Robert Guediguian has spoken of the influence of Chekhov on The House by the Sea (Le Villa), and the shadow of the Russian dramatist, particularly The Cherry Orchard, can certainly be felt in the French director’s latest film, his 20th in a career that stretches back now some four decades.
I met Agnès Varda, who died today aged 90, just once, for the interview that’s reproduced below. It was in Paris in January 2018, shortly before the Belgian-born filmmaker was to become the oldest Oscar nominee in history, for the wonderful documentary Faces, Places. The encounter felt like a lucky break – blessed exposure to an icon and one of the most grounded and delightful inspirations one could imagine.
This is a love that begins sweetly, turns terrible, and is told with unflinching directness. Directed by Catherine Corsini, An Impossible Love is based on a novel by Christine Angot (known in France, and increasingly elsewhere, for her powerful autobiographical fiction), which is in turn based on Angot’s own troubling early life and family experiences.
Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop (L’Atelier) is something of a puzzle. There’s a fair deal that recalls his marvellous 2009 Palme d’Or winner The Class, including a young, unprofessional cast playing with considerable accomplishment, but the magic isn’t quite the same. And the film’s interest in a social issue, how the young and disaffected come to be engaged with far-right politics, remains an adjunct to a story that becomes finally more involved with itself.
As in The Class, Cantet (together with his co-writer for both films, Robin Campillo) has developed his story around a strong sense of location – in this case, the port of La Ciotat near Marseille, once a centre of shipbuilding, then a beacon of industrial action, now rather a backwater of industrial decline – as well as through the theme of education. His teen protagonists here have been chosen (for reasons we never quite discover) to take part in a summer writer’s workshop with a Paris novelist, Olivia (Marina Foïs), whose speciality seems to be psychological thrillers that pull no punches. The loose idea of the course is that they will develop, together, a story that draws equally on their own preoccupations and those of their milieu.
His discontent seems much more existential - think, Camus - than social
It looks as much like an exercise in bonding as anything else, and the dynamics of (mixed-race) interrelationship between its participants quickly comes to the fore – or rather, how one of them, the loner Antoine (Matthieu Lucci, outstanding; with Marina Foïs, pictured below), becomes increasingly a disruptive force, his contributions to the gestating shared narrative dominated by violence. His discontent seems much more existential – think, Camus – than social (there’s little sense of deprivation in his home environment), while Cantet’s narrative reveals his affiliations, through older friends, with movements close to radical (white) disaffection.
The balance of the story gradually changes. Instead of guiding the wider path of her students’ investigations, Olivia becomes increasingly caught up in herself following Antoine’s solitary world, and trailing the traces he has left behind on the Internet. She can explain such interest by treating it nominally as research for a future book, but Cantet plants at least a germ of suspicion about an unsettling furtive sexuality lurking around this otherwise rather abstract connection. In turn, Antoine develops his own obsession with her, which leads to a last act that unsatisfactorily leaves behind any psychological tension achieved to date in favour a full-blown thriller-style denouement. It may engross, but we’re left with a sense that our attention has been grasped by the rote of genre rather than anything more subtle.
That’s certainly where it departs from The Class, though Cantet’s new film certainly develops his earlier concept that exploring ideas – as envisaged in the group’s shared development of its story – can be as engrossing as any more traditional sense of encounter. Even here, that potential never vanishes entirely: Antoine’s final appearance among his fellows has him delivering a stunning verbal assault every bit as lacerating as any other more direct attack could be.
As its title suggests, The Workshop presupposes a process of development, the result spontaneous rather than predetermined. It feels as if Cantet has stirred together various aspects that have been important in his previous work – an element of social realism, a subject and script explored through extensive “workshop” development with his young collaborators, even the agile handheld cinematography of Pierre Milon (who also shot The Class) – and rather drawn a blank. On occasions, the tensions between his teenage characters are real, as if the experiment is working; then, with a closing scene that steps into a different, entirely conventional retrospective register entirely, Cantet seems to have wrung his hands, and admitted that this pursuit of the dividing line between fiction and reality has been absorbed within its own contradictions. Intermittently interesting, finally a disappointment.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Workshop
You have to turn to the brief interview with director Anne Fontaine that is the sole extra on this DVD release to discover the real source of her film Reinventing Marvin. Though Fontaine and Pierre Trividic’s screenplay is credited as original, it draws heavily – Fontaine calls it a “free interpretation” – on Edouard Louis’s bestselling 2014 autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, which told the story of his growing up in the French provinces in an environment profoundly hostile to his emerging gay identity.
