I Live For A Living.

Another day, another ex-Cahiers du Cinema writer, Nouvelle Vague founder member. While we've played around with Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, today we're touching on someone often thought of as the ultimate father of the movement, Claude Chabrol (this is an extremely arguable claim, by the way, but we're not here to discuss history. In fact, we're not even going to look at one of his films from the period in question, instead drifting back merely three years to 2007.)

The Girl Cut In Two stars two young actors who have only recently appeared on this blog, Ludivine Sagnier (in Swimming Pool) and Benoît Magimel (from The Piano Teacher.) Sagnier plays Gabrielle, a television weather reporter and the object of the affections of both celebrated older author Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand) and young playboy Paul (Magimel.) Charles is a bit of a whore, married to one woman, seeing Gabrielle on the side, going to a variety of sex clubs. Paul is a bit of a pig, not doing anything with his life except relying on the fortune he is set to inherit, arrogant and cocksure. Gabrielle is in the middle, flattered by both attentions, though the one she really wants is Charles. Charles, however, once he has her, uses her as a pawn in his game before discarding her, unwilling to bring her into his life when he is otherwise perfectly happily married. Paul, meanwhile, won't give up, begging for her hand, promising the world. But this love for Gabrielle, or desire, or whatever, doesn't end in happiness for either Paul, Charles or the beautiful Gabrielle.


It's a nice film, albeit somewhat bland. It doesn't feel anywhere near as exciting as I feel it could, coming from someone with the pedigree of Chabrol. It was feels quite run of the mill for the most part, bolstered by strong performances from the leads that are nonetheless playing somewhat distant and dislikable characters, quite alienating the viewer from the emotions of the characters - in fact, other than a period of Gabrielle's devastation, it is damned hard to see any real emotion from the characters. Even Paul, who seems to wear his heart on his sleeve, often seems insincere, as though he has ulterior motives - which wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.


This isn't to say it's a bad film. It is quite entertaining to watch, the film compels your attention and keeps moving forwards. It's just a bit average, a bit run of the mill. There isn't anything here that particularly grabs your attention and emotion. It spends a perfectly pleasant couple of hours in front of you and then disappears again. 2.5 stars.

Pianos & Porn.

Have I mentioned today how much I love Isabelle Huppert? No? Well there is no time like the present. And combine Huppert with Michael Haneke - glory.


The Piano Teacher (or La Pianiste) obviously clicked, with the Cannes jury at least - Huppert won Best Actress (her second such recognition from the festival), her costar Benoît Magimel won Best Actor and Haneke won the Grand Jury Prize. Based on Elfriede Jelinek's novel, the film centres around the horrifyingly sexually repressed piano teacher Erika (Huppert) and her relationship... well, with the world around her, manifested in a gifted pupil Walter (Magimel.) Erika, in her forties, lives at home with her mother, even sharing a room. She frequents video rooms in sex shops, even sniffing discarded cum-soaked tissues as she watches. She cuts her genitals while sitting on the edge of the bath, right before dinner. And she is cruel and hard with her students.


She meets Walter, who falls for her cold distance due to her talent with the piano, and some glimmer of humanity and weakness he is able to discern within her. What he doesn't realise, however, is the twisted sadomasochism that takes the form of that weakness. Despite her attempts to distance him, Erika finds herself drawn into some sort of relationship, of sorts, with him, which sees her make public her desires for the first time, much to the horror of Walter. It is only later, when her dreams come true, that she realises how unpleasant they really are.


Huppert is extraordinary. She is always extraordinary, but here... here she is something else. She is so incredibly there, within this horrid creature that she plays, but managing to imbue Erika with the frailty of her own fear and shame. Rather than hating her tormenting ways, from the get-go you feel sorry for whatever has driven our protagonist to this point in her life.


Magimel does a fine job opposite Huppert as the young, beautiful, precocious but ultimately arrogant and unaware student of music. He was good, though whether I'd plant him as the best of the fest I don't know. Having said that, I can't actually be bothered looking up who else was in contention, so we'll let him have it, shall we?


