Sydney Film Festival and The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop reviews the wild ride of TITANE (Julia Ducournau, France, 2021)

Agathe Rousselle

Organizers of the world’s leading horror and fantasy film festival in picturesque Sitges outside of Barcelona must be bemused. 

They have been at it for 54 years and now one of their own, down the coast at Cannes, has nabbed the Top Gong from the most famous film festival in the world.

Unthinkable is probably close to the mark. After all, even the most venerated of the ‘arty’ horror mob at Cannes like the two Davids, Lynch and Cronenberg, haven’t come within a bull’s roar of taking home the Palme d’Or. 

In 2016, Julia Ducournau’s first film, the cannibalistic-horror Raw, collected the Best New Director award at Sitges. And now here she is, five years later with her second film, landing what is unquestionably the most prestigious recognition a film director can have.

By any standard, it’s a meteoric rise and Titane, by any standard, is a wild ride. 

Vincent Lindon

Body horror at its most expansive, it reconstructs rather than deconstructs notions of gender, sexuality and body-image. Opening with a car accident and a young girl having a titanium plate embedded in her head, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) grows into a woman who has sex with - and gets pregnant by - a car, while doing a variety of murderous things to a variety of people with her lethal hair pin. And that’s just the first act.

Logic is not a strong suit here, nor is it meant to be. Much of what happens makes no sense and the viewer is asked to take plot contrivances on the chin. Playing the main character, Rousselle was cast in the role after only one short film and some Instagram photos. But as riveting as she is to watch, when she has to pass as a man (a French firefighter!), we don’t believe it and have to watch incredulously while her male firefighting colleagues take forever to twig to the truth. 

It’s reminiscent of the character of “Onion” in The Good Lord Bird, an African-American boy dressed as a girl throughout this Civil War era television series, clearly male and recognized as such immediately by every black he meets – male or female – but not by any of the whites, who are stupid enough to accept his feminine gender. 

Here, Ducournau seems to be saying most men wouldn’t know a cross-dressing, gender-bender, serial killer if they fell over one. There is one exception, however. The firefighting chief Vincent (Vincent Lindon) who wants Alexia (now known as Adrien) to be his lost son. 

Vincent is like a 21^stCentury incarnation of Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) in Some Like It Hot. When Jerry (Jack Lemmon) reveals he is not a woman and Osgood replies: “Nobody’s perfect”, you can almost hear Ducournau and her characters laughing their heads off.

*********** 

Titane has already screened at the Sydney Film Festival and begins screening at your cinemas across Australia on November 25th.

Julia Ducournau with the Palme d'Or

 

Sydney Film Festival (inc Streaming) - Barrie Pattison considers JOHN FARROW: HOLLYWOOD'S MAN IN THE SHADOWS (Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg, Australia, 2021) and retrieves his own thoughts on CALIFORNIA (John Farrow, USA, 1947)

Lana Turner, Lex Barker, John  Farrow, John Wayne
on the set of The Sea Chase  (John Farrow, 1955)

The Curious Case of John Farrow.

I remember Ann Roth, Elia Kazan’s costume designer, rounding on Gillian Armstrong in the interview in her Orry-Kelly documentary and telling her that it wasn’t because the subject had done outstanding work on 42nd St. Casablanca and An American in Paris that he was up for consideration - but because he came from Kiama. Armstrong, to her credit, left it in the picture. 

That registered because I once (declaration of interest)  proposed a documentary on John Farrow, the boy from a house in Marrickville not unlike the one I grew up in, who went on to become the busiest Australian director in Hollywood and that wasn’t the half of it. He was awarded a CBE by the Queen and a Knighthood by the Pope, prepared an English-Polynesan-French dictionary, commanded a submarine and mated with Tarzan’s mate, fathering daughter Mia. I wouldn’t want to go all Lord Byron on John Farrow’s case but you could argue he really was someone who’d put his talent into his work and his genius into his life ... and he’d been responsible for my favorite cowboy movie. 

