MA SAISON PRÉFÉRÉE (André Téchiné, 1993)

A quick advisory to the domestic filmgoer weaned on commercial fare: André Téchiné’s Ma Saison Préférée (My Favorite Season) will surprise and confound you who might still relish the old Filipino paradigm of family dramas – the oversentimental, the histrionic, the overdramatized kind. Téchiné’s film, instead, depicts a portrait of a dysfunctional family without the emotional and cathartic excesses. Family tensions and antagonisms here are negotiated with such sophistication and elegance that one comes away from it with warm, ennobled feelings. 

André Téchiné’s Ma Saison Préférée, a film about cherished memories and idealized pasts, is also a film about misrecognitions: we don’t see from one set of lenses, and therefore don’t see an experience identically. In Téchiné’s shorthand, the seasons simply stand for memory’s mnemonics. Summer beguiles the film’s characters, middle-aged siblings, Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) and Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), for instance, not for the warmth of the sun and days in the park, but for something each of them separately knows.

Some of this film's characters, however, cling too fiercely to their shared memories, jealously guarding not just these memories but those with whom they experienced those special moments – to the point of everyone else’s exclusion. At such times, these memories verge on the pathologic, verge on murking their pure waters. 

Such memories, such ties, tangled and obsessive, lie at the heart of Téchiné’s film. It starts with a premise that seems harmless enough: a family gathering around a mother’s incipient old age and widowhood, but it’s a family, as the story unfolds, freighted with curious bonds.

Adopted into daughter Emilie's home as a result of her incapacitation, Berthe seems ill at ease in her new domicile. Things hint at the incongruous as Emilie finds her mother muttering to herself in the dark at ungodly hours of the night. Is it her infirmities, her unfamiliar surroundings, that make her an unsettled member of the household? When Antoine, Berthe's youngest son, visits for Christmas, the central twist slips in: it rekindles the tight-knit closeness between Emilie and him. Berthe, meanwhile, seems especially responsive to her son, to the detriment of Emilie's family. Family romance, yes – in a way. 

Emilie, a prospering lawyer, and Antoine, a brain surgeon, are seemingly well-adjusted professionals on the surface. But the quirks soon start to show: we find Antoine muttering to himself in the restroom a stream of mantras redolent of psychoanalysis. While Emilie vents her unsettled, sexual emotions on a stranger on a park bench. Emilie and Antoine are in the thick of reevaluating their relationship, their unusual closeness borne out of an intimate childhood. Emilie seems more sure of what it all means, but Antoine seems to value it differently. He seems to dance attendance around her at every chance. And perhaps it explains why Antoine doesn’t see eye to eye with Emilie’s husband.

Berthe, as the film culminates, reconnects more pronouncedly with her own children. A brief but memorable sequence shows the three together on the road recreating their happy journeys in childhood, Emilie and Antoine singing humorous nursery songs. They seem fleetingly happy. They go on along their magical itinerary, retrieving their magical past. Family romance, yes – in a way. 

Ma Saison Préférée adroitly and tastefully renders Antoine and Emilie’s potentially incestuous relationship. Director André Téchiné, who also wrote the screenplay, sidesteps a polemical outcome with assured subtle and lyrical direction, mixing solemn and comic moments. (His light touch gives this film a funny sense of gallows humor at times, as evidenced by Antoine’s suicide attempt.) Téchiné's relish for unorthodox relationships, as films like The Wild Reeds would bear out, is in evidence yet again. Ma Saison Préférée, despite its delicate theme, ends with warm, rarefied feelings. All without the emotional manipulation and exhaustion we are accustomed to. 

Title in English: My Favorite Season

reviewed:  June 13, 2009

MARIE-JO AND HER TWO LOVES (Robert Guediguian, 2002)

 

The French, it seems, do not shock so easily. They aren’t hardened and rigid moralists about to cry foul at the prospect of the aberrant and the transgressive. Well, at least not to those of us moviegoers attuned to the ethically-ambiguous and sophisticated laissez-faire of French cinema. The theme of marital infidelity, for one, has obsessed and exercised many of its filmmakers for ages and established an extensive tradition of controversial filmmaking. In Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, a husband declares his dalliances with a woman with the full expectation that his wife would understand him. Louis Malle’s Les Amants is regarded as one of the watershed films in this subgenre, featuring the most torrid sexual scenes at the time of its initial screening all across Europe. Other notable exponents of this much-contested theme are Claire Denis, whose Friday Night apotheosizes one tryst, and Bertrand Blier, whose films like Trop Belle Pour Toi and Get Out Your Handkerchiefs were not only well-received but also well-awarded. 

