Monthly Archives: March 2022

  • Paris, 13th District

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Les Olympiades, Paris 13e

    Jacques Audiard (2021)

    Jacques Audiard has made some fine films – See How They Fall (1994), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009).  His recent output is making them seem a distant memory.  Audiard’s first English-language picture, the revisionist Western The Sisters Brothers (2018), was a fancy misfire and his latest continues the decline.  Paris, 13th District is meretricious and unintentionally desolating.

    The director wrote the screenplay with Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius.  The source material is three short stories by the admired American graphic novelist and cartoonist Adrian Tomine, although, as Tomine makes clear in an interview on the Curzon cinemas website, Audiard’s film is ‘using my stuff as a very basic premise, and really going off in its own direction’.  The Tomine stories, according to the Curzon interview, concern ‘a former call-centre worker cast adrift in an uncertain period of her twenties’, ‘a young woman whose social life is plagued by her uncanny resemblance to a porn star’ and ‘a teenager [who] pursues stand-up comedy as a way of persevering through trying times at home’.  Each of the trio is recognisable in Paris, 13th District, though it’s a shame the stand-up – by some way the film’s most likeable character – has a relatively small role.

    Émilie Wong (Lucie Zhang), from a Taiwanese family, lives in an apartment belonging to her grandmother.  The old lady (Xing Xing Cheng) is now in an old people’s home, where her granddaughter occasionally visits her.  Overqualified for her soul-destroying call-centre job, Émilie tries to stave off boredom by repeatedly going off script with people on the other end of the phone line.  Outside work, she spends most of her time on dating apps until Camille Germain (Makita Samba), a teacher and part-time doctoral student, rents a room in her apartment and they start an affair.  (His younger sister, Eponine (Camille Léon-Fucien), still living at home with their widowed father (Pol White), is the would-be comedy performer.)  Émilie, having fallen in love with her tenant, falls out with him because Camille doesn’t feel the same way.  He leaves the apartment, quits teaching and, in order to fund his studies, gets a job in an estate agent’s office.  Working there for similar reasons is Nora Ligier (Noémie Merlant), whom Camille dates and beds, although she’s anxiously unresponsive.  Regularly mistaken for a porn star called Amber Sweet and slut-shamed as a result, Nora looks up and starts communicating online with her supposed doppelganger.  After quite a few of these interactions, Nora and Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth) eventually meet in reality, which confirms their shared belief that they’re made for each other.   After several further brief, narky encounters by phone or in person, Émilie and Camille reconcile and reach the same conclusion.

    Of the four main characters (including Amber Sweet), three are in their thirties and Émilie is a decade younger.  Jacques Audiard is sixty-nine.  There’s a lot of sex in the film and most of the nudity – all of the most graphic nudity – is female.   Paris, 13th District might have been expected to attract a deal of adverse criticism for this but the rare relevant references in reviews I’ve seen are indulgent.  In NME, Elizabeth Aubrey thinks the sex ‘never feels gratuitous or, crucially, a result of the male gaze in a film where women are always front and centre’.  Actually, Camille is often front and centre in terms of narrative prominence, though never full frontal, unlike Émilie and Nora.  A possible explanation for why this discriminating approach doesn’t amount to male gazing comes in a piece by M J O’Toole for Hammer To Nail.  O’Toole commends Audiard – ‘a widely acclaimed, but [sic!] white male filmmaker’ – as ‘wise for co-writing [Paris, 13th District] with two esteemed female French filmmakers …, resulting in a truly witty, genuine and thoughtful screenplay that helps subvert the male gaze’.  How does that work – if what the director chooses to let the camera see keeps de-subverting things?

    The title suggests the exact geographical setting – ‘Les Olympiades’ are high-rise apartment blocks in the 13th arrondissement – will be important but it turns out not to be (in striking contrast to the suburban Paris housing project that becomes the temporary home of the asylum seekers in Audiard’s Dheepan (2015)).  Paul Guilhaume’s black-and-white cinematography has been variously described as ‘sumptuous’ (Rob Aldam, Backseat Mafia) and ‘harsh’ (Elizabeth Aubrey).  The former is closer to the mark.  There are atmospheric nighttime shots of the tower blocks but nothing hard-scrabble about the lives being described:  the concrete jungle that is Les Olympiades has no evident psychological effect on any of them.  Deciding to make the film in black and white comes across as a senior citizen’s bid to be distinctive and even modish.

