• _The Souvenir_; _Meteorites_; _Orpheline_

    From septimus3 NA@21:1/5 to All on Fri Mar 27 21:27:28 2020
    "You are lost. And you will always be lost."

    Anthony to Julie, in _The Souvenir_

    I watched Joanna Hoag's on amazon prime which gave me the chance to revisit
    the beginning of this odd, semi-autobiographical film. It starts out so promising, with B&W stills of bleak Sunderland in the North East of England.
    Then the tactile hand-held camera swerve around Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne)
    as she photographs fellow party-goers in 8mm (it must have been the early
    80s). She wants to make a feature film about a boy being unusually attached
    to his mother in Sunderland; the decaying town would be a metaphor for
    the mother, who dies in the end. The story prefigures Julie's own trajectory in the film; lanky and diffident, she would become the "boy" transfixed by Anthony, a "Foreign Service" officer who shares her privileged upbringing
    and taste for decadence (even if they express it so differently). Unlike Julie, he is regally self-assured, and our nice-mannered protagonist sticks with him through his cocaine overdoses and staged robbery of her apartment. First time actress Byrne has the striking tall frame and androgynous look
    of her mother Tilda Swinton but is already a far more naturalistic, yet expressive actress than when Swinton was at that age. Julie wants to find herself through discovering the world. Unlike Anthony, she is brought
    up to be a hand-maiden. Not all of us can be kings and queens.

    As she clings on to the pompous Foreign Service greaseball like an anchor,
    she loses her own way spiritually speaking. This searcher becomes rooted
    to the spot. She abandons her film, stops going to class or watching
    people, turns inwards towards her (un)happiness. Simultaneously the film becomes mannerist, abandoning its initial exhilarating energy and settles
    for static, medium shot compositions. The color palette has always been
    pale but now turns positively bleached. There are no more close-ups.
    It degenerates intp a navel-gazing exercise, distancing in formalism but navel-gazing all the same. The supporting cast are now mere tableaux, decorations for Julie's story. The copious elliptical transitions
    reinforce the sense that neither the film nor the protagonist cares
    about the fate of these "extras" in their perfect period mileau ,
    pontificating in their perfect upper middle class monologues. Such condescension. (Ideally a low-key protagonist should be given shape
    by a debris of loud, colorful characters swirling round his/her eye
    of the storm.) The rest of the film is a pale reflection of its first
    20 minutes.

    But one can applaud the writer-director for honesty and the auto-critique
    (the naivety of loving and sticking with a loser, siphoning money from
    her mother to support his habit) -- which makes this a far more satisfying project than _Portrait of a Lady on Fire_. It is an admirably low-key
    story about the film school experience, miles from the Southern-Cal hustlers-trying-to-score-a-gig type dramedy. If only the film were not
    so unbalanced; it serves little function other than that of a cautionary
    tale about well-brought-up women in the 80s. If there is a more universal message, a point that resonates more broadly, I must have missed it.

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    Romain Laguna's _Meterorites_ strains rather too hard for cosmic relevance
    but the more conventional coming-of-age drama crystallizes what is missing
    from _The Souvenir_. Nina (Zea Duprez) is a headstrong wild child and highschool dropout who works at a "dinosaur" theme park in the south
    of France. One day she sees a meteorite crashing behind a hill and
    takes it as a sign for destiny. (After all, an asteroid has been
    postulated to lead to the extinction of dinosaurs.) She hooks up with
    her best friend's brother Morad, a minor drug dealer, only to have him
    dump her. She loses her job, gets into a fight in a club after stealing
    a cellphone. Is she the meteorite that crashes and burns? At the end
    of the film she hikes alone into the hills. For a moment I thought
    she has gone to Algeria to find Morad. Instead she finds ground zero
    of the meteorite strike, and I assume herself, in the process. Will
    she rise from its ashes, be reborn, even turn into a filmmaker with
    her newfound sensitivity? (Like the luckless downtrodden protagonist in
    Abdel Kechiche's _Game of Love and Chance_?) If so, with any luck she will
    be a more caring filmmaker than Julia/Joanna Hoag.

    The French film has no "name" actor in the cast at all and is completely ignored by critics. Its strength is that it harkens back to classics
    like Pialat's _À Nos Amours_. Duprez is even more untamed than Sandrine Bonnaire there, except that there is no father figure; her mother has
    tattoos from finger to shoulder, and when not working on a farm she goes clubbing in search of new flings. Race plays a much larger role too;
    Nina's brother (half-brother?) teases her about dating an Arab, when
    she can pass for half-Arabic herself (unlike brother and mother, both
    blonde). But that's in appearance only; she drinks, parties, and never
    hides her face, and the film pointedly shows her admiring her own
    sexuality as if "me-too" never happened. (I mean that as a praise.)
    In its way, _Meteorites_ is even more elliptical in story telling
    than _The Souvenir_. The episode about Nina's suspected pregnancy
    is particularly intriguing. But all the characters around Nina are so
    real; they have "agency," future trajectories hinted at; never do they
    feel like static tableaux to decorate Nina's story. The director
    has such a fierce regard for all characters' fates. I'll be looking
    for director Lugana's and actress Duprez's next projects.

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    The best film I've streamed recently is _Orpheline_ ("Orphans") by
    Arnaud des Pallieres. It is an anti-coming-of-age film told in
    episodes unfolding in reverse chronological order. The protagonist
    is played by four different actresses, although Adele Haenel, the
    eldest of them, appears in flashbacks and the coda. The storytelling
    is efficient rather than revolutionary and the cinematography is just
    adequate; the true strength of the film is the actresses (including
    Adele Exachopoulous as a younger version of Haenel and an imperious
    Gemma Arterton inhabiting the kind of criminal-mentor role she is born
    to play). Adele Haenel has never been better; here's hoping she will
    take on more such challenging roles and not fall back on her default
    angry young woman persona.

    (for A.)

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