31: Through the Olive Trees (a.k.a. Zire Darakhatan Zeyton-Original Persian title)

            Some movies are all about their final shot.  Without it, they’re less than the sum of all their other parts, but with it they are so much more.  Such is the case with Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (1994).  Presumably based on events that took place during the filming of Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987) and Life, and Nothing More (1991), the film rounds out an unofficial trilogy, that preceded Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997), for which he won the Palme D’Or at Cannes.  It has been some time since I saw that film, but if pressed to choose, I’d say I preferred Olive Trees to the later movie.  While the 1994 picture may not have the consistent tension that Taste of Cherry possesses, I feel that it builds to a slightly more rewarding—if equally uncertain—ending.

            Kiarostami uses the only professional actor he’d ever hired up until that time, Mohamed Ali Keshavarz, in the role of a director trying to film a movie in post-earthquake Northern Iran.  He and his crew arrive with the hope of casting locals in the key roles (as Kiarostami had always done), but can’t seem to find a young man and woman to play a recently married couple.  The AD (Zarifeh Shiva) thinks she has it right, but finds that the actress might be difficult to work with and that she doesn’t really understand the role.  After casting calls and wardrobe issues the director is ready to shoot, but finds that the young man he’s cast stammers when he speaks to women, making him less than ideal for the role of the husband.

              A replacement actor is called in, but things go from bad to worse.  He’s unable to make it to the set when a municipal rebuilding project blocks the roadway.  When he does arrive, it turns out that he has asked the actress who will play his wife to marry him, and that she has rebuffed his proposal, and now refuses to speak to him.  Neither performer really seems all that interested in the success of the film.  She studies between and even during takes, and he proclaims his love for her every time the director calls “cut.”  Both of them have trouble following direction.  They shoot, and shoot, and shoot; one bad take after another, building the frustration I always seem to experience in Kiarostami pictures.  He begs her to show him some sign that she loves him as well, but she is resolute in her silence.  They continue in this pattern until finally the director is satisfied (or exhausted).

            The film is a multitude of slices of life, but none better than the final scene.  After shooting is wrapped, the actress decides not to wait for a ride back to the village from the set.  She begins to walk, carrying a plant that the production team borrowed for the filming.  The director, by now sympathetic to the actor’s lovelorn plight, suggests that he follow her as she walks.  As he pursues her through the hills and the trees of the film’s title, he continues his proclamations of love.  After what seems like miles, the camera that has trailed behind the two stops at the top of a hill.  I could only speculate as to what this pause of secondary motion* symbolizes for Kiarostami, but I can say with certainty that to watch these two people continue to walk on, her leading and him following, as they get smaller and smaller, is deeply moving.  Aided by Domenico Cimarosa’s “Conc. C 4.Allegro Giusto,” it is an almost perfect shot.

            Through the Olive Trees, like all of Kiarostami’s work, builds to a conclusion that leaves more questions than answers.  When I reviewed his The Wind Will Carry Us (1999; #70) back in December I noted that I was interested in seeing his Certified Copy (2010), which was stirring up notable debate amongst critics as to the possible twists contained therein.  Having now seen that film I can attest to its greatness and to the credibility of this debate.  In the end, I don’t think it really matters what you believe about the couple at the film’s center (the same could be said for Through the Olive Trees), but that you’ve experienced what they’ve experienced for the time you’ve been with them.  After all, the film wouldn’t be half the fun without the speculation.

            This was the final Kiarostami film I needed to see from the 1001 list, and in a way I’m glad this worked out to be the last.  It is my favorite of the four, surpassing along with Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us the dreadful Close-Up (1990).  I have no doubt that Certified Copy will be canonized in the next edition, and rightfully so, but for now this is Kiarostami’s best film on the list.  My favorite theory about film writing says that essentially there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town.  The great thing about the best Kiarostami films is that you have to decide which one of those stories you are watching.  That’s usually the secret to the mysteries they hold.   

