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)

TERROR IS A MAN (Gerry de Leon, 1959)

 

A taut and superbly crafted science fiction horror b-movie, Terror is A Man terrifies on an individual, reflexive level, with its visceral and psychological effects, as well as on a wider, macrocosmic level, with its frightful visions regarding renegade science. The title could not have been better chosen: it’s a resonant billing and advertising come-on rolled into one. Terror and man, in the hands of the future National Artist, Gerry de Leon, truly, surpassingly, equate. 

For the purposes of the genre, there is the nominal beast of terror on the loose, while the true monster hides in plain sight, preens, man-like, in a dignified gown, on the foreground. This film revivifies and returns to the thematic concerns of Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau, among other models, as it skewers the arrogant anthropocentrism of man and the cold, inhuman methods of science.

A remote, misty and shadowy island off South America, the ominously named Blood Island, is the locus where terror reigns. De Leon conjures up an eerie and expressionist atmosphere with minimal fuss and minimal trappings, an island where a crazed scientist named Charles Girard rules with the sanction of science. Performing countless surgeries, transplants, and other disfiguring experiments on a panther, he seeks to bring about a new and improved species of man, a man without the burdens of unproductive emotions. 

The film's monster of science, a furry biped midway between animal and man, follows a cardinal principle of horror: he is a monster kept, literally, under wraps for much of the film. In fact, he is never completely visible, always either drenched in shadows, or swaddled in layers of gauze. When he starts to wreak revenge, we are held breathless by what he does and inflicts more than what he must look under the bandages. When the islanders start to die, they flee en masse just as an American survivor of a shipwreck is washed onshore. What this newcomer, a man named William Fitzgerald, finds on the island are unwilling accomplices to the heedless experiments: Frances, Girard’s wife and unwilling nurse; Walter, the doctor’s minion who lusts after the doctor’s wife; and their native servants. 

De Leon makes do with a shoestring budget and true poverty aesthetics. Filmed on location in Corregidor and Cavite and other parts of Luzon in the Philippines, with an able cast of mostly American actors, Terror is A Man was shot in grainy black-and-white with bare and spare settings and yet has the look and feel of a well-oiled Hollywood b-movie production. Filipino exploitation, in the form of other horror fare and women’s prison flicks, was still a decade or so away, but de Leon’s effort could very well have served as a prototype and template for those following in his footsteps.

At a time of over-heated debates worldwide about the possible pitfalls of genetic experimentation, Terror is A Man has the potential for a revival. With its eerie imagery of sadistic trial and error and unfeeling inflictions in the pursuit of knowledge and know-how, it packs a potent argument against the free, unregulated enterprise of scientific study. De Leon may be simply paying homage to literary classics by H.G. Wells and Shelley, but perhaps he had a strong prescience of technological and scientific dilemmas about to come, a prophecy that provides caution against man's boundless freedom.

Reviewed: September 24, 2010 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

BIYAHENG LUPA (Armando Lao, 2009)

 

Like a mirror image, Biyaheng Lupa resembles a little-known 1980 film by Slobodan Sijan entitled Who’s Singing Over There? with this premise: a passenger bus, a long journey, a cast of disharmonious travelers who must keep their sufferance. There, too, is the star-crossed destination. While the similarities are striking, they remain broad strokes of a deceptive comparison. Armando Lao’s debut feature outstrips its Serbian antecedent: it's not a simple account of comically claustrophobic travel, but a poetic, disembodied journey of voices.

Biyaheng Lupa is not so much a road movie, a journey to appointed places, as it is a trip into inner landscapes. Mouths barely open. Like telepaths, we hear the passengers think and feel inwardly, all their psychic activity audible on the soundtrack – making us privy to dramatic irony. Regrets, suspicions, disdains, fears, hopes, paranoias, desires, prejudices, the whote gamut: all feelings and senses oscillate in a steady stream-of-consciousness on this eventful bus ride. Travel has never been a more introspective activity. We don't get the impression of noise: the disembodied voices are devoid of ambient noise. 

Lao’s characters strike close to Filipino sensibilities and yet sound not too rehashed. Lao’s light satire sees them as caricatures caught in their funny and comical foibles. There is the man with the body odor who is unaware of it. This is complemented by a shadiness – pragmatic or opportunistic? – as he secretly wolfs down a wrapped espasol he finds under his seat. There is the multi-level marketer who dreams grand dreams of profits but is discomfited at every turn and finds no takers among a busload of streetwise passengers. His anti-cancer merchandise even gets him into trouble with the military. 