My documentary didn’t get any further than budgeting the Hollywood clips but now we do have Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg’s feature length John Farrow - Hollywood's Man in the Shadows in the re-opened Sydney Film Festival. (The film is still streaming fo another few days and you can buy a ticket IF YOU CLICK HERE (Ends Sunday 21st November)

It’s nice to see someone tackling the underdocumented Farrow, who Paramount’s vigorous re-issue policy had made so prominent in my early film going. However the film is kind of unsatisfying. It’s gappy on the unknown pre-Hollywood years.

Relatives tell us about him faking a Newington education and being nabbed for coming on in a white coat with a stethoscope round his neck during the Spanish flu epidemic. They have him fighting in exotic revolutions but don’t nail the story of being recruited for a U.S. film being shot in the South Pacific for his maritime skills. 

Sailing for L.A. in 1919 (and jumping ship, giving him later emigration status problems) Farrow turns up as a Hollywood actor and a notable screen writer, represented by some badly reproduced titles for White Gold, though he was credited on Victor Fleming’s Wolf Song, the Schoedsack Four Feathers and the Pabst Don Quixote. Farrow didn’t realise wife to be Maureen O’Sullivan was the star when he dated her on what was then “The Capture of Tarzan.” The interviews suggest Maureen wasn’t big on mothering skills. Her privileged Catholic background generated Farrow's conversion - with a glimpse of his Papacy, Thomas More and Father Damian books. 

Man in the Shadows curiously omits 1939’s Full Confession, Farrow’s first Catholic movie, though giving us (good quality) footage from its companion piece  Five Came Back - one of the only half dozen films Robert Mitchum would watch. 

However WW2 took up Farrow’s attention with a commission in the Canadian navy from which he was invalided out with Typhus to make The Hitler Gang, one of the few war time films to put the Fuhrer on screen, and Wake Island netting Farrow a director Oscar nomination.

About there we hear about his long takes, illustrated by China, with William Bendix, from 1943. Bruce Beresford observes he’s not game to try that and breaks his own material into edits. Farrow’s complex shots, developed in movies like Invisible Menace and  Commandoes Strike at Dawn (not cited - Paul Muni and Lillian Gish in an Irwin Shaw script ) may have started the forties vogue for these - see the films of Edmund Goulding and Hitchcock. Technicolor had to build special fourteen-minute magazines to shoot Farrow’s California (his best film and one of the most handsome ever shot in the process) which appeared the year before Hitchcock got attention for long takes in his draggy Rope. 

Outside a couple of  images from California  glimpsed in the montage finale, Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows lets footage from  Hondo stand-in for the Farrow westerns (John Wayne’s “There is no word in the Apache language for lie”) - They seem determined to sell Farrow as a film noir director, emphasising The Big Clock  and the  Mitchum films. Also, unpardonably, the team beak-up the virtuoso, imperceptibly composited opening of The Big Clock which anticipates films like Gravity and  Spectre. 

Four times Farrow leading man Ray Milland liked the way Farrow let him create bits of business as he practiced to become a director himself and  mature Daryl Hickman comments favorably on the treament he got.  Farrow didn’t always go down so well. Howard Keel called him a “rat fink” and son John Charles, the only one of the seven Farrow children who participates, gives a grim picture of his disciplinarian father in describing doing a bit part under his direction. 

HUAC arrives post WW2 and leading conservative Farrow’s stand against right-winger De Mille in the Director’s Guild dispute does get favorable mention - though they don’t identify George Marshall as the messenger sent to recruit him. 

The film touches on Farrow’s clandestine second family where the mother was murdered and the son unacknowledged. 

The team are unwilling to describe the quality drop after his stint as Paramount’s go to director and race through the final years to his work on the Empire series (dupey clip.) Mike Todd and Farrow clashed on Around the World in 80 Days and our man’s allocation to  King of Kings didn’t survive the briefing where Sam Bronson explained that he expected to get away with racy material that would be censored doing any other subject. 

In this, as with the De Mille incident, there is a welcome glimpse of John Farrow as someone of undaunted principle but Man in the Shadows offers a rather glum protagonist. I’d just as soon hear about his out there sense of humor - his Technicolor short showing Hollywood couples in the rodeo audience - Gable & Lombard, Cary Grant & Randolph Scott - or complying with the requirements of his new religion by making confession at the out of the way Spanish quarter chapel where the priest didn’t understand a word of English.