The canon is expanding each day. Of recent vintage is Robert Guediguian’s Marie-Jo and Her Two Loves, where this time, it is a woman who asserts her questionable subjectivity. Marie-Jo, the main character, is torn between what can only be reductively called a romantic love and a pragmatic love. To her, at first, there doesn’t even seem to be a distinction between sex and love. She seems to be playing it by ear. What makes this scenario more remarkable is the fact that Daniel, her husband, and Marco, the lover, seem amenable to a three-cornered relationship. When the husband senses the tell-tale signs of infidelity and verifies the affair, he teeters between confronting her and keeping quiet. He chooses the latter. While on the other hand the lover is reduced to importuning her over the phone for the next tryst. He doesn’t demand her divorce and allows things to go on as before. 

Marie-Jo, in truth, is caught between two equally desirable choices. Daniel is a thoughtful and devoted type of man who may lack learning and education but whose love and constancy for Marie-Jo cannot be questioned. Marco, on the other hand, is the stuff of romance and robust love: a good-looking man with a felicitously effusive tongue, he is a well-traveled seafarer who knows a hundred cultures and can regale any listener with fantastic tales for hours on end. Marie-Jo starts her affair on purely sexual grounds with him, but ends up head over heels in love. Enough for her to abandon Daniel and her daughter Julie. 

Set in the seaside city of Marseille, with recurrent shots of massive sea-faring hulls of ships and wide expanses of water, the film tests the openness to forbidden relationships of its world-wise inhabitants. Surprisingly everyone around Marie-Jo approves of her affair with Marco and entertains the possibility of her leaving Daniel for the lover: a workmate of Marco’s, a patient at the hospital where Marie-Jo is a nurse. It is for the simple reason that she seems noticeably “happy” and the lover likewise. 

What makes this film with a tricky theme a highly watchable affair is its recognition of relational details, details that can be telling and diverting. In one scene, Marco asks for a full disclosure of Marie-Jo’s day at home like a lovesick, forlorn lover. Hesitatingly she proceeds to describe all her domesticities, and stops humorously – to the dismay of the lover – when she comes to a point of describing what the husband does sexually to her. Another equally diverting scene is when Marie-Jo sets up Marco to meet her family and both sides end up liking each other. Marie-Jo and Her Two Loves (2002) seems to mark a departure for the director of The Town is Quiet (2000). Missing from the former film is the almost ethnographic study of Guediguian’s hometown, Marseille, and its locals; in its place is something akin to a fable, not a moral one but one about human foibles that cannot be judged or faulted. With that, the film concludes with a poetic but perhaps too contrived ending – the deep blue sea, a watery deus-ex-machina.

Reviewed: June 8, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

17 FOIS CÉCILE CASSARD (Christophe Honoré, 2002)

Christophe Honoré‘s 17 Fois Cécile Cassard is a film encompassing 17 fragments in the life of its title hero, a disconsolate widow who can’t seem to overcome her husband’s suicide. It is not a selfish suicide but one of self-sacrifice – in order to secure her future and their son’s with insurance money. As her sense of bereavement, however, becomes too much, she becomes incapable of living from day to day and taking care of her son. She must leave everything behind – her hometown of Tours, her friends, her son – and embark on a journey of consolation and renewal. 

Through 17 moments that trace a trajectory from grief to recovery, Honoré dramatizes a familiar story and perhaps a personal, autobiographical one, dedicated to the director's parents. By no means, however, do these fragments -- stylized and aestheticized -- form a clear-cut and conventional story. There is a suffocating sense of unreality to the proceedings: the characters Cécile Cassard meets along the way may not be mere people but abstractions incarnate; his final destination, Toulouse, seems like an allegorical city. Much of the film is drenched in the atmospherics of darkness and stasis complemented by soundscapes that reflect the inner states of the film’s widowed protagonist. Great distortions and noise in the tradition of My Bloody Valentine suffuse much of the soundtrack. 

Another promising alumnus of Cahiers du Cinéma – a part of the second generation after Godard, Truffaut and company? — Christophe Honoré fashions out a brave and bold debut, a film that doesn’t so much take its cue from traditional plotting as it does from the gradual processes of life. We see the gradations from loss to renewal unfold as they should, with compact and quiet tonalities. 

