Tag: Paris

We (Nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The strange thing about the banlieues that surround Paris is that none of them are technically considered to actually constitute the city proper. Never-mind the fact that the city itself is largely made up of people commuting into the centre from these suburbs each day; popular outskirts such as Seine Saint Denis are counted as their own departments.

Even more curious is the make-up of Paris. Once when coming in from Charles De Gaulle, I noticed that the majority of people on the train were black; but when finally reaching my friend in Montmartre, almost everyone in the famed district was white. There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the different ethnicities in the city, with the prospect of moving up the economic food chain an almost impossible task.

We examines this interesting make-up of Paris’ outskirts — which still reveal the fault-lines at the heart of French society — using the urban RER B train as a connective tissue between the different people one can expect in director Alice Diop’s hometown. She has Senegalese roots, but her observations are not tied towards one race or people, taking an all-encompassing look at the different types of people that make up the larger metropolitan area.

Stretching from a Malian garage-worker who hasn’t been home since the early ’00s, to young girls teasing each other on a housing estate, to the residents of an old-person’s home, the film is effectively a collection of self-contained portraits in search of a larger picture, Diop a modern flaneur, taking in the panoramic city scene. Traditional stereotypes of the banlieue are completely dispelled here, with the film beginning and ending with rural scenes; first spotting a stag in the far distance, later accompanying affluent residents on a fox hunt. Those who expect Parisian banlieue to still resemble the scenes of La Haine will be surprised by its diversity.

Often the most compelling images are those of her own family; such as her departed mother, glimpsed enigmatically through home footage, and her father, proudly talking of how he traversed from Senegal to make a better life for himself. But these moments, touching in and of themselves, can’t intersect with the film’s otherwise observational approach in a satisfying way.

Additionally, several of the film’s aesthetic choices and elongated scenes test the patience of a digital festival-goer, who may have been more generous in the stringent atmosphere of a cinema screening. With no central thematic point, rather than simply a loose geographical tissue, holding the disparate scenes together, its anthology approach seems to strain its ideas rather than focus them. Coming in at a significant two hour runtime, one imagines the tighter, more effective film lurking within a second or third edit. Diop has a noble aim; to survey that, like her mother, which she feels has been forgotten to the sands of time — notably spelled out during a visit with a local historian — but the execution is often painfully academic. The title We is meant to stand for everyone, but without really honing in on anyone at all, this ‘we’ remains rather vague.

We played in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It shows in October at the BFI London Film Festival.

The Escape

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tara (Gemma Arterton, also executive producer) is married to Mark (Dominic Cooper) with two small kids Teddy and Florrie (real-life siblings Teddy and Florrie Pender). He has a secure job and they’re living somewhere in a housing development in Gravesend, Kent. Her life consists of responding to his sexual advances, which no longer satisfy her the way they once did, getting him to work and the kids to school in the mornings, keeping the house tidy during the day and playing with the kids after school. She has her own car but doesn’t get out much except to do the household shopping. If her life ever possessed any significant meaning, it’s long lost in the humdrum of a housewife and mother’s everyday married routine.

Something needs to change, and judging by a pre-title scene where Arterton wakes up alone in a house with framed art prints on the wall and walks alone to a park, it’s about to do so. The first hour after that charts the gradually worsening situation of her relationship with her husband and kids, punctuated by a trip up to London and the purchase from the Southbank’s second hand book market of The Lady And The Unicorn, a tome about six medieval tapestries which hang in Paris and represent the five familiar senses and an unfamiliar sixth one which represents something like our moral judgement. Which is what the film is about: taking stock of one’s life and making any necessary changes if and where it seems less than satisfactory.

The remainder sees Arterton take off to Paris, visit the museum with the tapestries and get picked up for a one-night stand in her hotel room by charming French photographer Philippe (Jalil Lespert). She tells lies to redefine her identity, saying she works for a London commercial company and she’s not involved with anyone. When it turns out he has a wife and kids, she tells him what he did was wrong and turfs him out, which seems a little bit two faced to say the least given she’s done much the same to him. After that, will she be able to go back to her husband? The pre-credits scene, which also closes the film, suggests not.

