Monthly Archives: March 2017

  • It’s Only the End of the World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Juste la fin du monde

    Xavier Dolan (2016)

    Xavier Dolan’s latest has its admirers and its detractors, as the end of last year’s Cannes festival made clear:  there were plenty of boos, along with applause, at the announcement that It’s Only the End of the World had won the Grand Prix.  Dolan raises hackles more because he’s so young (twenty-seven) and prolific (this is his sixth feature in seven years) – but this isn’t an easy film to like even if you’re as impartial about him as (I think) I am.  It’s Only the End of the World is unusual, though, in at least one important way.  This adaptation of a stage play is – unlike Fences, to cite an obvious recent example – a distinctive, coherent piece of cinema.

    Jean-Luc Lagarce’s theatre piece Juste la fin du monde is about a playwright, a gay man in his early thirties, who visits his family to tell them he’s terminally ill.  Lagarce wrote the play in 1990, when he was thirty-three and had been diagnosed with AIDS, from which he died five years later.  In Dolan’s film, the central character Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) tells us in voiceover at the start that there are ‘motivations … that force you to leave without looking back’ and ‘just as many motivations that force you to return’.  Louis takes a plane, then a taxi from the airport, to the family he’s not seen for twelve years:  his mother Martine (Nathalie Baye); his younger sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux); his elder brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel); and the latter’s wife Catherine (Marion Cotillard).  Except for a few flashbacks to these characters’ younger selves (and the people who briefly feature in Louis’s opening journey), this is the entire cast of It’s Only the End of the World.  All four of Louis’s relatives are, in different registers, talkative.  Catherine, whom Louis hasn’t met before, rattles on nervously about her and Antoine’s (unseen) children.  Her husband is aggressive from the start, with a tendency to deride the others’ turns of phrase. The most astonishing statement in the movie is Antoine’s claim that he keeps silent not in order to listen but in order to be left alone. This strategy is bound to fail since he never shuts up.

    Xavier Dolan has said that, in adapting the play for the screen, he ‘tried to keep the idiosyncrasies and the singularity of Lagarce’s vernacular’.  The abundant words are the film’s foreground, an effect reinforced by the delivery of most of them in tight close-ups.  The supercharged talking heads take a lot of getting used to, especially the more familiar faces among them.  The dithery eagerness-to-please of Marion Cotillard’s Catherine is particularly difficult:  we know that, in a less stylised piece, Cotillard would be expressive in a subtler way.  The same is true, to almost the same extent, of Léa Seydoux.  Even in the case of Vincent Cassel, whose habitually forceful acting might be thought better suited to Dolan’s treatment, the effect of face and voicebox working flat out together is too much.  I found Nathalie Baye easier to take only because I remember her less well from other films (though she’s been in the front rank of French actresses for decades).  Gaspard Ulliel, whom I’d not seen before, is a different matter anyway:  the central character’s role in It’s Only the End of the World is, increasingly, to observe and listen rather than speak.

    Louis has a series of extended one-to-one scenes with the other four, each of whom has the lion’s share of the lines.  Mutual awkwardness seems to be the explanation in his conversations with Catherine.  With Martine, Antoine and Suzanne, it’s a combination of their self-preoccupation and Louis’s reticence.  This is sometimes comically overstated.  When Martine asks ‘How old are you?’ Louis asks in reply ‘You mean me?’  As there’s no one else in sight, Martine’s sarcastic rejoinder, ‘No, the watering can …,’ is fair enough.  She then goes on talking about something else before – it seems long afterwards – getting back to the original question (the answer to it is thirty-four).  The balance of verbal power between Louis and his family soon makes it clear that the purpose of his visit will remain unfulfilled – that he’ll leave without telling them about his illness.  It’s definitely the blood ties that make him tongue-tied as well.  The one person who perceives what Louis has come to say is Catherine but her halting speech prevents her getting further than two words into her question – ‘How long …?’ – before she leaves it hanging in the air.  When Louis is about to leave, he looks at Catherine and swears her to secrecy by putting a finger to his lips.

    In a more realistic style of drama, based on conventional storytelling and character development, Louis’s failure to speak would likely come across as no more than tamely predictable.  Even those infuriated by Dolan’s weird, consistently exaggerated approach aren’t likely to describe It’s Only the End of the World in those terms.  As the others await Louis’s arrival, Martine presides over lunch preparations:  the ambience of the kitchen suggests that the fate of nations depends on the starter.  We’re told the weather is hot; with most of the film taking place indoors, the heat is conveyed chiefly by sweat on faces – as well it might be, given the energy the actors are expending.  Later on, ominous thunder turns up on the soundtrack:  as usual, this is a signal of gathering personal tensions as much as of a storm brewing outside.  This particular thunder remains a sonic cliché but fits perfectly into the peculiar atmosphere that’s been worked up.

