Tournée (2010)

A lot of things are going on in Tournée (On Tour), though not much happens.

We follow a burlesque troupe of Americans, led by a wiley, scrabbly French manager named Joachim (the wonderful Mathieu Amalric), as they "skirt around the edges" of France (meaning, coastal towns). Things end much as they begin, with existential despair sometimes leavened by a little lovemaking and a little champagne. Joachim is a scraggly has-been TV producer, now running a self-described "girly show". But, much like a slew of Giancarlo Giannini characters (especially this one), it's unclear who's lording it over who in this sexist/feminist mish-mash. The burlesque performers - Mimi Le Meaux, Kitten on the Keys, Dirty Martini, and others (all real-life burlesque performers) - assert that the show is led by them, for them; it's a liberating experience of women taking ownership over their own bodies. It's an emancipation, even as Joachim herds and frets and stresses over logistics and booking venues.

When Joachim is not fretting over the tour, he - ahem - tours through his old French life (fresh, as he is, from an indeterminately long sojourn in the US). We meet old lovers (male and female), old colleagues, and his two kids. And everyone, okay, totally hates his guts - though we never find out why. These ancient grudges lead to some of the comedy's few actually funny scenes, such as when Joachim's son runs away in the middle of the night and then pretends not to know him in front of the police.

The film's about the show, but it's also about the tour of life, and we mostly get a classically French look at existential despair. Joachim and the girls are living a picaresque life on the edges of society - sometimes liberating, sometimes alienating. (This is best exemplified in Mimi le Mieaux, who has moments of coming apart at the seams.) 'Cuz, gosh, don't it all just make you feel so mortal! Boobs sag, eyelashes are fake, and there's a general sense of glitzy decay, of desperate grasping and of fizzling hopes. Joachim himself is a bit of a crumply sad-sack (though we felt Amalric was too young for the part), mostly trafficking in self-pity.

That said, as is usual in these "oh, the abyss!"-type stories, there's a redeeming humanism throughout. You love these characters, even if they sometimes worry about being unlovable. The girls tease Joachim, he yells at them, but there's a real affection as well. It might be senseless grasping across the abyss, but - hey - it's something!

Anyway, Mathieu Amalric directed this as well, but it was really his performance that made us want to watch, and that is the best part of the show. Miranda Colclasure (as Mimi) was touching, and there were some minor roles - the lady in the gas station! or the lady at the grocery store - that were memorable and well-done.

La cagna (1972)

Ugh. What a piece of misogynistic pap.

Other reviews of La cagna (literally, The Bitch, though the international title is Liza) have mentioned it being "highly symbolic" - but surely the director, Marco Ferreri, could have made these same symbolic points using a less rubbish story.

Liza (Catherine Deneuve) and Giorgio (Marcello Mastroianni) are directionless misfits, fleeing from society in an ad hoc, haphazard way. They both end up on a tiny, remote island in the Mediterranean - Liza having swam away from her friend's yacht, Giorgio having established himself as a hermit there with his dog, Melampo. Shortly after Liza's arrival, they "fall in love" - or something, at least. Giorgio then drives Liza back to civilization in his motorboat. Liza then promptly returns, kills Melampo, and takes the dog's place.

There are obvious, striking similarities between this and Lina Wertmuller's far superior Swept Away - the remote island setting, the sadomasochistic love affair, even the actors' looks. But what Wertmuller achieves is a subversion and criticism of La Cagna's central conceit: bourgeois ennui, and how men and women react to it by retreating into primal roles of dominance and submission. Heck, even the uneven Adam Resurrected, which featured a similar nurse/patient, dog/master-roleplaying love affair, was more subtle than this. Both Wertmuller and, to an extent, Adam Resurrected satirized this patriarchal fantasy of "natural"/"savage"/"in the wild" gender roles - La cagna instead embraces them, presenting them as the real thing, as enviable, even.

La cagna also unfortunately relies on lobby room jazz muzak coupled with moody shots of Mastroianni and Deneuve to denote profound philosophical depths. But honestly, Ferreri's not fooling anyone: the characters are paper-thin, the attempts at backstory sloppy and unconvincing ("Ludwig is wrong! No, Ludwig is wrong!" Liza insists - sparing us who Ludwig is or what he's wrong about; the blunt flashback to Melampo as Giorgio crouches over another dead dog - how much more obvious do you need to be? WE GET IT). There's no sense of how much time is passing, no investment in the relationship, and no build and release of dramatic tension. Instead, we trudge along with inane dialogue and, at its worst, tediously stupid gender politics. And those sunglasses! Self-described "Robinson Crusoe" Giorgio springs for Yves Saint Laurent sneakers, but not sunglasses? Oh, come on.

