Old Yorker

  • Blue Valentine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Derek Cianfrance (2010)

    It begins with a child’s voice calling for a lost dog.  Within a few minutes, we can see that the love between Cindy, the child’s mother, and her husband Dean, who’s not the girl’s biological father, has also gone missing and won’t come back.  The symbolism is undeniably obvious; yet her parents’ conversation with five-year-old Frankie about the dog and the search for it are so quickly absorbing and upsetting (the animal has been knocked down and killed on a freeway) that the writer-director Derek Cianfrance alchemises his facile metaphor.  Blue Valentine is a description of a marriage falling apart.  It’s not especially insightful or even thought-provoking but it is an intense and a gripping description.  This is a film where you get so tied up with the two main characters that you stop wondering what will happen next; you live their experiences with them, as you partake of the lives of people close to you – except that you may also be counting yourself lucky that your life isn’t usually as gruellingly unhappy as Dean’s and Cindy‘s.  Cianfrance cuts between the couple’s present and past:  except for Ryan Gosling’s change of haircut, things don’t look much different.  But the emotional gulf between their getting-to-love-you days and the hollowed-out present tense is devastating.  The courtship includes perhaps the most charming scene of any film of 2010, when Dean, on a ukulele, serenades Cindy with, and she dances to, ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’.  Again, the choice of song is too neatly apt but the rendition is irresistible.  Dean explains that, in order to sing at all, ‘I have to sing goofy’, which is believable and eccentrically touching.  Cindy doesn’t, technically speaking, dance well.  Yet his singing and her dancing are both wonderful.

    This is the third performance I’ve seen from Ryan Gosling, who’s able to suggest very different kinds of intelligence effortlessly, and the limits of his characters’ emotional intelligence empathically.  It’s both outrageous and poignant when Dean, who often flies off the handle, insists to Cindy that things can’t be that bad because he isn’t violent towards her (although he comes perilously close at times).   Gosling’s line readings have incredible wit.  Dean accuses Cindy of wanting him to be something he isn’t – professionally successful, maybe other things too.  He’s right and she knows it:  it’s a real strength of Michelle Williams’s acting here that her disappointment communicates itself as much in the spaces between words as in the words themselves.  Williams makes the breakthrough into being the actress her supporting role in Brokeback Mountain promised she might be.  Cindy rarely smiles (when she tells Dean a joke about a paedophile it’s startling in more ways than one); Williams has to show the gradings of her character’s moods within a more limited emotional range than Gosling, and she does it impressively.  Cindy, a nurse whose businesslike manner with her parents seems a form of self-protection, really hardens in the course of Blue Valentine.  Faith Wladyka is very affecting as Frankie, who’s old enough to know something’s wrong but not old enough to understand what.

    In the middle of the film – chronologically and substantially – the couple stays overnight in a motel.  Each of the rooms is themed:  ‘Cupid’s Cove’, ‘The Atlantis Room’, and so on.  Dean, whose idea this love-rekindling one-night-stand is, chooses ‘The Future’.  It sounds, like the calling for the lost dog, weakly symbolic, and pat.  Here too, though, the detail is transforming and the ensuing action is compelling.  The room is described as ‘like we’re inside a robot’s vagina’.   The couple’s aggressive sex makes it not just like old times but expresses what’s desperate and going wrong between them.  The breakdown of the relationship between Dean and Cindy is powerful because no one’s unequivocally to blame and this makes you feel helpless.  The larger view of marriage that the film presents is dispiriting in a different way because it’s imposed, merely asserted.  Cindy’s parents have an evidently unhappy relationship.  Her widowed grandmother tells Cindy that married life wasn’t up to much for her either.  This admission of evidence for the prosecution is a weakness in Cianfrance’s screenplay.  Elsewhere, though, and apart from a few bits of improvisation that feel forced, this script contains some of the best naturalistic dialogue – in the couple’s rows, their growing intimacy, their getting drunk together – heard in American films of the last year or two.  I think the final sequence, as Dean walks away from Cindy and Frankie, into a night lit up by fireworks in a celebration happening somewhere else, will stay in my mind.

