Perhaps the most succinctly insightful critical response to the work of Nicolas Roeg might be Michael Clark’s portrait of the British director in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Entitled “al-jebr”, this Arabic word means “the bringing together of broken parts”. There are certain keywords that recur in critical appraisals of Roeg’s work: fractured, shattered, collapsed, labyrinthine. This is no less true of his now thankfully re-released 1973 masterpiece, Don’t Look Now, which forms part of an early body of work, including 1970′s astonishing Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell), the deeply pessimisticWalkabout (also 1970), and the glacially prescient The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). These films inspire similar “what ifs” to the contemporaneous career of Francis Ford Coppola. After his under-appreciated 1980 film, Bad Timing, Roeg seemed unable to reach the intense complexity his earlier work had shown, and has since managed to succeed where even Coppola has failed, by earning the epithet “largely forgotten”.

Don’t Look Now begins with the tragic drowning of Christine, daughter of John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), and in a sequence famed for its elliptical yet instinctively communicative editing, introduces the key symbols and themes of the film. The motifs of water, of the colour red, of breaking glass, of criss-crossing (noted, in the left-right alternation of shot angles, by Manny Farber in his 1975 essay on Roeg), of spirals, of aural/visual disjunction, of deception/perception, of restoration (forgery/authenticity), are all introduced and established. An early, Hitchcockian, jumpcut from Laura’s scream of horror to the screech of a drill in Venice brings us forward in time, and establishes also Hitch’s presence as an influence. John and Laura have travelled to Venice, where John is working on the restoration of a Byzantine church (which, in a Gothic film, provides a pleasing counterpoint of styles). There they encounter two eccentric sisters, one of whom, apparently psychic, claims to be able to see their dead daughter standing between John and Laura, but also warns them that their lives are in danger while in Venice. John is sceptical, while Laura is willing to believe, and finds a degree of calm in the sisters’ words. The sisters even suggest that John himself possesses second sight, a possibility he denies to himself, in spite of otherwise inexplicable sensations.

This denial cuts to the heart of Roeg, his treatment of time in particular; that we preserve our illusions of control over time, that we structure and order them to give our lives structure and order, and that when encountering alien conceptions of life and time, some of us can make the leap and others won’t. John, professionally engaged in making the present look like the past, will not admit the possibility that he can see the future in the present, despite all signs to the contrary. Roeg’s camerawork increasingly jars sightlines and angles, giving the impression that John is being watched. Venice’s legendary ability for confusion – between east and west, sea and land, decay and splendour – begin to make their presence felt, as John, separated from Laura, is led through the city’s labyrinth by a false Ariadne, to his death.

There is something insistently ecstatic – rapturous, yet distanced – about the rapid montage of John’s demise, a change, and his acceptance of that change, in his consciousness. There is a sense in which only by the “bloody silly way to die” (as the ending of Du Maurier’s original short story has it) can John’s sense of guilt be reconciled. Even at the last, his reconciliation with his apparent “gift” is fudged and distancing. In contrast, Laura’s acceptance of the supernatural leads to growth and survival.

Sacrifice, experience by example, collective progress, all of these, along with his professed belief in a collective unconscious, place Roeg firmly within a Jungian framework. This positioning is emphasised in the fascination with reflective surfaces, and in the sound design, especially in the sequence where John is chasing Roeg’s fairy-tale ogre, accompanied not by Hermann-esque music, but by deep Jungian churnings. Within the canals of Venice, Roeg’s mise-en-abyme of the auditory canals also manages to suggest a mosaic or even fractal structure – of structures within structures. Chris Marker’s observations, in Sans Soleil (1983), on Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), about the spiral nature of time, elicit another strand of Hitchcockian imagery in Don’t Look Now - the spiral. First seen on a slide in the opening sequence, then in the flight of pigeons, in a stairwell, in a bishop’s crook, in the misty wake of the dwarf and John – all contributing to, Farber’s words, Roeg’s “cubistically spiralling style”.

At a time when visual, narrative and emotional complexity seem inaccessible and inconceivable to British film financiers and distributors, film makers, and perhaps even the audiences, an opportunity to revisit one of this country’s most glittering, underrated and serious talents is welcome and necessary. It remains to be seen whether it will influence any of the above constituencies one iota.

Fucking Åmål, retitled Show Me Love for more sensitive markets such as the USA and the UK, is Swedish poet and novelist Lukas Moodysson’s debut feature, and already the biggest Swedish film of all time. The film follows Agnes (Rebecca Liljeberg) who, even after 18 months in the provincial town of Åmål with her family, still has no friends, and Elin (Alexandra Dahlström) who is sick of the fact that by the time something is ‘in’ in ‘fucking’ Åmål, it is ‘out’ everywhere else, and is also keen to rid herself of her virginity.

