FILM REVIEW: HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (RESTORED RELEASE)



Man (Eiji Okada) and Woman (Emmanuelle Riva) in Hiroshima Mon Amour.


Somehow we drifted off too far...

By Ed Rampell

The late 1950s and early 1960s was a pivotal, heady, historic time for French cinema, as Nouvelle Vague or New Wave classics flowed onto the screen. Whereas Cahiers du Cinema critic and enfant terrible Francois Truffaut’s reviews excoriating the state of France’s motion picture industry had previously literally resulted in his being banned from the Cannes Film Festival, in 1959 filmmaker Truffaut triumphantly returned, winning Cannes’ Best Director and OCIC Awards (as well as an Oscar nom) for his masterpiece, The 400 Blows. In 1960 Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless was released.  Then there was Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Resnais’ film -- which won the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes bestowed by international film critics -- long unavailable for theatrical screenings, has been restored and is being theatrically re-released in glorious black and white. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a groundbreaking work written with a novelist’s sensibility by Marguerite Duras (who, along with Resnais, scored Cannes’ Film Writers Award). Having been born and raised in Vietnam and Cambodia Duras also enhances this story about what Noel Coward would call a “brief encounter” between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva as Elle) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada plays Lui). Elle is making a pro-peace film on location in postwar Hiroshima and the A-bombed city forms a backdrop to their love affair.

(Riva appeared in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 concentration camp uprising drama, Kapo and, at age 85 co-starred with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s 2012, Amour.  Interestingly, Okada starred in a Japanese film called Hiroshima in 1953 and went on to act opposite Marlon Brando in his 1963 meditation on U.S. imperialism, The Ugly American, and in 1964’s Woman in the Dunes.)

As for Hiroshima Mon Amour’s politics, it was quite daring to make an anti-nuclear film at that time, especially vis-à-vis U.S. audiences. To this day many Americans have an unexamined assumption that nuking Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, was a vital -- hence justifiable -- factor in ending WWII, a rationale Elle gives voice to. But Resnais and Duras audaciously critique this rationalization (which Olive Stone blew to smithereens in his recent Untold History of the United States documentary series for Showtime) and present the human face of atomic disaster. Viewers should be aware that there are a few gruesome shots that caused this cineaste to avert his eyes from the screen -- but then again, nuclear war is no cotillion ball.

The nuclear nightmare has left its mark on Lui -- although he was away from Hiroshima, serving overseas as an Imperial soldier, when the Enola Gay dropped its fatal, fateful payload on its civilian target, which included Lui’s family. Just as Elle’s experiences in occupied France during WWII made an enduring, indelible impression upon her. As a teenager she had a doomed romance with a German soldier at Nevers.

The Frenchwoman therefore has sex with men who were both on the opposing side during WWII (as Duras well knew, Japan and France vied over Indochina).  Although not explicit by 2014 standards, the sexuality onscreen was bold in terms of 1959’s aesthetics -- at a time when professional virgin Doris Day held sway in Hollywood, it is clear that this interracial couple is engaging in and enjoying sexual intercourse in an artfully shot sensuous sequence.

In the existential mode, Hiroshima Mon Amour asks profound questions: Can love overcome the horrors of war? Sigmund Freud asked which is stronger: Eros (the life force) or Thanatos (the death instinct)? Or, as “Dr.” George Carlin, that consummate master of wordplay, put it: “The person who thought up the slogan, ‘Make Love, Not War’… his job was over that day. He could’ve retired at that moment. If it would’ve been me, I would’ve walked away. So long, I’m goin’ to the beach. You guys work it out.”

Speaking of Freud, Hiroshima Mon Amour is also about the persistence of memory, and how it can rule and even terrorize our lives, long after those traumatizing event s have taken place. Indeed, one could make the point that both characters, especially Elle, suffer from PTSD. The work’s film form, which deploys flashbacks and even flash forwards to a flashback, helps express these notions. Resnais continued to experiment with cinematic structure as late as his 2012 You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, made two years before his death in 2014 at the age of 91.

In 1959, the N.Y. Herald Tribune predicted Hiroshima Mon Amour “will still be important 50 years hence.” Well, today, as in 1959, this black and white, subtitled movie is not for everyone -- popcorn munchers thirsting for mindless entertainment might want to move on to the next theater in the multiplex. Some 2014 viewers may even find the acting, storyline, etc., to be pretentious, too arty, too intellectual, perhaps even laughable.