Honoré takes away the literalness of the film's theme and subjects, and grounds them in a defamiliarized milieu. Toulouse, viewed through the prism of endless nights and dark emotions, becomes a kind of purgatory, populated almost exclusively by homosexuals, who are our world’s wretched, after all, consigned to a kind of social limbo. Honoré is unflinching in depicting homoerotic acts, the maddened men and their maddening sexual desires, as though to hint at the city’s psychical and emotional turbulence. 

Toulouse under a dark night is the film’s overarching presence, but the characters here provide a noteworthy counterpoint. Béatrice Dalle is sufficiently understated -- no chewing the atmospheric scenery here -- as Cécile Cassard. Romain Duris (L’Auberge Espagnole), who plays Matthieu, the gay man with a compassionate heart, however, steals the spotlight. Notable is the scene where he, barely clad in a thong, performs a number from Jacques Demy’s Lola. Although he is involved with another gay man, Matthieu has love to spare for Cécile and perhaps to everyone else who needs succor. Matthieu is like a consoling mother, a principle of nature, who promises to give Cécile another son. Perhaps, just perhaps, the night is lifting, the music is taking a redemptive turn. 

Reviewed: June 10, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

 

RIDICULE (Patrice Leconte, 1996)

Ridicule, when it goes unrefuted and unretorted in kind, is the kiss of death in this costume film by versatile French director Patrice Leconte. Ridicule, in a nutshell, is a pungent yet tasteful satire on aristocrats set in pre-revolutionary France. Set in the main at the palace in Versailles, it isn't so much about King Louis XVI as it is about his scheming and competing courtiers. At this court, wit is the ammunition; in order to survive – that is, to escape ridicule – one must devote oneself closely and studiously to cultivating it. 

Interestingly, this period piece appropriates many of the tropes of American high school movies, only this time in finery and thick facial powder. The competitions of wit and other goings-on at Versailles are not unlike the academic pursuits and rivalries evoked in this genre. One marquis, for instance, is not unlike a conscientious student who keeps careful notes – notebook after notebook – of witticisms he picks up from day to day – quips, paradoxes, repartees, all kinds. Another, an abbot no less, is like an exam cheat who makes sure he gets questions whose answers he already knows. The hectoring cliques are here, too, intent on putting the nonconformists in their place. While those who can’t keep up, the weak-hearted, resort to something drastic. They hang themselves.

Le Marquis Gregoire Ponceludon is the natural wit, the newcomer who is at court for more pressing and urgent reasons. An older aristocrat, Le Marquis de Bellegarde, takes him under his wing and becomes a bosom friend. The old man has a headstrong and academic daughter, Mathilde, who devotes her time to perfecting the 18^th century prototype of scuba-diving equipment and testing them out at the nearest well. But in order to further her studies without worries, she has agreed to marry a rich, old nobleman who can provide for her future. But that is all before she meets Gregoire, a well-learned engineer who seeks royal support to drain the fever-infested swamps of his humble region. 

Ridicule’s strength lies in its finely-conceived script – though some of it is easily lost in translation. Everyone here – even the deaf-mute – is a master at intellectual one-upmanship and can eloquently trade barbs with those who dare open their mouths. Everyone speaks in sweet, sententious tones, in effortless epigrams, as though they were reading from Voltaire or Rochefoucauld. In Ridicule, wit stands for the superficial concerns of aristocrats while peasants struggle to survive and die of preventable ailments. At court, wit seems to be the index of those who are most treacherous. Take Madame de Blayac, who presides over the games of intellect. She maneuvers and uses every expedient – of words, of charm, of connections – to get her way. Gregoire, beware.

Ironically, King Louis seems oblivious to it all. He displays the least capacity for these verbal games, and often misses the point. It isn’t long before the French Revolution breaks out. Could these courtiers have talked their way out of the guillotine?

Reviewed:  June 11, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

INDEPENDENCIA (Raya Martin, 2009)

For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign
domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation.
-- Amilcar Cabral

Everyone of us is channeling Americans. For over a hundred years now, we have imitated and internalized their smallest tics and their thickest twang; we aren’t called Little Brown Americans for nothing. Our assimilation of all things American is there to see – though perhaps too self-evident to notice. We eat Kentucky Friend Chicken and McDonald’s burgers and wash them down with swigs of Pepsi or Coca-Cola. We wear the latest shoes from Nike and listen to the latest songs by American Idols. We watch the latest movies churned out by Hollywood, starring our favorite state-side actors. These are our everyday realities. We are, in truth, not as independent as the history books would like us to believe; we are living in the shadow of these insidiously neo-colonial times.
 