It’s an undeniably powerful picture of a youthful outsider, one for whom lack of understanding at home, in an unsympathetic working-class family, proved almost as cruel as the school bullying that his sexuality evoked. But Louis offered no clue as to how he came to escape a world that could so easily have trapped him, no suggestion of the process – and, crucially, who helped along the way – that saw him evolve into who he is today, with a confidence that was able to overcome such beginnings. In other words, just how the “reinvention” alluded to in the film’s title actually took place.
Fontaine has filled in that gap by positing an imagined concept that the Louis figure, here named Marvin Bijou – the awkwardness of that surname, translated as “Jewels”, seems horribly ironic for a context that is anything but sparkling – found his path out of that desolate early milieu through theatre. Early encouragement from a sympathetic schoolteacher is fortuitously followed by engagement with an intuitive stage director-coach, who draws Marvin both out of himself and into the Parisian gay scene. Never entirely losing his shyness, his involvement in that culture grows, encouraged by a largely benevolent sugar daddy figure who moves in circles of which the youth could once barely have dreamed.
With the film’s action framed by the young man’s development of his life story into a stage script, this unlikely dream narrative is completed by acquaintance with Isabelle Huppert, no less, who plays herself (pictured above, Huppert with Finnegan Oldfield). What else remains but to put on a show with her that will bring him fame, as well as a chance to revisit, and in some way make peace with, those childhood roots? There’s barely a cliché of the well-trodden “self-realisation through art” formula left untouched, with the gradual childhood absorption of the young Marvin (an absolutely winning performance from Jules Porier, main picture) in the challenges of his chosen artistic path familiar from the likes of Billy Elliot.
Huppert plays beneficent with her customary aplomb
But Fontaine's story seems somehow to predicate the world of her grown-up protagonist; he later changes his name to Martin, adopting the surname of that first supportive teacher, too. Finnegan Oldfield is undeniably attractive in that role, but aesthetic engagement comes to dominate over emotional involvement as the story progresses. Fontaine talks of needing to find actors who could “fit with each other”, and there is indeed an almost uncanny echo between the shape of their faces, especially evident in a shyness around the mouth, of the two; she cast Oldfield first, but the essential presence here is surely Porier, who brings an absolute, open-eyed freshness – one that can be almost agonising to witness – to the world that he negotiates with such difficulty. Reinventing Marvin hits home when dealing with the pain and awkwardness of its early scenes, far more than the mannered direction, rather overstretched at 115 minutes, which it takes later en route to a rather portentous finale.
It may be a story about a kind of redemption, but those childhood scenes remain more memorable, albeit in an almost gruesome way, than anything that follows. Gregory Gadebois is tremendous as Marvin’s indolent, overweight father, who oversees his hapless prolo household with alcoholic brusquerie, a characterisation that leaves us to question the film’s suggested resolutions. Vincent Macaigne, attractively sympathetic as the youth's drama teacher Abel, is never more convincing than when he’s disabusing his moping protégé about the lasting interest of his incarnation as “tormented working-class fag”. Huppert plays beneficent with her customary aplomb, even as we wonder whether she would be moving in these circles in the first place.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Reinventing Marvin
On the eve of her tenth decade, the marvellous Agnès Varda embarked on the enchanted journey that we see in Faces Places. For admirers of the great French director – of whom there are a great many: indeed, it is hard not to be won over by her resolutely independent, profoundly humanistic substance and style – its spirit will recall her two earlier documentary films of the century, The Gleaners & I (2000) and the more autobiographical The Beaches of Agnès (2008), though the mélange between personal and social is here complete. This is a journey that celebrates a life richly lived as well as the human interaction, the delight in the sheer richness of humanity, that has always been inseparable from that existence.
