_Waiting for Someone_; _At Eternity's Gate_
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All on Fri Dec 28 00:03:35 2018
"It was painted by a madman of Old Terra," she said,
bringing her cheek close to his while both looked at
a copy of the painting. "Look at it! An encapsulated
human moment."
In a landscape? Yes, dammit. She was right.
He stared at the holo. Those marvelous colors! It
was not just the colors. It was the totality.
_Chapterhouse: Dune_, excerpted by vggallery.com
_Waiting for Someone_ is director Jerome Bonnell's only effort that
I find slightly disappointing, although the excellent cast keep it
interesting. It has the malaise of a 1990s Canadian indie drama where
all characters are depressed or dying of cancer or dealing with very
somber tragedy. Few of them are particularly fascinating, and the
assumption is that multiplying tragedy of loosely connected characters multiplies the interest.
Needless to say, that is terrible mathematics. But at least Bonnell's
film has Florence Loiret-Caille as the enigmatic prostitute; half the
reviews of this film laud her performance as the main saving grace.
She negotiates the usual problems in her profession -- violence, self- loathing, and a few customers' unrequited love -- with unusual grace
and non-chalance. Loiret-Caille really seems to have reinvented what
could have been a thankless, cliched role.
Unfortunately she mostly serves as protagonist Louis' (Jean-Pierre
Darroussin) elusive object of desire. Halfway through the film, she disappears, refusing to answer calls, and his heartbreak is palpable.
Louis is a divorced, almost bankrupt cafe owner. He is lonely and hits
on any young woman he can gets his hands on. (In modern parlance he is
a serial sexual-harassment offender, especially towards his waitress.)
The scene where he finally finds -- and loses -- Loiret-Caille is the
truly heart-breaking moment in the film. Other than that, Louis' sister (Emmanuelle Davos) has a sexless marriage; she sleeps with an ex-student
who has come back to town to see the kid he has left behind; there is
even a huge dog that has lost its owner. None of these is particularly touching, partly because little is shown about these characters apart from their misfortune, and partly because Bonnell optimistically provides
each with a pat, optimistic end. The too-neat tying up of interconnected vignettes is accomplished by the use Kieslowski-like guardian angel
characters, like the woman with three dogs who show up at opportune times,
or the cafe waitress who drifts in and out of so many scenes to provide continuity. Bonnell's previous film _Le Chignon d'Olga_ manages true
empathy for the entire ensemble cast because all characters feel organic
and have rich inner lives. Here "synthetic" is the operative word. But
at least Loiret-Caille is memorable here, as she is in Bonnell's debut
and in his _Queen of Clubs_. In subsequent efforts Bonnell has wisely
moved beyond ensemble casts. I have now seen every single feature he
has made -- he needs to make more films.
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Speaking of films that do not cohere, Julian Schnabel manages that in _At Eternity's Gate_ despite having van Gogh in every scene. Willem Dafoe is quite eloquent as the painter despite not saying much; his physicality -- painting, running in the fields, climbing vertical rock cliffs, ecstatic communion
with nature -- speaks for him. (The actor, in his 60's, runs around like
the young man of 37 that van Gogh was at his death; a painter's life is incredibly physical, as Jessica Chastain in _Woman Walks Ahead_ demonstrates.)
Those outdoor scenes are moments he is at his most sane, if most antisocial. They are the film's highlights, although Schnabel mars them with an emphatic piano score neither baroque nor modernist; the use of something simple and elegant (like in Bela Tarr's films) would have resonated better. The
sequences here van Gogh interacts with others (Gauguin, his doctors and asylum supervisors, his brother Theo ...) are distractions. At times Dafeo's van
Gogh has the lucidity of a Joan of Arc arguing the fine points of the Gospels with the asylum director. At other times Schnabel loops ongoing conversations so that van Gogh seems to replay in his head words that he and others speak just moments ago. This, plus some muted outbursts, are the extent of the madness afforded the artist. (The ear-slashing occurs off-screen.) The
asylum scenes remind me of _Camille Claudel 1915_, but comparison with
Dumont's rigorous work is not in Schnabel's favor. If _At Eternity's Gaze_'s central thesis is that the painter finds calm only while painting, the filmmaker needs to bestow that clarity and consistency on a subject sorely lacking in both. If the argument is that the Dutch genius' madness is instrumental, is indeed transferred on to the explosive, intensely emotional brushstrokes in his canvas, that point simply doesn't register at all.
Or perhaps the film is really about van Gogh's intimation of "eternity" and destiny. The real Vincent never sold a painting while he was alive. The abuse, discrimination, and harsh critique about his art from the French provincials remind us that distrust of foreigners and outsiders have
existed long before 21st century identity politics. The painter eventually reconciles his obscurity with his belief that his work is for posterity.
(Other artists, as successful as Beethoven and as misunderstood as Schubert, expressed similar views.) Schnabel seems to treat all this with a grain
of salt; the subject of eternity first comes up while van Gogh is painting
a vase full of pink roses, telling a little girl that his images will last
long after her flowers have withered. They do, indeed, but not *that* long: the cheap red pigments the van Gogh used had long since faded, and now
the roses are white! When I visited Boston's Museum of Fine Art for the
first time in 10 years, I found Renoir's famous "Dance At Bougival" badly cracked. Even oil paintings have limited shelf lives without controversial "restorations." Surely someone as well-versed in the art world as Schnabel,
a painter by training, knows this too well.
In general, I do question the polyglot camera work which turns the film
into more of a mess than it needs to be. The aggressive, Dutch-angle
hand-held close-ups used in the beginning; the fish-eye lense and gauzy
filter that obscures the lower frame in the middle; the strange coda at
the end with Paul Gauguin (van Gogh's friend but a far inferior artist)
getting the last words; things just never cohere or make much sense. Ultimately, this seems a film less about van Gogh than about Schnabel. _At Eternity's Gate_ seems a sequel to _Diving Bell and the Butterfly_, which
also deals with someone getting outside of his head. But Vincent van Gogh
was so much more.
(for A.)
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