Agnes is having a 16th birthday party and, for want of anything better to do, Elin and her sister Jessica (Erica Carlson) turn up having made a bet that Elin wouldn’t dare to kiss Agnes who, it is rumoured, is a lesbian. Elin manages to kiss Agnes and then disappears without realising that Agnes has a crush on her.

The rest of the film centres less on Agnes’ growing confidence in public knowledge of her sexuality, than on the confusion within Elin on her unexpected and reciprocal feelings for Agnes and whether to act on them or not.

For a film that has enjoyed such critical and commercial success, Show Me Love has been criticised in some quarters for a perceived shallowness – not an unusual accusation for films that purport to deal with or portray youth. What is so striking about the film however, is its realistic observation of youths and their provincial boredom; Moodysson seems at times to be filming the youths’ parties and interactions with the skill of a wildlife documentarist. He captures the chaos and thoughtlessness of teenage parties, the cruelty and capriciousness of popularity contests, the gaps that rise up between parents and their children and the fact that not all teenagers develop and ‘grow’ and the intense despair of provincial boredom.

Moodysson also indicates that teenagers are not often that sophisticated in their tastes, provincial teenagers less so, nor are they usually that dextrous when trying to make a point. As a result, the choice of ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ as the song to which the two girls kiss manages to ring true. Moodysson also shows a delicately sure touch when portraying homophobia, in one scene letting Oskar (Axel Widegren), Agnes’ little brother, bring it to his mother’s initially liberal attention that his elder sister is apparently a lesbian. The only scene that falls flat comes at the end where the girls come out of the (water) closet, a scene conceived purely to allow weak puns in reviews.

The director is helped throughout by a largely first-time cast, with Liljeberg and Dahlström both excellent and, among the supporting cast, Carlson and Mathias Rust (as the meathead with whom Elin tries to cement her heterosexuality after she dreams of Agnes), give notably good performances. Show Me Love, despite its bum note resolution (which it manages to recover from in the very last scene), is an enjoyable 90 minutes, at times excruciatingly so, and comes strongly recommended.

Showing in its original version rather than the longer “director’s” cut (widely held to be a more balanced and complex film), the tenth anniversary re-release of this 1989 winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes, and the Best Foreign Language Film at both the Oscars and the Golden Globes, offers an opportunity to reassess a film that was panned by critics on its release, but proved something of a hit with the public.

The storyline aspires to myth, but finds itself hovering between romance and melodrama, as we follow a middle-aged Salvatore into his memories of childhood, when he was known as Toto. He has received a message from his mother telling him that someone called Alfredo has died, and that the funeral is tomorrow. Salvatore thinks back to his childhood in the Sicilian village of Giancaldo, where he is an altarboy to the priest, also the local film censor. Toto, whose father died on the Russian front, finds a surrogate father in Alfredo, the curmudgeonly projectionist at the local Cinema Paradiso. Toto, obsessed by films, persuades Alfredo to teach him to be a projectionist. One evening, a reel of film catches fire in the projector, and Alfredo is blinded. Toto becomes chief projectionist in the rebuilt cinema, a post he occupies until he goes to the mainland to do his military service. In the months before he goes away, he has an abortive love affair with Elena, the beautiful daughter of the local banker. Upon his return, he cannot find her, and returns to Rome to begin his career in film, not returning to Giancaldo until Alfredo’s funeral.

In many ways, it is easy to see why Cinema Paradiso received such a critical savaging: it is unashamedly romantic and emotionally manipulative; the characters, while largely amusing and engaging, are hardly complex; the setting, a lovingly-drawn Sicilian village, is replete with every cliché imaginable; and the plot often lumberingly symbolic. These flaws were given a thorough airing at the time of release, but why is it still, even in this version, a viable piece of cinema?

The film operates in three periods: Toto’s childhood, adolescence and middle age. Each is marked by a different quality to the memories, and the nostalgia they invoke. Toto’s childhood is conjured with a small arena of familiar haunts and faces. Much is made of Toto’s emotional wisdom, and though this makes him seem cutely precocious at times, it allows the delight to be tempered by hints of melancholy. Once we pass into Toto’s adolescence and passage into manhood, the tenor of the scenes, while not losing playfulness and warmth, becomes a little less open, the public scenes more anonymous, the projection booth, a surrogate womb for so many years, no longer a world in itself. The scenes from which his memories are launched are marked by the disillusionment of middle age, and the safety of nostalgia.

The redemptive role played by the movies (and it is the experience of the “movies” that the film is largely concerned with) is emphasised again and again. From the outset, the similarity between church and cinema is shown by following a shot of motes of dust dancing in a shaft of light in church with a shot of the shaft of light emerging from the projection booth in the Cinema Paradiso. Both serve as a focus for, and serve the spiritual needs of the community. Yet it is the cinema that seems a more loving and complete microcosm of the world – all life is here, and so on. During the course of the film, the cinema plays host to both the hoi polloi and the self-proclaimed local bigwigs, to a nursing mother and a couple having sex, pubescent youths masturbating along to Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman, and a prostitute. Finally, when Salvatore returns to the predictably derelict cinema after Alfredo’s funeral, posters for porno films litter the ramshackle interior. The point that Tornatore is making is obvious, but no less passionate for that.

