Film review

  • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Les parapluies de Cherbourg

    Jacques Demy (1964)

    Even now, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is extraordinary; in 1964, Jacques Demy’s romantic drama must have seemed entirely sui generis.  As far as I know, a sung-through movie musical was pretty well unprecedented – and it’s hard to think that any film had looked quite like this one.  It features probably the most famous collection of wallpapers in cinema history – most vividly and variously in the supposedly modest apartment where the teenage heroine Geneviève Emery (Catherine Deneuve) lives with her widowed mother (Anne Vernon):  the colours and patterns of their dresses are sometimes co-ordinated with the wallpapers.  These are also conspicuous, though more muted, in the home that Geneviève’s boyfriend Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo) shares with his invalid aunt (Mireille Perrey).  Well into the film, Guy, at his lowest ebb, picks up a prostitute and they go back to her boudoir.  The wallpaper there is quite something too.  In fact, the interiors are never less than eye-catching, even when there’s only paint on the walls – even in the garage where, at the start of the story, Guy works as a mechanic.

    Yet Demy and his DP Jacques Rabier repeatedly take an interesting journey to reach the highly stylised décor (created by an art direction team led by Bernard Evain).  Each of the narrative’s three parts begins with entirely realistic images, of the Cherbourg sea front.  The camera then moves inland, and in the direction of stylisation, onto a street in the town and the shops there.  They include Mme Emery’s umbrella boutique (which gives Demy his title).  The three ‘acts’ – ‘The Departure’, ‘The Absence’ and ‘The Return’ – are precisely dated, which serves to underline the film’s realistic aspect.  This is particularly so in the second and third parts, when the screen indicates specific months, marking the passage of time in Guy’s military service in Algeria, then in Genevieve’s pregnancy.  The main action starts in late 1957 and ends in the first half of 1959.  A final episode, so dramatically and emotionally crucial that it’s anything but a postscript, takes place at Christmas 1963.

    Even within the film musical genre, the line between absurdity and entrancement can rarely have been finer than it is in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – at least in the early stages.  The challenge of adjusting to recitative is sharpened by Demy’s setting the opening scene in Guy’s workplace, where he and the garage owner Aubin (Jean Champion) sing lines like ‘The engine still knocks when it’s cold but that’s normal’ and ‘Check the ignition on the gentleman’s Mercedes’.  (Demy also wrote the screenplay.)  As the obstacles to Geneviève’s romantic happiness with Guy increase, the juxtaposition of emotional distress and candy-coloured interior decoration also threatens to topple into inadvertent comedy but it never does, thanks to Michel Legrand’s insistent, limited, haunting melodies and to the supernal beauty of the main cast.

    Umbrellas is perhaps unique in that, since none of them does their own singing, we rarely hear the principals’ actual voices[1].  But these performers are so alluringly expressive that their physical presence is more than enough.  This is most obviously true of the spectacular leads – twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve and the young Italian actor Nino Castelnuovo – but Anne Vernon’s highly entertaining Mme Emery is the embodiment of chic.  It’s a mark of the level of good looks Demy seems to have required that Ellen Farner and Marc Michel, in what are conceived as relatively unglamorous roles, are, respectively, very pretty and strikingly handsome.  Farner is Madeleine, the dutiful girl who cares for Guy’s bedridden aunt.  Michel is the jeweller Roland Cassard.  Madeleine carries a torch for Guy throughout, and eventually marries him – after Geneviève has wed Roland.  His wallet has already saved Mme Emery’s failing business.  When Guy, who knows that Geneviève is carrying his child, goes incommunicado during his time in Algeria, Mme Emery draws her own conclusions.  She persuades her daughter to do the sensible thing and accept Roland’s marriage proposal.

    Lovelorn Roland Cassard, who agrees to take on the responsibility of another man’s child, is also a character in Lola (1960) – the first and only non-musical part of Demy’s ‘romantic trilogy’, which The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) followed.  I haven’t seen Lola but this second viewing of Umbrellas reinforced the puzzle of how I can like it so much but find Rochefort, for which Michel Legrand also wrote the music, an abomination[2].  I think there are probably three main, interlinked reasons.  Both films may have been stimulated by Hollywood musical romances, and Demy’s love of them, but Umbrellas, unlike Rochefort, is small-scale, tells an intimate story with dramatic pressure, and has an ingeniously grown-up ending.  (Although this may have inspired, more than half a century later, the ending of La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s synthetic musical seems more thoroughly influenced by The Young Girls of Rochefort.)