Susan Lumsdon’s locating material in Australia and L.A. is striking but extends what
is a rather long movie. The piece includes comments from Charles Higham, David & Margaret, Scott Murray, David Thomson, Philippe Mora, Terry Moore & Todd McCarthy among many. Mia Farrow figures in an appearance on Letterman and a glimpse of grandson Ronan at the podium is there to promote significance. 

...   and here is a program note I prepared for a screening of
Farrow’s 1947 California.

Though less celebrated, California is a  companion to the big costume films of the forties - Les enfants du paradis in France, Romanze in Molle in Germany and David Lean’s Dickens films, sharing a common, highly studio-art directed, national aesthetic. 

Came the end of WW2 and Paramount’s house leading man Ray Milland carried off the then even more valued best actor Academy Award. The studio might have been expected to showcase Milland’s talents in another gritty drama of the streets. However Hollywood was embracing post war Technicolor and Paramount, since the phenomenal silent era success of James Cruze’s 1923 The Covered Wagon, had a confidence in large scale westerns as part of its corporate culture. These all came together as the big budget 1947 production California.

And who was there to put at the helm of this prestige undertaking but their returned war hero and Oscar nominated (Wake Island)  film director Neville John Villiers Farrow C.B.E. 

Though he’s not credited on the script, none of his other films carries so much of the Farrow imprint. His background as historian ran to having Edith Head copy museum costumes and to designer Hans Dreier reconstructing the 1848 Colton Hall in Monterey where the California Assembly voted to join the Union. Farrow’s Naval background contributed villains who had worked the slave trade, placing it with the director’s Two Years Before the Mast, The Sea Chase, Submarine Command or Botany Bay and there’s the shadow of his Prominent Catholic status.

The film goes explicitly Old Testament in the opening Earl (Walk in the Sun) Robinson vocals comparing California to the promised land and we have the emphasis Barbara Stanwyck places on marriage and the sub-plot of George Coulouris  locking pious Argentina Brunetti out of Eduardo Cianneli’s Hacienda chapel, violating its sanctity to store guns for the planned insurrection. 

California recalls The Covered Wagon with plows to break the plains, the dividing wagon train and a military renegade wagonmaster, though Milland’s Trumbo doesn’t steal cattle to feed starving troops. He had to desert or shoot the husband, in the back story we are fed in instalments (Frank Ferguson on patrol, the question of whether it was the woman’s fault, Commander Roman Bohnen’s scene). Halfway they switch to the secessionist movement plot line of  the later Cruze Pony Express silent. The writers even borrow the opening of Stagecoach.

Milland is in his element, delivering the artificial language effectively and authentic
looking. In a day’s growth of beard and grubby leathers, he tells Stanwyck not to waste two days' ration of water washing her hair. “Stay dirty like the rest of us.” We even get to see a tide mark on his neck, in one of the detail touches that occasionally lift the film - the antique card game that Stanwyck loses, real life California Congressman Albert Dekker caught still reloading a period firearm, meaning that he has to fight with a knife. Before I used to notice such things, the knife fight stuck in my memory and now I realise that it’s different to similar scenes because, like most of the dialogue, it’s done without edits. 

The way California is made is remarkable. It’s full of six and eight minute takes and anticipates Rope by eighteen months, without anyone noticing. It works a lot better here too. The film is however also well served by montage sequences in the Earl Robinson material and the card game.

Milland recalled that this technique made the performers really nervous. If they got something wrong in one of these complex shots, everyone would have to do it all over again. Barry Fitzgerald misread his line about the grape cuttings on the end of a take and they had to do that reel’s worth three times. Is that  the take of the slapping scene where Milland actually knocked out Barbara Stanwyck?

They didn’t scrimp on the cast. Heroine Stanwyck and Barry Fitzgerald also had fresh Oscars. George Coulouris (who Farrow detested) had been Anthony in Welles’ Mercury Players “Julius Caesar” and this carries right down to celebrity bit parts - Frank Faylen,  Gavin Muir, Julia Faye, Anthony Quinn. The standard of performance is remarkably high.  

