A MARRIED WOMAN - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally written in 2009 for DVDTalk.com.

Jean-Luc Godard was one of the most prolific filmmakers of the early 1960s, producing a string of exciting, creative films that, as Susan Sontag once wrote, work as one long piece of cinema, an evolving, ever-expanding movie from a singular artistic source. Of those early movies, one of the least talked about seems to be Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman), his 1964 study of one woman's emotional dilemma. Perhaps it's just that the movie fell between the more popular Band of Outsiders [review] and the sci-fi detective film Alphaville [review], and so the less flashy feature got lost behind the spotlight. Regardless, it's an unfair development. A Married Woman is a worthy companion piece to Godard's divisive 1963 masterpiece, Contempt [review], exploring many of the same themes of infidelity, changing affections, and performance, but this time more sympathetic to the female side of the story.

Macha Méril stars as Charlotte, a young wife married to Pierre (Philippe Leroy), an older man whose previous marriage ended after two months, leaving him a cuckold with a young son. Despite going through the motions of wife and lover, Charlotte has grown tired of the arrangement, and she has sought extramarital passions in the arms of a handsome actor, Robert (Bernard Noël). Robert wants her to leave Pierre and be with him, and Charlotte has agreed to get a divorce so they can make that happen. Yet, pulling the trigger is not so easy.

A Married Woman is told in a series of distinct chapters, opening with a rendezvous with Robert, transitioning into Charlotte's return to family and time with Pierre, then a little girl talk, and finally back to Robert. Far from a conventional narrative, A Married Woman is composed of Godard's usual aesthetic, like a series of cut-up snapshots rearranged and pasted together. The final product is a little like a parlor-room drama given a modern remix. Continuing his groundbreaking experiments with music, advertising, and slogans, Godard splices conversations with movie posters (as well as his usual self-reflexive references to the same), ads for brassieres, and the sights of Paris, including the Eiffel Tower and a Jean Cocteau window display. Instead of the usual talking heads, he presents conversations as one-sided, having each character look directly into the camera and state their business, with their partner sometimes posing questions off-screen. Thus, discussions are more like filmed interrogations than an exchange of information, each lover demanding to know if they are loved and how much. Just what are you prepared to do for me?

Ever the trickster, Godard plays fast and loose with the idea of the male gaze in A Married Woman. The lovemaking scenes are staged using strictly framed shots, focusing on different parts of Charlotte--the back of her neck, her bellybutton, her legs. It is both reverential and objectifying, loving and lustful, a dichotomy Godard is acknowledging as existing in both of Charlotte's male partners. As she will figure out, they want to possess the parts, but not necessarily the whole. She wonders why both of them don't want to see her in her complete nakedness, Robert even imploring her to put on a shirt as she wanders their shared boudoir in panties and nothing more--though even in her exhibitionism, she hides a little, covering her breasts with her arm. Then again, if Robert would express his desire to see them, she'd reveal all. Interesting, too, that both the husband and boyfriend end sexual encounters with talk of pregnancy, of each wanting to give Charlotte a baby. Her nervous reluctance is refreshing. Not all modern women want to be mothers, after all, and the implication is that the men see this as a final stamp of ownership, the way to shackle her. The men are frighteningly interchangeable, especially the way Godard regularly shoots only the backs of their heads or leaves them off camera entirely.

Marriage didn't go so well for Pierre the first time, something that comes to bear in his new relationship, and Godard is sharply aware of the double-standards that come to play in a male/female relationship, especially in regard to sexual freedom. Charlotte says as much when Pierre questions her past history, and she knows he doesn't trust her because of his own history. As a pilot, Pierre is often gone, and in his absence, he once had a private detective follow Charlotte, catching her in her early flirtation with "that actor." As she tells him, even if his suspicions are correct, it doesn't give him the right to have her tailed.

Godard is smart to have Charlotte be such a conflicted character and not altogether wholesome. She is often childish, fighting over whether she can play some records or worrying about her bust size. The auteur is fascinated by the division between youth and age as much as he is the division of gender. There are ongoing discussions of memory vs. action, past vs. present. Pierre is hopelessly stuck in the past, whereas Charlotte only cares about right now. In one of his usual extreme juxtapositions, Godard introduces us to Pierre just as he is returning from having been to Auschwitz to watch the trials of Nazi war criminals, all of whom profess to not being able to remember the atrocities. Is Charlotte's disinterest evidence of a flighty personality, or is Pierre merely an intellectual poser? In the middle is Pierre's guest (director Roger Leenhardt playing himself), an even older man who is more in tune with where these things intersect. Intelligence, as he says, is the ability to compromise, to be able to assess all factors and proceed accordingly.

