Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (32) (ii) - André Delvaux's Magic Realism

André Delvaux

Belgium was created as a country in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Bi-lingualism divides the country between French-speaking Wallonia in the north and Dutch/Flemish-speaking Flanders in the south. Some Belgians extend this linguistic identity and feel affinity with France or the Netherlands. Following an uprising against the Dutch in 1830 Belgium gained its independence. Early film production consisted mainly of documentaries. Henri Storck is credited with the promotion and development of cinema in Belgium. “Although emphatically Flemish, his social awareness and artistic independence [as a documentary filmmaker] transcend[ed] class and ethnic boundaries…Firmly rooted in Belgium’s artistic traditions [he was] also open to the influence of the outside world” (Lieve Spaas 10-11). It was not until after World War II that the Belgian film industry began to take shape and the distinctions between Flemish and Francophone cinema became blurred (ibid 9). As filmmakers, the Flemish trio of Storck, Charles Dekeukeleire (also a leading critic), and Delvaux “were unique in creating a dual Flemish Francophone identity” (ibid 12).

 André Delvaux  (1926 - 2002), Flemish-born with French schooling, was son of Belgian painter Paul Delvaux who is often identified with surrealism. While visually reminiscent of his father’s art and the work of Flemish surrealist painter, René Magritte, his first feature is based on a novel by Flemish author Johan Daisne. While he acknowledged the influence of Vertigo, none of Delvaux’s subsequent films were more self-categorised than his first feature The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short/L'Homme au crâne rasé (1966). His second feature One Night a Train/Un Soir un Train (1968) is also based on a Daisne novel, De Train der traagheid/Train of Slowness, which “again confronts the viewer with reality and illusion and with Delvaux’s belief that it is impossible to know the other or oneself” ( ibid 15).  Delvaux’s special love for music is evident in Man, the placement of the spare score composed by the performing quartet running parallel with rather than seamlessly absorbed by the narrative.

Senne Rouffaeur, The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short

Daisne’s novel in the form of an uninterrupted confession, is transformed into subjective narrative by Delvaux’s evocatively original approach; Govert Miereveld (Senne Rouffaeur), a middle-aged lawyer married with two children, teaches commercial law at a girl’s school where he develops a secret love for one of his students, the beautiful Fran Veenman (Beata Tyszkiewicz). On Fran’s last day at school Govert has summoned enough courage to reveal his love to her but circumstances prevent him from doing so and she goes out of his life. Some years later finds Govert, now reduced to working as a law court clerk, still obsessed with his lost love. One day he is obliged to travel with a former colleague, a forensic doctor, to attend an autopsy to be conducted on a decomposing body at a cemetery. The detached gruesomeness of the process profoundly affects Govert. Later that day he is overwhelmed when he sees Fran, who is now a famous actress, at the hotel. 

Following appearing to fall asleep in his room he ‘imagines’ going to her room to declare his love, fact becoming indistinguishable from fantasy. “To juxtapose the horror of the autopsy with the beauty of the young actress, lends a dramatic tone to the film - or is it a reflection of Govert’s disturbed mind? […] The only certainty the viewer gains [through the uncertain gaze kept by Delvaux at a distance] is that the subject sees but does not know the other” (ibid 14). The price of peace for Govert has been the loss of his sense of being in the aftermath of his traumatic meeting with Fran. Magic realism has been suggested as relevant by Spaas when dealing with the notion of identity “for it is precisely the idea that one’s own identity can be the object of knowledge which is being challenged.”                                                                                                                                                                    

The core question in the work of both Daisne and Delvaux concerns perceptual knowledge : how do we know that what we perceive is actually there? And how do we know what we remember is real? And if we cannot be sure of the world we perceive, how can we know ourselves?“ (ibid 12).

The revelation in a newsreel that Govert inadvertently views ten years later, in the institution where he appears to be interned, that Fran survived the shooting, lifting the burden of Fran’s death, that in Govert’s destruction he has found peace as Gottfried : “I look at myself from the outside. I am someone else.”