The crew are also top rank technicians at the peak of their skills. Cameraman Ray (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Lady in the Dark) Rennahan, pioneer of the Technicolor process, does some of his best work. Editor Eda Warren was a regular Farrow collaborator. Not only is costumier Edith Head in full cry and but ex-Ernst Lubitsch associate, Art Department Head Hans Dreier furnished twenty seven locations, notably the near mile long, a one hundred and four wagon train mobilised (in Arizona) with army surplus walkie talkies in exteriors and its studio reconstruction for the night scenes. Throw in the arrival in Pharoah Town's bustling exterior street and the handsome saloon and Spanish Hacienda. Celebrity composer Victor Young’s score, complete with choral interludes, is uneven - bits of it coming from other hands. There’s enough music to qualify as an operetta with the distinctive Earl Robinson song interludes and Barbara Stanwyck’s numbers - she does her own vocals. 

In the best western movie tradition, the action scenes are highlights. The riders sweeping through the vineyards (four tons of off season grapes kept in cold storage) is particularly well staged, followed by Dekker’s men wheeling back (through gates later re-cycled for Jamaica Run) when they see Milland at the head of miners, riding up for the battle. There must be an awful lot of Richard Farnsworth stunt work but Milland is actually in the shot with what looks like a real explosion. 

Though critics tended to ignore these new Technicolor A feature westerns, they became a dominant element of the next decades of Hollywood film making. California was in constant re-issue for twenty years, proving to have been a test case to be followed by the studio’s excellent new version of Whispering Smith with Alan Ladd and Farrow and Milland making Copper Canyon, before it all edged into B productions.

It’s hard to imagine something so impressive not attracting attention.

On 4K HDR/DV - David Hare welcomes a restored ANATOMY OF A MURDER (Otto Preminger, USA, 1958) & TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1976)

This is the second big six picture collection boxset from Sony of their “Columbia Classics”, all totally new updated restorations executed in 4K with HDR/DV. Grover Crisp who has personally curated these sets (and much more) through Sony’s still flourishing physical media arm makes a particularly strong case in some of the copious restoration notes on each title in which he really promotes the complete revelation HDR and it’s much wider color gamut, wider dynamic range and more has to seriously sell the superority of the new format over all and any earlier Home Vid platforms.

I won’t take much more space here but to say the movies I’ve sampled so far are breathtaking in these UHD 4K discs, even better than a first 35mm viewing of a revival print of Anatomy of a Murder at Sydney Uni Film Group in 1968. By then (only ten years after it was made) the O-neg had been intefered with after wear and tear leaving ten no less lab shots re-inserted from an inferior later gen neg. Even the very beautiful master Criterion used for its own Blu release a few years ago is still stuck with the dupe shots, although Crisp’s team did an almost total restoration on that occasion. 

For the new release they restarted the elements harvest and in the process found a third gen but extremely high quality neg which yielded clean optical shots which now seamlessly meet the rest of the print’s image quality for grain, grayscale and density.

The new 4K of Taxi Driver is from just a few years ago but Crisp and his team are now able to use HDR to really push saturation and the emphasis on grain and texture in this new disc which is quite frankly, gobsmacking, and once again the image quality once again surpasses the 35mm I first saw in opening week at the old Town Cinema in Pitt Street, Sydney. Another bonus is the discovery of multi track stems of Herrmann’s score for which they’ve added a five channel Dolby track with the score isolated on the rear channels. You’ve got to hear this to believe it. They also preserve the original legacy mono track.

I understand the new 4K of the Preminger was amongst the “rediscoveries” at this year’s Cannes event. This boxset, with marvellous liner notes from Julie Kirgo for the Preminger, and Glenn Kenny for Taxi Driver is worth every cent. The remaining four titles (Oliver, Stripes, Sense and Sensibility and The Social Network) are yet to be plundered by me.

Streaming - John Baxter gives attention to a film that slipped under the Covid radar - MY SALINGER YEAR (Philippe Falardeau, USA, 2021)

Margaret Qualley and that portrait

MY NEW YORK YEAR. 

            My first American literary agency was a three- or four-person operation occupying a cluster of rooms on the twenty-somethingth floor of a ‘thirties building in mid-town Manhattan.  It subsisted almost entirely on tending the estates of past clients, now long-dead, whose portraits decorated its walls. 

