Daily Archives: Monday, February 8, 2016

  • Elles

    Malgorzata Szumowska (2011)

    Juliette Binoche is the visual equivalent of the actor whose vocal brilliance means they can read from the telephone directory and be spellbinding.  Binoche can be an annoying presence too (see Certified Copy) but as Anne, the journalist protagonist of this new film, she is – as she was in Hidden – fascinating to watch just doing normal things at her Paris home.   She doesn’t appear to be acting yet there’s a definition to her movement and to every gesture that seems to enrich her characterisation.  She wears no make-up here and it’s as if we can see her even more clearly than usual.  Malgorzata Szumowksa is fortunate to have Binoche in Elles because this is otherwise, in spite of its superficially bold themes and plenty of aggressive sex to illustrate them, an unsatisfying and a rather silly film.

    If I understand the narrative (I may not), the action takes place over the course of twenty-four hours.  Elles begins as Anne’s husband Patrick (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) and her two sons, the teenager Florent (the inappropriately named François Civil) and the younger Stéphane (Pablo Beugnet), go off to work and college/school respectively.  (It turns out that Florent is actually skiving off.)  Patrick’s boss is coming to dinner that evening and the meal and its aftermath provide the climax to the film, which ends with the family reassembling for breakfast next morning.   When the males go out, Anne, who writes for the French Elle, stays at home to complete the article she’s been writing.  It’s about student prostitution in Paris and it’s soon clear that Anne has become obsessed with her subject.  We see her interviews with the two young women who feature in the piece – Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier), who’s French and who uses the name Lola when she’s selling her body, and the Pole Alicja (Joanna Kulig).  We also see their sexual encounters with various clients.  You assume at first that these are flashbacks to events which Charlotte and Alicja are recounting to Anne in interview.  As the film progresses and Anne’s fascination with the girls’ modus vivendi is revealed, these episodes are interspersed with what appear to be her fantasies.  By the end, you wonder if virtually all the bedroom activity was in Anne’s imagination – or, at least, reflects how she visualised what Charlotte and Alicja told her.  During the dinner party, she shuts off from the tedious conversation of her guests:  she sees round the table, instead of them, a selection of the men who we’ve seen previously as clients of the two young prostitutes.  But there’s an exception:  one of the men involved with the girls really is one of the dinner guests (Scali Delpeyrat).  Are all the clients we see in the sexual episodes men whom Anne knows in real life?  Does their behaviour in those episodes indicate how she, in some part of her mind, actually sees them?

    Anne is shocked not only by the lives that Charlotte and Alicja lead but by their cheerfully pragmatic attitude towards it.  Charlotte explains that she feels more in control with her clients than when she’s with her boyfriend; what she finds disgusting is the drab existence of her parents (Valérie Dréville and Jean-Louis Coulloc’h).  Like Charlotte, the hard-up Alicja finds that the money comes in handy:  it allows her a much better standard of living than she could otherwise enjoy.  At one point in Elles we’re introduced to a blowsy middle-aged woman, wearing clothes that are brightly coloured and tight-fitting.  I immediately assumed she was a prostitute of a more familiar kind (on screen anyway) than the two youngsters Anne is interviewing.  The woman turns out to be Alicja’s mother (Krystyna Janda), who discovers a sex toy in her daughter’s possession and upbraids her in tones of conventional maternal consternation.  Malgorzata Szumowska may be using Anne more persistently than this character to make us aware that our own conception of prostitution, like hers, is behind the times.  Yet we don’t get a sense that the subject of her article is a radically new departure for Anne – it’s surprising that she’s so easily shockable.  We often watch her preparing the dinner which, for her husband, is professionally significant:  Szumowska wants to stress how much this woman, even though she has her own high-powered career, is still on kitchen duty.  The plot of Elles depends on the job that Anne does but the director is so preoccupied with her domestic servitude that she has her react to Charlotte’s and Alicja’s sideline as if she were not a hard-bitten journalist but a middle-class housewife – who needs to get out more but can’t because the males in her family prevent her from doing so.