    The bid has succeeded, at least in the eyes of the admiring critics who see fit to compare Paris, 13th District with films that appeared in the efflorescence of the nouvelle vague sixty years ago.  I suppose they do have in common young protagonists and the enduring dazzle of France’s capital city.  Also from more than half a century ago, I remember a review of Arthur Hiller’s Love Story (1970) by Margaret Drabble in The Listener.  Lofty denunciations of this box-office smash, the film of the Erich Segal novel that was already a commercial phenomenon, weren’t hard to find but Drabble’s was funny, especially on the impossibility of transposing Segal’s tale from America to England:  if the Harvard jock hero had been an Oxbridge rowing blue, she said, no one would have taken him seriously.  The workplace where Camille and Nora meet in Paris, 13th District kept reminding me of this.   Even if they were ‘trying to navigate love in a digital age be it via casual hook-ups, dating apps or online porn’ (NME again), millennial estate agents in London rather than Paris could only be characters in a broad comedy.

    The actors are good, especially Camille Léon-Fucien as the stammering stand-up and Noémie Merlant, who makes Nora’s literal-mindedness both amusing and sad.  But Nora’s outlook, like those of the other principals, is scarily shallow.  The problem isn’t their often thwarted hedonism but their lack of interest in anything outside themselves.  Camille shows no more intellectual appetite for the literature doctorate he’s working towards than for selling real estate.  His political views don’t extend beyond railing against the state of the over-scrutinised, under-resourced teaching profession he decides to leave.  He’s still preferable to Émilie, though.  The warning signs are there as soon as it’s clear we’re meant to find her dissident approach to call-centre work zany and endearing.  What Émilie later does in relation to her grandmother is something else.

    When Camille has moved out and she needs a new tenant, Émilie offers a prospective female flatmate a rent reduction in exchange for regularly visiting the grandmother on her behalf:  since her dementia means she no longer recognises Émilie, it won’t make any difference.  I wondered if, and hoped that, this breathtaking proposition – the most memorable thing in the film – might be revealed as masking Émilie’s intolerable distress at the extinction of a person she loved.  It’s true that, when the grandmother eventually dies, Émilie sheds tears.  But, on the day of the funeral, her misery seems to be about fearing Camille won’t turn up to accompany her to the event.  She’s about to leave the apartment when he arrives, and Audiard chooses this moment to deliver the standard rom-com resolution that puts a smile back on the heroine’s face.  When Émilie finally dashes out to meet Camille downstairs, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether they’ll bother going to the funeral at all.  I wouldn’t have wanted Jacques Audiard to take a morally censorious attitude towards the people in Paris, 13th District.  I just wish he hadn’t bothered making a film about them.

    24 March 2022

  • I Want to Talk About Duras

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vous ne désirez que moi

    Claire Simon (2021)

    When she read the book Je voudrais parler de Duras, writer-director Claire Simon told herself ‘This is completely unsuited to cinema – so let’s do it!’  The resulting film is showing at this year’s BFI Flare festival.  A few minutes in, you may feel restless, that Simon’s first thought was right and her second a mistake.  Once you accept, if you can, that I Want to Talk About Duras will carry on in the same vein, it becomes increasingly absorbing.

    This is more or less a two-character piece and the subject is a couple’s relationship but only one individual is a member of both duos.  He is Yann Andréa who, in his early twenties, became obsessed with the work and persona of the novelist, screenwriter and film-maker Marguerite Duras (1914-1996).  After contriving to meet her, Andréa became Duras’s partner, despite the thirty-eight-year age difference between them, and they lived together at her home in Neauphle-le-Château, in the Yvelines department of northern France.  A would-be writer and actor, Andréa appeared in one of Duras’s films, L’Homme atlantique (1981), but it wasn’t only on set that she directed him.  She also told him how to live his life – what to eat, what to wear, who to see (or, usually, not see).  She habitually belittled and sometimes hit him.  The author and journalist Michèle Manceaux was a friend of Duras and a neighbour in Neauphle-le-Château.  On two consecutive days in early December 1982, Manceaux came to Duras’s house to conduct taped interviews with Yann Andréa, as requested by him and, surprising as it may seem, with his partner’s approval.  He wanted to talk about Duras.