Elsewhere on the bus, a discreet cougar jealously guards reveries about her younger man on her way to another tryst. Her thoughts of romance, however, are broken as the town gossip has just come on board the bus. Her wariness turns to slight panic when she realizes that a picture of her lover and herself is missing. The gossip is an odd creature: a beautiful lady who is indeed profiled as a curiosity seeker. Yet her caviling instincts are balanced by her romantic thoughts for the ticket man on the bus.

Characters also come in parallels and polarities. The young text-mates, one of them a conflicted and secretive mute, who provide the aspect of puppy love. A homosexual and a good-looking teenager are cats and dogs. And this apparently involves thwarted sexual advances in the comfort room. A look into the hearts of a pair of old characters reveal checkered pasts, tinged with regrets and slight despair. 

Various checkpoints, stop-overs, and drop-offs mark the lengthy journey which, in hindsight, have the effect of a Russian roulette. But there are moments when the static nature of the mise-en-scene – mostly static framing of characters with just the dynamism of aural information – stagnates the flow of the film. Lao shifts gears with a song number, a chorus of the passengers with their teary-eyed plea for love or tenderness. Or understanding. I forget. Touching enough. 

Biyaheng Lupa may not break new ground in film art, but there are few films that precede it in its use of the stream-of-consciousness as a narrative device. Fewer have even succeeded. Off-hand there are Resnais’s seminal Last Year at Marienbad and Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone, but Lao’s film can be said to be more ambitious. In his directorial debut, he attempts a subconscious portrait of an ensemble cast of characters. It takes some flair and some balls to even attempt it. And Lao has some success. 

Biyaheng Lupa, in the end, however, is watered-down sociology, the sanitized fabric of the Filipino subconscious. The resulting portrait is not as raw, illogical and impressionistic as the Filipino psyche would have been. Still, this is one auspicious debut with moments of sheer cinematic beauty. Look for the butterfly floating through the bus, a lyrical moment that signals the uncertainty of this bus ride we call life. 

Reviewed: October 28, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

ALL IS FORGIVEN (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2007)

All is Forgiven is a family drama unlike any other: its portrayal of the sad realities of a troubled home, warts and all, is rendered with dignity and grace, subtlety and lyricism. While its underlying foundation and genre is drama – here one that enacts a family's dissolution and fragmentation, and its aftermath – it remains even-keeled and avoids the spectacle of the overwrought. It's a film that lives and breathes with graceful action as much as graceful pauses.

Mia Hansen-Love’s quietly poetic first film is one that does not take a high moral ground about the nature and dynamics of families. Everyone, after all, is born of a family: no didacticism needed. All the film wishes is to frame and follow its characters, its family of three: the thirty-something Frenchman Victor, his Austrian wife, Annette, and their still-uncomprehending five-year-old daughter, Pamela.

The film begins in 1995 in Vienna, where Annette is employed, and shifts to Paris a month or so later, where it slowly becomes clear that each change of residence is an attempt at a fresh start. This is all because Victor is nursing a bad habit. A drug addiction. Casually, he sums up his concept of life this way: writing in the morning (he is a failed poet), taking walks in the afternoon, and doing drugs at night. The change of scenery, however, fails to remedy their escalating marital problems, and the family dissolves.

The second half of the film takes place in Paris, twelve years later. Elided in the action are the rehabilitation of Victor, who now lives quietly in the city as a proof-reader in a publishing house; Annette’s re-marriage with another Frenchman; and the upbringing of Pamela. Pamela, who is now a high school student, soon receives word from Martine, Victor’s sister, and their contact results in a meeting. All those intervening years, Martine reveals, Victor has been trying to touch base with his estranged daughter. When Victor finally does get the chance, the father-daughter reunion is civil and without recrimination. As they meet subsequently again and exchange letters, the past is threshed out and finds a measure of resolution. The end is a moment that echoes with powerful pathos, with an even more ultimate resolution.

All is Forgiven, paradoxically, reveals and repeats what each of us already know, and yet resonates with a kind of emotive power that few films achieve. What’s almost as paradoxical is how Hansen-Love has crafted a highly refreshing film while remaining indebted to a host of filmmakers: in it, we find the quiet grace of Ozu, the poetic touch of Assayas, the conflicts of Pialat, and the tormented figures of Garrel. On second thought, the way Hansen-Love marshals her diverse influences with remarkable assurance and aplomb, and ultimately delivers, why should it be held against her?

Therein lies the real achievement of this film. Once director Hansen-Love realizes the universality of her themes, their inherent nature in our collective consciousness, she proceeds to draw on film lore, and her final calculations and execution bear her out. Elliptical, almost plotless, without a grand thesis, yet almost mythical, All is Forgiven tells us a story of such surprising immediacy and detail that we will remember the names and faces, flaws and all, for a long, long time. A lifetime.