Raya Martin’s Independencia, making its Philippine premiere on Independence Day ironically in a French film festival, may not espouse up-in-arms revolution (how, when the enemy is within us?) but delivers a subtly nativist message: the Filipino should endeavor to rediscover his pre-colonial roots. It’s the first small step in his long journey towards recovering true independence. Set in the early 1900s and onwards, Independencia avoids, perhaps by default, the grandiosely-scripted and astronomically budgeted depiction of an epical and heroic era: the American occupation. Instead, writer-director Raya Martin astutely focuses on common folks, non-comnbatants: a mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and her son (Sid Lucero) who flee to the forest as soon as the threat of war encroaches on their town.

Here, in this forest, reality seems refracted through a strangely allegorical and magical prism. Birds dart out of the bushes like shimmering bullets; breezes blow unceasingly; ferns and palm fronds sway and bend; a stream ripples and flows through it. In the conversations that will transpire within its bosom, this forest will be alluded to as the object of greed, and two towns go to war for it. This is where mother and son seek refuge. Soon (no one knows the nature of time here) they are joined by a woman (Alessandra de Rossi) who has been raped by American soldiers. In due time, she gives birth to a fair-skinned child. 
 

Independencia, however, is not about a family’s insularity. What this retreat from the outside world ultimately means is a symbolic return to the Filipino’s bedrock strength, a revalorization of his indigenous culture, his pre-colonial past. Within this film’s family, the oral tradition of myths, proverbs, legends and general folklore, is reenacted and passed down from one generation to another. Talk of talismans, giant wild boars, and the aswang circulate among this family in the woods. And the realities in the forest – e.g. the son finding his way home only after turning his shirt inside out, the appearance of wood spirits – don’t seem to contradict what this family partakes in.

Not unlike South American and other Third World writers employing magic realism in their works, Martin harnesses the inherently surreal/fantastical aspects of our folklore in order to mirror the under-emphasized and misrepresented aspects of our culture. Circulated in the deep of the night, circulated during meals, the stories exchanged in the depths of the forest are a kind of nourishment, a defense mechanism that both diverts and fortifies.

And yet in Independencia, Martin has fashioned out one of his least confounding and more accessible films to date. Independencia is not unlike a well-told legend: there are moments of facile objective reality combined with moments that ask us to suspend disbelief. Much of Martin’s unconventional and unpredictable narrative techniques are becoming familiar to us, it seems. He has also decided to meet his audience halfway: much of the counter-intuitive filmmaking we’ve seen in movies like Autohystoria and Now Showing is kept to a minimum. (But perhaps these are just the strictures of this particular film – to be displaced by the stylistic demands of the next film.) Instead of unknowns and non-professionals, he casts well-known, professional actors for this, and they invariably deliver.

Conceived as the second entry in Raya Martin’s cycle of films set during periods of national struggle (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional being the first), Independencia may not mention America once in any of the film’s dialogue but its pernicious presence, its colonizing threat, is palpable. There is a newsreel-like sequence at midpoint of Independencia that brings this home: an actual atrocity by American soldiers shooting a boy suspected of pilfering is reported in quasi-provincial, faux-American accent. The film finesses its point with humor. There are no strident anti-American slogans here. That the American atrocity mirrors what happens in a 1976 film (Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara's Minsa’y Isang Gamu Gamo), only seems to suggest the currency of the Americans’ unchangingly contemptuous, subhuman regard for Filipinos.

In this light, Independencia can be seen a sophisticated post-colonial film and Raya Martin, at least in this instance, a veritable post-colonial filmmaker. Making a virtue of meager funding from European institutions (in particular, the IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund in 2007), he uses unconventional and postmodern approaches to film Independencia. Noteworthy is his reliance on distanciation techniques, which puts the stamp of its real post-modern provenance on the film. This film, shot in black and white by Jeanne Lapoirie, may look like an early 20^th century American movie, but it is unmistakably a product of its time. Independencia is a living, breathing film: its colonial discourse is not restricted to the past, but remains as valid as ever. Hence, the tell-tale markers like the theatrical acting and theatrical dialogue, the unnaturally thick make-ups, the hybrid sets (a fusion of natural, live elements and handpainted backdrops brought to life by production designer Rodrigo Ricio), characters talking straight to the camera, the effect of film seemingly running out of its reel are not unjustified instances. The presence of White Leghorns – a variety of poultry not introduced to the Philippines until 1950 – in a film that is supposed to be set during the American era also tells us of the timelessness of the issues problematized by this film.

