Shades of Caruso

Love And Violence At The London Film Festival

Though I’ve lived in London for a decade, it was only this year that I finally joined the BFI and made an effort to attend the London Film Festival. Even when a colleague saw the original cut of Miike’s Ichii The Killer (which he maintains is far superior to the really quite tedious UK cut included on this DVD), I was not compelled to try. If the giddy joy I experienced this year is anything to go by, mark me down as a fool for not trying earlier. I’ve not been this excited about a cultural event since 2000, when Scott Walker’s Meltdown festival on London’s Southbank featured Smog, Jim O’Rourke, Elliott Smith, Jarvis Cocker, and the unforgettable Fuckhead, all in the same week.

Perhaps I’m most excited as the movies I saw were, for the most part, extremely good, not to mention impossible to see in the UK any time soon. Enter The Void, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Les regrets, White Material, Extract, Metropia and Valhalla Rising don’t have release dates yet, and some of the others are coming out slowly. The Men Who Stare At Goats is out now, with The Informant!, Un prophète, We Live in Public, and Up In The Air rolling out over the next couple of months. Getting a jump on some of these was essential, as I plan to spend the rest of the year catching up with as many movies as possible before the traditional end of year Shades of Caruso Listmania! event happens. At the moment I think I have my top ten sorted, though there are still a couple of yet-to-be-released films that could crack the list. We shall see.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète is on my list. Newcomer Tahar Rahim — in one of the performances of the year — plays Malik El Djebena, an Arabic youth with a troubled past who is sent to prison for six years after assaulting a police officer. Though he is intent on keeping his head down, Malik’s stay is complicated by the arrival of an Arab prisoner (Reyeb – Hichem Yacoubi) who is to testify against Corsican gangster César Luciani (played like a kind of corpulent and manipulative spider/crook hybrid by the amazing Niels Arestrup). The Godfather-esque crime boss cannot approach Reyeb, who is surrounded by Arab prisoners, and so enlists Malik upon pain of death. The young boy has no choice but to kill Reyeb, leading to his estrangement from his brethren. Even worse, he is treated like a servant by the Corsican gang. Humiliated, powerless, and haunted by the murder he has committed, Malik begins to plan his revenge, but first he must better himself, consolidating allies and resources during his six year sentence.

After I stumbled from the screening, my jaw scraping along the floor like a broken fender, I found it impossible not to compare Un prophète to De Palma’s Scarface, but please don’t take that as a comment on the quality of Audiard’s film. Even as a fan of early career De Palma, the appeal of Scarface has baffled me for decades — it has struck me as one of his most misjudged films, half deathly serious cautionary tale, half gaudy semi-parodic nonsense. The one or two good setpieces are surrounded by kitsch, madness, and a horribly pitched central performance from some kind of demon who resembles mid-80s Al Pacino but can’t possibly be him because that kind of roaring caricature didn’t show up in his filmography until the 90s. If it was a demon taking Al Pacino’s place in Scarface, I reckon the name of the demon is Hooahhh, and is a distant relative of Pazuzu.

Nevertheless, the similarities are there. Tony Montana and Malik El Djebena are immigrants who fall foul of the law and find their calling while in “prison” (actual for Malik, symbolic for Montana, who is kept in a camp for Cuban immigrants with criminal backgrounds in Florida). They both kill to get out of their tough situation, and undergo baptisms of blood (Montana in the notorious chainsaw scene, Malik in the soon-to-be-notorious razorblade seduction scene). They start off as enforcers but climb their way to the top using ruthlessness, opportunism, and pluck. There is even a straight homage later in the film, as Malik and his colleague Ryad are given the job of eliminating an associate of Luciani, a job which begins to go wrong almost immediately and ends with Malik taking matters into his own hands. Compare this to a similar scene in Scarface as Montana resists killing a Bolivian anti-government activist with a bomb. Despite being shot in similar styles, there are deviations. Malik’s decisions don’t doom him the way they do Montana, and both films have very different endings: there is no “Say hello to my leetle fren!” craziness in Un prophète. The most dramatic and satisfying moment in the final act is played out silently, and manages to be even more emotionally resonant than Montana’s final stand.

Audiard’s style couldn’t be further from De Palma’s, yet he generates far more cumulative power and tension through careful use of pace and composition. His only concession to stylistic excess comes with Malik’s dreams/hallucinations, as he is visited and advised by the ghost of Reyeb, who gives him glimpses of the future that, at least once, save his life. The fantastical touches are scattered so lightly through the film that they barely register. Compare that to De Palma’s near-insane overkill, all long takes, flashy Hitchcock references, and crash-zooming. In many of his other movies that’s just fine, but Scarface always looked like a red-tinged mess, and now — when compared to the spartan aesthetic of Audiard’s instant classic — it looks even sillier.