Ultimately, this is what Charlotte must do, particularly after a mid-point twist where she realizes she is pregnant and has no idea which of the two possible candidates is the father. Macha Méril is wonderful to watch in the movie, making Charlotte more than an empty vessel for Godard's philosophy--even if her discussions of acting with Robert bring to mind some of the theories of Robert Bresson, who saw actors as models to be posed. (A brilliantly choreographed meeting between the lovers, showing the lengths they'll go to cover their tracks, also reminded me of Bresson. Specifically, the scenes of thievery in Pickpocket.) As an actress, Méril is always aware of both her surroundings and the internal debate that Charlotte is having. She always appears to be thinking, she is never blank. Her performance serves Godard's subversion of the male gaze quite well, actually, and Raoul Coutard's gorgeous photography practically dares you to get lost in her beauty and forget that there is a brain in her head. Good luck, because Méril makes it pretty much impossible.

The tragedy of A Married Woman, then, is that for as much as Charlotte may want to weigh her options, what she discovers in her final tryst with Robert is that the choice is ultimately out of her hands. Any relationship lives or dies on the vagaries of its participants, and so as much as Pierre's mistrust of her is a self-fulfilling prophecy, so too is Robert's status as an actor and his role as the other man going to make him a capricious lover, someone for whom permanence is not truly viable. As in life, the end of the film is abrupt, coming before Charlotte--or the viewer--is ready, and thus hitting all the harder.

L'ARGENT - #886

There was an “everything is connected” subgenre in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s that was perhaps kicked off by Richard Linklater’s Slacker, but that really traces roots back to Max Ophuls and La ronde [review]--films where characters are connected by social happenstance (13Conversations About One Thing) or perhaps an object (Robert Altman’s Gun TV series). One chat leads to another, one careless act affects a passerby, a butterfly flaps its wings and a writer looks for meaning.

Linklater is a devotee of Robert Bresson, and it would stand to reason that Bresson’s 1983 crime drama L’argent was an inspiration. Based on a story by Tolstoy, L’argent tells the tale of several lives thrown into upheaval by two selfish teenagers choosing to pass a counterfeit bill at a small camera and photo shop. When the storeowners decide to unload it, along with other fraudulent notes, on a trusting deliveryman, they not only expose their own unscrupulousness, but force the driver into a legal wrangle he can’t get himself out of.

This man, Lucien (Vincent Risterucci), is the closest we get to a main character--or at least he's the one we root for, if only temporarily. His life is the most damaged by the initial crime and the several more it inspires. His plight is transformative. He is the good man forced to be bad. It's a gradual change, one that seems natural, despite of--or perhaps because of--Bresson’s technique. The French director is famous for extracting emotion from performance and approaching his actors as poseable “models.” His cast blandly hits marks, delivers its lines with little intonation, and maintains a steady gaze. To some, it's stiff and amateurish, but once you tune in to Bresson’s wavelength, his narrative theories begin to make sense. You just have to lock them in place.

It's almost like kabuki in its formalism. By staging L’argent with such a rigorous dispassion, we are spared the melodrama, we are spared being swayed by our own feelings, and instead we watch the pieces move, staying in the moment rather than trying to guess the plot twists, reserving judgment until it has all passed, the audience serving as an observant jury. We don't judge Lucien, we don’t put ourselves in his shoes, we instead just watch. In fact, when he does show some real emotion, it's such an affront, Bresson has him bury his head in a pillow. Open weeping is for other movies.

Which isn’t to say we aren't invested. We totally are. The sheer cruelty of humanity underlying every callous turn is undeniable, it's just that we follow the events as we would a true crime story rather than a fiction, as if they already happened and are thus beyond inevitable. We can't help but feel for Lucien, but perhaps it makes us less sympathetic when he makes wrong turns. L’argent does not romanticize his crimes.

Ironic, then, that showing the crimes themselves is the only place where Bresson’s theories fail him. While the mechanics of the violence are evident, the abstraction renders them ineffective and even confusing. Is it that showing the actual blood and gore as evidence would bias us more than the director would like, or is he just squeamish? If we are the jury, we would need to consider the victims--even after some of them are declared unlikable--otherwise the testimony is incomplete. Lucien’s actions already seem outsized, and Bresson’s editing—chopping up the scenes, showing the beginning of the action and an implied outcome (jumping from a raised weapon to blood splatter, etc.) but never the in between, proves only to make them less believable.