Not overly sophisticated (thank God), indeed somewhat crude at points (excellent), and rather like a mixture between The Sure Thing, Beavis and Butthead and Shadowlands (just kidding), Y tu mamá también is extremely good-natured, thoughtful and enjoyable – far more so than the witless trailer (which makes it out to be a teen gross-out comedy) suggests.

It follows two seventeen-year-old Mexico City friends – Tenoch (Diego Luna), a corrupt politician’s son, and middle-class Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal, of Amores Perros) – and Luisa (Maribel Verdu), the beautiful young Spanish woman they meet at a party. To impress her they invite her on a road trip they are planning to go on, to what they say is the best beach around, La Boca del Cielo, or Heaven’s Mouth – which they’ve invented. She declines, but when her husband (Tenoch’s writer cousin) calls her in tears to tell her of an infidelity, changes her mind, and calls the boys – who are forced to rustle up a car, and a plan. The ensuing road trip tests their friendship and their sexuality.

It’s crisply shot, consistently funny, and still manages to feel like it’s got more going on than in an average teen road movie. As the Charolastras or Space Cowboys, as they dub themselves, Tenoch, Julio and their friends get stoned, masturbate furiously and jam around to a teenage coda. Luisa’s own crisis, and its resolution, finds its release in helping the two teens begin their graduation out of that teenworld to adulthood, some apparently complicated sex (not at all, as everyone who sees the film is at pains to stress, gratuitous), and encounters with rural folk, into whose lives we are given a brief insight by the omniscient narrator.

The film wears its politics lightly, but manages to give a clear impression of a Mexico that is changing, even growing up. From the heavily-guarded appearance of the President at the party at the start of the film, to the horde of pigs trampling the campsite, and the invasion of tourist hotels at the end, Alfonso Cuaron handles the two levels of the film skillfully and enjoyably, never overburdening the spectator with too much weight or too much fluff. Along with the excellent performances, from Garcia Bernal in particular, this makes for a lighter, but equally praiseworthy, Mexican follow-up to Amores Perros. In short, just go and see the bloody thing.

Asif Kapadia’s accomplished debut feature (following on from his acclaimed short “The Sheep Thief”) offers a variation on a classic story – feared bad guy tries to go straight, and his former employers put a price on his head. 29-year-old Kapadia himself has described it as a samurai film set in India (in, erm, “Hindu”, as the BBC review has it), and has said that it took its inspiration from a Japanese folk tale. The film was awarded the Sutherland Trophy at the 2001 London Film Festival, and lives up to the brief: an original and imaginative first feature. (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD)

While the story is pretty well-worn, Kapadia’s variations and visual brio work well with the journey from Rajasthan’s deserts to the Himalayas. The Warrior, Lafcadia (Irfan Khan) is the ruthless head of a warlord’s private band of warriors, who, in the process of meting out punishment to a village late with its dues, has a mystical encounter with a young girl he is about to kill. The girl is wearing his son Katiba’s amulet, which Katiba (Puru Chibber) gave to her when she saved him from a group of bullies. Returning to himself, he immediately runs home and flees with his son. On hearing this, the warlord (Anupam Shyam, full of detached, bored menace) demands his head. While his father prays at a shrine for safe passage, Katiba returns home to get his knife, is captured by the warriors loyal to the warlord, and taken, along with the head of a lookalike, by Lafcadia’s former deputy, Biswas. Pressured to identify the severed head as his father’s by the deputy, whose own neck is on the line, Katiba does so, and his throat is slit – witnessed by Lafcadia, who has slipped unnoticed into the watching crowd. Lafcadia flees, and on his subsequent journey of redemption and retribution encounters a young orphan thief (Noor Mani), and an elderly blind woman on a pilgrimage.

Although The Warrior calls to mind the unswerving trajectory of a Western, the preoccupation with landscape, a real urge to situate, it recalls the early Chen Kaige, Yellow Earth (1984) in particular, with its curious mix of anthropology and epic, even heroic framing. Set in a barren desert region, where spilt water leaves no trace, Lafcadia’s band display a barrenness too – disrupting sacred and communal moments, raping and pillaging. The contrast between their behaviour in that landscape, and the cool contemplative atmosphere of the mountain towards which Lafcadia instinctively heads gives the film much of its momentum. Casting for faces, as Kapadia has admitted, has its merits too, especially in such a silent film. The textural qualities of the film are enhanced both by the extremely distinct cast members (some non-actors) and their controlled performances, and by the sound design, which privileges the background to an unusual degree. Asif Kapadia’s boldness – in design and execution – is to be commended, and though it’s rather slow, and rather simplistic, its many merits far outweigh the gripes. And he’s from Hackney, so this is one gangster-heavy Britflick you don’t need a frontal lobotomy to enjoy.