    The Polish mother and daughter share a bed.  As the girl sleeps, the mother leans over and holds her daughter in an embrace which may be more than maternal.  This moment connects with the larger ambiguity of Anne’s feelings about the young women.  We see Anne flirting with Alicja especially – is this a flashback or a fantasy?  We watch her masturbating:  is she turned on by the variety of sexual experience that the two young women enjoy – highly exotic to Anne, whose boring chavinist husband turns down her offer of fellatio after the dinner guests have gone – or is she physically attracted to the girls?   I’m really not clear what Malgorzata Szumowska is getting at in Elles.  I partly suspect that she sees the way that men treat women as essentially subjugating so that all women who have relationships with men are, to that extent, a sisterhood:  the signs of intimacy between women in the film may be meant to express this as much as lesbian attraction.  (I also suspect that Szumowska and Tine Byrckel, with whom she wrote the screenplay, include the character of Alicja’s mother partly because Anne can’t have a daughter:  she has to be on the receiving end of an exclusively male ménage.)   The girls’ clients are sadistic (Andrzej Chyra) or pathetic (José Fumanal) or desperate (Laurent Jumeaucourt) or callow (Swann Arlaud) or more than one of these things:  you can’t help but feel they’re all treating Charlotte and Alicja badly.   But Charlotte and Alicja – both intelligent and pretty – don’t feel abused or degraded; and Szumowska is also insistent that Anne can’t understand the girls’ sense of empowerment.

    Malgorzata Szumowska appears to want to have it both ways.   She means to show that men use women.  The only two possible exceptions in evidence are, in spite of what Charlotte says, the boys that she and Alicja choose to be with for free (Ali Marhyar and Arthur Moncla).  Yet Szumowksa also suggests that the two girls are liberated.  This thesis is irritating not least because Charlotte and Alicja are educated whores:  as such, they’re likely more acceptable to the audience that Szumowska means to challenge.  She makes such confusing points about prostitution that what in the end seems outrageous in Elles is less the matter of sexual exploitation than the high cost of living for students in Paris today.  Since the film is worth seeing mainly for Juliette Binoche doing chores and making them look remarkable, it’s fitting that one of the domestic details is, after Binoche, the best thing in Elles – a fridge door that won’t close properly.   When Anne is preparing the dinner, some of the images are given an obvious sexual flavouring.  Better is the moment right at the end when, at the breakfast table, Anne passes her husband a jar of preserves she can’t get the lid off:  Patrick shows his masculine strength to succeed where she fails (and looks pleased with himself).   This closing sequence is scored by the closing movement of Beethoven’s Seventh.  One of my favourite bits of music, it’s also one of the most overused in contemporary arthouse cinema.  It just about works here if you’re prepared to believe it’s playing on the radio:  Anne listens to what I assume is the French equivalent of Classic FM, which never seems to play the unexpected.

    21 April 2012

     

  • Edge of the City

    Martin Ritt (1957)

    It certainly deserves its place in the BFI ‘Birth of the Method:  The Revolution in American Acting’ season.   The source material is a 1955 television drama, A Man is Ten Feet Tall, by Robert Alan Aurthur, who also wrote the screenplay for this, Martin Ritt’s first feature film[1].   Edge of the City is the story of the friendship between Axel Nordmann, a young white man from Indiana, and Tommy Tyler, an African-American who works as a longshoreman on the New York docks, where Axel gets a job.  The interracial relationship made the film, at the time of its release, not just controversial but, in Southern states, simply unacceptable.  It was refused by many movie theatres and, thanks to its limited release, a commercial failure.  A main strength of Aurthur’s script is that the colour of Tommy’s skin is both crucial and unimportant.  He is eventually killed, after coming to Axel’s aid, by another stevedore, Charlie Malik, who’s both a vicious bully and a virulent racist.  But when Axel and Tommy are drinking in a bar together or having a meal at Tommy’s home, with his wife Lucy (who’s black) and her friend Ellen (who’s white), none of the characters suggests any racial self-consciousness, let alone comments on the ‘mixed’ gathering.