But 55 years hence, for serious cinema viewers interested in fine films and movie history, Alain Resnais’ masterpiece remains essential viewing. In 1961 Truffaut and Godard co-directed the whimsical short A Story of Water, a romance about the flooding of a French village, which in retrospect could be viewed as metaphorical foreshadowing for how the New Wave inundated world cinema. And Hiroshima Mon Amour remains an essential ripple in this marvelous movie movement. So as far as this cinefile and Resnais fan is concerned, he’s impatiently waiting for the restoration (assuming it needs it) and re-release (which it surely needs) of Resnais’ other early Nouvelle Vague Classic, 1961’s Last Year at Marienbad.

Editor's note: I would highly recommend people explore Ultravox's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" as well. It it is also a bonafide masterpiece.

 

FILM REVIEW: ALPHAVILLE

Natasha (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) in Alphaville.

Godard is not dead

By Ed Rampell

One of my favorite genres depicts dystopian sci-fi societies, wherein humans fight to be free from futuristic fascism. On the page, George Orwell’s terrifying 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World are the greatest exemplars of this type of anti-totalitarian tale in tomorrowland. But for my money (or whatever means of currency they’ll use in years to come), arguably the greatest interpretation of dystopia for the silver screen is Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 masterpiece Alphaville, which has been lovingly, lushly restored and is being theatrically re-released in all its black and white glory by Rialto Pictures. And almost 50 years later, the prescient Godard’s sci-fi classic takes on a whole new dimension as a parable of the NSA national security surveillance state.

The 35-year-old auteur was in fine form when he and renowned cameraman Raoul Coutard shot this low budge take on high tech totalitarianism. When the French New Wave shook world cinema with imaginative, stylish pictures, among other things, these filmmakers made their own versions of Hollywood genre movies. Godard’s first feature, 1960’s Breathless -- with cinematography by Coutard and based on a story by Francois Truffaut -- took on the conventions of Film Noir, as did the second feature Truffaut directed, Shoot the Piano Player, made that same year.

In 1965 the visionary Godard -- who expressed the most filmic, formalistic verve of the Nouvelle Vague’s cineastes, with the possible exception of the late Alain Resnais -- cinematically synthesized (or, perhaps we should say “cin-thesized”) Film Noir, espionage movies and science fiction with Alphaville -- and in the process rendered a potent political work of art presaging his revolutionary agitprop.

Alphaville’s alpha male is portrayed by L.A.-born actor Eddie Constantine, who reprised the role he was noted for in French films: Lemmy Caution, a two-fisted, tough guy secret agent and/or detective in movies such as the 1950s flicks This Man is Dangerous and Dames Get Along. But in Alphaville, wearing a Bogie-like trench coat and fedora, Lemmy is thrust into a dystopian future where the despotic state is ruled by the omnivorous, omniscient Alpha 60, which has an eerily disembodied voice, decades before the coming of Siri. Alpha 60 is the cinema’s spookiest computer that side of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL in that other sci-fi masterpiece, 1968’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. As secret agent 003, Lemmy goes undercover, posing when he enters Alphaville from the “Outlands” as a reporter for the Figaro Pravda newspaper named Ivan Johnson (while Lyndon Johnson was U.S. president).

Godard’s wordplay throughout is tellingly droll and Orwellian: Alphaville is on “Oceanic” time, a reference to 1984, as is the futuristic city-state’s “Ministry of Dissuasions”; the close-up of an elevator button reads “SS” -- a play on the French word for basement (“sous-sol”), clearly a nod to the Nazis’ secret police -- and Alpha 60’s mastermind is the über-scientist Prof. Leonard von Braun, aka “Nosferatu”, obvious references  to both the Nazi rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, who went on to work for the postwar U.S. space program, as well as to F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist Dracula classic.

Lemmy gets mixed up with von Braun’s daughter Natasha, who is charmingly played by Anna Karina. Although according to some critics Natasha is assigned to Lemmy as a “Seductress, Third Class” (look for character actor Akim Tamiroff cavorting with another Seductress in a cameo), her dialogue suggests that Natasha is quite innocent and naïve, perhaps even virginal.

