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tnwestlake
Reviews
Eri Eri rema sabakutani (2005)
Not Shinji Aoyama at his best - still worth a look
I happen to think Shinji Aoyama is one of the best film makers working today. I was virtually dragged to see Eureka by my boyfriend who knew nothing about the film, but loved the idea that it was 4 hours long and Japanese: I found myself totally entranced by one of the most absorbing, intensely human films I've ever seen. A couple of years later I ran into Desert Moon and was again bowled over (it took me a moment to realise it was the same director).
As you can imagine I had (very) high expectations of this movie: the bible's most devastating phrase for a title and mass suicide the theme (and believe me, Shinji Aoyama is a master at drawing immense hope out of the deepest despair)... and, well, it wasn't that great. It's still a good film - beautiful to look at, interesting themes intelligently developed, plenty of room given for good acting, and some very lovely music, but it just lacked the depth I was expecting. At some points it even started to resemble a music video...
Maybe I'm being harder on this film than it deserves - it's still more worthwhile than a lot of the films I've seen over the past year - but Shinji Aoyama is capable of genius and simply doesn't deliver it here...
Odete (2005)
hysteria collides with despair
The thrust of this story is so odd as to stretch credibility almost to the point of crumbling, but Rodrigues just about managed to keep me on board, with a clear, almost ritual, exposition of the two characters' stories, before they start to entwine in a bizarre cocktail of obsession and distress. The overall feel is that of Greek tragedy, an excruciating inevitability that helps to accept, unlikely as it may seem, the final scene where the male lead is sodomised by the female, while the ghost of his now-dead boyfriend looks on (I kid you not).
A brief outline of the plot will give you an idea of just how strange this film is: Rui and Pedro have been in love for a year - they've just exchanged rings and the future is full of plans, but then Pedro is killed in a car crash. In another part of Lisbon, Odete works in the local supermarket and is going out with Alberto, one of the security guards. She starts to get broody to the point of obsession and, when Alberto refuses to have a child with her, she throws him out. Up to now, were still in a normal film, but Odete gatecrashes Pedro's funeral and the weirdness begins. She steals Pedro's ring (by sucking it off his finger, in a scene not devoid of necrophiliac undertones - at this point any doubts about her instability are completely dispelled), claims she's carrying Pedro's child and begins to insinuate herself into Rui's life by implying an almost supernatural connection with Pedro. When the pregnancy turns out to be phantom - or faked, we're never really sure and in any case, no-one in the film really takes it seriously - she persues her obsession by subsuming Pedro's personality and manipulating Rui into an acceptance of her as a substitute for his dead lover.
While the film may appear some kind of freudian horror story, the core remains very human: Odete is as lost as Rui and never really convincing as the reincarnation of Pedro. Her gauche efforts in this respect tend to alleviate the creeping sense of evil that permeates her manipulation of Rui, who can only accept such a sham because of his overriding need to sublimate Pedro's death.
Rodrigues leaves much open to interpretation: just how conscious is Odete of what she is doing to Rui? just how far is Rui taken in by her? His refusal to comment leads me to think he's suggesting it doesn't really matter: here we have two people taking the same road to meet two different needs, which can be said of a great many love stories.
The film is sound enough in its technical aspects (acting, photography, etc.) to carry the story, so I'd recommend a look if you get the chance.
Presque rien (2000)
Presque rien - talk about the passion...
First love is a desperately difficult subject to pull off convincingly in cinema : the all-encompassing passion involved generally ends up as a pale imitation or, worse, slightly ridiculous.
Lifshitz manages to avoid all the pitfalls and delivers a moving, sexy, thoroughly engrossing tale of love, disaster and possible redemption, while tangentially touching on some of the deeper themes in human existence.
The core story is of Mathieu, 18, a solitary, introverted boy who meets Cédric, brasher, more outgoing but just as lonely, while on holiday with his family. As the summer warms on, they fall in love and, when the holidays end, decide to live together. A year later, the relationship ends in catastrophe: Cédric cheats on Mathieu who, distraught, tries to take his own life. He survives and, in order to get perspective back on his life he returns to the seaside town where they first met, this time cloaked in the chill of winter.
If the tale was told like this it would never have the impact it does: much of it is implied, all of it happens non-sequentially.
The intricate narrative is essential to getting a deeper feeling of the passions experienced, through the use of counterpoint and temporal perspective. Fortunately, the three time-lines used (the summer of love, the post-suicide psychiatric hospital and the winter of reconstruction) are colour coded: warm yellows and oranges for the summer, an almost frighteningly chill blue for the hospital scenes and warming browns and blues for the winter seaside.
Both main actors put in excellent performances though, whilst it's a delight to see Stéphane Rideau (Cédric) used to his full capacity (I'm more used to seeing him under-stretched in Gael Morel's rather limp dramas), Jérémie Elkaim (Mathieu) has to be singled out for special mention: you can feel his loneliness, then his almost incredulous passion, then his character crumbling behind a wall of aphasia. Beautifully crafted gestures get across far more than dialogue ever could.
The themes touched upon are almost classic in French cinema: our difficulty in really understanding what another is feeling; our difficulty in communicating fully; the shifting sands of meaning
The film's title "Presque rien" (Almost Nothing) points to all of these and, indeed, to one of the key scenes in the film: In trying to understand why Mathieu attempted to kill himself, a psychiatrist asks Cédric if he had ever cheated on him
"Non
enfin, oui
une fois, mais ce n'était rien" (No
well, yes
once, but it was nothing). Cédric still loves Mathieu he brought him to the hospital during the suicide attempt (none of which we see) and tries desperately to contact him again once he leaves but cannot understand that he has lost him forever, because something that seemed nothing to him (a meaningless affair) is everything to Mathieu.
Whilst the film is darker than the rather unfortunate Pierre et Gilles poster would suggest, it is not without hope: we get to see Cédric's slow, painful attempts to get back in touch with life, first through a cat he adopts, then through work in a local bar and finally contact with Pierre, who may be his next love. But here the story ends: A teenage passion, over within the year, another perhaps beginning. So what was it? Almost Nothing? Certainly not when you're living it
F. est un salaud (1998)
a gem
Outstanding acting, great casting, and really tight direction work together to make an unsparingly tragic plot both utterly believable and inexplicably hopeful.
Dark, sexy and very disturbing, the film's central theme is of love: though it is used, abused, warped and betrayed, it retains a strange and constant purity throughout, even up to the central character's almost shocking conclusion at the end. There is no question of bestowing any redemptive power on love, since this is a film of unflinching reality, but love's ability to provide sense to an existence otherwise bereft of meaning is shown to the full. There are few films that try to do this. Even fewer succeed, but this is one of them.