No, we're sorry, but we really don't care about Giorgio's deep guilt over his abandoned, unstable family at home and their bourgeois restrictions on his creativity. Melampo - Pinocchio's dog - may indicate that Giorgio is Pinocchio, but Peter Pan might be more appropriate.

La tête en friche (2010)

La tête en friche (My Afternoons with Margueritte) tries to be a charming sketch of bittersweet village life, but instead it falls flat. It was just embarrassing.

In a small town somewhere in France, the stout Germain (a gone-to-seed Gérard Depardieu) unwillingly occupies the position of village idiot. Slow to read, slow with numbers and painfully conscious of this, Germain spends his days trying to find simple pleasures - his vegetable garden, his girlfriend, drinks with the mates - and trying to keep at bay the ridicule and disdain of the other villagers and, most especially, his indifferent, shrewish mother (Claire Maurier). Things take an upturn when he befriends the coquettish, patient, 95-year-old Margueritte (Gisèle Casadesus), and they spend their lunches sitting on the park bench, reading Camus to each other. Under Margueritte's loving care, Germain gets (1) the mother he wanted, and (2) the confidence to blossom like a little intellectual flower.

The core of the story is sweet enough, and might have made a charming piece. Instead, things are handled so bluntly that we wondered if the film wasn't trying to go all meta on Germain's bumbling, clumsy ham-fisting. Example: the distracting and unnecessary flashbacks, where a school-age Germain - in the same outfit! and the same haircut! - is regularly mocked by his teachers and mother for being slow. Or Margueritte and Germain's execrably banal conversations. Or the fact that Depardieu, bless him, is about thirty years too old for this part, and his relationship with the beautiful bus driver, Annette (Sophie Guillemin), strains credulity. Or their awful (AWFUL) pillow talk. Or the Italian stereotype, Gardini (François-Xavier Demaison), complete with oily hair and hands flying around.

French films about the honest, humble "la vie est belle!" glory of the village have been done before - and, presumably, there must be some good ones. But all the ones we've seen - this, Chocolat, Amélie - rely on a sort of maudlin sentimentality, as well as a romanticized notion of the rich, golden-toned Frenchness of living in France, that we can't stand. Let Nanni Moretti glorify the mundane and the good life.

Capitaine Achab (2007)

Capitaine Achab is a total snooze during the childhood scenes, but totally picks up when the titular character grows up, loses his leg and is played by the short, demon-like Denis Lavant.

We want to call this film "weird" because... well, because we can't think of any other description for it. It was completely bewildering, and, even worse, not intentionally so. Part of this is our fault: we are so ignorant we had no idea Moby Dick even takes place in America, so when the French characters started saying "Nawn-too-kett" and "Zjhonneee LarhSON", we went, "Waiwaiwait, they're in the US?!" Laugh at us, if you must. But some of the blame also lies with the filmmakers, who give us such a slippery, elusive story (much like an albino sperm whale!) that we had a lot of trouble figuring out its tone. With the random shots of genitalia interspersed with meditative voiceovers over the nature of wandering eggs (uh, chicken eggs) mixed up with stock footage of whale harpooning, periscope-style camerawork and Tim Buckley covers... man, what is going on here!?

The story is told in five distinct chapters. At the beginning of each chapter, we learn the narrator's name - Ahab's grizzled dad (Jean-François Stévenin), his pious aunt (Mona Heftre), Mulligan the stoic priest (Carlo Brandt), Anna the lover (Dominique Blanc), and finally Starbuck the First Mate (Jacques Bonnaffé). Each chapter is, we suppose, meant to illustrate a particular characteristic of Ahab's - how he picked up his legendary single-mindedness, obsessive determination, you know, the whale thing. But none of it is really interesting until we get to the adult Ahab, with his craggy, angry visage and whale bone stump for a leg, and then the payoff for that long, boring backstory is pretty awesome. If the story had followed just the adult Ahab, we would have been well chuffed. But then, we guess that would have just been the book.


Hot hearts, mortar chests and whale bone legs.

Because Denis Lavant is a rollicking good Ahab, compelling and unstable where the child Ahab - Virgil Leclaire - was just blandly cute. You can't really get behind the child Ahab, even if the narrator (Mulligan, in this scene) is calling him a "four-foot ten-year-old little badass" (okay, we paraphrase, it was more like "le petite badass"). But you can definitely get behind Lavant's Ahab, with his squirrelly, sinister energy. Beware, that man is a badass.

So: a very lopsided movie, with random moments of awesomeness spiking out of a sea of weird. Featuring also a large white whale and NO ONE says, "Thar she blows!" (Alas.)

And now, if you've never read Moby Dick but kinda want to now that you saw such a compelling performance of Ahab, in other words, if you feel like us today, join us in admiring this excellent passage about Ahab from the book (freely lifted from Wiki):

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Goosebumps, people!