Independencia concludes, empathically, in the most unambiguous terms possible. Orphaned and alone, the fair-skinned boy (Mika Aguilos), whose outward Caucasian appearance might be a potentially symbolic vector of cultural syncretism between the colonizer and colonized, enacts the supreme gesture of self-determination. Pursued by American soldiers deep in the forest, the boy makes sure of signifying his true allegiances. His realization of who he is and where he belongs, paints the sky in different shades of brown. This is, after all, the brown man’s world -- his beloved country. Long live the Filipino!

Reviewed: June 18, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

L'ESQUIVE (Abdel Kechiche, 2003)

 

I remember the civil tremors that rocked Paris and other major suburbs across France in October and November 2005. They would be televised to us from half a world away in the form of harrowing, post-apocalyptic images on the evening news. Shots of burning cars and public buildings, scenes of youths fighting pitch battles with riot police—all still linger in my mind. They marked a social upheaval that recalled the uprisings of May 1968 and prompted fears of government overthrow. It all seems to have stemmed from the deadly electrocution of two minority teenagers perceived to have been caused by brutal police persecution. It dredged up and brought to the fore decades of long-simmering resentment by marginalized masses, mainly North Africans and other émigrés, who had suffered from racism and xenophobia.

Abdel Kechiche’s L’Esquive, shot almost prophetically in 2003, paints the grim picture in one of the disenfranchised housing projects where many of the minorities have been relegated. This film depicts life at the periphery, the brutalized conditions of the ghettos arising from state neglect and public paranoia. In French, esquive is a sporting term that refers to a sidestep. In Kechiche’s film, it is about Muslim teenagers learning to navigate the everyday dangers of the banlieues. Shot properly in cinema-verite style – in the manner of Raymond Depardon and Frederick Wiseman – L’Esquive is a documentary of adversity and resiliency disguised as fiction, capturing graphically the pent-up and misplaced energies of its young subjects. It is equally made memorable and resonant by the naturalistic performances of its ensemble cast: all of them seem to be non-professionals playing their own lives.

At the film’s center is the budding young love between Krimo, an inarticulate hood, and Lydia, a glib, indomitable theatre actress. But we know the prospects of romance here seem false and out of place, they may not be forthcoming, and yet we are glad that this film is not about extreme displays of violence either. We don’t even mind that all of the characters seem to be screaming at the top of their lungs each time they speak. (It seems to be the norm: even friends engage each other in these seemingly uncivil ways). There are no death tolls mounting here, but this is a film that paradoxically conveys its points subtly: we know at the end who will most likely live less-than-peaceful destinies and those who will execute the appropriate esquive. What L’Esquive captures instead is the tough-as-grits explosion of language. At every turn, there is the prospect of heated altercation. 

This is Kechiche’s sense of proxy violence, his fiery brand of pacifism and diplomacy: rage and anger transmuted and expressed in words. Krimo’s father is behind bars and is only mentioned in passing. We know that Krimo is in a gang, too, but all we witness of him is his brooding ways, his often funny inability to articulate his thoughts and feelings. Much of the violence happens offscreen: Kechiche insulates us from its easy spectacle. It is enough to pit his characters in the dialectics of the streets for us to get a sense of their unsettled, unnerving lives. They snarl like lions; their voices growl; and their idiom is not fit for the faint-hearted. And yet they are not afraid to laugh and cry, to express their fears and their hesitations.

The best that L’Esquive offers to the viewer is the value of sublimation. Characters like Lydia and her ‘homeys’ devote their all to the theatre and at film’s end, there is a sense of their assimilation of social skills that will help them integrate into wider society. Lydia in particular goes around in a period costume – her comfort, escapist blanket? – in order to internalize her role in a Marivaux play. It is enough to intrigue Krimo, who drops his old girlfriend and tries his hand at acting. But as the drama professor points out the thesis to Marivaux’s Triumph of Love: the much-hardened, much-brutalized Krimo is too much a product of a violent upbringing to take on the role of the harlequin. And yet like the-once-diffident Lydia, Krimo would stand an even chance of redemption if he just kept at it long enough. If he just kept at it long enough. 

L’Esquive won 4 Cesar Awards in 2005, including one for Best Film. 

Reviewed: June 3, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)