Miguel Albaladejo’s fourth film, winner of the Best Film prize at the LA Latino Film Festival, is another light romantic comedy, competently acted, competently scripted, competently shot. Spun round what is essentially a telenovela plot, with telenovela characters – the cardboard psychiatrist protagonist, Miguel, played by the Catalan Sergi Lopez (whose beige, shrinking performance could be in protest at being forced to spend months shooting in Madrid), the predictably sparky beautician, Jasmina, played with sub-Almodovar charm by Mariola Fuentes, and the tumour-surviving (what do you mean I’m spoiling the plot? It’s a telenovela… You weren’t expecting tumours?), mother-in-law (Maria Jose Alfonso) – Albaladejo intends us, I am sure, to draw some Significance from the Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary People, but no Hegelian Aufhebung out of the numerous colliding banalities is forthcoming. If, however, you are looking for a mildly diverting, flossy, typical bit of Iberiana, then this could be a good bet.

Pitched, to be honest, midway between a film and a TV film, Ten Days Without Love (a telenovela title if ever there was one) opens true to its Spanish title El Cielo Abierto - The Open Sky - with a torrential downpour, people putting up umbrellas, pulling down blinds, shutters and screens. Miguel is on the phone to his wife, Sara, who left him 3 days previously for another man. She has rung from Tokyo to ask a favour – her mother is flying down to Madrid for a check-up, and is expecting to stay at their flat. Could he put her up for the night? At that moment, the mother-in-law, Elvira, arrives and Miguel is extremely accommodating, but she takes Sara’s side against Miguel. It emerges that Sara has run off with Miguel’s… wait for it… father (su padre! Joder, tio!), a famous painter and womaniser, which, obviously, changes everything.

The same day, a patient of Miguel’s steals his wallet (ummm, it never rains but it pours), and when Miguel goes to track it down, he meets the patient’s down-to-earth beautician sister, Jasmina – she evidently likes him, he is slow to respond, but eventually (you’d never guess it if I didn’t tell you) their love, or at least hers, (it all gets a little bit Jersey Girl – she’s ultra-enthusiastic, and why shouldn’t she be? She dumped her last boyfriend for knocking off ATMs… Miguel’s obviously on the rebound, looking for a bit of validation), blossoms, and is confirmed at the end when Sara returns from Tokyo, and is left standing in the rain. Maybe I’m clutching at straws, but at the last, judging from his face, Miguel seems just to be going with the flow, and you do at least wonder quite how long this inevitably unlikely liaison will last, whereas Jasmina looks like she’s hit the jackpot.

Fleeting charm is provided by scenes of Miguel’s patients (the usual collection of “the voices, the voices” and surly kids), and of Jasmina’s domestic life – rough kids (hearts of gold, of course, made to grow up too quickly, motherless children, tragedy, etc.), and semi-senile grandparents (who, desde luego, talk sense when it’s most needed). Damn it, she even strikes up a rapport with some gypsies. Albaladejo manages to put together what is a more or less solid, extremely conventional, clumsily feelgood film, but with little depth of characterisation, motivation or structure. Perhaps your money would be better spent on a couple of steaming plates of albondigas.

After her delicate and very Canadian debut, Kissed, focusing on a picnoleptic female necrophiliac, Lynne Stopkewich has turned to another literary adaptation for her new film, inhabiting another sexually transgressive woman, this time one diving into the depths of her self and of sexual expiation. Using the same creative team and lead actress, Molly Parker, Stopkewich has forged another striking feature, simmering down Laura Kasischke’s novel to a strong central trajectory, but while only occasionally reaching the tightness and drive of the first film, she manages to invest the unravelling knot of the story with a determined and understated feeling of imminent threat. (Spoilers ahead…)

(Plot spoiler warning:)
Molly Parker plays Leila, a receptionist at a small-town motel, who sells herself to pudgy, bloated men for the price of their room. She seems to do this, in forensic close-ups of shoes, hands and empty spaces, without any real end in mind, hiding the money in her jewellery box, in the uncommunicative home she shares with her apparently anorexic husband. We are introduced, in what appears initially to be a rather lame analogy of Leila’s life, to a young girl who befriends Leila while feeding swans on the river. Like Leila, the girl has a complicated family situation (her mother cheating on her salesman father with his brother, and also with her lawyer). Cue the inevitable flying-away of swans.