Luckily, this does nothing to lessen the tragic poetry of L’argent. Particularly as the truly bad people, unmoored as they are by the appearance of this fake cash, suffer very little consequence. Bresson carves out a world where heeding one’s conscience only leads to mistakes and punishment. The survivors mostly serve themselves, or feign charity for effect. Which, when you really think about it, means the themes of L’argent are perfectly in sync with the storytelling. Remove emotion, stick to what can be known--and done.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS - #851

In 1975, the writer/director Rainer Werner Fassbinder applied his finely honed sense of Sirkian melodrama to Fox and His Friends, a small story that encompasses class, ambition, and, at its root, a need to be loved. Fassbinder himself played the lovably dopey Fox, a one-time carnie whose continual insistence that he’d win the lottery finally comes true, cashing him in for 500,000 deutschmarks on the same day his boss and lover was sent to jail for tax evasion. Ironic, as one of the men gets money from the government, the other is busted for not putting his in.

That day, Fox also meets Max (Karlheinz Böhm, Peeping Tom), a wealthy antiques dealer. The two size each other up in at a public restroom in a silent scene full of secret gestures, meaningful looks, and a test or two. It’s masterfully choreographed, almost like something out of Bresson’s Pickpocket. Max has come along at just the right moment, introducing his new lover to a social group befitting his newfound riches. Max’s friends are disdainful at first, seeing their coupling as lewd and Fox himself as a rube. He also has a bit of a rough allure--a bad boy, if you will--so soon one of the men gives in to his lust. Eugen (Peter Chatel, The Merchant of Four Seasons) takes Fox home, and the former con man has no trouble seducing and dominating his conquest. It’s only after the fling becomes something serious that the dynamic changes.

Eugen’s family is going broke. Their bookbinding business is heading for bankruptcy, and the son sees only one way to bail his judgmental father out. He asks Fox to loan them some money, with promises of equity when the loan is paid off. As audience members, we see almost immediately that not all is as it seems with this plan, but poor trusting Fox, so eager to be accepted, and so afraid that Eugen will think he’s stupid, signs the deal without admitting he doesn’t truly understand it. It’s the final shift of power, the con man becomes the conned, making Eugen free to criticize and humiliate his lower-class boyfriend all he wants. His most insidious habit is how he corrects Fox’s etiquette. “If you’re looking for the dessert fork,” he begins, seeing Fox eating a pastry with his hands, and then ends by pointing out that it’s on the left of his plate. He couches his recriminations with a sharp dig, giving the pretense that he’s repeating something Fox already knows. Self-aware mansplaining. (It reminds me of Michael Sheen’s equally infuriating “um, actually” behavior toward Rachel McAdams in Midnight in Paris [review].)

Fox and His Friends is pleasantly simple, with big emotions but few dramatic sweeps to match. Fassbinder approaches everything gently, including his own performance. Rather than play Fox in broad strokes, he goes low-key. Fox is not very bright and surprisingly naïve, but not in a way that inspires laughter from the audience. Instead, as Eugen chips away at Fox’s swagger and reveals the kind-hearted simpleton underneath, we only gain more empathy for the well-meaning bumbler. We wish he’d do better, and would smack him upside the head if we could, but outside of some ostentatious purchases that bite him on the ass later, most of his financial loss comes from wanting to please his lover. His generosity is genuine, and also equal opportunity. One of their worst quarrels occurs when Eugen objects to Fox giving a loan to Klaus (Karl Scheydt, The American Soldier), his carnie boss, when he is released from jail. How hypocritical that Eugen’s anger is because he believes Fox will never see that money again. Fox trusts Klaus will pay him back, and regardless of that, you have to help your friends. Their other terrible fight comes in Morocco, when they look to pick up another man. It’s a strange and nuanced disagreement, hinging on a dual offense: Fox being hurt that he’s not enough, and also disgusted that Eugen doesn’t act with more authority in making it happen. You want this, so be a man and take it.

The only characters that the director goes big with are Fox’s belligerent, alcoholic sister (Christiane Maybach) and Fox’s friends at the gay bar, who come with their best “girl, please” sashay. Even more than 40 years later, Fassbinder’s depiction of the gay lifestyle still feels surprisingly fresh. That’s because rather than making Fox and Friends a movie about being homosexual, it’s just a movie with homosexuals in it. In fact, Fox and Friends is completely lacking in heterosexual expression. The only straight couple we see is Eugen’s parents, and they are past the demonstrative stage of their relationship.