    Claire Simon’s script consists of the transcript of those interviews (or part thereof), published in book form after the deaths of Andréa and Manceaux (in 2014 and 2015 respectively).  They’re played by Swann Arlaud and Emmanuelle Devos, who are marvellous.  Arlaud, with his mobile, delicate features and suppressed nervous energy, suggests Yann’s anxious, exasperated sense of confinement but also his excitement at being the centre of attention and his relief at being listened to.  And Devos is a superlative listener:  as the confessional proceeds, she subtly conveys in facial movements both Michèle’s sympathy for Yann and her discomfort with what she’s hearing.  It’s only fair to describe I Want to Talk About Duras as a two-hander but Arlaud and Devos aren’t quite the only people to appear on the screen.  There’s also Marguerite Duras, an obscure figure glimpsed through a window in her house, although her presence registers more definitely in the film’s soundtrack – as footsteps downstairs from the room where Yann talks with Michèle and as the cause of a few interruptions to their conversation, when the telephone in the room rings (though Yann cuts the calls off).  More important, the real Duras appears in a series of archive film clips – in interview, reading from her work, playing the piano, directing L’Homme atlantique.  The force of personality that comes through in these clips fully lives up to Yann’s characterisation of Duras as an intimidating figure, easier to be compelled by than to like.  Although he isn’t seen on the film set, he’s on the receiving end of Duras’s commands there.  Insisting that he mustn’t try to act, she repeatedly barks out what serves as the motto of their off-set partnership:  ‘Only do what I tell you’.

    Another character is present for only a few minutes of screen time but, in what amounts to an interlude between the two interview sessions, serves to give context to Michèle Manceaux and to underline the oppressive claustrophobia of the Duras-Andréa relationship.  At the end of the first day’s recording, Michèle walks back to her own house.  It’s an ominous journey, past winter trees, in fading light.  When she gets in, she needs warming up.  She lights a fire and pours a drink before starting to play back the cassette recording to check that her ears didn’t deceive her when Yann referred to the sexual relations that he and Duras enjoyed.  When she goes to bed, Michèle is unsettled.  She sees in her mind the couple having sex (in the form of explicit ink drawings, by Judith Fraggi).  Simon shoots these sequences to make the viewer very conscious of Michèle’s being alone and uneasy:  they’re like the prelude to a murder or, at least, to the arrival of an unwelcome intruder.  Instead, when a man suddenly appears and climbs into bed beside her, Michèle smiles and relaxes.  The following morning, she’s up early to write; when the same man comes in and they exchange a few words, we don’t hear what’s said but it makes Michèle laugh.  In his last appearance, he drops her outside Duras’s house and drives away.  The easy affection between Michèle and the man is refreshing and relieving after the previous day’s interview, and before Michèle returns for a second helping of Yann.  Her companion, as the cast list describes him, is played by Christophe Paou (best known internationally for Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013)).

    Before he met Marguerite Duras, Yann Andréa had at least one girlfriend, Bénédicte, whom he mentions to Michèle and who’s seen in one of the brief flashbacks with which Simon also punctuates the narrative.  Despite this and his temporarily intense physical relationship with Duras, Andréa was gay.  Another flashback shows him cruising in twilit woodland (recalling the landscape of Michèle’s journey home), where he meets another man (Philippe Minyana, the fourth and last actor credited in the IMDb cast list).  Yann was born in 1952 so it’s not too surprising that, even in France, he was ill at ease with his sexuality and/or coming out.  Much more startling is the strength of Duras’s homophobia.  Simon includes footage of an interview where Duras discusses her 1982 novella La Maladie de la mort (in which a gay man hires a woman to stay with him in the hope of experiencing heterosexual love) and asserts her equation of homosexuality with ‘absolute death’.  It seems she used Andréa’s sexual orientation as a stick to beat him with.  Perhaps even literally …