Reviewed: September 13, 2010  (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

TIRADOR (Brillante Mendoza, 2007)

Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador opens summarily and briskly with a police raid on a shantytown in the outskirts of Quiapo. Rendered in cinéma-vérité fashion, it's a night sequence that simulates what we see on the evening news, the herky-jerky camera work that documents all manner of interrupted illegality – and in this breeding ground of criminals, out they come tumbling.

The element of surprise rattles the red-handed: packets of drugs and other paraphernalia go flying out the windows, prostitution stops short of consummation, and the guilty, who must feel accordingly so, take a dive into fetid waters to escape. No exit for the unwitting – except for those who have learned to adapt to these specialized lives, those who know the loopholes of the law and can humor them.

It’s a heady and humorous beginning to what is essentially a cross-section of the underbelly of Quiapo, a portrait of the small-time criminals whose fates literally crisscross in the commerce and commotion of its busy streets. Much of the humor and irony can be self-deprecating, taking to heart, it seems, the truism that the Filpino laughs at his own misfortunes. And there can be as much misfortune as fortune in the act of everyday survival. Mendoza’s criminals are not smooth and infallible operators, but they know how to roll with the punches.

Young Odie is one of them, and his modus operandi is to pilfer coins from unattended gambling machines. Another is Caloy who must turn to snatching after his pedicab is heartlessly repossessed. Odie’s father will take your valuables at knifepoint, but shares his meager takings with adopted families. Rex and Tes are a couple in more ways than one, pilfering cheap electronics in well-coordinated tandem.

In Tirador, most of these men and women, young and old, have long ago stopped sentimentalizing the despondency of being at the bottom of the social totem pole. Even among their own kind, there is no letting their guard down. They live by the cold laws of the urban jungle, where Social Darwinism applies with ruthlessness as well as with finesse. One can never afford to turn his back on a cowering figure or a seemingly repentant or remorseful quarry. They are a pack of chameleons with well-practiced masks, all honed to second nature.

Mendoza’s social commentary – leavened by streetwise idiom and the jargon of gangsters and thieves – levels the breakdown of law and order on the whole rotten hierarchy of society. The usual suspects are easy targets and not spared here: they whose electoral faces are plastered all over walls like so many mugshots of wanted criminals. But the culture of cynicism and immorality are more deeply entrenched. Politicians and religion are partly singled out, but in truth, it’s an over-determined state of things. Corruption breeds corruption, ad infinitum.

To disentangle the coils of corruption, however, is not, ultimately, Tirador's purpose. What’s paramount is its study of self-preservation. Nothing is sacred here-- so that the feast of the Black Nazarene is not just a moment for religious fervour – but provides singular opportunities for thievery. Grand electoral rallies, with the fiery motherhood speeches of the country’s supreme leaders, are equally promising bonanzas for thieves.

Tirador, as the foregoing suggests, is sheer gritty realism – but not angry, certainly not vociferously so. Paradoxically it radiates raw and lurid power with underplayed drama. As a piece of docudrama, it has much method and stripped-down production values in common with Mendoza’s other real-time film, Manoro. It’s a visual departure from the self-conscious aestheticism of his other films namely Masahista and Serbis. But in Tirador, there is a hand-in-glove dovetailing of form and content. The handheld, in-the-trenches camera work goes hand in hand with street-level proceedings, observing without comment what would otherwise be sentimentalized or overdramatized. Where exploitation might be unavoidable, Tirador achieves sheer human compassion.

  
Reviewed: September 29, 2009  (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

SUMMER HOURS (Olivier Assayas, 2008)

 

Birdsong. Emerald green trees, lush verdant undergrowth. Dogs playfully bounding in the glistening grass. You can hear them breathlessly panting. Children hunt and search, heartily and boisterously, for hidden treasures among the boughs. These opening images in Olivier Assayas’s latest film Summer Hours set a lyrical tone for the luminosity that follows. We are in the middle of the Marly estate in the French countryside, as Helene, the matriarch, celebrates her 75 th birthday. Everyone who matters is present: Helene’s two sons, Frederic and Jeremie, and lone daughter, Adrienne, and their children, despite their hectic, cosmopolitan lives. Alone with her eldest son, Frederic, however, Helene is leaving instructions and the contents of her last will and testament. 

These are no idle premonitions. True enough, Helene soon passes away before the end of summer. Her last will is most needed to sort out inheritances, a considerable one that includes her collection of antique furniture, paintings and books. Her former lover happened to be Paul Berthier, a painter of some renown. Helene had rightly foreseen what would happen, taking into account her children's different circumstances, the different lives they lead. While Frederic wishes to keep the summer house and its contents intact, Jeremie and Adrienne, both industrial executives based in different countries, see no need for it. Jeremie, in fact, is in dire need of money to buy a house in his adopted China; Adrienne may have to live much of the time in Japan. 