            The proprietor, then in his eighties, had known all of them as friends, and could be amusing about their eccentricities. He was not without a few himself. Outside his window, Astroturf covered a terrace the size of a golf green. On quiet days, he would step out with the Ben Hogan driver he kept in the corner of his office and, indifferent to where they landed, whack a few Titleists into the smog of East 24^thStreet. 

            His assistant, une dame d’un certain age  who had been, and perhaps still was, his lover, satisfied my curiosity by taking me down into the sub-sub-basement where a room was crammed with steamer trunks, each stencilled with an illustrious name. Within them was the accumulated correspondence and memorabilia of that particular literary great.

            A treasure trove for the biographer, I suggested. She glared.

            “Those vultures? Never. They know nothing about these....”  She ushered me out,  slamming and double-locking the door. “....and they never will, as long as I’m alive.” 

            I thought of her while watching My Salinger Year (aka My New York Year), the latest film by Quebecois director Philippe Falardeau.

Director and co-writer Philippe Falardeau

            As the walking wounded movies of the pandemic begin to limp into the light, it’s become more interesting, at least in France, to monitor broadcast video and streaming outside Netflix and the other major sites. The 2021 My New York Year/My Salinger Year had some kind of release, even, apparently, in Australia, early this year,  but otherwise sank without trace. It deserved better, if only on the basis of Falardeau’s  tragi-comic The Good Lie, (2014) about a well-meaning Reese Witherspoon trying to integrate the remnants of a tribal Sudanese family into white middle-class Canada.

            Mike Nichols’ 1988 Working Girl set the bar high for stories of modern young women striving for business success. Sigourney Weaver dominated that film as the manipulative boss who is also a role model for upwardly mobile Melanie Griffiths. Weaver appears again in My New York Year  as the literary agent, blessed (or cursed?) with reclusive author J.D. “Jerry” Salinger as a client.  In a manner which, probably not by accident, echoes Anne Hathaway as the neo-fashionista in The Devil Wears Prada, Weaver’s naive assistant Joanna Rakoff (Margaret Qualley) must stifle her own creative ambitions to help insulate Salinger from his intrusive public. 

            The story has its basis in fact. In the mid-nineties Rakoff left California to work at Harold Ober Associates, a revered New York literary agency. Sigourney Weaver is a thinly-disguised portrait of senior partner Phyllis Westberg. 

Sigourney Weaver as Phyllis Westberg

            Falardeau, who co-wrote the script with Rakoff, wisely declines to concentrate on Salinger. Tim Post plays him in a couple of near-anonymous appearances but he’s mainly present as a husky telephone voice and that familiar portrait from his Catcher in the Rye days, prints of which dominate the Ober office like a religious ikon.

            The film focuses instead on Joanna’s struggles to reconcile real life with the fantasy of literary success.  In typical bildungsroman fashion, she learns that, when life and legend conflict, printing the legend is only a short-term solution. 

            She tries anyway, dumping her well-meaning Californian lover for an edgy New Yorker, only to impair that relationship by exercising her new-found critical abilities on the manuscript of his novel. At the office, she tries to second-guess her boss about a new book from young-adult author Judy Blume, pleading the cause of art against money. Most disastrously of all, she’s tempted, a la Miss Lonelyhearts, into replying personally to one of the weekly harvest of letters to Salinger which it is part of her job to shred. 

            At the end of her year, Joanna must decide whether to join Margaret on the battlements, defending commerce from the attacks of art, or take arms with the hungry generations battering at the gates. No prizes for guessing which way she jumps.

             My New York Year, uncertain with whom to sympathise and anxious to show every facet of Joanna’s dilemma,  bites off more than it can chew. As in The Devil Wears Prada, the late introduction of a back-story for her boss, revealing a complex private life, forces us hurriedly to reassess the character of Margaret, something done more deftly by Aline Brosh McKenna in the earlier film. 

            Nor does Margaret Qualley’s Joanna convince as someone who might, in time, succeed as an  author. Her total published work, two poems in The Paris Review, doesn’t suggest it acts on Salinger’s advice to write every day, while her near-reverence for The New Yorker, a visit to the offices of which is staged like the pilgrimage to some sacred site, argues against the independence of spirit that might earn success. She’s first and last a fan, and long before she sees it, we accept that Salinger is right to isolate himself from such people. The love of one’s admirers, even those as sincere as she, can be toxic.  Look what happened to Orpheus. 