Language: Persian

Runtime: 103 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off  

*camera movement

32: The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain-Original French title)

            I think there are two essential questions raised by director Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973).  The first is a matter of form, and the second is a matter of content.  Is it possible to make an interesting movie about boring people?  That’s first and foremost.  Reviewers asked this question upon the film’s release, and those who weren’t stymied by its three and a half hour runtime found that indeed such a feat was attainable.  The trick is in the writing and the casting.  So often, movies are about people who appear to be boring realizing their potential and becoming great.  This picture is about how tedious and unexciting it is to appear interesting while never actually realizing any potential whatsoever. 

            In Eustache’s mind no actor could better convey this paradox than Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut’s reliable alter-ego.  In this role, written specifically for him by Eustache, he breaks free of the confines of Antoine Doinel, but he never really leaves him behind.   He is Alexandre, a self-centered pseudo intellectual whose “busy” life seems evenly divided between sleeping, pretending to read in cafes, and picking up women.  He lives with a woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), but he treats her badly, never willing to commit to their relationship.  He’s fixated on an old flame, and as the film opens he gets out of bed with Marie to arrange to meet his former lover. 

            When she rejects him, he doesn’t seem particularly upset.  After all, there are still plenty of hours in the day.  He drinks and smokes with a friend and discusses his favorite banal topics, all the while hoping to meet another potential conquest.  Eventually she materializes in the form of Veronika, played by Eustache’s own former lover Françoise Lebrun.  Though at first Alexandre is tepid in his pursuit, his interest is peaked when he begins to realize that she is just as adept, and perhaps even better, at the game of sexual musical chairs. 

            He begins an affair with Veronika, making only what appear to be intentionally poor attempts to hide it from Marie.  When she discovers the romance, she’s marginally hurt but even less surprised.  She and Alexandre fight, but nothing comes of it.  In writing, Eustache was clever enough to realize that the audience that would accept this film wasn’t interested in major changes, and for that matter, neither are Alexandre and Marie.  She claims to love him, as does Veronika, but I don’t recall him ever declaring love for her.  I was compelled to wonder why she didn’t kick him out—after all, it is her apartment he sleeps at—like any decent woman would, but was then reminded by the film’s title that neither of the women Alexandre is interested in is particularly decent.  To him, women really only have two functions. 

            While ultimately Eustache is able to generate sympathy for his female characters, even as they both remain sexually subservient to Alexandre, their actions rarely seem justified.  Despite his evident loafer status, Marie is always willing to take her boyfriend back, and even warms to Veronika when it becomes clear that she isn’t going away.  The three form a love triangle that is wholly beneficial to none of the parties, and yet are temporarily content to remain sexually available but emotionally distant from each other.

            These characters lead the type of lives that sound interesting, but are in actuality tremendously without excitement.  They sometimes seem to fight simply because there isn’t anything else to do when they are tired of sex.  This unfortunately begins to feel formulaic in a 212 minute film.  Yes, it has its interesting moments, but they are more often generated through the subtle but growing distances we sense between the characters than by any scenes of sex or violent outbursts.  Alexandre (perhaps in an extension of Doinel) sometimes comments that these events remind him of a bad movie, and it’s difficult to tell whether Eustache is being ironic.

            He based this film on events from his own life, which leads me to wonder whether he and his characters are self-centered, or just his movie is.  It is a picture comprised of three and a half hours of conversations that ultimately add up to very little having been discussed.  Yes, this is an interesting movie about particularly boring people, but I don’t know whether that ultimately means that the people are boring, or that sex is.  This leads to the second question the film raises.  Was the sexual revolution really all that revolutionary?  Alexandre would likely claim that it was, but he’s simply using women’s lib and sexual liberation as his excuse to get laid.  He is, in effect, a chauvinist of the truest form, and so immature that he can’t even conceive of a different way to perceive women.