Here is a scenario that would in lesser hands be fraught with melodramatic possibilities and histrionics. But Olivier Assayas’s film keeps emotionalism within acceptable levels, not only achieving a film of assured pathos but parlays his premise into a statement not just about the Marly family but about each one of us, each human being. And as it makes its humanistic statement, it offers a gentle reproach to the inexorable march of civilization. Summer Hours is not so much about family intramurals as it is about the recognition of each one's birthright to live according to a personal compass. 

There is what we might call a sweet dynamic among the Marly siblings. To make his point, Assayas never overplays the angle of fraternal civility, leaving only little, automatic gestures as shorthand for respect and reverence. No words necessary, the gestures are reflexive and heartfelt. Much of the differences among them is made elliptical. 

Summer Hours, more aptly, ranges over generational contrasts, between Helene and her children, and in the last act of the film, between Frederic and his teenage daughter, Sylvie. Too preoccupied with the matters of the family estate, Frederic is jolted when he finds out Sylvie’s adolescent indiscretions. Shoplifting. Smoking pot. Sexual initiation. The father may be furious but to borrow a phrase from Godard, this is her life to live. Yet surprisingly Frederic subsequently consents to what might be seen as a desecration: Sylvie throwing a party for her friends in the auctioned summer house. Perhaps it's just as well. After all, these, too, are her summer hours. 

The history of civilization has been notable for its production and preservation of cultural artifacts. Assayas’ film, which features rich imagery of the auction of art treasures and family heirlooms and the interiors of museums, may never refute that, but it postulates each person’s inalienable heritage: Nothing takes more privilege than the individual, the human welfare. Let each one explore the height and latitude of summer -- those too-few, too-brief summers. 

Reviewed: June 7, 2010 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

GOD'S OFFICES (Claire Simon, 2008)

It’s OK. No one knows us here, a teenage girl reassures another in the opening sequences of Claire Simon’s felicitously titled God’s Offices. They stand restlessly on a balcony of an abortion clinic cum family planning center in the heart of an unnamed French city, moments away from taking their turn with a social worker. As the film unfolds along the fine lines between documentary and fiction, this troubled teen will pass through a revolving door of women, women of all ages and walks of life, as they receive all manner of help, from simple advice and assistance to life-altering succor about matters of sex and the repercussions of sex. Whether referring to this halfway house for women or the conceiving womb, God’s Offices depicts a humane though often painful portrait of women.

Drawing on research material she and her team gathered between 2000 and 2007, Claire Simon crafts a story -- nay, a series of stories -- that hews close to sessions recorded at a host of family planning centers across France, sessions unified by an inherently confessional tone and themes that would otherwise have been kept in the dark. As befits the material, the film is captured in cinema-verite fashion (not too overly shaky and intrusive, however), and a supplemental authenticity is added by a cast of first-time actresses playing the beleaguered women. It’s an inspired stroke of casting that the social workers are played by well-known veteran actresses of French cinema, including Beatrice Dalle and Nathalia Baye. They provide the compassionate presence and the voice of reason through an often tense and disconsolate film, a presence more subtly empathic and empathetic than what non-professional actors might be able to portray. 

God’s Offices, if nothing else, puts forward a whole spectrum of sad and tragic human stories from the vantage point of women. Through highly detailed and informative accounts, one gets the sure sense that women take the brunt of sexual relationships. Anxiety from delayed periods. The pill. Abortifacients. Pregnancy. Abortion. The wrath of families and the whole social stigma of unwanted pregnancy and motherhood. The few men who figure in this film are angry, demanding and impatient figures, and the men who figure in the women's narrations are no more scrupled. This series of episodes channels one exhausting psychic outpouring. But in a film that features only one half of the gender divide, we are merely getting one side of the story, however honest and genuine the accounts are made to be. 

The thrust of the film is, unswervingly, the story of women. With an almost unvarying emotional pitch, it plays out a dozen or so slices of women's life in a 2-hour duration. There is the young teenage girl at the film’s opening asking simply about contraception behind her parents’ back. A more distraught and tearful episode features the confession of an impregnated woman caught between a husband and a lover who turns to blackmail in order to bed her down repeatedly. Another confession reveals a woman, who for years has suspected her own sterility, suddenly getting on the way. How? Everything comes full circle at the end, when a middle-aged Bulgarian prostitute is asked why she keeps getting pregnant with the same man. There is but one answer wafting through the corridors of God’s offices: Love. A picture that foregrounds abortion and its convenient rationale, God's Offices intimates, at film's end, that most noble of human emotions and motivations. Nothing should be unwanted and tainted, not the wages of love. 

Reviewed: June 6, 2010 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)