    17 January 2011

  • Claire’s Knee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le genou de Claire

    Eric Rohmer (1970)

    The fifth of Eric Rohmer’s six ‘moral tales’ is extraordinarily assured but not very interesting.  Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy), a diplomat in his thirties, is vacationing at Lake Annecy, where he also spent childhood holidays.  Although soon to be married to a woman called Lucinde, with whom he’s lived for some time, he’s unaccompanied.  (Lucinde is never seen in the film, except as a photograph.)   Jérôme accidentally meets up with Aurora (Aurora Cornu), an old friend from Paris and a novelist, who’s staying in the lakeside house of a Mme Walter (Michèle Montel).  Jérôme tells Aurora that, now he’s engaged to Lucinde, he no longer desires other women.  Aurora, however, encourages him to test his complacency by flirting with Mme Walter’s younger daughter, Laura (Beatrice Romand).  It’s immediately clear that Laura has a schoolgirl crush on the suave, urbane Jérôme; after initially resisting Aurora’s scheme, he takes Laura on a hike in the mountains above Lake Annecy.  He realises that he finds her charming and although nothing physical comes of these feelings Jérôme is irritated when Laura turns out to have a boyfriend, Vincent (Fabrice Luchini), of about her own age.  Laura leaves for a stay in England shortly after her elder half-sister Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) returns home – she too has a contemporary boyfriend, called Gilles (Gérard Falconetti). Jérôme becomes possessed by desire not for the whole Claire, however often he sees her slender body in a bikini, but only for her titular right knee.  Aurora tells him he should touch Claire’s knee in order to exorcise his fascination for it and this is what Jérôme eventually does.   It happens when he gives Claire a lift to Annecy in his motorboat and they have to take shelter en route from a rainstorm that suddenly breaks the glorious summer weather.  Aurora is right: Jérôme’s physical contact with the object of his desire breaks the spell.

    One of the strongest bits of Claire’s Knee is its ending, when Jérôme‘s month-long holiday is over and he’s departed the scene.  He has left in a state of renewed self-satisfaction, not least because the knee-touching occurred when Jérôme was comforting Claire, who began to cry when he told her that he’d seen Gilles kissing another girl: Jérôme thinks he’s convinced Claire that she’s too good for her arrogant (and admittedly tedious) boyfriend.  The latter calls at the Walter home shortly after Jérôme has left.  A tearful Claire rows with Gilles, who explains how he came to be kissing someone else.  Aurora at first watches the youngsters, curious to know what will happen next, but she then disappears from the screen.  Claire and Gilles are the last characters we see and, as they sit together on a bench by the lake, they appear to be reconciled.  It’s as if the various controlling influences of the film that we’ve been watching – Aurora, Jérôme, Rohmer himself – all now have had to let go, to let others’ lives continue independently.   This trio’s control is increasingly claustrophobic, which is why the conclusion of Claire’s Knee has impact.  Rohmer may be represented, in different ways, by both Aurora and Jérôme.  She, the writer, analyses the motives of characters in the scenario that she creates and defines their roles, until the people actually involved take over; the self-analytical Jérôme is interested principally in his own feelings and his capacity to manage them.

    Jérôme is somewhat troubled by his fascination for the knee but somewhat is the operative word:  Eric Rohmer seems not to do extreme feelings.  Jérôme’s motorboat hums daily up and down the lake, barely creasing the water.  The surface of the film remains similarly undisturbed – in fact there’s little suggestion of turbulence at any level.  Claire’s Knee is very wordy, especially in the conversations between Jérôme and Aurora, but its appearance and the atmosphere that this creates are no less crucial to the texture.   The summer landscape, as visualised by Nestor Almendros, is sensuous but also stifling – the fact that all the characters seem to be written as the same voice intensifies this effect.  Although Laura, Claire and their boyfriends go about in bikinis or shorts, Jérôme is always fully clothed, to emphasise (I assume) his willed objectivity and borderline voyeurism, and Eric Rohmer plays amusedly with the movie convention of the sexy storm:  even when a thunderclap breaks the drought and it pours with rain, the physical contact between Jérôme and Claire doesn’t go beyond his caressing of her knee.   The expert Jean-Claude Brialy and the vivid Beatrice Romand are standouts in a cast whose playing reinforces the prevailing becalmed quality of Claire’s Knee.

    19 January 2015

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