    In the carefree early days of their relationship, Geneviève and Guy imagine the child they’ll have together.  She says it will be a girl called Françoise.  He wants a boy called François.  Both dreams come true, though not in the way the couple expects.  Their love child is a girl and Geneviève gives her the name Françoise but Roland is her de facto father.  It’s Madeleine who gives birth to Guy’s son François.  At the end of the film, Guy is running his own garage, bought with his aunt’s inheritance.  It’s evening and Madeleine takes François (Hervé Legrand, Michel’s son) out to see the Cherbourg Christmas lights.  Soon after they’ve gone, a car pulls up at the garage.  The driver is Geneviève, returning to Cherbourg for the first time in several years.  Little Françoise (Rosalie Varda, Demy’s daughter) is in the passenger seat beside her.

    I’d remembered that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg didn’t end happily but not the details.  For a minute or so, I thought Demy had botched it.  When Geneviève and Guy clap eyes on each other again, for the first time since he left for military service, both leads seem to under-react.  Then Guy invites Geneviève to come into the garage and she does so while the child stays in the car.  As the former lovers talk, without evident emotion, the harsh truth of the reunion that you’ve anticipated so eagerly starts to sink in.  You’re primed for it to be momentous, in light of the intense romanticism of what’s gone before.  In the event, the reunion is perfunctory and has to be:  so much has changed.  Guy failed to reply to Geneviève’s letters to Algeria not because he wanted to avoid paternal responsibility for the baby she was expecting but because he was injured and in hospital.  Even so, it makes rather devastating sense that he now doesn’t pay much attention to the daughter who can’t actually be his.

    Wearing a fur coat and a stylish hairdo, Geneviève looks rich and unhappy but it’s somewhat baffling when Guy asks her, on the basis of her appearance, if she’s in mourning.  She is, though.  The news that her vivacious, early middle-aged mother has died adds startlingly to the melancholy of the scene and to our realisation that the youngsters at the start of the story have grown up and older.  Perhaps there’s a particular impact here for a generation of Anglophone viewers who, like me, grew up in the 1960s hearing not Jacques Demy’s libretto but the English lyrics of numbers derived from Michel Legrand’s score – especially the main love theme.  This became ‘I Will Wait for You’ and the message of that song – ‘If it takes forever I will wait for you’ – acquires an ironic charge in the film’s finale, which demonstrates the impossibility of such a commitment, thanks to the operation of chance and force of circumstance.  The past is irrecoverable.  Geneviève and Françoise drive off.  Madeleine and François return home.  Demy uses the idealising qualities of his picture to pull the rug from under the audience – even though the visuals are prettified to the last.  In the closing shots of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Guy and his young son play together in the snow that’s fallen for Christmas.  Amusingly modernised by the Esso signage in the background, this is nevertheless a lovely, traditional, happy-family image.  Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?  It’s a brilliant ending.

    12 December 2019

    [1] The main singers are Danielle Licari (Geneviève); José Bartel (Guy); Christiane Legrand, the composer’s sister (Mme Emery); Georges Blanes (Roland Cassard); Claudine Meunier (Madeleine); Claire Leclerc (Guy’s aunt).

    [2] It’s the next free DVD the BFI will be sending to Champion members, as one of our regular perks.  For the first time, I’ve asked to receive the ‘reserve’ alternative.  This is Varda by Agnès, the cinema envoi of Jacques Demy’s widow.

  • Honey Boy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alma Har’el (2019)

    I went to Honey Boy knowing it was based on Shia LaBeouf’s life story, and came out wishing I hadn’t known.  Ignorance would have let me see the film for what it is, required it to be self-sufficient.  The knowledge that it’s an account of LaBeouf’s own youth, troubled relationship with his father and time in rehab, supplies Honey Boy with not just a referent but also a substance of sorts.  Professional reviewers, needless to say, are well aware of where LaBeouf got the ideas for his screenplay:  plenty of the summary reviews on Rotten Tomatoes focus on how successfully the film avoids being a vanity project and/or if it’s a form of therapy for its writer.  Only he can answer the latter question but I think there is a vanity involved in LaBeouf’s reliance on foreknowledge of who he is – as a means of giving what’s supposedly a work of fiction a context and heft it mightn’t otherwise have.  But this can’t be more than a suspicion since it’s impossible to unknow what you know of the material beforehand or to put this out of your mind as you watch.  Particularly because Shia LaBeouf is there on the screen, playing the character based on his father.

