Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • Two in the Wave

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Deux de la Vague

    Emmanuel Laurent (2010)

    Never leave the cinema until the film is over, closing titles included.  At the very end of this mostly disappointing documentary about the careers and relationship of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Emmanuel Laurent gives us a couple of minutes of pure gold – Jean-Pierre Léaud’s screen test for Les quatre cents coups.   It’s not the only highlight – there are excerpts from Godard and Truffaut films of course – but it’s perhaps the only unexpected one.   The birth of the New Wave and the eventual falling out of its two leading lights are a true story with a built-in dramatic arc – you might think it’s hard to go wrong with it.  Laurent appears to have assumed that too.   He has an unimaginative framing device:  a young woman (played knowingly, archly by Isild Le Besco) is looking through an album of press cuttings, from which Laurent’s story (narrated by Antoine de Baecque) takes off.   Laurent doesn’t organise the material in a way that creates any kind of momentum.  He then – like so many non-documentary film-makers who eschew dramatic convention until the eleventh hour – changes his mind suddenly for the sake of a big finish.  The growing hostility between Godard and Truffaut allows him to do this.

    One of the irritating things about Two in the Wave is that Laurent treats ‘the New Wave’ as if its manifesto were written on tablets of stone – as if Godard and Truffaut, because they began making films according to a consciously adopted set of principles, lost credibility as soon as they started to move away from their starting point.  (Of course the pair’s own perceptions of how far they’d moved caused the rift between them but I assume each of them believed only the other to be guilty of bad faith.)   There are moments when Laurent seems to be attributing this oversimplification to the ‘media’ in France during the 1960s; the trouble is, he himself fails to present any more nuanced an account.  He rather suggests it was downhill all the way after Les quatre cents coups and A bout de souffle.   There’s a strong focus on Jean-Pierre Léaud in the closing stages.  We see him in a sequence of roles, at various ages.  He’s undoubtedly an iconic figure in the history of the New Wave but the effect of this montage is rather saddening.  It seems to intend to show Léaud’s versatility and star longevity but is no more than a reminder that, while he’s a good enough actor, the adult Léaud is much reduced from the screen presence he was in his teens – and a very different type.  An incipient tough as the adolescent Antoine Doinel, Léaud grew into a figure that sometimes looks like a caricature of a delicate, high-strung romantic sensibility.  And grew is probably not the right word anyway:  Léaud never seems fully grown up yet he retains little of his teenage charisma.  (That’s largely why the screen test at the end lifts your spirits so much.)   It’s ironic that Laurent presents Léaud, who worked with Godard as well as Truffaut, as an element of the New Wave that endured.  Because Léaud never advanced beyond his first appearance as Antoine Doinel, he comes across more as an embodiment of arrested development.

    The tensions between the two protagonists – and our own feelings about their work that we bring to watching Two in the Wave – naturally keep the film interesting in spite of the weak direction.  Seeing them shoulder to shoulder during the events of 1968 is fascinating:  the footage may have been selected to emphasise this but it’s plain to see that Truffaut is galvanised by the controversy of Andre Malraux’s attempts to remove Henri Langlois from his post at the Cinémathèque Française, Godard by the May ’68 student demonstrations.  (Truffaut stands beside him on a platform but his face suggests they’re miles apart.)  As personalities on screen, Truffaut has considerable personal charm and Godard – repellently chilly and sure of himself – has none.  Yet I sympathise with what he wrote to Truffaut in response to what the latter (or Ferrand, the director whom Truffaut plays) says in Day for Night:  ‘Movies go along like trains in the night … people like you and me are happy only in our work … ‘  Godard rightly insisted to Truffaut that what kind of train matters terribly.  He has more interesting things to say than Truffaut too – for example, when he distinguishes cinema from arts which aren’t (can’t and don’t try to be) lifelike.  I’m not sure, though – especially after watching this – that I want to see the political doctrinaire’s post-1970 cinema any more than I like the later work of the indiscriminate cinéphile.

    25 February 2011

  • Two Days, One Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Deux jours, une nuit

    Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (2014)

    The Dardenne brothers seem to be mellowing in their late middle age, at least as far as casting is concerned.  They very successfully used a well-known actress, Cécile de France, in a leading role in The Kid with a Bike.  The Dardennes’ latest is virtually a one-woman show for a star, Marion Cotillard.  In Two Days, One Night – set in the Dardennes’ usual territory of the small industrial town of Seraing, near the brothers’ native city of Liège – Cotillard plays Sandra, a young wife and mother about to return to work, after suffering some kind of nervous breakdown, at a small solar-panel factory (Solwal).  During Sandra’s absence, the factory owner and his foreman have realised they can manage without her, provided that the other sixteen staff work slightly longer hours.  Management proposes a thousand euro bonus for each worker if they agree that Sandra should be made redundant.  Most of them badly need the money and accept the offer.  Sandra learns the news on a Friday afternoon.  She and Juliette (Catherine Salée), one of the few colleagues who opposed the offer, catch the boss Dumont (Baptiste Sornin) just as he’s leaving the factory.  They persuade him to take another vote on Monday morning.  Two Days, One Night describes Sandra’s attempts over the intervening weekend to get her co-workers to change their minds.