Gary Jensen (Callum Keith Rennie), seemingly a drifter, arrives at the motel and has Leila come up to his room, where he hits and rapes her. Something (indicated by a trademark Stopkewich burn-to-white) shifts in her, and although she initially rejects his apologetic overtures, the offer of $200 and Gary’s now gentle and attentive manner convince her to resume their liaison. The rapture she seems to feel at someone taking time and care over her physical pleasure cements her relationship with Gary, and before long, she plans to leave with him for an unknown destination. Gary suggests that they spend the night at his house, where one of his friends is waiting, and leaves her to rest while he goes into town. Gary has told his friend to sleep with Leila, to which she assents almost automatically. When they have finished, she gets up to find a stream of cars arriving at the house, and she is told that Gary is in fact a pimp of sorts, and she is expected to get back in the bedroom. She lapses into almost catatonic unresponsiveness, and is beaten by one of the men, but when he gets out a knife, she jerks into it, and cuts her neck. The men panic, but one of them bandages her neck, and helps her escape to the river. As we move towards the climax of the film, we realise that, in the little girl, Leila is in fact meeting her childhood self. She escapes back to the other side of Suspicious River, and lives to see the swans come back.

Suspicious River is at least as intense as, and more emotionally excoriating than Kissed, and shows Stopkewich expanding her vocabulary and her range (although the burn-to-white seems to have become a key indicative device in her vocabulary). Her films thus far have had a very definite feel, but seem at times too similar to other work, distinguished partly by the perceived extremity of the subject matter. While Kissed showed an engaging and keen Campionesque eye for how solitary, coherent yet odd childhood can be, the dreamy feel of Suspicious River and the neat device of looping past with present contribute to a film that leaves the viewer feeling as passive and detached as Leila is through her own compulsive encounters in darkened rooms, yet compelled to dwell on her descent into hell long afterwards.

The first I knew of Sans Soleil was in the 1999 Notorious exhibition at Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art. The Hitchcock-themed show featured contributions from Atom Egoyan, Victor Burgin, Douglas Gordon and Cindy Sherman. Tucked away in a corner, round past the reading area, was a monitor. I sat down to watch halfway through the piece. Four loops later, people had wandered in, and wandered out, but I had stayed, lassoed by a sequence in which a woman talked about a letter sent to her by a man about visiting the San Francisco locations filmed in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). I bought the catalogue. I’d heard of Marker, come across references to him, but had only seen La Jetee (1962). I embarked upon a search for the film from which this mesmeric sequence had been lifted: Sans Soleil. It’s relatively difficult to find in London, but eventually I found it at a video rental place in Islington. I ended up taking a day off work and spooling it back and forth, watching sequences over and over. The BFI’s re-release this month, as part of the ICA’s Marker season, and alongside the first ever conference on his work, should raise awareness of Marker outside of documentary circles to something more than the man who made the film on which Twelve Monkeys (1995) is based.

[One gripe, something that slipped through the net - this is a new print of the French version, but the text of the subtitles doesn't seem to draw on the existing English-language version, narrated by Alexandra Stewart. This means, for one, that "Ile de France" is unaccountably translated as "Mauritius". Unlike those who think that, since there's a "perfectly good" English-language version, it's actually quite valuable to hear the slightly different rhythms, the different implications in the French narration.] [[UPDATE - this is my own ignorance shining through - see the comment at the end of this post]]

When you Google “Sans Soleil”, you find plenty of short reviews – a couple of hundred words, or thereabouts – , a few bloated pdfs, and a handful of medium-length pieces: once you start, it’s very difficult to stop. Even the basic parameters take up space: was Marker born in Belleville, France, Beijing, or in Ulan Bator, Mongolia? Was he in the Resistance? Is Hayao Yamaneko, creator of The Zone – of manipulated, mediated images – another name for Marker, or, as the Pacific Film Archive programme notes state, a video-artist who “worked in television in Tokyo, and acquired the status of Artist in Residence at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, after making the video tape, “Who Decided Our Death?”…” Sandor Krasna, the fictionalised character who writes the letters to the unnamed female narrator, is given his own biography, a Hungarian cinematographer who freelanced in the USA, and “became fascinated with Japan after paying a visit to the Philippines during the filming of Apocalypse Now!”

This complicates Marker’s essay form, of course – how much Krasna can be said to speak for Marker as he makes present his locations – the quay (or jetty?) in Guinea-Bissau, Amilcar Cabral, Tokyo’s department stores, its takenoko, its eta or hinin (burakumin), the three Icelandic children that open the film, the emus on the Ile-de-France – is at the root of a great deal of critical confusion. Musings, and conclusions, on personal and collective history, memory and time, in Africa, Asia and Europe, are underscored by references to animals and planetary time – opening out multiple perspectives, multiple narratives. Interruptions in the narration, and the images, afford the possibility of engaging with the (direct and associative) ideas expressed through a structure more musical than filmic – unsurprising for a film containing a fictional, potential film named for a Mussorgsky song cycle. It is a film to stop, rewind, access at different points – evidenced by the discrete power of the Vertigo section – and points the way to the mesh of Marker’s later CD-ROM work. In one way, it feels like postcards that Odysseus might have sent back to Penelope. The last letter she speculates on might just be hand-delivered.

I could go on, I want to go on. I will, another time. But maybe I’ll go and watch it again: just one last time, I promise.