But it’s not just the culture that Fassbinder treats matter of factly, it’s the whole of the film. He and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Broadcast News [review], The Last Temptation of Christ) don’t aim for the bright Technicolor of the 1950s pictures Fassbinder emulates; rather, they take a rather unadorned approach, something that brings to mind the Dardennes more than it does Sirk. It gives everything the feeling of real life, of actual existences observed. What happens to the characters never happens because of their sexuality, nor are they being punished for it when things go wrong. When LGBTQ advocates talk about representation in cinema and other entertainment, Fox and His Friends is just the kind of thing they mean: a movie where they just exist like anyone else. Fassbinder pointed the way forever ago, it’s time more started following his direction.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

MURIEL, or THE TIME OF RETURN - #824

Time, time, time...see what you’ve done to me?

Time and its effects play an important role in the films of Alain Resnais. In Hiroshima mon amour, two lovers steal secret hours in order to forget the atrocities of war; in Last Year at Marienbad [review], the past emerges at a most inconvenient time for a couple guilty of infidelity--so inconvenient, they try to deny it. In both films, the past and present seem to run along parallel courses, sometimes converging, sometimes becoming jumbled.

All these things come to bear in Resnais’ 1963 film, Muriel, or The Time of Return, crystallizing what the filmmaker had done before in a dual narrative, depicting both the young and the old as victims of repetitious history. If Hiroshima was about the flames of early romance, then Muriel looks at a romance that has burnt out and sifts through the ashes.

Marienbad star Delphine Seyrig rejoins Resnais for Muriel, playing Hélène, a widow living in the costal town of Boulogne. She runs a furniture store specializing in vintage items, and the shop doubles as an apartment for her and her stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée). One could suggest that their home is essentially a storehouse of memories--though largely those of other people. Which isn’t to say they don’t harbor some of their own. Both have secret wounds that haunt them, and Hélène is about to bring some of her worst to the fore. She has invited her lost love, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien), to come visit. He is eager to rekindle their affair, but she is more interested in poring over what went wrong. You see, back in the day, Alphonse went off to North Africa to fight in WWII, breaking several promises to Hélène, and never returning to her arms.

As we go, we will learn more about why Alphonse did what he did, and also how Hélène was not exactly the faithful paramour she suggests she was. We will also learn what Alphonse hides now, including the true nature of the “niece” (Nita Klein) who travels with him, and how Hélène has a gambling problem. Meanwhile, running concurrent with these revelations is Bernard’s story. He is freshly returned from the war in Algiers, an experience that has changed him. He is now mostly idle, experimenting with art and film, but also in his own love affair. He evokes the name of Muriel when referring to the woman who has a lock on his heart, but that too is a ruse.

For Muriel, Resnais collaborated with writer Jean Cayrol, who also wrote the commentary for his documentary Night and Fog. Together they craft a tricky narrative, one that, in execution, plays with time in a literal fashion. In some scenes, we see two timelines at once. We may see a street at night, and then see a quick flash of how it appears in the day. We also see moments repeat, one on top of the other, compounding increments using slivers of the whole to suggest the complete action. In a similar manner, Resnais employs quick-cut montages to indicate the passage of time, though if one pays attention, it’s almost as if there is more happening than would be possible in the space allotted. As Alphonse’s overnight trip extends, it seems as if months go by; to listen to dialogue later in the film, it’s merely a week.

This makes sense in a world where Alphonse’s trauma from combat is as fresh as Bernard’s, even though decades separate their tours of duty. We are meant to see the two men as one and the same, Bernard is the young version of Alphonse, the future stands next to the past here in the present. Muriel is also Hélène, the woman left behind by a soldier. All is fair in love and war, but in this case, the latter has turned the former into a tragedy.

Yet, we can also see Bernard’s existential plight as a critique of Alphonse’s. What we learn about Bernard’s time in Algeria has more in common with what would go on in Vietnam over the next decade, a predictive of modern warfare. The horror and pain is real and fresh, and lacking the clean justification usually associated with WWII. By contrast, what we know of Alphonse’s time as a soldier sounds almost sanitized, as if it were fiction--which we can eventually argue maybe it was.

So, too, are all the love stories. They are passionate fictions, a clinging to something that never was. Hélène tells Alphonse that, “I loved you with no help from you.” This is true of all of our lovers. They are pursuing their own concerns in their relationships, and the other half of the equation is practically immaterial. This is why none of the versions of their shared stories line up. It’s not just a matter of perspective, but also participation.