The whole is light on dialogue and heavy on improvisation, especially in the family scenes with the two kids, with writer-director Savage opting for a fluid, handheld camera approach to capture the potential of open-ended performances. He’s helped by his decision to use a small crew which allows for great versatility in shooting. If it sometimes feels like not that much happens in its 105-minute running length, there’s an intensity to events as they unfold in the moment on the screen.

Long after viewing, most of the domestic scenes fade but the memories of the trip to Paris and the one-night stand remain, as will Cooper’s hurling her tapestry book across the kitchen in a moment of rage and Arterton’s losing her composure and swearing at her kids. The highly effective music by Anthony John and Alexandra Harwood cleverly adds a sense of longing in the domestic senses and a feeling of satisfaction when Arterton finally gets away. Ultimately, it’s a clever little film which, through a mixture of script prep, strong casting and improv, achieves its aims. So, worth seeing.

The Escape is out in the UK on Friday, August 3rd. It’s available on VoD from Monday, December 3rd.

Tilting at windmills in Paris

Posted on by victorfraga

I have waited for many films to arrive, but there’s only one that I’ve anticipated for 16 years: Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Over the years it has even invaded my own dreams, quite fitting for a film made by a dreamer about a dreamer. I’ve followed its numerous iterations, from the initial hope that Johnny Depp would still star (following the success of those pirate films, he ruled himself out in 2009), to the Robert Duvall/Ewan McGregor two-header, and on to perhaps the most heartbreaking and tantalising version with John Hurt as the Man of La Mancha. At one point Gerard Depardieu (with Depp as Toby) was in the frame, then even Al Pacino was considered. Others have come and gone. In fact, the project goes way back, to a more literal concept with Sean Connery and Danny DeVito that Gilliam floated in the early 1990s.

Obviously, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was always set to play at Cannes. It was going to be independently funded with European money, and that’s where the festival directors and distributors gather. However, when former producer Paulo Branco attempted to sabotage it after leaving the project in what looked like a blatant attempt at extortion, everything was up in the air until the last minute. Without Branco’s machinations, the film would probably have played in competition – but in the end, Gilliam’s premiere bagged the final slot, showing the closing ceremony and… out of competition! It also garnered a 20-minute standing ovation despite festival fatigue, one of the longest ever.

With uncertainty still raging days before Cannes, I chose to trek to Paris instead, where screenings had been scheduled and looked likely to go through. With no UK distributor lined up, I wasn’t taking any chances on missing something I’d waited 16 years for, and so grabbed for the earliest screening I could.

How much of that Cannes ovation was for the film and how much for Gilliam’s perseverance is open to question, but in my opinion it’s probably his best work since Brazil (1985), and so richly deserved. Of course, Cannes reactions are not necessarily the best indicator of how well a film will perform with critics or audiences. No one was sure what to expect – from around 1989, when Gilliam was still a hot property in Hollywood, to now, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote transformed from a more faithful retelling of Cervantes’ lengthy and perhaps ultimately unfilmable novel to a meta-version that incorporated elements of Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to a deeply personal contemporary version without the time travel angle once considered. The documentary Lost In La Mancha (Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe, 2002) showed something very different than the final film.

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As personal as it gets

At some point in the noughties, co-writer Tony Grisoni suggested that lead character Toby should be a movie director rather than an advertising executive. And so Toby (Adam Driver) emerged as a youngish filmmaker who made a student movie called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote for his thesis. Now back in Spain to make a Quixote-inspired advert, he finds out that the town he shot as a student is close by. He visits to find some inspiration, and learns that his film had a profound, and not necessary positive, impact. That’s especially so for the village shoemaker, who played the role of Quixote (Jonathan Pryce) and now seems to believe he really is Cervantes’ knight.