    Set in Los Angeles, Honey Boy moves to and fro between 1995, when the protagonist Otis Lort is a twelve-year-old child television actor, and ten years later, when he’s a movie star on the skids:  after a series of violent, drunken misdemeanours, Otis is in rehab for alcohol addiction.  The child Otis (Noah Jupe) is based in a grotty motel complex with his father James (LaBoeuf), also in attendance whenever his son’s on the TV set.  A former rodeo clown, James is a registered sex offender with serious drink problems and anger management issues.  His nearly continuous verbal abuse of Otis occasionally turns physical.  Otis’s mother (Natasha Lyonne) hardly appears at all, although she’s a voice on the other end of a phone line in an upsetting scene where the boy is stuck in the middle, relaying his parents’ angry words to each other.  In 2005, Otis (Lucas Hedges) is, most of the time, angrily resistant to the help his calmly-spoken therapist (Laura San Giacomo) and quietly tenacious counsellor (Martin Starr) try to give him.  Otis is marginally more agreeable in the company of his rehab roommate (Byron Bowers).  The only kind of physical intimacy that occurs in either half of the narrative is between the pre-adolescent Otis and a young woman (FKA Twigs), who’s a neighbour in the motel block.

    Alma Har’el and her DP Natasha Braier often use a handheld camera, close in on the actors, and the effect is certainly claustrophobic.  This may be designed to make the audience experience what Otis is feeling; what it does, rather, is cut the viewer off from the people on the screen, especially because the images are typically dark-toned, sometimes to the point of near-invisibility.  With Lucas Hedges playing a young man undergoing therapy, the visual scheme naturally brings Boy Erased to mind:  Hedges could be forgiven for wondering if and why his directors seem to want to hide him from view.  For just his first couple of minutes on screen, you fear he’ll be straining to play an aggressive personality but he quickly adjusts (or you do) and gives a strong, convincing performance.  His native sensitivity plays off against Otis’s aggression most effectively.  Besides, Hedges has the imagination to get himself inside Otis’s head and skin – even if you never lose the feeling that, after Boy Erased, Ben Is Back and now Honey Boy, a break from psychological treatment for this fine young actor is seriously overdue.

    Noah Jupe, thirteen when the film was shot, is accumulating thankless tasks even more precociously than Lucas Hedges:  Jupe was Matt Damon’s son in Suburbicon and Christian Bale’s in Le Mans ’66, in which Damon also co-starred.  Otis is this English boy’s best role so far, and you can see why he’s in demand.  His emotional suppleness and unstressed vulnerability make it very credible that Jupe’s character grows up into Lucas Hedges, even if Otis’s potential for anger isn’t evident in his younger version.  Shia LaBeouf and Alma Har’el, whose first dramatic feature this is, have worked together before:   he was one of the producers on her 2016 documentary Love True, four years after starring in a music video that Har’el directed.  All in all, it’s easy to understand how LaBeouf has ended up playing James in Honey Boy but I think it was a mistake.  Children of whatever age tend to have a clear idea of who their parents are or were.  When the material is as decidedly autobiographical as it is here, that clarity runs the risk of being limiting.  Shia LaBeouf in effect prevents himself from using the imaginative sympathy that drives the work of Lucas Hedges and Noah Jupe here – as it drove LaBeouf’s in this year’s The Peanut Butter Falcon.

    The photographs of the actual LaBeouf senior (as well as of the younger Shia) that Har’el shows at the end of the film suggest that she and LaBeouf have tried to replicate his father’s appearance.  As in Borg vs McEnroe, the dissimilarity between LaBeouf’s facial shape and features and those of the person he’s playing creates a very different and perhaps distorted impression.  There’s a humour in his father’s face that LaBeouf junior barely suggests, even he does deliver plenty of his lines with harsh wit.   The film’s prevailing acridity ironises its title; when James calls Otis ‘honey boy’, his tone is usually ironic too.

    The closing stages are relatively hopeful.  James and twelve-year-old Otis smoke cannabis together, from the marijuana plants the father has been growing beside a highway.  In 2005, twenty-two-year-old Otis, whose rehab is progressing positively, revisits the place.  This sparks a reverie in which he imagines returning to the motel, finding his father there dressed in his rodeo clown costume, and telling James he’s going to make a movie about him.  ‘Make sure you make me look good,’ James replies.  The two of them then ride off on the father’s motorcycle before James fades out of the image, leaving Otis to continue on his way alone.  This mildly upbeat resolution doesn’t remove the persisting sense you get through Honey Boy that the decade between the film’s past and present must have been full of misery and trauma for Otis Lort.  Although you’re not ungrateful for this elision, you can’t help suspecting Shia LaBeouf thinks it justified on the grounds that his own troubles are already matters of public knowledge.

    11 December 2019

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