The difference from those previous films is that in Faces Places Varda does not travel alone, her companion here the vivacious photographer JR, a half century her junior: she has seen “88 springtimes”, he is 33. (Quite how they met is shrouded in a whimsical series of opening episodes charting how they didn't meet, including an irresistible disco scene with the veteran Varda gamely bopping the dance floor.) JR’s speciality is large-scale photo portraiture, created in the most democratic style possible: he drives a special photo-camion, designed to resemble a camera, complete with photo booth and equipment which produces, directly out of the side of the truck, huge prints for pasting on walls,. Or any other suitable surface, since his speciality (aided by a team of assistants) is plastering his images – which can be anything up to ten times human scale – on anything, from gasometers to train wagons. Portraits in landscape, as never before.
It’s their shared interest in their subjects – hardly the right word, when collaboration is so close – that makes this pairing ideal; these are not artists working on their own, but creators of events. “To meet new faces,” is how Varda expresses the resolve behind their road trip, its destinations better caught by the film’s French title, Visages Villages. No big city monotony here, rather an exploration of rural France, its singularities and personalities relished to the full.
Was there a guiding concept behind their journey, as they travel from the declining mining communities of the North to the villages of the South, where a sense of profound permanence seems to reign? Hard to say, when chance (“We enlist it as an assistant!”) so clearly played a role. In each location, JR and his team create small monuments to individuality, putting the sitters in a spotlight that nevertheless seems a natural part of their environment: they range from Jeanine, the last remaining resident in a whole row of miners’ dwellings (pictured above), through portraits of the wives of three Le Havre dockers that are emblazoned, almost 100 meters in height, across the sides of shipping containers, to the collectif of a Provence chemical factory (pictured below, with Varda and JR).
Change is a recurring motif, a level of dehumanisation noted in working life
That last detail brings home that the Varda-JR tandem does not consciously seek out any sort of rustic idyll; modernity is a natural element in these worlds, even if politics remains distant (notwithstanding any reflections we may have that some of the communities visited would surely have voted for Le Pen). And change is a recurring motif, a level of dehumanisation noted in working life: where once whole communities would have brought in the harvest, now a single farmer attends to 2,000 acres on his own, sitting atop a tractor/harvester that is fully controlled by computer.
“What is the subject, actually?” Varda muses at one point. For her, perhaps, it is in the conviction that whatever activity a human being may engage with, it should not dwarf the humanity of the individual(s) involved. Faces Places teaches us quite a lot on matters caprine, including that today’s goats often have their horns removed (burnt away, or “disbudded”, at an early age). That’s ostensibly to reduce damage when they fight, but Varda is affronted: how she rejoices when she finds a smallholder who resists all that, a place where milking by hand rather than machine is seen as the natural process. To treat someone or something as mere “product” is the worst thing of all.
By loose extension, art becomes a catalyst that can transform the everyday. Asked by one railwayman why JR has pasted images of Varda’s eyes (and toes, too) onto the sides of chemical-storage train tankers, she replies that it is to endorse the “power of imagination”. We may perhaps wonder whether there is nevertheless an elitist concept involved somewhere, in this conscious idea that “art is for everyone”, especially when promulgated by France’s generous funding regime. But Varda’s film brings home how that can never be the case when everyone is involved (the film’s crowdfunding element is surely as appropriate here as the concept has ever been).
Faces Places is also a picaresque story of bonding between two individuals, their symbiosis of engagement with those whom they encounter reinforced by the gentlest of teasing. Both look with such curiosity at the world around them, that issue of vision associated both with Agnès’s failing sight and JR’s reluctance to take off his dark glasses. That latter strand harks back naturally to Varda’s 1961 burlesque film-within-a-film, Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires (Beware of dark glasses), in which Jean-Luc Godard, no less, starred with a Keatonesque charm, a quality singularly lacking in his behaviour in the final scene of Faces Places. It proves a rare moment of sadness in a work where these two presences, perfectly accompanied by Matthieu Chedid’s string score, are so entrancingly life-affirming. If ever a film could promise you une bonne journée, it’s Faces Places.
Overleaf: watch the preview for Faces Places
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting precisely those films that most of the rest of us delight in, the ones from the first decade or so of his career. From his debut Breathless in 1960, through the likes of Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou – what an astonishingly prolific time it was for him – they practically constitute a roll call of the Nouvelle Vague.