Obviously, the film owes a massive debt to Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), which had a major impact on Gilliam (Brazil‘s original title was 1984 ½): a key scene for him was when Marcello Mastronianni dances around the film producers who are coming at him from all directions, a visual that portrayed what would be necessary to work successfully in the movies years to Gilliam before he made a film. Like all of Gilliam’s films, despite being grand, it’s intensely personal. Toby and Quixote portray the director’s two sides: Toby personifies the deeply frustrated would-be artist whose passion and determination have been channelled into commerce, while Quixote is the dreamer whose life was enriched and yet damaged by the story.

The film business is full of damaged people whose lives are lived episodically through the films they make. And when a film crew comes to town, it affects the place socially and even environmentally—living out your dreams carries untold risks. Indeed, there were accusations that the filmmakers damaged a world heritage site in Portugal while this one was made. The thin line between madness and dreams is always the main theme in Gilliam’s work, and there are certainly echoes of The Fisher King (1991; one of his few fully contemporary films), The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) here. Gilliam has joked over the years that his wife, Maggie Weston, says he just makes the same film over and over. Of course, most true artists have certain themes that permeate their work and they constantly re-evaluate those questions because they are close to their heart. 

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A star-studded cast

The casting is exemplary. Adam Driver came to fame as the only reason to watch Lena Dunham’s TV series Girls, but in the last few years he has been able to pick off the directors he wanted to work with, from Noah Baumbach to Jim Jarmusch to Spike Lee. His Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017) role brought stardom, and attaching him to the project helped Gilliam sell the film overseas. Driver isn’t a stereotypical handsome leading man—he has an interesting face but isn’t a pretty boy, and here he perfectly captures Toby’s humour and arrogance. His comedic timing is coupled with enough depth to bring you along on his journey.

Jonathan Pryce has a long history with Gilliam—his breakthrough role was the lead of Sam Lowry in Brazil, and although he had been pegged for a different role in 2001, in 2018 he reached the age where he can pull off the role of Quixote but still has box-office power. He stepped into the role of after Gilliam’s old Python buddy Michael Palin was touted for the role and there was even a mock-up poster made for that version for Cannes. 

Stellen Skarsgård is great as an absolutely horrid producer (perhaps there’s a bit of Branco in there) and Rossy de Palma also shines in a supporting role. Jason Watkins plays Toby’s assistant and perfectly captures a particular campy, upper-middle-class film agent type. The cast is filled out with Spanish and British actors who have perfect faces for a Gilliam production and Joana Ribeiro as Angelica is destined for stardom.

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The eye of the Man of La Mancha

The film was shot by Gilliam’s own Sancho Panza, Nicola Pecorini, who’s a genius cinematographer but rarely gets works. Pecorini has worked with Gilliam ever since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), despite a blip during Brothers Grimm (2005). Blind in one eye, he always comes up with interesting shots. Unlike a lot of Gilliam’s movies, there’s a lot of fish-eye lens work along with the trademark wide lens shots. Of course, the landscapes they found in Spain and Portugal do half the work. There are a couple of jump cuts that don’t work for me, but that’s a minor criticism. There is little CGI, which I think is a good thing and there is even a line about Toby preferring handmade effects than CGI. It’s difficult to get the budget for high-quality CGI, and the handmade quality fits the kind of film that Gilliam wanted to make.

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A long cinematic journey

In other words, it was worth sleeping on the overnight bus from Leeds to Paris just to see The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, not once but twice: first at the UGC Cine Cite Halles multiplex, then at the MK2 Beaubourg, where the audience was smaller but far more enthusiastic. There were a couple of walkouts at both screenings, but in my experience that’s usually a good sign – the director has provoked a strong reaction (although at the MK2 it looked more like a ‘wrong date movie’ situation.) My attempt to blag a poster were, sadly, unsuccessful.

