack of vanity, as well as his comic precision, that makes Carell such a likeable performer.  His acting here verges on the miraculous – he gives Phil depth, which isn’t in the writing, but it’s an essentially light-hearted depth.  It takes a lot of skill to achieve and sustain that kind of balance.   The noisy stupidity of Date Night is modified by the charm of Carell’s playing and by the brief appearances of two other very talented people we meet along the way.  Mark Ruffalo is the husband of a couple the Fosters are friends with and who are breaking up.  James Franco is some kind of lowlife.  While I was sorry to see them in this junk, it’s good they come through as vividly as they do, Franco especially.  The well-known names in the cast also include Ray Liotta (as the mobster boss), Taraji P Henson (as a detective) and Mark Wahlberg (as a security expert whose musculature seems to generate around one gagline in every three).

    2 May 2010

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