    While stressing his respect for Jean-Luc Lagarce’s linguistic inventiveness, Xavier Dolan has made large structural changes to the original, which he explains as follows:

    ‘The second half of the play is almost entirely abstract.  Characters talk to everyone and no one, all on stage, yet in different places …  I had to recycle bits and pieces from earlier scenes, omitted scenes and scenes I invented from scratch in order to write a second half, and the end.’

    Yet the film too is increasingly abstract in its second half.  It’s in a rare outdoor sequence – or, at least, a sequence of Louis and Antoine driving in a car together – that this registers most strongly.  Dolan shoots the sequence from inside the vehicle, largely from a backseat point of view.  Antoine is driving furiously fast but there’s no risk of a collision since the road ahead is empty of other traffic.  This is immediately striking but then believable:  you accept the sealed-off world Dolan has created rather as, in the theatre, you can accept what’s on stage as the whole world for the duration of a play.  The words in It’s Only the End of the World are so torrential that they begin to lose force; through the intensity of the direction and the acting, images gain the upper hand.  Instead of the earlier tautology of looks and words telling us the same thing, you’re less conscious of what’s being said than of the expressive power of the faces on the screen.  For much of the film, Dolan’s extreme stylisation has a distancing effect:  you’re so aware of the technique that it’s hard to respond emotionally.  By the closing stages, however, the powerful acting is transmitting the characters’ feelings very directly.  Antoine’s tearful outburst, as he rages about being treated as the family freak, is unexpectedly touching.

    As well as rumbles of thunder, there’s a ticking clock in the house – a cuckoo clock withal.  Xavier Dolan pushes this cliché to the point of, almost literally, exploding it.  In the final scene, the clock chimes and a live bird bursts from it, beating its wings frantically in the confined space before falling to the ground.  When the bird flies out of the clock, Louis is alone in the room with it.  He then exits.  The film’s closing shot is of his exhausted avian avatar on the carpet, twitching slightly.  The symbolism is preposterous but it’s all of a piece with what’s gone before – even a fitting climax to it.

    28 February 2017

  • The Salesman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Forushande‎

    Asghar Farhadi  (2016)

    In The Salesman, as in each of Asghar Farhadi’s previous three films, there’s a pivotal event which isn’t shown on screen but is either alleged or assumed to have taken place.  The event is probed repeatedly in what follows.  The main characters of Farhadi’s latest, like those of About Elly and A Separation, are youngish, educated and middle-class:  Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), a husband and wife, are theatre actors in Tehran, where Emad also teaches literature part-time in a boys’ school.  At the start of the film, the couple are preparing to play Willy and Linda Loman in a production of Death of a Salesman.   A few days before the play opens, they’re forced, along with the other residents, to evacuate their apartment block.  It’s no longer safe to live there because of subsidence and power failures, caused by work being done on the foundations of an adjoining building.  Babak (Babak Karimi), a fellow actor, offers Emad and Rana an apartment which he owns and rents out, and which has recently been vacated.  The couple move in.  On the opening night of Death of a Salesman, they make their way home separately, Rana arriving first.  She’s about to have a shower when the entry buzzer sounds.   Assuming it’s her husband, she opens the door to the apartment and returns to the bathroom.  When Emad returns sometime later, there is blood on the stairs and the apartment is empty.  He finds Rana in a local hospital with a head wound.  This is superficial but the frightening circumstances in which it occurred have cut deeper.  Rana tells Emad she was in the shower when she felt a hand touching her head.  Startled, then horrified to discover the hand wasn’t Emad’s, she screamed and struggled, hitting her head on the side of the shower.  She barely saw the intruder, who quickly left the apartment.

    When a character in a movie is an actor playing a part on stage, one tends to expect life-on-screen to start imitating art:  A Double Life syndrome.  There are resonances with Arthur Miller’s play in The Salesman but, so far as I could tell, they’re not major – and certainly not enough to foretell what will happen in Farhadi’s film.  Of greater impact, at any rate, is the fact that this is an Iranian production of Death of a Salesman – in other words, something culturally unexpected.   As the story progresses, however, the liberal-minded and relatively emancipated people in it are shown to be (as they were in A Separation) trapped in the conventions and inequalities that govern life in Iran more generally.  When she’s taken to hospital, Rana isn’t asked by medical staff how she sustained her injury; nor does she want to report the incident to the police.  Although Emad thinks she should, others in the apartment building share Rana’s view.   As one of their female neighbours puts it, ‘You’d have to justify letting him in. There would be a trial and all kinds of stories’.  Anxiety on this score is sharpened by the revelation that the previous tenant of the apartment was a prostitute who, according to the neighbours, had plenty of male guests.  (This never-seen woman is a continuing presence, and not only because the intruder is assumed to be one of her clients:  the apartment still contains her clothes and other possessions.)  Rana’s refusal to involve the police impels Emad to do his own detective work (although the show also must go on:  the performances at the theatre continue).  At first, his pursuit of justice seems an understandable, even a reasonable, alternative to the formal legal route that Rana so fears.  But Emad becomes increasingly obsessed with tracking down the culprit.  We begin to suspect that, though he loves Rana and is concerned for her wellbeing, the husband considers the manhandling of his wife to be harmful chiefly to his self-esteem, offensive to himself more than to her.