    Yann amusingly explains to Michèle that Marguerite’s attitude was the same regarding any of his tastes of which she disapproved:  he equates homosexuality with eating leeks, since both were forbidden by her.  Even so, Duras’s declared mission to ‘uncreate’ and ‘create’ Yann was centrally focused on his sexuality, as Simon makes clear in the original French title of her film (‘You desire only me’).  There are fascinating questions raised by the project that Simon, reasonably enough, doesn’t even attempt to answer.  How much had Duras dominated in her previous marital relationships?  (Andréa, according to Wikipedia, was her third ‘spouse’.)  Was her plan to remake Yann pre-meditated or something that developed solely because of his particular personality?   It seems not unlikely that his idolisation of her was a big part of what made Duras see him as fair game for servitude but how did his homosexuality, much as she professed to loathe it, sharpen her reforming zeal and add spice to the undertaking?  Was there more to ‘uncreate’ and potential for greater (re)creation than a straight man would have offered?

    Marguerite Duras was a famous exponent of the nouveau roman in early post-war France.  Her writing style was considered radical.  She consistently opposed bourgeois social convention, which may partly explain the appeal to her of a romantic partner decades younger.  Yet one of this film’s most striking features is how old-fashioned her views on sexuality already seem – a reminder of how much has happened in the quarter century since the end of her life.  Perhaps this wouldn’t have changed Duras’s mind but, in seeing homosexuality as (worse than) a dead end, she wasn’t able to foresee same-sex marriage and parenting of children born through surrogacy.  Writing this note, I’ve kept bumping into terms that are common parlance now but which it seems awkward to attach to attitudes and situations of forty years ago, when the words didn’t have the same currency.  To say that Yann Andréa ‘identified’ as gay or was subject to his partner’s ‘coercive control’ somehow diminishes the perplexity he may actually have experienced.

    I Want to Talk About Duras has sustained tension partly because you never stop being aware of how un-cinematic it essentially is – two people sitting in a room, one of them doing nearly all the talking.  If it’s essential to drama that character is revealed through action – rather than through verbal description of past actions – then this film hardly qualifies as dramatic.  Yet the challenge that Simon sets her actors and how they meet it, is engrossing to watch, and what Yann has to say extraordinary enough to hold your attention.  One thing I’m not quite clear about:  what did those involved intend should happen to the recordings made?  Michèle Manceaux, who wrote for Marie-Claire at the time, comes to the interview armed with notebook as well as cassette recorder, and she jots things down.  Yann looks both nervous and pleased to be talking to a proper journalist.  Yet when the tape runs out at the second session, Michèle immediately announces, ‘That’s it’, and the interview stops.  It’s suddenly as if she brought her journalist toys along to play a game that’s over now, and Yann’s post-interview behaviour hardly contradicts that impression.  Michèle asks him for an envelope to put the two cassettes in before she hands them to him.  The only envelope he can find is too small and he tells her to hold onto the cassettes for now.  A voiceover then takes over.  It explains that Yann never did get the tapes and summarises their afterlife of obscurity, until both people talking on them were no more.

    That the interview recordings have conferred on Andréa and Manceaux a cultural life after death must please Claire Simon, who, according to her interview with Victoire Tuaillon which BFI used as the handout for this Flare screening, sees the Duras-Andréa folie à deux as inspired by a quest on both their parts for literary immortality.   On the simpler matter of mortality, you can see on Duras’s Wikipedia entry a photograph of her grave in Montparnasse Cemetery, where it seems Yann Andréa too is buried:  the gravestone, with a surrounding decoration of writing paraphernalia, bears the names and dates of them both.  You’d like to think the shared resting place reflects something Yann wanted that Marguerite Duras was no longer in a position to overrule.  More likely that her devoted companion took the view that, in death as in life, he should accede to her wishes.

    20 March 2022

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