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MY SALINGER YEAR was released in Australian cinemas nationally by Palace Films in January 2021. It came out on DVD and Home Entertainment (iTunes, Fetch, Amazon etc) through Madman Entertainment on 21 April.

It is presently also available to stream on Binge and Foxtel Now.

 

Sydney Film Festival - Janice Tong's first Filmic Postcard - BERGMAN ISLAND (Mia Hansen-Løve, France, 2021)

Vicky Krieps as Chris (left) and Tim Roth as Tony (right)
discussing which Bergman film they should view that
evening in the private 35mm screening room

The creative process is often joyless. It is in fact a solitary joylessness.  

It’s also easy to confuse productivity or the flow that one finds in ‘doing work’ with the process of writing or scripting. The two are not the same. In fact, one can produce a huge body of work without any artistry.

 

I remember reading a Joan Chen interview years ago, where she had said that “a happy home is the enemy to art”. I am paraphrasing here, but you get the gist. 

 

Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island  seeps under your skin, and envelopes you with a kind of malaise borne of sadness. And unlike her earlier works All is Forgiven (2007) or The Father of My Children (2009), two films where I found her fragility and sensitivity as a storyteller and director to possess the lightest touch, that even with a difficult and tragic storyline, something magical and radiant comes out in the films. And again, later with Eden (2014), her magical touch is all the more pronounced, there’s a subtlety to the way she layers her narrative and intersects complex relationships. 

Chris (Vicki Krieps) solitary  self-discovery or invention?

 

I found Bergman Island to be none of these things. There was something more stoic and passive, but also confident in this film. Perhaps part of the confidence came from the way Tim Roth’s character Tony, a famous director Anthony Sanders, spoke and acted; that he was productive (he’s always talking, projecting himself), in the way he drove his car (that he didn’t slow down even when he arrived at the destination), in the general way that he handled himself (with his lover, with colleagues he’s trying to impress, with his fans). He is the epitome of Deleuze’s ‘action-image’, a man on the move, seemingly propelling the story forwards. The films he makes are also centered on ‘strong’ female leads in ‘action’.   His post-film screening discussion was cut short by his partner’s exit from the stadium. A closing of the door took us in a more rhizomatic direction; we get to follow her, instead.

 

We are led into another perspective, his partner’s. Chris is sensitively played by Vicky Krieps (I only saw her in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread years ago but have not forgotten her on-screen presence). She is more subtle in her confidence, she is outspoken, independent, and deeply thoughtful. Her ‘inaction’ (in the sense that she finds it difficult to progress her script) in fact outweighs and artistically surpasses the momentum that Tony seem to exude. Her story is one that bifurcates, in a film within a film; about a young writer/director, Amy, (played by Mia Wasikowska, who was actually here at the SFF screening on Sunday night) who also heads out to Fårö Island (like Chris and Tony), but for her, it is to attend a wedding of her friend. 

Anders Danielsen Lie as Joseph,
Mia Wasikowska as Amy, ex-lovers –
Is it possible to truly get over your great love?

On the way there, she meets up, quite by chance, her ex-lover Joseph, (played by the wonderful Anders Danielsen Lie. (I saw him last in the brilliant film Oslo, 31st August (2011); or you may know him from the recent television series Seizure which is currently available on SBS on Demand) Amy has not been able to get over him. No spoilers here, but there is a lot of unresolved tension that needs to play out between the two friends.

 

Chris and Tony have travelled to Fårö Island to take on a writer’s residence. It is an island situated in the north east of Gotland, and it's where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked for many years. He made some of his most famous films there: Persona (1966), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and the actual house Chris and Tony were staying in was where Scenes from a Marriage (1973) was shot, not to mention the bed they stayed in. Some of the scenes, such as the front-on shot of the bed with Tony holding a book reading, made me, as well as Chris, giggle in delight. But that was at the start of the film.