Plus, while De Palma and writer Oliver Stone liked to play up Scarface‘s depiction of the American Dream gone awry in an attempt to add inject profundity into what would be more acceptable as an out-and-out exploitation flick, Audiard and his co-screenwriters (Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit) touch on enough uncomfortable aspects of modern French life that — as Dafri explained prior to the screening — many politicians have used the movie to score points against their opponents. French prisons are notoriously overcrowded, and relations between French natives and Islamic immigrants are fractious, so a movie which deals so frankly with both issues is bound to be explosive. No matter how much Audiard protests that his movie has no message, the backdrop of his crime drama is portrayed vividly enough that it’s hard not to take the film as an indictment of the system as it stands. Scarface‘s message about the corrupting effect of greed on the human soul was crushed under tons of tacky sludge, and amounts to little. Here, Audiard tells the story of one young man bettering himself (at the expense of others, sadly), and speaks volumes about contemporary racial and economic politics in Europe. Everyone who adores De Palma’s movie should do everything they can to check out Un prophète, because this is how it’s done.

Attending so many movies in such a short space of time left me greatly fatigued and mildly ill. Like some kind of Vitamin B injection, Audiard’s crime thriller gave me a burst of energy that lasted until I saw Cédric Kahn’s Les regrets. Kahn was responsible for L’ennui, one of my favourite films about sexual obsession. Adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravio, L’ennui depicts a philosophy teacher (Charles Berling) who falls for a young woman (Sophie Guillemin) to such an extent that his life falls apart as he pursues her, oblivious to her dark past. His efforts to stalk her and keep her interested in him become frantic, though as the object of his desire seems utterly unmoved by his devotion, there is a poignancy there too. It’s a memorable portrait of a man made into a fool by his desire.

Sadly, Les regrets feels like a retread of the same themes. Whereas the earlier film is an adaptation, here Kahn directs his own screenplay. Architect Mathieu (Yvan Attal) returns to his childhood home while visiting his dying mother, and accidentally encounters the former love of his life, Maya, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (who spookily resembles Virginia Madsen). Though married to another architect with whom he owns a small company, Mathieu is compelled to sleep with Maya in an attempt to make right what once went wrong. At first Mathieu seems to be fighting against his urges, but it’s not long before his desire for Maya takes control of him, and he jeopardises his marriage and his career. Maya is similarly afflicted, unable to resist her attraction to her former lover, until eventually she realises that Mathieu’s obsession will destroy both of their lives. Though she recovers a little, Mathieu is too far gone, and his actions doom him.

Les regrets is not without its pleasures. The three leads — Attal, Bruni Tedeschi, and Arly Jover as Mathieu’s neglected wife Lisa — are all wonderful, balancing on a line between absurdity and pathos with skill. Several scenes are simultaneously farcical and gutwrenching, with Mathieu and Maya racing around France to grab brief moments together, their desperate lovemaking becoming more passionate but less intimate. Late in the film Mathieu finally meets Maya’s daughter — a figure who has been mentioned but never seen — and yet this sobering collision does nothing to stop him, so determined is he to reclaim Maya’s love. Those regrets, those lost years, drive both characters to self-destructive lengths, and every so often Kahn captures a moment of panic or lust that perfectly reflects that experience and our own desire to turn back the clock and make things right with those we once loved, all while satirising the awful selfishness of these middle-class idiots who only occasionally give a damn about anyone else in their lives. The final ambiguous scene is especially damning.

Nevertheless, this feels more like a variation on a theme than a movie on its own, and as I’ve only seen once of Kahn’s movies it was especially disappointing. Perhaps if I had seen one of his thrillers (Roberto Succo or Feux rouges) this similarity would have seemed less bothersome, and certainly the stakes aren’t as high as in L’ennui, but the scenes of Attal and Bruni Tedeschi racing around to arrange one of their trysts were too familiar. Plus, I’m sure Kahn intended to make his protagonists so unlikeable, but for much of the movie the tone wavers between romantic tragedy and satire. Daisyhellcakes is convinced the movie is making fun of French erotic cinema, right down to the stolen moments of passion, the agonising and sub-poetic exhortations of love, and the overheated final act with characters passing out from stress and exploding with erotic rage. It certainly has its share of funny moments, but as a cultural visitor and heathen with only a passing knowledge of French cinema, I can’t help but feel that I was laughing at the tragedy and feeling empathy during the comedy.

These reservations are, of course, entirely subjective. Consider Les regrets recommended, especially if you’ve not yet seen L’ennui, though I’d say that’s still the superior movie. Of course, similarity to other films isn’t really a killing blow. There was one other film we saw that was heavily indebted to another, but this film was inspired enough to add iguanas, abuse of the elderly, and an uncanny — and entirely random —  impression of Ed Sullivan. More to follow…

November 6, 2009 - Posted by admiralneck | Al Pacino, Brian De Palma, Cédric Kahn, Elliott Smith, Jacques Audiard, Jim O'Rourke, London Film Festival, Nicolas Cage, Pazuzu, Smog, Takashi Miike, Uncategorized, Werner Herzog