Hazanavicius logs into the action in 1967, with the director (played by Louis Garrel) finishing La Chinoise with Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin). It was the year of their marriage, the two decades that separated the couple in age – she was still a student, but had already starred in his Weekend, too – proving no barrier to their love. Hazanavicius based his script on Wiazemsky’s roman à clef recollection of the period, Un an après, though he is on record that he emphasised the adaptation’s elements of comedy (something that Wiazemsky, then at the end of her life, was apparently very happy about).
La Chinoise did not go down well with audiences – we see walk-outs and napping at its premiere – while the screening at the Chinese embassy was even worse: expecting to be received with open arms by the Maoists with whom Godard was becoming increasingly involved, it was rejected as a “piece of shit”. But with the Evènements of May 1968 underway, politics was coming out onto the streets of Paris and into the lecture halls of the Sorbonne.
These are big set pieces that are beautifully recreated here. Godard's presence at the street protests is ironically marked by the recurring joke of how he breaks his glasses over and over again in the demonstrations (a nice late line in Stacy Martin’s voice-over suggests that it was the rising optician costs that finally stopped him joining them). More significantly, he was rejected by the student protestors, not least for arguing, in relation to Palestine, that the “Jews are the new Nazis” (plus ça change...). Intent on changing his creative direction, Godard was flummoxed by people coming up to him to ask why he wasn’t making movies like Breathless anymore (even a policeman, after a fracas, confesses how much he loved Contempt).
Losing his sense of humour in parallel with the lightness of that earlier work, Godard becomes increasingly narcissistic and his contretemps with Anna increase. There's an excursion to the South, during the days when Godard and fellow protestors were instrumental in closing the 1968 Cannes film festival, followed by an extremely well-shot long car journey back to Paris (the social upheaval had produced general strikes and shortages of petrol). Alienating his companions in the crowded vehicle, he argues for the destruction of the oeuvre of his one-time heroes such as John Ford or Fritz Lang, the frame of his previous admirations reduced to the likes of comic Jerry Lee Lewis.
'Redoubtable' has delved deep into Godard’s box of cinematic tricks
Hazanavicius’s film was released in the US with the title Godard Mon Amour, and despite all the mockery of his protagonist, the effect isn’t snide: the stylistic tributes from the director (best known, of course, for that other cinematic homage, The Artist) illustrate that. Redoubtable has delved deep into Godard’s box of cinematic tricks, with numerous citations (the Jean d’Arc moment from Vivre sa vie, for one), games with titles, as well as drops in and out of black-and-white and reversals into negative. There are some smartly ironic script touches – one scene has the two main actors appearing naked as they talk about the purpose of nudity in cinema – while cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman achieves impressive visual pastiche, matching the colour palettes and shots of Raoul Coutard’s 1960s work for Godard to perfection.
There’s considerable sadness in the long final scene. With Anna happily absorbed in the shoot of a Marco Ferreri film, Godard arrives from the set of his latest radical anti-project full of petulant jealousy and self-centred paranoia: the ship that is their marriage – Redoubtable was actually the name of a French nuclear submarine, its appearance in the title an increasingly ironic commentary to the developing action – scuttles to the accompaniment of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. There's a final coda that glimpses Godard engaged in the strictly collective group-management cinema of his Dziga Vertov Group phase. Dead, dead, dead...
The playing of the lead couple is supremely accomplished, Garrel growing increasingly ruffled and sulky as Martin blooms. They both feature with Hazanavicius (along with the director’s wife Bérénice Bejo, who plays a smaller role here) in the only extra on this release, a 20-minute stage appearance and Q&A at the 2017 London Film Festival. It reveals little, though Garrel, talking about his own scepticism, mixes it up with “septic”. Godard had a self-regard that didn't really admit scepticism, but the poisonous overtones of that second word catch the direction we see him taking in Redoubtable all too aptly.
Overleaf: watch the preview for Redoubtable
A slow tracking shot over the gassed corpses of soldiers, their masks having failed the ecstasy of fumbling, opens The Guardians. This French art house film would perhaps have been better served by the English title The Caretakers; it's closer to the original French meaning and would have made it less likely to be confused with a superhero movie.
Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête had been planned as a slice of wartime escapism, a distraction from the privations of war. The film was also a chance for Cocteau to give his male lead Jean Marais a less overtly sexy role than his fans were used to, though there’s still a lot of smouldering going on, some of it literal.