    On the night of the incident, the trespasser departed so hurriedly that he left behind not just bloodstains in the stairwell but other clues to his identity:  a wad of cash, keys and, in the apartment building’s parking area, a white van.  The vehicle subsequently disappears from the parking lot but Emad traces it and identifies the owner.  When they moved from their old apartment, Emad and Rana left stuff behind; Emad pays the van owner, a young man called Majid (Mojtaba Pirzadeh), to transport these things to the new apartment.  Emad is frustrated when Majid doesn’t turn up at the old apartment building but instead sends his prospective father-in-law, Naser (Farid Sajadhosseini), who has a bad heart but is doing the job because he’s short of funds.  In the course of the lengthy conversation that follows, Emad discovers that the right man has turned up after all.  The ailing senior citizen, in spite of his denials, was Rana’s unexpected visitor.

    This encounter and the events that follow – with a Saturday matinee of the Miller play an intermission between the two – make for gripping, claustrophobic drama.  Emad locks Naser into a confined space in the apartment while he’s at the theatre.  He then returns with Rana and arranges for the old man’s family to join the party.  Rana, horrified by Naser’s physical condition and distress, warns her husband that their marriage will be at an end if he insists on telling all to Naser’s wife, daughter and son-in-law-to-be.  This climax is cleverly constructed:  Emad won’t expose Naser for fear of losing Rana; Naser won’t tell his family that he’s been held hostage for fear of what Emad might then reveal.  A shocking consequence of their shared reticence is that Naser’s family, assuming they’ve been called to a medical emergency, express gratitude to Emad for saving the old man’s life.   Before they depart, Emad asks to speak in private to Naser to ‘settle accounts’.  He returns to him the money etc that was left in the couple’s apartment.  Emad also hits Naser, a single blow that’s enough to bring on another collapse as he’s taking his leave.  By the time an ambulance arrives, it’s too late.   In the film’s final scene, Emad and Rana are back at the theatre, making up for their next show there.

    Cracks in a building, the legacy of things left behind after a hurried departure, keeping quiet, public performance:  these motifs of The Salesman make it easy to interpret the film as political metaphor.  Asghar Farhadi has few peers in world cinema as a creator of modern morality tales that see characters dealing with personal dilemmas in ways strongly influenced by the larger cultural forces operating in the society they live in.  Farhadi’s persuasive naturalistic style both helps to give his work believability and guards against portentousness.  Yet although his talents are all strongly in evidence in this latest film, I found an increasing conflict between the story and the realistic telling of it.  This could just be me being dim but there were bits of plotting I didn’t get.  How is the white van retrieved from the parking lot?  Since the vehicle is owned by Majid but was used by Naser on the night of the shower incident, didn’t the van’s disappearance for several days become an issue between the two men?  There’s a similar lack of curiosity on the part of Naser’s family as to where he’s got to on the Saturday afternoon (the job of moving Emad and Rana’s things presumably wasn’t expected to take many hours).  A bigger problem with The Salesman, however, is that Emad’s extreme behaviour in the closing stages – especially his brutal disregard for Naser’s state of health – strains credibility, even if we’re meant to think that Emad’s anger is greater as a consequence of the culprit’s being a shabby, overweight old man.  The problem is magnified because Shahab Hosseini’s fine characterisation has made Emad so thoroughly convincing:  it’s therefore more unacceptable for him to turn implausible.

    Farhadi raises but leaves hanging the question of Emad and Rana’s childlessness, and the suggestion that they have different feelings about starting a family.   When they first move to the new apartment and chat with Babak about how long they might stay there, Emad suggests the place may be too small if two become three but Rana seems to pooh-pooh the idea.  This hint at prior tensions in the marriage is reinforced by Taraneh Alidoosti’s playing of Rana, which  intermittently suggests an odd indifference towards Emad – before the incident that has such a dramatically distancing effect on their relationship.   There’s an excellent scene in which the couple share a supper she’s made, with the young son of one of the other actors in Death of a Salesman.  The light-hearted atmosphere and conciliatory promise of the meal vanish, suddenly and upsettingly, when Emad realises that the ingredients were bought with the cash the intruder left in the apartment (Rana didn’t know this when she did the shopping).   The change of mood from the first to the second of two sequences showing Emad in his teaching work is achieved by less subtle means but both three sequences are effective, even so.  When they find out about his theatre role, the schoolboys nickname Emad ‘the salesman’.  The film’s title eventually refers to a second character.   Emad’s interrogation of Naser includes the question of how he normally makes a living.  The answer:  ‘I sell clothes by the roadside in the evening’.

    26 February 2017

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