—–

A clarifying comment from Pete Korch:

Sameer,

Île de France is a double-barrelled term. It is the modern day name for the region surrounding Paris, France, and this is what most people have assumed Marker to be referring to.

However Île de France is also the old colonial name for the island of Mauritius, a former French and English colonial possession in the southwest Indian Ocean next to Madagascar. The Island is famous for its incredibly diverse wildlife including (before they became extinct) the Dodo bird and… THE EMU.

While I am sure there exist Emu in a zoo or farm of some sort in the Île de France surrounding Paris, whether Marker is referring to the one or the other, I think is impossible to tell. One might be able to do a detailed analysis of the roadsign image which appears with the fourth mention of the name to determine its location, but, seeing as Mauritius retains French traffic codes, this would probably be futile.

In any case, I just wanted to account for those “unaccountably translated” subtitles you mentioned. It is kind of obscure trivia, and I am not trying to sound pompous. I just figured it might interest you that it was, in the end, a valid translation after all.

On another note I completely agree with your assessment of the value of watching films in their original language and think we native English speakers and Americans do it far to little.

Great Film and thanks for your insights

-Pete

A theoretically engaging picture, somewhere between a magic lantern and a TV costume-drama, Rohmer’s first feature-length DV piece is a problematic view (and feels much longer than its two hours). Based on the possibly apocryphal memoirs of Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell), a Scottish former courtesan – and lover of both the Prince of Wales and the Duc d’Orleans – in Paris at the time of the Revolution, the film uses what feels like both an ancient and a groundbreaking technique, the superimposition of his actors on meticulously researched and intricately painted backdrops of revolutionary Paris. Alongside many of Rohmer’s habitual concerns – betrayal, the search for understanding, moments of disruption, and so on – he seeks to literalise his view of history as an accruing of personal viewpoints and modifications through his choice of a highly personal and unpopular view of the Revolution, rather than try to impose another retrospective gloss on the events. His and Jean-Baptiste Marot’s pictorial reconstruction of Parisian space in 1792 and 1793 draws attention to itself using the textures and styles of numerous forgotten urban painters and illustrators as a resource, and enables him to present an accurate, immediate, visually continuous, fixed point of view, rather than a live-action edited version of space, and also to hint at how urban space might actually help produce the events that take place within it.

The performances of Russell (either subtle, or neutral) and Jean-Claude Dreyfus (who, as the Duc d’Orleans, Grace’s former lover and present friend, enunciates his way through the film with an over-theatrical precision, but has an undeniable presence) leave one cold, and call into question Rohmer’s hands-off directing. As for the mise-en-scene, the alternation between painted exteriors and faithful interiors allows Rohmer to point up the irruption of chaos both into public space, in Langian movements, and into private space, Grace’s windows framing the chaos outside. In general, the disruption of regimes, routines and of everyday life.

Rohmer’s searching after truth, as distinct from authenticity, or from verisimilitude, lead him to wait for technology to catch up with his idea, although one has to feel that maybe some of the impetus of the project may have been lost in the interim. Presenting a somewhat distracting, “highly visible artifice” to an audience drunk on faithful reconstructions of French history has its own motivations: there is, a rarity in his work, little charge in the air – a deliberate distancing from the celebrated historiporn of La Reine Margot, The Horseman on the Roof and others. And Grace’s sexual history remains just there, in History.

Rohmer refuses to romanticise or glamourise the Revolution, indeed taking a highly-conservative, and, in France, controversial line: insisting in interviews that it was bourgeois-led, that the majority of decent people disapproved of the bloodshed, and taking from Grace’s memoir a cyclopean Royalist stance. While Rohmer has, in the past been scrupulous in attempting to elide viewpoint, here he is somewhat hidebound by the very partiality of Grace’s account, and we are left with an all too unequivocal view of the brutish, loutish, opportunistic mob of sansculottes. In the end, it feels somewhat like a conversation piece in a tea ceremony – a curio to spark off conversation and debate, but not sufficient in and of itself.

—

And here is a comment added to the original article, apparently from Jean-Baptiste Marot himself, describing the process of creating the tableaux:

Hello I am Jean Baptiste Marot

and I made the paintings of the eric Rohmer’s movie the Lady and the Duke.

maybe this following little text could interest you

Tableaux for the cinema

In 1998, Eric Rohmer asked me to make 36 paintings of Paris that would depict historical views of the city during the French revolution.

These paintings had to be made as genuine paintings of the time in which actors would move around and play.

To fulfil this specific order, I made up a 36 sketches story-board working on the best pictorial points of view for the urban spaces needed by the show.

Among these 36 sketches, 3 views were inspired by XIXth century paintings : Le Pont au Change and Le Pont Saint Michel by Corot and a view of Saint Roch church exhibited at Musée Carnavalet.

All the other sketches were made in observing the existing sites and with the help of ancient maps, engravings, documents…

A set of remarkable photographs of Paris taken by Marville just before the important demolition ordered by Haussmann during the XIXth century contributed to rediscover architectures that do no longer exist.