The trailer, since we can't find the DVD.

Léon (The Professional) (1994)

In the style of the PPCC, we go see a movie in the cinema - in this case, the bloated but impressive The Dark Knight - and we come out of it wanting to write a review... of something else. That's not to say we wouldn't like to review The Dark Knight, which was stuffed to the brim with interesting shots and interesting pop politicking and interesting themes (the whole Joker=dog thing was perplexingly weird). It's just that we don't have it on hand for screencapping, so we had to look for something else.

And what The Dark Knight reminded us of was: Gary!


Wonderfully sleazy.

Ahhh, Gary. Another one of our PPCC Favorites - like the Shash, Jeff, M*A*S*H and Star Wars. We just love Gary! Every time Gary appeared onscreen in the Dark Knight - what with his adorable moustache and adorably grandmotherly glasses and general harried overworked tough-guyness - our heart leapt. Batman, Schmatman - is Lieutenant Gordon OK?!

The best-all, end-all Gary vehicle is Léon. If you can watch this and not like Gary, you are missing the gene.


She's gonna need some water and sunlight if she's gonna grow. Not all this killin'!

Léon is one of those movies that has, like, ten million versions - the Director's Cut, the Extended Cut, the Whatever Cut. It also is consistently popular; frequently on American cable (Gary's weirdly dubbed "Bullcrap!" moment is one of our lasting memories of the Censored Cut) and a big hit at parties. What's funny is how a provocative and bizarre movie like Léon - wait 'til you read the plot - should become so... well, normalized. This movie's really quite freaky, and yet everyone we know loves it.

Especially us. Enter the titular Léon (Jean Reno). Léon is a top-notch assassin-for-hire, or "cleaner", with John Lennon sunglasses and a penchant for milk and plants. He is also not so bright. He lives in a crappy apartment building next to Mathilda (a 12-year-old Natalie Portman) and her seedy family. Mathilda is your regular old Lolita - a posturing and self-conscious bad-ass who clearly feels a lot older than her 12 years. Mathilda swears, smokes and speaks in a broad New Yawk accent. "I wanna kill those sonsa bitches," she says at one point. "I wanna blow their fucking brains out." Aww, cute. Anyway, enter our villain, Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman!). He gets two names even though he's always only called "Stansfield" because this guy, he is a legend. Here is a villain that - like Heath Ledger's Joker or Daniel Day-Lewis' The Butcher in Gangs of New York - is so perversely compelling that you worry about how much you like him. Stansfield is absolutely zany insane, and Gary plays him like a farce - chewing up the set and spitting it in your face. It is wonderfully entertaining.


Stan's INSANE.


Mathilda and Léon.

Anyway. Stansfield is a corrupt, hyped-up cop who kills Mathilda's entire family, including her older sister and younger brother, when a coke deal goes bad. Mathilda narrowly escapes by taking refuge at the neighbors' - namely, Léon's. When she discovers Léon's an assassin, she begs him to teach her how to "clean", as she needs to exact revenge against the slimy Stansfield. It becomes immediately apparent (at least, the PPCC thinks so) that Mathilda is the brains and Léon the muscle. Léon reluctantly agrees.

Hmm, majors teaching minors how to assassinate people? Well, there's more. Slowly, the young, pubescent Mathilda begins getting the hots for Léon. The two become friends - teaching other, helping each other and clearly caring for each other - and yet Mathilda wants more from the relationship. "Léon, I think I'm kinda falling in love with you," Mathilda says in one scene. Léon, characteristically, coughs up his milk.


Everyone did a lot of physical acting in this, and Jeon Reno was great at that.

The narrative structure of the film - directed by Luc Besson - is airtight and super-effective. Not a moment is wasted, and most moments pack a lot of punch. Besson's camera is fast and light, yet never disorienting. Rather, his camerawork is graceful, so that it feels like dancing. Yes, we said it, dancing. We know that sounds dorky. But it's true! The background score is another great asset in this film, and scenes like the shoot-out in Mathilda's home (warning for violence) are powerful and terrifying with their dizzy, swaying music.

The themes are interesting, too. One theme could be awakening and growing up - Mathilda's pubescence, Léon's realization that a better life exists, the plant. Of course, this theme is also one of the most disturbing, as we're talking about a 12-year-old's sexuality and a 40-year-old illiterate man who also seems a bit slow. The PPCC got into an argument over this once, because we really maintain that Léon is supposed to be mentally disabled. Anyway, if this doesn't have you cringing yet, wait 'til you see the Extended Extended Cut, or whatever it is which wasn't shown in America but was shown in France, as that cut contains some intense moments - for example, when Mathilda threatens to kill herself if Léon doesn't say he loves her.


Mathilda and Stansfield and a gun.


Mathilda and Léon.