Haneke does his twisted thing so well, and he does it again beautifully here. Erika is a tough cookie, very mean and dark and often shocking, but Haneke, of course, doesn't ever flinch away from showing her, from emoting with her and discovering empathy for her. He's not afraid to open the door to each of our hearts and remind us that, somewhere inside, we are all as desperate as she is. Cinematographer Cristian Berger shoots the film coldly and clinically to match the leading character, the first collaboration between Haneke and Berger before Hidden and The White Ribbon.


Riveting, striking and quite shocking, The Piano Teacher is high on my list of favs of the last decade. Haneke is pretty damn good, and Huppert is pretty damn amazing. 5 stars.

Haneke Love?

I haven't made much of a secret about the fact that I quite like Michael Haneke (see here and here), and it was with a great deal of expectation that I chugged myself off to see his latest The White Ribbon, thrilled to find that it was still playing in cinemas after I somehow managed to completely miss the fact that it released, oh, four months or so ago, despite the fact that I've been hanging out for it since it won the Palme d'Or back in May last year, beating A Prophet down to the Grand Prix (which has got to be one of my favourite films of my hundred odd so far in this marathon.)

The White Ribbon takes place in a small German town in the lead up to the outbreak of WWI. It's quite a difficult film to describe the plot of without either giving too much away, or becoming incredibly verbose. It is effectively a microcosm of society and humanity - there are powerful beings who show heart, innocent beings who (perhaps) show malice, death, love, destruction, hope and sorrow. A pastor is cruel to his children. A baron show sympathy for someone who destroys his crop. A doctor molests his daughter and abuses his mistress. But, in true Haneke style, they all have opposing forces of good or evil playing out within them. And the narrative is plagued by strange, dangerous things happening - a wire strung between trees tripping the doctor's horse as he rides home; the baron's son being strung up and tortured; the pastor's pet bird being impaled. Is it the children?


The film is black and white, shot by Christian Berger, who also lensed Hidden and The Piano Teacher and picked up an Oscar nomination and just took home the ACS award for his work. While much of the work is great, I thought the fact that it was shot colour and then monochromed in post detrimentally affected the quality of the visual tone - the blacks seemed a little brown, the shadows not as sharp as I really think they should have been. I've done this before myself, and I have never thought it looks as good as when you shoot it black and white, so I'm actually a little puzzled as to all the notice... and I should note that I only found out that it was shot colour after making this opinion of the look, so it's not a situation where I went into the film with my opinion coloured (boom boom.)


The acting was fairly fantastic from all of the cast, especially the children, many of whom were quite young. Haneke kept them all in check, reigning them in to fit the familial and social sensibility of the day - emotional externalisation wasn't really the norm in the early 1910s. 


But still... I actually thought when I emerged from the darkened theatre that something might have gone over my head, maybe I don't know enough about European history at the time and there was some important subtext that I didn't understand. This may be the case, or I might not have been paying enough attention to the subtleties, or I might actually just be stupid. But I'm familiar with Haneke's work - maybe that was it. I know I was waiting for something confronting, a shocking scene, that never quite came, and this may have tempered my ability to be overly confronted by what was going on bit by bit, which in retrospect is quite full on.


Actually, writing this now, I really want to see the film again. I'm going to give it 3.5 stars for now, because that's where I'm hovering, but when it hits DVD I'll check it out and maybe my opinion will change. Today, though, I'm hoping for an Audiard win for The Prophet on Sunday, though apparently the smart money is on Argentinean entry The Secret In Their Eyes, which I have not yet seen.

If Only...

Nanni Moretti is a fairly major name in Italian cinema, known as an actor, producer, director and writer, who has starred in many of his own films (something that often frustrates me...) I must confess I only had a passing knowledge of his name prior to a couple of months ago, and The Son's Room (La Stanza Del Figlio) is, I'm pretty sure, the only film I have seen either featuring him or made by him. As such, there is a distinct possibility that my appreciation of his performance in this film is not tempered by having seen him in other films, especially his own, something that I think affects my appreciation of the performances of other actor/directors such as Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood.

The Son's Room is about Giovanni (Moretti), and his reaction to the sudden, unexpected death of his son Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice.) Giovanni is a psychiatrist, seemingly well off, with a beautiful wife Paola (Laura Morante) and two children, Andrea and Irene (Jasmine Trinca.) Andrea is in some trouble at school, but it isn't really that bad, while Giovanni has some difficult patients, one of whom calls him out on a Sunday. On his return he is informed that Andrea had died unexpectedly in a diving accident whilst he was with his patient.