    In other respects, the screenplay is less distinguished.  Edge of the City is at heart a socially conscious melodrama with tragic and inspiring elements.  In one of their first conversations at the docks, Tommy tells Axel that, when he stands out from the pack and does the brave, right thing, ‘a man is ten feet tall’.  Tommy dies; Axel, along with the other longshoremen (whites and blacks), stays silent when Charlie Malik tells the police that Tommy accidentally fell on the baling hook with which Malik fatally stabbed him.  After a meeting with Lucy, in which she learns from Axel that her husband’s death was not accidental and angrily accuses him of not being a real friend to Tommy, Axel summons the courage to fight Malik.  The closing shot of the film shows Axel dragging the unconscious Malik towards the camera – and, one assumes, towards justice.  One assumes also that, in revealing how Tommy was killed, Axel will also be exposed as the army deserter that he is, and will go to jail.  But he will have attained the stature of which Tommy spoke.

    The moral scheme is familiar – the work setting and the central character’s dilemma about whether to tell the truth are obviously indebted to On the Waterfront – but the direction and acting make the material feel fresh.  You get this from the very first scene, when John Cassavetes’ Axel is looking for work.  This is a short exchange between him and the man (Ralph Bell) on night duty at the docks office but Martin Ritt and his actors get a great deal going between the few lines of dialogue – an atmosphere of wariness, furtiveness and anxiety is swiftly and economically created.  Both the docks and the streets of New York City, photographed by Joseph Brun, have a vivid immediacy throughout.  Perhaps the best scenes of all are the social episodes involving Axel, Tommy, Lucy and Ellen.  Although shadowed by the secret that Axel is keeping (or, once he’s revealed to Tommy that he deserted, by Axel’s fear of being found out by others), these sequences have a reality and vitality largely unencumbered by plot.

    Sidney Poitier is the only one of the cast who had appeared in the teleplay version of the story but there’s nothing preconceived about his performance.  Impressive in Blackboard Jungle, Poitier is truly exciting in Edge of the City.  His acting is fluid and his physical relaxedness and dynamism are remarkable.  Tommy Tyler is caring, witty, shrewd and cocky:  he’s a good man but nothing like the saintly stiff Poitier had become on screen by the late 1960s.  He’s intensely alive – which makes Tommy’s death all the more shocking.  John Cassavetes is overshadowed by Poitier but his physically static, closed-in quality is exactly right for Axel:  his interactions with Jack Warden’s Malik, when the pair first meet, are particularly expressive.  This is the first time that I’ve understood why Ruby Dee is such an admired actress:  as Lucy, she’s especially good playing the lighter moments – she and Poitier have an effortless emotional intimacy.  Dee, in her big scene (when Lucy finds out the truth about Tommy’s death), is a shade too aware that it’s her big scene but she’s undoubtedly powerful in it.  The cast also includes Kathleen Maguire as Ellen, Estelle Hemsley as Lucy’s mother, and Ruth White and Robert Simon as Axel’s parents, to whom their son makes two faltering, tortured, long-distance phone calls, early and late on in the film.  The score by Leonard Rosenman is one of the worst elements of Edge of the City:  you know what you’re in for from the opening titles – the jangling, discordant city-on-heat music that was such a familiar accompaniment to New York-set movies of the 1950s and beyond.  Martin Ritt sensibly rations the Rosenman for some time after that but it barges back in for the climax.

    20 November 2014

    [1] A Man is Ten Feet Tall is an alternative title for the cinema film too – and the one used on the print shown by BFI.  It seems from IMDB, Wikipedia and Pauline Kael’s note, however, that the ‘official’ title is Edge of the City.

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