Michael Richardson acknowledges that “the influence of surrealism is stamped on the films of André Delvaux, [see above]. Some of his other films, Rendezvous at Bray (1971) and Belle (1973), for instance, treat themes that parallel the concerns of surrealist writers like Julien Gracq and André Pieyre Mandiargues, although,” Richardson considers that,”Delvaux’s interest seems more to use the ambiguities of reality to construct visual tapestries than to seek out that point of the mind at which contradictions are resolved” (168). Tony Rayns finds that in “a remarkably original first feature […] Delvaux’s main feat is to take the audience into Miereveld’s manias without pretending to explain them […] The result is a mixture of psychological thriller and noir love story, and it’s more than a little wonderful.” For Richard Roud, Delvaux has an absolute genius for choosing his locations […] The most extraordinary achievement of Delvaux’s film is that he manages to suggest visually the metaphysical overtones which are spelled out in the novel. […] He does it mainly by being extremely simple and selective […] Delvaux presents the entomological portrayal of the everyday with, however, just the right number of details missing, to set in relief, those that are there. And what better way to portray a man obsessed?”

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Lieve Spaas The Francophone Film : A Struggle for Identity  2000;  

Michael Richardson  Surrealism and Cinema  2006;  

Richard Roud Sight & Sound  Spring 1967;  

Tony Rayns Time Out  Film Guide 2009;  

Tom Milne  Monthly Film Bulletin  February 1967; 

Ernst Mathijs 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die  2004.

The Current Cinema - Janice Tong discovers a film with no simple answers - CLOSE (Lukas Dhont, Belgium/Netherlands/France, 2022)

Heartbreak and silence

Eden Dambrine (Leo), Émilie Dequenne (Remi's mother)
Gustav de Waele (Remi) Close

Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont’s follow-up from Girl (2018) took the Grand Prix at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.. At first glance – the film’s tone is joyous: gameplay, running through fields of flowers – pink, orange and red dahlias – in the height of summer, the world is glorious and new. But this is a film about the breaking apart of a friendship and the fragility of growing up.

 

Two best friends, newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele as Léo and Rémi, (they are just brilliant, especially Gustav as Rémi), are at that age where they are completely unbound by the kind of social consciousness that is de rigueur these days. They hang out together, sleep in the same bed together, tell each other the kind of made-up bedtime stories that a mother would to lull their child to sleep without any self-consciousness. Any kind of physical closeness like holding hands is pure delight in their friend’s company. In the film’s context the two boys haven’t really built up a sexual language yet; let alone their identities. The two families adore the boys; they are like one big family unit; Léo’s brother, Charlie, as protective and jovial towards Rémi as he would his own little brother; Emilie Dequenne (I still think about her debut performance in Dardenne brother’s Rosetta (1999)) as Rémi’s mother and Léa Drucker as Léo’s mother, are both wonderful to watch.

 

Eden Dambrine as Leo in the tragedy of Close 

School starts and on the first day the pair was asked if they were ‘a couple’, or if they even realised that from the way they’re acting, their relationship could be perceived as such. A change occurs, immediately, and as one pushes the other away; without ever stating his intention or the reason for his actions – the hurt inflicted on the other cuts deep and with ruinous consequences. 

 

What I found devastating was that despite all the woke activism, the space for friendships that are as intense as the one experienced by these two young boys gets to be scrutinised by others who play no part in knowing their bond. And yet, just like that, this bond is savagely broken. 

 

 Gustav de Waele is sensitive and bright as Remi

My only criticism of the film is that it invested in the aftermath that followed. All the beauty that has gone before is wiped out. And yes, I understand this is true of real life – and perhaps that is how cruel the world that is all too ready to heal behaves: Rémi is remembered in a generic way by his classmates; the mother’s forgiveness; Léo’s confession and guilt. Everything that could be left unsaid was ‘said’ (by this I mean the overplay of the emotional rollercoaster) when you just want silence. The undercutting of a life, and I could only imagine that this has happened to families around the globe – is personal, cruel, unnecessary – and paying for a ticket to see this story seems to be in bad taste. Hard to know how to respond to this film, which to its credit neither preached nor explained anything away. There are simply no answers…

On Blu-ray - David Hare welcomes a magnificent restoration of Harry Kümel's long time cult favourite DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (Belgium, 1971) starring the equally magnificent Delphine Seyrig

Delphine Seyrig, Daughters of Darkness

The Belgian director Harry Kümel (born 1940) had been making movies since the 1950s before he hit the headlines internationally when his 1968 Monsieur Harwarden played the rounds of various Film Festivals, including Sydney and Melbourne, to considerable acclaim. Here was a new ultra-stylish auteur breaking onto the international stage at a time when all around him the new national cinemas (Cuba, Poland, Iran, West Germany) were swirling into view. 

