DVD: Reinventing Marvin

Moving from raw to mannered, partial Edouard Louis adaptation only partly convinces

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.Reinventing MarvinFontaine 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

Faces Places review - Agnès Varda's enchanted journey

★★★★★ FACES PLACES Agnès Varda journeys through her homeland with photographer JR

With photographer JR, the great French documentarist travels through her homeland

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.Faces PlacesIt’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.Faces PlacesBy 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

DVD/Blu-ray: Redoubtable

The trouble with Jean-Luc... Michel Hazanavicius’ mischievous riff on Godard and 1968

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.RedoubtableThese 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

The Guardians review - beautifully crafted drama

★★★★ THE GUARDIANS French release offers an artful look at farming during World War One

French release offers an artful look at farming during World War One

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.

Blu-ray: La Belle et la bête

Iconic, influential cinematic fairytale, perfect for children of all ages

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.

DVD/Blu-ray: Let the Sunshine In

★★★ DVD: LET THE SUNSHINE IN Claire Denis directs Juliette Binoche in a quest for the right man

Slim pickings in Paris: Claire Denis directs Juliette Binoche in a quest for the right man

Un beau soleil intérieur, the film’s French title, is part of a piece of advice given by a clairvoyant (Gérard Depardieu, in a surprise 15-minute cameo at the end of the movie). Try to find the beautiful sun within, he tells Isabelle (a glowing Juliette Binoche) and be “open” (he uses the English word). His huge, dented face seems to take up most of the screen.

Michel Hazanavicius: 'Losing himself is how he found himself'

INTERVIEW: MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS ON GODARD 'Losing himself is how he found himself'

The Oscar-winning director's new film, 'Redoubtable', charts the turning point in the life and career of the legendary Jean-Luc Godard

French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth.

Revenge - a blood-soaked joy

★★★★ REVENGE Never have desert landscapes and graphic self-surgery looked so good

Never have desert landscapes and graphic self-surgery looked so good

Deep in an unnamed desert, a violent and psychedelic retribution is sought. The aptly named Revenge is a brutally rewarding experience, bringing classic horror and exploitation tropes kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Juliette Binoche: ‘Repetition feels like near death’

JULIETTE BINOCHE INTERVIEW ‘Repetition feels like near death’

The star of Let the Sunshine In talks about love, psychics, her first collaboration with Claire Denis and calling Depardieu on his bad manners

It’s about time Juliette Binoche and Claire Denis teamed up: the legendary French actress, Gallic film royalty known by her countrymen and women as La Binoche, with one of the country’s most unique directors, both talented and formidable women who have very much forged their own paths in the cutthroat world of the film industry.

Just like waiting for a bus, there are now two collaborations between them, made in quick succession: the second, a science fiction co-starring Robert Pattinson, is in post-production. The Arts Desk met Binoche in Paris to speak about the first.

Let the Sunshine In has the ring of schmaltzy romcom or some feel-good, self-help musical; it hardly bodes well. And yet this is Denis (pictured below), whose work – Chocolat, Beau Travail, White Material, 35 Shots of Rum, the aptly named Bastards – doesn’t dabble in popcorn frivolity, but tangible, often painful reality; even her vampire film Trouble Every Day had the disturbing stench of believability.

Thus the new film, which involves a middle-aged, divorced artist, Isabelle (Binoche), and her desperate search for ‘one real love’. Through the course of the movie she considers numerous suitors, each clearly unsuitable, at least two of them married, Isabelle throwing her heart, soul and body at them, with humiliation and disappointment the reward. Though she has a 10-year-old daughter, we see the girl onscreen just once, as she’s driven away by her father. Isabelle’s focus is herself and her fear that her love life is behind her; and for someone who is seemingly successful and intelligent, and old enough to know better, she’s rather foolish about it all.

With its romantic theme, Let the Sunshine In is closest to Denis’ Vendredi Soir, an offbeat, touching love story involving a man and a woman who meet in a traffic jam. But the new film is edgier, more pessimistic and, actually, funnier. Denis has co-written the script with the French author Christine Angot, and the pair are so on the money in their characterisations and situations that the result is variously sad, discomforting and enjoyably ridiculous, with Isabelle and her amours equal targets; the writers also shoot a few well-aimed arrows at the pomposity of the Parisian art world.Denis has surrounded her star with some accomplished male foils, not least Gérard Depardieu as a clairvoyant to whom Isabelle turns in the film’s wondrously bonkers final scene. This is another first, since the pair haven’t acted together before, the encounter lent added spice by the knowledge of Depardieu’s unsolicited criticism of Binoche in 2010, when he told a journalist: “I would really like to know why she has been so esteemed for so many years. She has nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

She shows plenty opposite him, but that’s no surprise. And this is Binoche’s show. Gaudily dressed in mini-skirt and leather boots, her make up overdone, invariably on the verge of welling up, her Isabelle teeters on the edge of nonsense. Yet Binoche also reveals shards of integrity, intelligence, passion and some self-deprecating humour in her character. Despite her spectacular signature laugh, the actress has done relatively little comedy, though this confirms a gift for it.

The suggestion is of a full-blooded individual thrown off-kilter by romantic panic. It’s a raw, real, winning performance, in an off-beat, female-centred film, talky in that way that many failing relationships are, and speaking quite boldly about the problems that women of a certain age may have to find love, or at least a half-decent male companion.DEMETRIOS MATHEOU: What attracted you to this?