Another theme seems to be brains. Apart from the high number of people getting their brains blown out (don't watch this if you can't watch violence), there's also the relationship between the three main characters: Léon, Mathilda, and Stansfield. Léon seems to be immature, behind his years and slowly catching up. Mathilda is, instead, at the other end: leaping ahead and, in several scenes, acting like the "brains" behind their operations. And Stansfield spends most of the film with his brains permanently scrambled (egg, frying pan, your brain on drugs).

The performances are all great. Jean Reno has a difficult job, as he needs to maintain the audience's sympathies for Léon, even though he is (1) a killer and (2) possibly a pedophile. Yet Reno plays him with such gentle idiocy that it's hard to imagine him killing a fly (which makes him all the more terrifying, too!). Natalie Portman is very impressive - it's crazy to think she was so young! - as she handles herself maturely and effectively, often carrying most of the film's emotional weight. And Gary...! Here's a great backstage photo of Gary and Natalie. This film wouldn't be this film if it wasn't for Gary. Just watch it and enjoy.


The freaky Stansfield On Drugs tic.

La Haine (1995)

Bad-ass breakdancing, a brief relief from all that tension!

La Haine (Hate) is specific to French racial relations, but its themes of youth, poverty and inevitability of violence are universal. From West Side Story to A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints to Tsotsi, these films show us how a thousand details can tip the balance and cause a flashpoint; how angry young men living in poverty, even as they try desperately to avoid it, can seem wrapped up in violence. It is as if these young men too are helpless spectators, watching their own rush to a violent death. A line that is repeated several times in La Haine is:

Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!

The trailer.

That sums up the protagonists' fate: they are falling headlong to their doom, and they can do nothing but try to ease their way down with joints and hip-hop. All three main characters - Hubert (Hubert Koundé), Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), and Vinz (Vincent Cassel) - know that there is no way out of the projects, even as they dream of it. Society is against them: the police and bourgeoise their enemies. In this tense environment, misunderstandings can be fatal. At one point in the film, a young kid is telling the three tough guys a story about a celebrity, thinking he was on Candid Camera, overreacting to an autograph-seeker to the point of coming to blows. The story once again rings true for Hubert, Saïd and Vinz: they are puppets to their fate, and they are quick to see aggression where there is none. In Vinz's case, they are even willing to create their oppression as a way of creating an identity out of it.


The excellent Vincent Cassel.

Of course, La Haine is also a commentary on the racism and classism of post-colonial France. The film opens with Saïd, the son of Arab Muslim immigrants. Saïd is the pragmatic peacemaker of the three: more interested in making cash and getting laid than any ideological clash. He is also the most boyish. Hubert is of West African descent, and he is the most mature. He dreams of escaping the projects and he recognizes most clearly that there is no way out. Vinz is Jewish and the most ideological. Throughout the film, Vinz constantly talks big about how he's going to kill a token cop if Abdel (the poster child for the rioting which encompasses the film, a young French Arab who is beaten into a coma by the cops) dies in the hospital. Hubert and Saïd are less interested in abstract revenge and they disagree with Vinz's bloodlust. Indeed, we get the vibe that Vinz is overcompensating for his whiteness: while French anti-semitism is well-known, Vinz's minority status is hidden by his melanin. While Hubert and Saïd are regularly targeted - they are arrested, beaten, attacked by skinheads - Vinz is always frantic to get involved, always eager to prove his street cred and show that he, too, is a victim and wants to fight back.


The projects.


Hubert.

If we concentrate on the racial question, this film would make an interesting addition to a course on Franco-colonial relations: first, 1966's The Battle for Algiers, then this, followed by 2005's Caché. This film fits just as easily into documenting urban youth and hip-hop culture, in which case it could sit side by side with Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing.


A day in the life.

But apart from what the film tries to say, it's also very satisfying in how it looks. The choice of black and white film over color could be for a number of reasons: the moral dichotomy and shades of gray involved in the cops versus rioters situation, the black/white racial dichotomy, or just because it looks cool. As with Raj Kapoor's Awaara or Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, this would probably suffer if it was done in color: the filmmakers are just so good at giving the black and white textures and meaning! Furthermore, the moments showing us the time give the story a ticking time-bomb quality. We keep waiting for something awful to happen (and yes, it does). Yet even as the explosion looms closer and closer, we see how dull and empty Hubert, Saïd and Vinz's daily life can be. They prowl the streets, desperate for something to do. They talk about nothing and get high. It's obvious that they're unsatisfied, and it's obvious that they're trapped.

Given the recent riots in 2005, the film remains a timely look at one of France's big problems, and it makes the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, who called men like Hubert, Saïd and Vinz "thugs" and "scum", especially frightening. Hubert's words seem especially relevant: "Who's the asshole? In school we learned that hate breeds hate."