Language: French

Runtime: 212 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off  

33: The Bitch (a.k.a. La Chienne-Original French title; a.k.a. Ain’t Life a Bitch-Loose translation)

            La Chienne (1931) isn’t a Renoir masterpiece.  Critics usually refer to his late 1930s works, such as The Grand Illusion (1938) and The Rules of the Game (1939), when looking for the film that defines classical French cinema, and they are right to do so.  However, I was reminded this week by the release of the Sight and Sound poll, and Roger Ebert’s subsequent response blog, that choosing a single film as the definitive work of a director’s overall output can be dangerous.  Vertigo (1958), which topped the 2012 S&S list, doesn’t define or encompass Hitchcock.  Yes, most of his consistent themes and techniques are there (as well as some tricks he used only once), but no novice movie fan is going to get everything Hitch had to offer from that one piece.  They may not even like it.  Audiences didn’t upon its initial release, and Hitchcock wasn’t particularly fond of it.   

            But Vertigo is, without doubt, great.  In the context of Hitchcock’s career, he was at the top of his game.* Ultimately, I believe it was voted the greatest film ever because it is a great work from a universally respected director who made many great films.  It dethroned Citizen Kane (1941), atop the British magazine’s perch since 1962, and a movie that has benefitted from two factors unrelated to its production (as well as numerous creative elements that were).

 Kane was essentially forbidden fruit upon its release; kept when possible from the public at great costs by its unwilling inspiration, media magnate William Randolph Hurst.  When it was finally available to a wide audience, the anticipation added to the art.  Thus it ascended to glory in the 1962 S&S voting.  Perhaps even more alluring is that the film represents what might have been.  After Hurst’s slander campaign of the picture, Orson Welles was never again given the creative control that made Kane a masterpiece.  And though he made other great films, Citizen Kane remains a lone masterpiece from a director who had seemingly limitless potential.  People often say that ironically Yoko Ono made the Beatles what they were.  People simply didn’t want it to end, and they still don’t (me at least).  Perhaps it is the same with Hurst and Welles.  It wouldn’t be the only irony between them.

            All this to say that it is important to think about films within the context of the times, lives, and careers of those who made them.  In this regard La Chienne is a valuable motion picture.  Renoir’s second sound film, it was also his second collaboration with Michael Simon, the actor who came to represent French cinema of the 1930s.  Simon plays Legrand, a lowly clerk and cashier who is mistaken for a wealthy businessman by the prostitute Lulu.  Legrand comes to care for Lulu, and through deceptions sets her up in an apartment as his mistress.  His shrewish wife doesn’t seem to notice the money he slyly sneaks to support her, and is happy that his habit of painting seems to have subsided. 

            Meanwhile Lulu engages in her own deceptions.  Passing the paintings Legrand creates at the apartment off as the work of a young American artist, she and her boyfriend/Pimp Dédé devise a scheme to get rich in the art market.  Dédé encourages Lulu’s relationship with Legrand as it keeps the bills paid, all the while pretending to be her brother.  His motivations are self serving as well, as much of the art profits go toward his gambling debts.

            The complications of Legrand’s relationship with his wife begin to mount until fate intervenes.  Her first husband, long assumed dead, approaches the distressed lecher.  He proposes a change of status, and one of the film’s best scenes concerns the bargaining these two husbands engage in over their mutual wife.  Eventually, without legitimate claim to his bride, Legrand happily resolves to bow out and take up residence with Lulu.  However, things take a turn for the worse when he shows up to find her in bed with Dédé.

            Like much of Renoir’s work, La Chienne can’t be defined as a simple comedy or tragedy.  Both elements are at play here.  The director has serious things to say about humanity and society, but he isn’t above making his audience laugh to make his points evident.  He lays the groundwork with this film for his later tours de force, and to experience his sense of growing confidence as a director is a reward.  The film is gritty, emotional, and at times playful, and throughout Renoir changes tones deftly.  Viewing La Chienne is viewing a master artist begin to shape his oeuvre.         

           

Language: French

Runtime: 91 minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off

*or getting there.  I prefer Psycho (1960), which he made two years later when he wanted to go back to low-budget basics.