I had to reconstitute lost sites and to draw them from unknown standpoints like le Palais des Tuileries or le Château de Meudon, using topographic plans to reveal the slopes and levels of the former landscape which has been nowadays drowned by a dense urbanisation.

In the same time, we constructed the paintings in 3D images, putting all the sites and buildings on plans in order to fit the perspective of the paintings with the shot pictures, the painter’s point of view becoming the camera’s focus, its length, its direction.

I had to know very precisely the width of the streets, porches, the height of the steps… so that the actors would not pass trough the walls or walk one foot over the ground !

All data were programmed for the shooting in a laser pinpointing the accurate places and ways of the actors in a green painted studio.

In being faithful to antique painting (Vedute were very fashionable at the time), I had to adapt the oil-painting technique of ancient chiaroscuro in order to avoid any damage due to the different pictures productions (photography, digitalisation, film…).

What I have been mostly interested in this long term work has been to make visual the gap between the image of the painting (memory of the subjective feelings of a place) and the reality itself.

Being able, Place de la Concorde for instance, to embrace at a glance all the little lodges of the moats (today steles of inner-cities), the statue of Louis XV, the horses of Marly, materialising an idealistic view, where nothing could be hidden by nothing, that would be impossible to get with a naked eye.

I also enjoyed to pivot slightly la Porte Saint-Denis and to flatten, distort and move the surrounding elements according to the best perspective for the painting.

These techniques (painting and perspective) I required for this work are the ones I generally use in the practice of my art, conceiving tableaux, lamps or piece of furniture as objects halfway between images and things. I call my special marotte * “Tableaux pour la maison”.

“We’re like two ancient tribes, both almost extinct… And everything seems to be changing around us.” - Ghost Dog

There can’t be too many films that list a ‘Philosophical Consultant’ in the credits but Ghost Dog does, and there are signs that he earned his keep. While clearly Jarmusch’s most accessible and perhaps his funniest film to date, it is still a fluid, intelligent, innovative piece. Questions of social and cinematic history are raised with grace and humour, yet the principal line of action is allowed to rumble along enjoyably.

Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is an ascetic loner who shares his ramshackle rooftop home with a coop of homing pigeons and lives his life according to the teachings of an 18th-century samurai code, ‘Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai’. He is also a valued, if unorthodox, hitman who, despite his physical bulk is renowned for his ability to carry out hits unseen and untraced: the twelve hits he has performed for local mafia capo Louie (John Tormey), have all been flawless. But his latest hit, on one of Louie’s fellow mafiosi, Handsome Frank, goes wrong when he is seen by Frank’s girlfriend Louise (Tricia Vessey), the daughter of mafia don Ray Vargo. Vargo (Henry Silva) orders Ghost Dog to be killed, precipitating a violent clash between Ghost Dog and his employers.

The three ecosystems that Jarmusch collides in his films – mafia, samurai and rap – create a keenly-observed backdrop of incongruity and bewilderment as well as bringing up issues of thematic and aesthetic interest. Of particular note is the outstanding soundtrack produced by RZA, of the Shaolin-steeped East Coast rap collective Wu-Tang Clan. RZA even appears to have convinced Jarmusch of the validity of the aesthetics of sampling.

The film and its characters, aware of their own cinematic lineage but equally trapped by their inability to live up to it, appear acutely aware of the past and how it informs and comments on the present. Two ways of life, with rap culture as the backdrop, are opposed: Ghost Dog’s solitary, reflective, ritualised lifestyle in the sky and the shambolic, ageing mafiosi on the streets. Both, says Ghost Dog, are ‘ancient tribes’, doomed in the culture rising up around them, yet both listen to rap and hip-hop. Both operate by feudalistic codes deemed obsolete and anti-social by contemporary society, yet both codes have their eulogies and myths, not least in film.

Samurai films dealt largely with samurai in the Tokugawa period, when economic and political stability rendered the warrior class obsolete. These films concern themselves with the heroism and futility of the samurai trying to preserve their increasingly marginalised and devalued way of life. What is crucial is that there is no doubt, in either hero’s mind nor in that of the viewer, that he will fail: he is doomed from the start no matter what he does. The gangster film, originally concerned (like that other great American cinematic myth, the western) with frontiers, boundaries and turf wars, has now reached a stage in which the post-mafia now appearing even on our TV screens in The Sopranos.

Jarmusch’s mafiosi, in particular, seem to be well aware that they fall comically short of the cinematic mafia myth, but seem able to do little about it, even to the extent of being barracked and baited by children in streets that used to be theirs.

By contrast, Ghost Dog is in harmony with his environment as a samurai hero should be. Though corpulent, he moves with grace and stealth and kills with detached and ruthless efficiency. That the mafiosi in Ghost Dog need reading glasses, are three months behind on their rent and are obese, inept and petulant is clearly a source of amusement. The overflowing anger, frustration and violence of their behaviour contrasts with the elegance and economy of the samurai way. Their ineffectual, often innocuous nature is betrayed by their mesmerised addiction to cartoons (especially to cartoon violence), prefiguring the actual violence visited upon them through Ghost Dog’s revenge.