He’s a director who always struggles with length, and it’s Gilliam’s longest film since The Fisher King in a world where independent films are supposed to be 100 minutes max, it’s great that he was able to grab the time it needed—despite some minor pacing issues in the middle, it’s a story that needs time to unfold. If this is Gilliam’s last film (which I hope it isn’t), it’s a good one to go out on. At a time of so many mundane independent films and action/superhero films, the fact that Gilliam can still make a film every few years gives me hope for cinema, because that means it’s still possible to put his dreams and nightmares on the big screen.

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Click here for our editor’s take on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He was present in Cannes, and far less impressed with the movie.

My Golden Days (Trois Souvenirs De Ma Jeunesse)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The director revisits the main character of his earlier, three hour long My Sex Life… or How I Got Into An Argument/Comment Je Me Suis Disputé… (Ma Vie Sexuelle)(1996). Anthropologist Paul Dédalus (played once again by Mathieu Amalric) prepares to leave Tajikistan for Paris to take up a new job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He remembers childhood trauma, political intrigue and the love of his life as a young man in and out of the Northern French city of Roubaix (incidentally Desplechin’s home town).

The childhood trauma involves irreconcilable differences between small boy Paul (Antoine Bui) and his mother Jeanne (Cécile Garcia-Fogel) which result in lengthy shouting matches between parent and child and the boy moving out to live with his grandmother while his younger brother and sister remain with their mother. It’s gripping stuff and lasts maybe ten minutes. The young Bui is a beautiful bit of casting: you immediately see him and think he’s Amalric as a boy.

The political intrigue takes place when sixteen year old Paul (Quentin Dolmaire, who sadly looks nothing like Amalric or Bui and therefore defies believability as the same character) via his best mate Zyl (Elyot Milshtein), full name Marc Zylberberg, agrees to bunk off a school trip to Minsk so Zyl can deliver a package of money and other items to a refusnik community and Paul can give his passport to a refusnik teen who looks like him. It all goes horribly wrong, but because they’re privileged Western kids they return to France without too much difficulty. Shortly after this, the Zylberbergs move out of Roubaix and Paul loses contact with Zyl.

The story comes to light in the present day frame story when Paul is stopped at French airport customs owing to passport irregularities: specifically, a second Paul Dédalus holds a passport with many identical details. Again, it all works out fine. This episode runs about twenty minutes and feels less focused than the opener.

This leaves an hour and a half for the third flashback about the love of his life which again features Dolmaire as Paul in his student days, occasionally mediated by present-day recollection scenes featuring Amalric. It’s the story of his initially tentative, subsequently full on and finally disastrous romance with Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet, recently seen in I Got Life!/Aurore). She seems to have several men in tow from the moment he first meets her and their relationship goes from teaching her to play Go through passionate letter writing to a combination of letters when Paul is away from Roubaix and a consummated physical relationship when he’s there. Eventually, as he spends less and less time in that city, she dumps him for a rival who actually lives there.

The romance delivers some striking scenes. When Esther/Roy-Lecollinet enters a crowded party, she’s electrifying as the camera lingers on her. When she can’t say goodbye to Paul when he boards a train, you’ll be on the edge of your seat. But a few strong scenes among a lot of so-so ones does not a great film make. The relationship meanders all over the place with no sense of what was so amazing about it. When Paul embarks on an affair with the older Gilberte (Mélodie Richard) in Paris, you don’t particularly care.

And in a way that’s like the overall film. Someone looks back at their life. And…? What was so significant about that? What’s different, or remarkable, or special about them or their life? In this instance, it’s hard to pinpoint anything. Former cinematographer Desplechin ensures the film looks good overall, and his matter-of-fact shooting of sex scenes as narrative development rather than gratuitous titillation is to be applauded. Ultimately, though, his meandering script with its overall lack of focus proves an insurmountable obstacle.

My Golden Days is out in the UK on Friday March 16th. Watch the film trailer below: