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manohawkins
Reviews
Slogan (1969)
hard French, good ideas
Jane Birkin is English and mispronounces all of her r's in this movie. Still, her French is infinitely easier to understand than Serge's mumbling. They are cute together, although the plot of a doomed affair feels trite. The magic and music make the movie. Serge can make people and things vanish by snapping his fingers. This is analogous to the way he speeds up life and creates unbelievable situations in his commercials, like a man seducing a strange woman in a train-car by showing off his aftershave. This looks like it may have inspired Axe deodorant, which also has an off-the-wall French ad campaign.
The music is various clips of an instrumental version of the brilliant "Chanson de Slogan." He mixes this with a drumbeat, which eventually alternates phrases with the other song toward the denouement. Like in Je t'aime, moi non plus, the music stands out so much that I would have liked to have been enveloped in a larger number of melodies. These were enchanting though.
Je t'aime moi non plus (1976)
I loved you Serge, and then this...
I won't rate this movie, because it makes an impression despite being unimpressive on the whole. Often boring and disgusting, this movie can still stand to viewing given two academic crutches: its boringness supported by Brecht's warning that boring stories can be more thought provoking and its disgusting portrayals of sex held up by Paul De Man's proviso that disgust is a distraction from the larger picture.
The dialog has some merit. As in My Life to Live or Alphaville or Pulp Fiction for that matter, moments where the film has made you feel most alienated from the characters usually foray into uncommon, abstract conversations. The answer to "Johnny" (Jane Birkin) when she tells her boyfriend, "I love you. Do you love me?" is not "I don't" but rather an unenthusiastic, somewhat incomplete "yes." He explains that the way their bodies move in rhythm together is all love is, and that it's rare.
The scenes that will appeal to fans of French film are the ones where "Johnny" and her boyfriend are alone and where "Johnny" is not crying in agony. Her lover will utter something strange and surprising like that his work as a garbage man is important because moving things from one place to another is just like what happens to bodies after they die. Enthymemes, incomplete logical statements, abound in that character's statements. In this case, he does not establish the importance of transporting corpses. Later, he explains that sometimes he wishes he were crap, because he used to dream about coal-burning trains and they're electric now. He does not explain whether it's the look or the smell or the wastefulness of burning coal that appeals to him, and why the new technology thus devastates him. At the end of the film, he tells "Johnny" that he would not beat up his old boyfriend who had threatened her life, with less than an explanation: "You want me to make his face into hamburger meat? What would that do?" Indeed, his rejection of her demand leads to his devastating inaction and their climactic fight.
Serge's choice of such an unappealing gay protagonist makes this film feel homophobic. The mental inadequacies of the character do not stop at frail logic. His attempts to fool himself that "Johnny" is a boy make him seem as delusional as Scottie in "Vertigo," when Scottie dresses up a hat shop clerk named Judy Barton as a dead woman named Madeleine. His tolerance for "Johnny's" pain during anal intercourse paints him as an introverted and apathetic jerk a la Humbert Humbert. His flight from an angry woman makes him seem like any other craven character in a romance.
Characters and plot are not everything in a movie. The camera work is original and the songs are inspired, but FEW (just three songs!)! Why couldn't such a prolific musical mind at least work with leitmotifs within his three melodies? Some of the decay of Serge's ambition is e