And while Ghost Dog may have given himself over entirely to an ancient and exotic philosophy and may even feel the requisite tug between ‘giri’ (duty) and ‘ninjo’ (feelings) he is, despite the sheen of philosophy, still a hired killer. His skills have been developed and perfected not solely in a search for transcendence, but as marketable skills, and the infirmity and incompetence of his adversaries puts his superiority over them in perspective. Even so, he is respected by rappers and mafiosi alike, by the latter especially since he is dispatching them “in the old way”.

Ghost Dog’s careful lack of history, his hybrid lifestyle, his affinity with pigeons and animals in general, his assumed name (to all intents and purposes he is a revenant, and to Louie he shows the faithfulness of ‘man’s best friend’) all mark him out as a still, self-contained presence at the heart of the film. Yet his sense of honour – and his demise – hinge on the one memory to which we are allowed access: his naively faithful master/retainer relationship with Louie. This is based on Ghost Dog’s belief that he is indebted to the mafia capo who saved a teenaged Ghost Dog from two gun-toting white assailants. As Ghost Dog remembers it, his assailant’s gun is pointed at him, but in Louie’s account, the gun is pointed not at Ghost Dog, but at Louie himself.

The gap between the two accounts is reinforced by the appearance of the short story “Rashomon”, on which Kurosawa’s film is based, as a leitmotiv throughout the film. This serves to emphasise the film’s concern with histories and stories, both personal and tribal, the unreliability of memory, and the manipulation of that unreliability.

It is also important to remember that action is set in motion by “Rashomon”. Ghost Dog stops to pick up the book when he has carried out his hit on Handsome Frank at the very beginning of the film, and is seen by Louise Vargo, whose book it is. And at the end of the film, it is Louise who stands at the head of the new mafia order – and she has her book back. Insofar as this is a story of revenge and its timing, it is as much Louise’s story as Ghost Dog’s.

The principal reference point for Ghost Dog is Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film, Le Samourai. Jarmusch namechecks Melville (another perceived ‘maverick’ who worked outside the studio system and offered inspiration to a generation of independent filmmakers) in his credits, along with Akira Kurosawa and the prolific Seijun Suzuki.

In effect transposing Melville’s hardboiled hitman to an East Coast location, Jarmusch cements the samurai/hitman connection by making Ghost Dog an avid reader and quoter of a heretic samurai code, by having him practise sword techniques and pray on his rooftop, and by engaging him in a master-retainer relationship with Louie. Among other echoes, Ghost Dog wears white editor’s gloves when carrying out a hit, and, in a nice joke on Melville’s anti-hero, Jarmusch gives Ghost Dog an electronic device for disabling car alarms and opening car doors (in Le Samourai, Alain Delon has a hefty and unwieldy bunch of keys to carry out the same job).

Ghost Dog’s facility in gaining access and breaking codes is another thing that sets him apart from the mafiosi he faces. From his vantage point and with his attitude, he has a better perspective on events than his opponents. His “best friend” is a Haitian ice-cream vendor, Raymond (Isaach de Bankolé), who speaks only French, and although Ghost Dog speaks no French, they appear to be able to pick up each other’s thread. A typically Jarmuschian theme (see Mystery Train), this cuts away at the primacy of verbal communication: Jarmusch is as interested in what is said without language as he is in words themselves.

Consequently, codes of conduct, of dress and self-adornment and of music, all have their part to play in Ghost Dog. The stylisation of Ghost Dog’s behaviour in particular requires us to decode him less through the Bushido philosophy he quotes than through his intricately braided hair, his clothing (initially unremarkable, nondescript, even; later deliberately brash), the gesture with which he loads a CD (21 the volume level every time) and the movement with which he replaces his gun in its holster. A walking sign-system, he communicates as much by his manner as he does by what he says. Like the samurai, no gesture or ornament without its significance.

Related ideas of self-fashioning, naming, creation, recur throughout: Pearline (Camille Winbush), the young girl Ghost Dog encounters in the local park, and in whom he finds friendship and spiritual continuance, has a copy of Frankenstein in her lunchbox which prompts a moment of identification in Ghost Dog; the scene in which a contract is put out on Ghost Dog ambles into a marvellous discussion of adopted names (and a fine joke playing on the notion of gansta rap), picking up on the self-styled Ghost Dog, Native Americans, and rappers; furthermore, Ghost Dog’s adoption of the samurai ethic seems at time uncomfortably close to self-help therapy rather than a philosophical position, however many enigmatic sections from Hagakure are quoted. This all serves to raise the question: Is a samurai, an assassin, a mafioso, even a rapper forged, or born? Even the rappers have to practise in Ghost Dog.