He filmed a short dedication to Sternberg in 1968 with himself and Jo not long before his death, talking about Jo's movies, and this short has been wrapped into Criterion's disc of Docks of New York. Indeed, the ghost of Sternberg informs his 1971 Daughters of Darkness. 

 

In 1971 Kümel delivered this breakthrough, a Dutch/French/German co-production shot in English - a lesbian vampire movie, already an established horror subgenre, and a springboard for the incredible Daughters of Darkness, aka variously Les Lèvres Rouge, Les Rouges a Lèvres and other miniature gallic puns on "lips", "labia" and "Lipstick”. 

 

The movie opened outside Europe in late 1971, and I managed to see it while I was staying in New York City in early 1972 at one of the the still standing 42nd street movie palaces. This one was resisting the newly minted hardcore porn mode while dedicating itself to grindhouse fare. Daughters was playing a double bill with a German sexploitation Costume horror called Tower of Screaming Virgins, (directed by Franz Antel) the plot loosely based on a Dumas novel, but with tits and blood quotient surpassing anything I'm sure Dumas might have hoped for. Tower was actually interesting enough in its own right, (I never look down on honest trash), but the main event was Kümel’s movie which alternately bored and exhilarated the audience, with enough explicit blood and sex to keep them awake.

 

The movie sings with its brilliant production design and the intelligence of the screenplay, not to mention wardrobe by half a dozen people, although Kümel surely dictated all the details of Delphine's small number of costume changes, alternately feathered, furred, metallic, gauzed, worn by Delphine in full bore homage to Travis Banton and of course Sternberg. Delphine's first big entrance to the Ostend Hotel at midnight is executed with a walk that is never mere walking but swagger, saunter, swoon and arch. 

 

By the time Kümel shoots Delphine’s first close up (above) he takes us on a journey across her face. If you can, remember Dietrich's high precision eye and mouth movements, head turns, pauses and gazing into keylight during the "It took more than one man to change my name" moment from Shanghai Express. Delphine inherits that sequence's facial acting and takes it to the next level by adding Dietrich's first entry into the upper class brothel in Angel, although in Kümel’s movie she's now wearing scarlet red with black furs and a lace fascinator. 

 

The seemingly impossible achievement of this movie is to never succumb to "mere" camp. The elements of disguise, character and setting are never less than multi layered with reflexive aspects, from the white and black and red color Nazi uniform coding of Christina Rau’s Louise Brooks-esque goth companion to Delphine. Down to the Banton and Sternberg stylization of Delphine's look and performance. Kümel himself says partly in jest during his commentary track on this new disc, that his producer felt this was Delphine's best role. In fact it is but, as Harry says it's one of so many. Her Muriel and the "woman" in Marienbadfor Resnais, her Jeanne Dielman, the lady who lunches for Bunuel in Discreet Charm, her murdered lover in Zinneman’s Day of the Jackal. 

 

It has to be said Delphine is an axiom of cinema. And with Kümel she meets one of the movies' last great stylists. For the uninitiated the last screen is "Mother", a rich old queen who outlies the narrative, played by the great Dutch filmmaker, Fons Rademakers (below) wearing far too much eyeliner, mascara, hair dye and foundation, and a particularly unattractive lippy. 

 

So the Belgians do have a sense of humor. 

 

The title has been given a full blown multi disc release by the people at boutique horror label Blue Underground. The movie was restored from a previously lost 35mm O-Neg with supervision by Kümel, and the boxset includes the title in full 4K UHD and Dolby Vision, as well as a regular Blu-ray. I have only been able to access the latter for this review but frankly the image quality and encode are so fine I doubt there is much uplift for improvement left for the 4K disc.