JULIETTE BINOCHE: I know something about the difficulty of love. I was touched by the writing, because it's rare to have a script that is so well-written, which feels real. And it was my first time with Claire Denis. To have the complicity of those two women, Claire and Christine, putting together those fragments of love, was very appealing.

But we didn't know it was going to be that funny. When I saw the film the first time people were laughing a lot, and I was laughing as well. The second time I saw it I was crying. The film can be taken very differently. It depends how you feel, what kind of distance you have. 

Why do you think the character is so unlucky in love? 

I think she's trying to find a solution outside of herself, for her lack of love, her need, which is what we all tend to do. What I've learned going through life is that you've got to find some place in you that is at peace, first, in order to then attempt a relationship. But it takes courage. And it takes time also. 

I don't believe that suddenly everything is resolved because you're in a couple. When I was a young lover I thought you really had to meet your alter ego, the other part of yourself. Now I don't think that exists. True love, the one that stays forever, is in you. It takes a while to understand that. That's why you suffer so much. When you're not expecting everything from the other person, then I think that things can happen, in a different way.

The film also touches on the way that social differences can affect relationships.

That's a big question, and not an easy one. Can love survive social differences? It’s  a very important subject to the writer, Christine. She had been through that kind of situation. So what she writes about it is very explored, lived, and I felt that in the writing. For the man who I meet when dancing, Claire decided to cast Paul Blaine, because he was more fragile in a way, and that was very intelligent. I felt the difference somehow. It brings something special to the film.

What did you bring of yourself to this character? 

Everything. 

The film ends with Depardieu’s clairvoyant (pictured below) Have you ever looked for those kinds of answers? 

I've been to a psychic, in my twenties especially. I understand the thirst for it, wanting to know the truth. When you're hesitating about something or someone, you think it's going to help you. It does help in a way, if it defines what you're feeling already, but I find it dangerous, because anybody can tell you anything and then you go for it. It's all crazy, I think. Your belief system, that's what's most important. You need to trust your intuition. Did Depardieu apologise by the way, for his criticism of you? Any humble pie on the set?

No. But I didn't need an apology. Actually three months after his declaration I saw him by accident in the street. I went to him and I took him in my arms and I said ‘Gerard why are you so mean to me? What have I done to you?’ And he said 'No, no, no, I'm saying stupid things, don't believe them.’

He then said, ‘I'm fed up that you're working with perverse directors’. I asked him who he was talking about. And he said, ‘Well, Leos Carax and Haneke’. But then he said that [Haneke's] The White Ribbon is actually a good film. After we separated I thought, ‘Well he's made films with Pialat, he's made films with Blier! I think he was just caught out by meeting me like that.

You know, the first time I ever went on a film set it was Danton [which starred Depardieu, in 1983]. I was just 18, still in high school. A friend of my father's was working on the film and invited me to watch the shooting. I was excited. And Gerard came to me, very open, and he said ‘What are you doing here?’ I said I was to be an actress. He said, ‘Work on your classics’. He was very cute and generous. So when suddenly years later his declaration happened, I was shocked. 

So many of the scenes in the film feel raw, immediate. Did you try different ways of playing them?

No, because we didn't have a lot of time. We shot the film in five weeks. Very quick. Even the Depardieu scene is one day. So I had to make sure that I knew my text. Then you just throw yourself into the scene.

How did you find the experience of working with Claire Denis?

It was beautiful. It was like watching a painter. It was not always the logical way, she would go one frame, one shot at a time, working in steps, more than having the general idea of it and knowing exactly which shot she wanted. It was moment to moment, which I liked. I was learning by seeing her see.

Also she has such respect for human beings. She loved all the characters. There was no hierarchy, it was a very moving way of going through a film. 

And you’re working with her again? 

Yeah, in one year we've made two films together. That’s never happened to me. Science fiction. Nine actors in this space, coming from very different places. It was exciting.

Is there a different spirit on set when working with a female director? 

I've never really felt that, because you work with the sensibility and the intelligence of someone. The complicity is not sexual. There's a seduction that's happening between the actors and director, but the seduction has to do with the fact that we need to create this fire between us, so that we can go into the work together, see if we need another take, never losing time.You’ve been working now for some 30 years. How do you stay challenged or engaged?

I’m always trying to find something new, that I’ve never done before. Repetition feels like near death. Creation is about the new. Something is going to happen but you don't know what. So you're moving towards that moment. 

Life gives me things, I say yes or no. Or I create encounters. Abbas Kiarostami [Certified Copy, pictured above] and Bruno Dumont [Camille Claudel 1915, Slack Bay] were directors I was dreaming about working with – so you have to pick up the phone or go to that person and say it. Sometimes it's that’s simple.

So what was the challenge in this film?

I think it was the writing, because it was already there, I just had to put my hand in the glove. That was a new kind of situation for me. Most of the time we are really trying hard as actors because the writing, the script is not precise. But with Christine it's been felt, it's been lived.

When a script is not well written it's usually because it comes out of the head and not out of experience, and you really feel it when you’re acting and learning the lines. But on this one I felt lifted by the writing, and by the actors. 

You’ve done nudity before, but not often, and this film goes straight into a long nude scene. Are you ever comfortable with such scenes?

You kidding me, I'm fucking scared! But I'm doing it. I think you've got to go into your fear, that's the challenge of it. So you can learn something from it, and change the fear eventually. Singing is very frightening to me, because I’m not a singer, and I’ve discovered how to put emotion into the singing. And the same with dance. But I'm frightened like anybody. 

  • Let the Sunshine In is released in cinemas on 20 April

@dem2112

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Let the Sunshine In

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