Giovanni, naturally, doesn't take it well. Paola is devastated, while Irene seems to be disocciating and trying to hold the family unit together, but Giovanni is blaming himself and the patient who drew him away from his family on that Sunday. He imagines what the day may have entailed should he have said no to this patient, and they are all happy endings - running with his son, enjoying an ice cream, just generally keeping him away from the sea. He quickly goes back to work and proves particularly unable to deal with his patients problems - to him they all seem so trivial and pathetic when he is dealing with the loss of someone so dear to him, and his passion is now gone. With his son gone and his lust for his work gone, his wife a mess and his daughter struggling to hold it all together, he seems destined for a tragic spiral toward the bottom.


A letter appears from a girl called Arianna (Sofia Vigliar), a love letter. Andrea and Arianna had crossed over for a day at a camp a few months earlier, and she does not know about his death. When she arrives at the family door, at the behest of Paola, things begin to come back together for the family as they take a quick trip to the French border to drop hitchhiking Arianna and her friend off.


The Son's Room is a beautiful little portrait of loss and hope, of dreams and reality. It in no way overextends itself, content to dwell on the immediate reactions and responses of the three remaining family members, all to eager to cling to the well of discovery offered reluctantly by Arianna. With the exception of the patients Giovanni is seeing, the characterisations and performances are subtle and underplayed, and in some ways the hysteria of his patients is a soothing antidote to this - they're in a way offering up the illogical thoughts and grief that the family, particularly Giovanni and Irene, aren't as willing, or perhaps aren't able, to show. Yes, the patients are very stereotypical crazies, but as facets of Giovanni there is no other way to portray them.


The film won the Palme d'Or in 2001 over such films as Moulin Rouge!, Mulholland Drive and La Pianiste (and Shrek! Shrek was up for the Palme d'Or!), as well as many other lesser known titles, and I'm not about to come out and say it was more deserving than any one of them - though how often does the Palme d'Or go to a film that seems to have the general opinion behind it? I will say it is a solid character study, a well-crafted film about a moment and how that can affect people within a short space of time. Flashes of unexpected human beauty come through with Giovanni's imaginings of what could have been, and they are truly beautiful. Simple, but, strangely, lovely. 4 stars.

The Best?

Hidden (or Caché) has been popping up on Best Of the '00s lists since they first started appearing a couple of months back - it topped the UK Times list, as you may remember.

Do I think it's the best film of the last ten years? No. Don't get me wrong, it is a damn good film. But I don't even think it's Michael Haneke's best film of the '00s (that would be The Piano Teacher, or La Pianiste - and how obstreperous can I be? That's three posts in a row where I've disagreed with a widely held view as to a director's best film. Geez, get a grip. All this railing against the mainstream mould ain't gonna get you nowhere.)

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche star (and much love is sent from me to both their fabulous souls) in another very grown-up thriller, each of them offering up riveting portrayals of their own half of a couple beset by fear of... what, exactly, we're not entirely sure. Auteuil plays Georges Laurent, a television presenter, with Binoche playing his wife Anne. They begin to receive strange videos, left on their doorstep, showing simply them. The first, for example, is a shot of the outside of their house, filmed for a couple of hours, showing nothing much more than the activity on the street, and the Laurent's leaving the house to go to work. That's it.

Gradually, however, the videos start probing in Georges' life. Into his past. They go to the police, but the police say they can't do anything until this person actually tries to do something to them, physically. So the two (and their grumpy teenage son) are left struggling to come to terms with a stalker who may or may not be dangerous, with no idea how to make it stop. Georges ends up stumbling on a theory after one of the videos, but his explorations of the possibility ends in tragedy, in one of the most powerful scenes I've seen in a while. The films ends, but leaves you wondering if it really has.

Hidden is a truly gripping film. It holds you in its beautiful framing and perfect tension without issue. The two magnetic and very talented stars keep you fearful and caring. Nary a foot is put wrong. And I don't really want to talk much more about it, because I don't want to start giving things away - I already fear I have let on too much. 4.5 stars.