As is to be expected, Seyrig carries the picture. As we would see years down the road in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles [review], she doesn’t really need anyone else on the screen with her--though her co-stars ably back her up. She is particularly good playing off of Thiérrée, whose wooden posture is reminiscent of Martin LaSalle’s meticulously choreographed turn in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. Thiérrée is more operational, while Seyrig is deep in each moment, each emotion. She plays older here, Hélène is middle-aged, but the make-up is casual and not overdone; Seyrig is excellent as the concerned and nervous mother-type. In the first scenes with Alphonse and his niece, when she brings them into her home and feeds them, she never stops moving, putting the needs of everyone else ahead of her own, and thus making her selfish addiction all the more shameful for her.

Eventually, truth outs everyone, and time catches up, and Resnais leaves us both hopeful and unsure. There may be options for a better tomorrow, but it may also just be that the past is repeating once more.

Muriel, or The Time of Return has been available on DVD before, but it’s been a decade or so since the last release, and the new Blu-ray was struck from a recent 4K restoration. The colors are vibrant and the picture is crisp, showcasing the beautiful photography of Resnais’ regular DP Sacha Vierney (who also shot Belle de jour [review]). The disc has several documentary and interview clips, including a 1969 piece with Seyrig and a 1963 chat with composer Hans Werner Henze (The Lost Honor of Katharine Blum [review]), whose ambient score sits in between classical composition and more modern textures, thus expressing the themes of the movie through sound.

Alain Resnais

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

PIERRE ETAIX: LE GRAND AMOUR/HAPPY ANNIVERSARY - #655

If you're unfamiliar with the name Pierre Étaix, don't worry, you're not alone. Up until recently, the celebrated French comedian's films have been largely unavailable due to a legal tangle with the distribution rights. I don't know the particulars of what finally caused those rights to be untangled, but soon all film fans will have a chance to get to know Étaix's artistry, thanks to a touring retrospective of his work and an upcoming Criterion boxed set.

The writer/director/star only made a handful of feature films and shorts through the 1960s, following stints as an assistant and gag writer for the likes of Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Nagisa Oshima. Étaix left film to return to his first career as a clown, but not before leaving an indelible mark on the cinematic landscape. In reviewing his final comedy feature, Le Grand Amour, released in 1969 and leading the dual weekend of Pierre Étaix films playing the NW Film Center [full schedule here], it's easy to see why. His playful flights of fancy, careening out of conventional narrative and into the realms of imagination, are delightful and intoxicating. One can't help but imagine that movies like Le Grand Amour were an early influence on Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose Amélie would not be out of place as one of the many girlfriends Pierre fantasizes about throughout this rumination on love and marriage. (Etaix actually had a small role in Jeunet's film Micmacs [review].)

Le Grand Amour begins with a wedding, as befitting any such movie. Étaix is at the altar, waiting to tie the knot with Florence (Annie Fratellini), and remembering his past loves and imagining a few paths not taken. The ceremony ends, and the film jumps ahead a decade. Pierre and Florence have settled into their married life, with all the ups and downs that entails. They are mostly happy, despite the gossip that's being passed around about them. In one ingenious sequence, Étaix shows the evolution of a rumor, as a chance greeting is soon inflated into a full-grown affair, the moment replaying and escalating with each added whisper. Pierre takes some lumps for this false story, before falling into a similar trap for real. He becomes quite smitten with his new secretary (Nicole Calfan), despite her being 20 years his junior.

The rest of Le Grand Amour shows Pierre trying to concoct a way to have the young girl and be free of his wife. He lives out the illicit, though amusingly tame, relationship in dreams, both of the sleeping and waking variety, debating the pros and cons. One amusing scene shows him obsessing over a strand of hair left on his desk, going back and forth between it and a portrait of his bride. It's one of the more straightforward segments of the film; other bits break the bounds of reality. When Pierre consults with a friend, that man becomes a part of the daydream, often to have his own speculations backfire (pie to the face!) because he doesn't understand Florence the way her husband does.  In Le Grand Amour's most memorable stretch, Pierre's bed leaves his room and goes out onto the open road, joining the traffic of other slumbering dreamers as he searches for the object of his affection. The beds, in their way, have become cars, and Étaix ups the ante by having their drivers suffer from engine trouble, crash into one another, and other mundane experiences normally reserved for regular metal automobiles.