Scenes from a Marriage, the formidable Liv Ullmann as
Marianne and Erland Josephson as Johan

 

There were a lot of pressure-points that Hansen-Løve toyed with; by placing her audience in a mirror-maze, she creates a kind of fluid ambiguity that blends fiction and real life, reinterpretation and impulse, critique and factual. I would bet that audiences would be asking themselves these questions right the way through the film. Is this a reflection of the director’s own personal story that we see in Chris - being overshadowed by her partner who is a more prolific director, like that of her relationship with Assayas, or is Amy actually Chris’ double? Or, is it in fact that everyone involved in this film, are in fact in the shadow of (and yet continually and alternately inspired and haunted by) the ghost of yet another more luminous director, that of Ingmar Bergman. 

From left - Director Ingmar Bergman, cinematographer
Sven Nykvist, ASC and actors Erland Josephson and
Liv Ullmann on Fårö in the 1960s.
(Photo by Allen Watkin from London, UK, via Wikipedia Commons)

 

After all, this is Bergman’s island so to speak, and I guess, also Wallander country (in many of the scenes, I can’t help but see Kurt there with his dog Jussi). One can only take so much of the sea and sky, the landscape and it’s climes. They demand a slowness. This, coupled with the austere interiors come together to drive a kind of conformity that presses against those who go there. And those like Chris and Tony who supposedly went to be creative, or, at least, to embrace the quietness; I would say an opposite effect came to bear, “it’s oppressive” noted Chris; and to me, it is stifling, like the ticking clock and it drives in despair instead. But something did happen, something ‘clicked’, Chris found her own ‘safari’ into her creativity and narrative of and at Fårö Island. The idea of getting lost here is perhaps the best means of arrival.

 

To compartmentalise an interiority requires both solitude and validation. For Tony, his validation came from the effusive praise of his admiring public and festival organisers. For Chris, by sharing her story with Tony, the horizon was painted in the process. For her, she was unable to like a director’s films if they do not “behave” in their personal life. And this, I guess was the unspoken chasm that splits them; and in doing so, also open up the question of whether it is possible to separate the artist from the person? (How do you separate Heidegger from his allegiances?) 

 

Without diving into this debate here, there were also many moments where you could still find a glimpse of Hansen-Løve’s magical touch: when Amy wakes as Chris, or when Chris visits Bergman’s house and finds her friend there instead, listening to music; or our fateful rendezvous with Ingmar Bergman Jnr at the crossing. And for those moments, I am content.

 

The Sydney Film Festival finishes today on the 14th November.

 

 

#sff #sydneyfilmfestival2021 #sydneyfilmfestival #frenchfilms

Sydney Film Festival - Rod Bishop recommends THE YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM (Jafar Panahi, Anthony Chen, Malik Vitthal, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, David Lowrey, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, USA, 2021)

The better Covid-19 films to have come our way include scriptwriter Jack Thorne’s care-home drama Help (with Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham) and the two documentaries: In the Same Breath(Nanfu Wang) and Totally Under Control (Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyun and Suzanne Hillinger).

The Year of the Everlasting Storm is an art-house contribution and its seven short films make for an enthralling couple of hours.

The opener is set in Tehran, in the apartment belonging to Jafar Panahi, the Iranian film director who was placed under house arrest in 2010. It opens with his huge pet iguana, Iggy, lusting after some pigeon eggs beyond the lizard’s reach on an outside balcony. When the intercom rings, Panahi and his wife Tahereh think it’s probably someone from the Covid Unit, but it’s his 90-year-old mother in full PPE, strolling in and spraying everything in sight with an antiseptic wipe (like a real-life South Park skit).

The family use mobile phone video to connect with their daughter in Paris while Iggy prowls the corridors, sometimes retreating into his safe haven under a cupboard and then finally watching - while being stroked and sung to by Panahi’s mother - as a hatchling emerges from one of the eggs. There’s a lightness of touch to Panahi’s short despite the constant elliptical references to disease and death. Beautifully and lovingly made. 

A further three shorts from Wuhan, Santiago and California are also family-based and share similar reactions to lockdown isolation. Like Panahi’s film, they all show different ways of transcending the horrors of pandemic life. 