Setting the stage for the later 1960s, love is the animating force of this struggle against a computerized tyranny where “logic” dictates human behavior at the expense of “conscience” and “passion.” Beneath Lemmy’s brawny private eye persona lurks an idealistic romantic. So like Winston Smith and Julia in 1984,Lemmy and Natasha couple up and resist the authoritarian Alpha 60, that Big Brother-like computer, which attempts to reign over a “technocracy, like ants and termites.” But Lemmy and Natasha are all-too-human and there’s a nearly rapturous scene when they discover and express their love for one another, which was quite avant garde for 1965 and remains rather lyrical, even poetic. One could make a legitimate case for Lemmy and Natasha taking their place alongside Romeo and Juliet, their 20^thcentury counterparts Tony and Maria, and Porgy and Bess, as two of Western culture’s great lovers.

Alphaville is full of Godard’s signature style and leitmotifs -- rapidly cut montages, pictorial panache (check out the cleverly lensed scenes wherein Lemmy gets the hell beaten out of him in an elevator), Paul Misraki’s Noirish soundtrack, the use of written words (as with Orwell the importance of words and their meanings is key here; Godard even compares the dictionary to the Bible). And, but of course, no Godardian film would be complete without the auteur’s pseudo-philosophical musings (which detractors contend became rantings and ravings) of a vital, dissenting, visionary voice pleading for love, conscience and poetry in our ever-increasingly regimented, mechanized world. In Alphaville Godard arguably prophesized the advent of the National Security Agency’s techno super-state half a century before Mssr. Snowden bravely blew the whistle.

Many believe that after his New Wave phase Godard went off the rails, making totally incomprehensible pictures. The poor movie maestro must have heard this phrase even more than Woody Allen: “I like your    films -- especially the early ones.” Be that as it may, while Godard remains a cinematic éminence grise still creating screen enigmas from his perch in Switzerland, Alphaville was made when the New Wave’s enfant terrible was near the top of his game. It is a highly entertaining love story, a sci-fi Film Noir literally about man (and woman!) against the machine.

Alphaville opens in special theaters nationwide, including the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles. 

  

FILM REVIEW: SUBMARINE

Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) in Submarine.

Keeping head above w(h)at(h)er

By Don Simpson

Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is the cinematic sibling of Harold Chasen and Max Fischer, the young male protagonists from Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore respectively. A 15-year-old Welsh boy with a geeky penchant for reading the dictionary, Oliver dourly trudges around Swansea outfitted in a black duffel coat with leather briefcase in hand. Solipsistically fancying himself as a fully-formed gentleman with superior tastes and sensibilities, Oliver is the cinematic reincarnation of The Catcher in the Rye’s (Oliver’s favorite modern American novel) protagonist, Holden Caulfield.

Oliver pines over a blissful obsession, despite her eczema, with an iconic first-love character, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a classmate who bears a remarkable resemblance to Chantal Goya circa Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin (one of many film's references to the nouvelle vague). Jordana professes a severe disdain for emotions and romance, preferring a boy who would be willing to allow her to burn his leg hair with matches and co-conspire schemes of petty arson, a role Oliver would not object to playing. 

Oliver causes enough of a splash to gain Jordana’s attention when he collaborates with her in bullying a doughy classmate, Zoe (Lily McCann). Though the guilt from this incident seems to haunt Oliver for the remainder of the film, the event nonetheless leads him to meet Jordana under a railway bridge with a Polaroid camera and diary in tow where Jordana promptly orders Oliver to his knees and their romance commences with a first kiss that tastes like “milk, Polo mints and Dunhill International.”

He may start off as Jordana’s pet, but soon Oliver’s pubescent fantasies of having a girlfriend and losing his virginity are realized. Their iconic young love is presented to us by Oliver via soft focus Super 8 memories propagated by fireworks, sunsets, beaches and bicycles. The superficial first two weeks of their relationship gives way to Jordana and Oliver dealing with family issues -- Jordana’s mother (Melanie Walters) has been terminally diagnosed with a brain tumor while Oliver’s parents’ (Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor) relationship is on the skids -- that drive a wedge between them.

Incessantly monitoring his parents' sex life by way of their bedroom dimmer switch, Oliver has determined that it has been a long time since his parents have turned the lamp down low, so he takes it upon himself to save his parents’ marriage. First, Oliver plots to pull his mother away from the clutches of her cheesy ex-boyfriend, Graham (Paddy Considine), a cartoonish representation of a New Age-y self help guru who makes a living lecturing about the enlightening benefits of light. Next, Oliver must rescue his father from the oceanic depths of depression, a state of mind that Oliver quickly finds himself slipping into.