    It’s no surprise that this film isn’t 12 Angry Men and not simply because Sandra needs, rather than complete consensus, only a majority of her colleagues to support her.  It’s a relief anyway that not all the factory workers do the altruistically right thing (as they likely would in, say, a Ken Loach film).  Of course it’s necessary for dramatic suspense for the new vote to be knife-edge but the Dardennes’ socialism is nuanced enough to supply most of those who don’t shift their position with a good economic reason for doing so.  The Dardennes are evidently aware that the upbeat ending of The Kid with a Bike will raise the hopes of some of their audience (including me) of a repeat here.  For a few moments, it appears this will be forthcoming:  Sandra falls one vote short when the ballot results in a tie but Dumont then tells her he’s willing to give her back her job.  The sting in the tail is that he won’t therefore continue to employ the only one of the sixteen staff on a fixed-term contract – a young man called Alphonse (Serge Koto), the last of her colleagues whom Sandra got to see, late on Sunday evening.  Alphonse initially agrees to vote for Sandra rather than the bonus but, by the time their conversation ends, is havering, fearful of having his contract terminated in just the way the boss now intends.  (Alphonse nevertheless votes for Sandra.)   It’s clever (if unsurprising) that Sandra has to face the moral dilemma with which she confronted her colleagues.  It’s not unconvincing that she doesn’t need to think long before declining Dumont’s offer.  Yet the very ending of Two Days, One Night suggests that the Dardennes are softening in the resolution of their stories – and less persuasively here than in The Kid with a Bike.  It seems from her phone call to her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) and her smiling final walk away from camera that we’re meant think the experience has been the making of Sandra and given renewed strength to a marriage that was in trouble.  I found both things hard to accept; that caused me to leave the cinema feeling somewhat dissatisfied – and reminded me of other weaknesses of Two Days, One Night.  I’d been able, thanks to what’s undoubtedly a compelling story, to put these to the back of my mind as I watched the film.

    Sandra is so mentally and emotionally fragile from the start that there’s an element of suspension of disbelief in accepting her willingness even to start approaching her Solwal colleagues and to ask them to put her before their own finances.  The Dardennes are well aware of this – Sandra is more than once on the point of giving up – but what made her continuing campaign credible to me was the role that her strongly supportive husband plays over the weekend.  At one point, however, Sandra tells Manu she thinks he doesn’t love her any more – that he feels sorry for her but doesn’t love her.  Manu can hardly bring himself to refute this and it rings true.  As played by Fabrizio Rongione (who is Belgian, in spite of his name), Manu appears determined rather than naturally driven to do the right thing.  There’s something slightly effortful in his displays of physical affection towards Sandra.  Of course there’s an urgent financial need for her to keep her job – the couple have two young children – but you still get a sense from Rongione that the family crisis is energising Manu into newly decisive behaviour that transforms the couple’s life together.

    After what seems like a clinching setback during the Sunday afternoon, Sandra attempts suicide.  Marion Cotillard’s playing of this, as Sandra matter of factly swallows Xanax tablets and returns the foils, now emptied, to the bathroom cabinet, is impressive – but there’s not enough residue from the episode to prevent it feeling like a melodramatic shot in the arm to the plot (and Sandra’s discharge from hospital is remarkably rapid).  There’s no suggestion that Sandra and Manu are deliberately subduing thoughts of what has just happened until all the co-workers have been seen (and the couple’s children have disappeared from the action at this stage).   All the overdose really achieves is to make you feel the factory foreman Jean-Marc (Olivier Gourmet), who’s meant to be a nasty piece of work, has a point in asserting that Sandra’s psychological frailty means that Solwal would be better off without her.   It’s puzzling too that Sandra isn’t more affected by the break-up of the marriage of one of her colleagues as a result of the events of the weekend.  Because Anne (Christelle Cornil) is well out of a life with her bastard of a husband Yvon (Philippe Jeusette), the Dardennes seem to overlook how Sandra would be likely to react to being, in effect, the cause of the break-up.

    Two Days, One Night is far from great but it’s completely absorbing and, at ninety-five minutes, refreshingly concise.  The Dardennes are particularly good at locating the exchanges between Sandra and her co-workers – the laundrette where she sees Alphonse, a makeshift football pitch where another young man Timur is training local kids.  (Her encounter with an older colleague, Hicham (Hicham Slaoui), is relatively clumsy.  His wife has been very cagey about where her husband is and Sandra bumps into him in  the mini-mart where he’s moonlighting.)  It’s really affecting when Timur (Timur Magomedgadzhiev) breaks down in tears, telling Sandra how ashamed he was not to support her in the original vote and thanking her for the second chance – and Marion Cotillard’s initial disbelief at his reaction is very right.  It’s not so right when she walks away from the encounter with a radiantly hopeful smile on her face but her acting is mostly admirable and she carries the film effortlessly.  It’s both ironic and rather heartening that the beautiful Cotillard,  whose international breakthrough was achieved through an elaborate (and overrated) impersonation of Edith Piaf in La vie en rose, is now being cast – rather in the way that her compatriot Juliette Binoche also sometimes is – for her charismatic naturalness.

    28 August 2014

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