In her short, Laura Poitras, who made the Edward Snowden doco Citizenfour, uses an international group of activist journalists who are terrified by the Pegasus software being used on mobile phones to surveil private citizens. Many of them have been targets themselves and give examples of its use (including the killing of Jamal Khashoggi). Chillingly, they warn of the marketing of Pegasus software for Covid contact tracing.

The David Lowery and Apichatpong Weerasethakul contributions don’t directly reference Covid at all. Lowery weaves a tale of exhumation, the body of a New Orleans boy who seems to have died of a past pandemic disease, or maybe during Hurricane Katrina. His body was buried in Texas and is reclaimed at night by an unknown woman. 

Weerasethakul has us looking at white sheets teeming with insects that have been attracted to a bed by a host of overhanging florescent lights. A gecko clings to the underside of one light, the heat causing it to constantly move its legs, rather than give up access to all these delicious insects. 

The Thai auteur, always enigmatic, cinematic and speculatively interpretive, lets us gaze into an apparently chaotic test-tube of the natural world where the behaviour of even the smallest of insects is beyond the control or understanding of humans.

One screening remains of this film at the SFF on Sunday 14 November at 8.30 pm, Event Cinemas George Street.

TO BOOK TICKETS CLICK HERE 

 

Elvis and Me - Louis Skorecki recalls meeting the great man and remembers LOVE ME TENDER (Robert D Webb, USA 1956,

 

Louis Skorecki and Elvis, Paris, 1959

(Viewed on February 3, 2006/November 11, 2021)

I didn't know Elvis well, but I've been around him long enough and close enough to guess what wood he was heating up from. He was a real guy, a macho, a tough one.

All this happened in Paris, two or three years after his first film, one of the most beautiful, LOVE ME TENDER...

He was passing by. I had been on his case for several days. He was young and handsome, I was even younger and almost as handsome, as you can see in the pictures.

We both posed,. I had about a dozen records under my arm that he signed. Two or three days later, I came back to get the pictures signed.

Like an idiot, I traded the records for some dough (or swapped them for bad jazz records. I don't know anymore.. ) ... It wasn't worth anything back then.

I still have the pics. Frontal, classical, laughing. Looking at them today, it's hard to tell who looks dumber, the fan or the rocker. Let's just say it's me.

Love Me Tender sounds better than Cavalier du Twilight, the French title under which I saw the movie at the time. Nobody watched movies in Version Originale, especially Presley's.

That was the fifties, the best, the dumbest.

Elvis, Debra Paget, Love Me Tender

LOVE ME TENDER, has also has one of the most beautiful dances by Elvis Presley, a slow rock as they called it. He sings it for the beautiful Debra Paget, she who will sing Fritz Lang three years later, in the Bengali Tiger and the Hindu Tomb (Jean-Claude Biette loved her so much, the beautiful Debra Paget, that he went to see her many times... at the Touquet... )

Debra Paget, Love Me Tender

Debra Paget, The Tiger of Eschnapur

Robert D. Webb, filming Debra Paget and Elvis Presley, isn't Fritz Lang, but the movie rocks well. With Jaihouse Rock and Flaming Star, this is one of the best Presleys. King Creole ain't bad either.

How would Fritz Lang have filmed Presley? Like John Barrymore Jr, the "lipstick killer" in While the City Sleeps, filmed in 1956, the same year as Love Me Tender?

John Barrymore Jr, While the City Sleeps

Or like Marilyn Monroe, filmed four years earlier in Clash by Night?

Marilyn Monroe, Clash by Night

I would have loved to see that for sure.

Finally, above is Elvis and young Skorecki in a photo that is not part of my original ten or twelve photos. It's colorised (Elvis wasn't wearing a red sweatshirt that day) but it's very well done (see details of the original Loving You cover, very true to the original vinyl...)

I discovered this anonymous photo, by a stroke of luck, almost twenty years ago, a beautiful book in a PRESLEY/THE FIFTIES box. I'll never know who took it...

*******

Editors note: I first discovered the writings of Louis Skorecki when I stayed in Paris for awhile long, long ago in 2004. His daily column in Liberation was a highlight of each morning. Now he regularly posts on his Facebook page and shares these thoughts, translated into English, on the Facebook page Friends Who Like a Fuller Life. I hope I might publish more of Skorecki's wonderful mini-essays.