Never delving too far into Oliver’s fantastical daydreams, Submarine conveys the teenage wasteland of Wales in the 1980s with a lugubrious backdrop of deteriorating industrial plants, garbage dumps and urban decay. By avoiding the modern teenage rom-com tendency of relying upon overt quirkiness or gross-out jokes to propel the narrative, writer-director Richard Ayoade’s morbidly mundane perspective of pubescence captures the realistic behavior of 15-year olds, specifically the forced pretense of their actions, their incredibly fickle behavior and their all-so-serious dramatizations of seemingly minor events. Despite his hyperactive teenage mind’s knack for self-delusion, Oliver is a precocious and idiosyncratic teen with big, brown puppy-dog eyes and a perspicacious outlook on life.

A series of alternating blue and red, Godard-esque intertitles, separate Ayoade’s feature-length debut into distinct chapters -- including a prologue and epilogue -- thus establishing a literary structure that serves as a nod to Ayoade’s source: Joe Dunthorne’s novel, Submarine. Ayoade makes one significant alteration to Dunthorne’s novel, staging his film in the 1980s (rather than the 2000s). The production design promotes a reverential nostalgia of bygone teenage years which will probably play most effectively for viewers who were teenagers in the 1980s. (As luck would have it I am part of this target audience, which might be why Submarine was so enjoyable to me.) Teenagers pass handwritten notes in class (rather than text messaging or emailing) and keep diaries (rather than posting their every thought on Facebook); and Ayoade fills the screen with antiquated technologies such as typewriters, Polaroids, VHS tapes, Super 8 film footage, clunky cordless telephones, and audio cassette tapes as if creating an ode to the analogue ways of the not-so-distant past. Erik Wilson’s cinematography, which abides by the same primary-colored palette of Raoul Coutard, and the jump cuts and freeze frames of Chris Dickens and Nick Fenton’s editing also lends Submarine the reverential (and referential) air of a film that is submerged in the past. 

However, Ayoade steers clear of a period-defining soundtrack, opting for a new-yet-timeless soundtrack performed by Arctic Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner.

SXSW 2011: SILVER BULLETS

Kate (Kate Lyn Sheil) in Silver Bullets.

Swanberg song

By Don Simpson

Blurring the line between fiction and reality, writer-director-producer-cinematographer-editor Joe Swanberg' film’s opts not to formally name any of the characters in Silver Bullets, most likely because all of the actors are playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

Joe (Swanberg) and Kate (Kate Lyn Sheil) are an onscreen couple who often work together on films -- the former as the director and lead actor, the latter as the lead actress. When Kate accepts the leading role as a werewolf in a new Ti West project, Joe finds himself casting a new leading lady, Kate’s friend, Amy (Amy Seimetz). Jealousy ensues. Joe rightly assumes that Ti has his eyes set on Kate while Kate becomes very upset that Joe would cast her friend in his next project because she knows that this also means that Joe and Amy will establish an extremely close (and naked) on-camera relationship. Oh, what an incestuous world of celluloid!

I do not think it is too much of a stretch to state that Silver Bullets is Swanberg’s most Godardian film to date -- and that is not just because it features a girl with a gun or an onscreen director with a penchant for cinema theory. This is a film in which Swanberg puts himself under the proverbial microscope, in true self-reflexive fashion, questioning his role as a filmmaker and as a sexual being.

Swanberg’s cinematic output has traditionally burst with unbridled sexuality -- a quality that I suspect may have caused some arguments with his off-screen lovers over the years. (Swanberg is currently married.) Silver Bullets appears to be Swanberg’s way of working through all of that, while directly addressing past criticisms of his work -- primarily that he is a predatory director who makes movies solely for the opportunity to make out with attractive actresses. It is important to note that Silver Bullets is much more sympathetic towards Kate; revealing Joe as a two-timing cheat.

Silver Bullets is also the most stylistically playful of Swanberg’s films, at least since Hannah Takes the Stairs. Swanberg tinkers not only with the visual aspects of cinema but with its narrative conventions as well. I have never really thought of Swanberg as an editor, but he does a beautiful job tying together Silver Bullets’ concurrent stories in an overtly artful fashion. Despite being completely unscripted, Silver Bullets is dramatically more complex than Swanberg’s previous efforts; it is also his most cohesive and coherent, especially in terms of purpose. Silver Bullets represents a clean break from Mumblecore (a genre not known for profound messages) for Swanberg. He has a lot to say, and the messages are relayed loud and clear.

Swanberg also premiered Uncle Kent at Sundance Film Festival 2011.