Étaix is a charming presence. His approach, at least here, is quieter than the likes of Tati or Rowan Atkinson, who bears a slight resemblance to the French comic. Le Grand Amour has some slapstick, but it's mostly situational. Étaix prefers mix-ups to pratfalls. His pacing is more languid, as befitting a dreamer. The laughs are subtle and unforced. Some jokes sneak up on you, such as when Étaix leaves his apartment to go downstairs and hang up on his mother-in-law in person. In that same scene, the strains of violin that have been playing under the action are revealed to be coming from a live player, Pierre's henpecked father-in-law. The comedian otherwise doesn't use music to emphasize his punch lines, that would be too obvious. Étaix lets the humor happen, he doesn't telegraph.

This allows for a cleverly ironic ending, one that maybe I should have seen coming, but that is funny enough to transcend cliché. Suffice to say, Pierre learns to appreciate what he has, only to find himself becoming jealous via the same kind of speculation that already bit him on the butt once.

It should probably be noted here that the majority of Étaix's films were co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière, a prolific screenwriter who also worked with Luis Buñuel on most of his movies through the 1960s and 1970s and who also worked on the script for Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum. The Étaix/Carrière collaboration dates all the way back to the clown's earliest film efforts, including his second short, Happy Anniversary (1962), which makes for a nice thematic pairing with Le Grand Amour (probably why the NW Film Center is showing them together). In this black-and-white comedy, Pierre Étaix plays a husband trying to get home for his anniversary dinner, only to end up stuck in traffic and himself causing further disruptions for his fellow drivers as he tools about running errands. Some of the on-the-road humor, as we ping from car to car, traveler to traveler, is reminiscent of Tati's Trafic [review], which was still over a decade away.

LETTERS FROM FONTAINHAS: THREE FILMS BY PEDRO COSTA - #508

Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is a bit of a difficult puzzle, and those entering his new boxed set cold (such as I did), may find themselves a bit lost at the outset. The Criterion Collection's bundling of Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa brings together three films made between 1997 and 2006: Ossos (Bones), In Vanda's Room, and Colossal Youth. These ponderous, ethereal films show realistic portrayals of the denizens of the Fontainhas slums in Lisbon, ultimately letting us peek around corners we might not otherwise see or even consider looking into; yet, the films also leave a queasy ambiguity in their wake.

The stark aesthetic style of the lead film, Ossos (1997; 97 minutes), doesn't pretty-up the rundown neighborhood or the people who wander its streets in search of food, money, and human connection. Costa's script has zero exposition and barely any dialogue. Costa demands his viewer fill in the gaps when his characters fail to share their feelings or explain about themselves. The story centers around a baby born to Tina (Maria Lipkina), a suicidal teen who tries to gas herself and the infant shortly after its birth. The homeless father (Nuno Vaz) takes the child from her, but when the kid gets sick, he nearly loses him. A nurse named Eduarda (Isabel Ruth) tries to help, but she is soon victimized by the father's selfish silence. He threatens without speaking, acting on his own impulses with little regard for the child, the mother, or any of the women he touches. Only a whore (Ines Medeiros) whom the thug tries to sell the baby to tells him the truth, that she can't stand him.

Mixed up in this is Clotilde (Vanda Duarte), a neighbor of Tina's who works as a maid and seems to be interested in helping, but her meddling only causes trouble and she doesn't really take care of her own kids, either. The relationship between all of these characters is often hard to figure out. What exactly do they mean to one another? Is it just the proximity and the shared experience that binds them? Costa doesn't seem interested in tying these things together, and though it may cause frustration and confusion when you're watching the film, it ultimately proves unnecessary. Ossos is a series of quiet vignettes strung end to end more than it is a structured narrative, with many of the scenes done in long takes and wavering somewhere between improvisation and Bresson-like construction. As the film comes to its close, the wordless exchanges in the narrow alleys outside of Tina's home suggest a cycle of doom that will never be broken. Just as the baby gets passed from one caretaker to another, or the kids trade Eduarda's compassion as if it were theirs to give, so too is life easily bartered with. In terms of survival, anything goes. Whatever gets you through the day, putting food in your mouth or numbing the pain, it's all negotiable.

Ossos is slow-going and it requires effort, and I warn you, it doesn't get any easier from there. In the second film in Letters from Fontainhas, In Vanda's Room (2000; 171 minutes), there is a character who, throughout the movie, is trying to untangle a skein of yarn and has little luck. Many may feel the same way watching the film.

Pedro Costa's approach in In Vanda's Room is to get as reductionist as possible, somewhat paradoxically given the length of the film. He shot the movie alone on digital video, blending documentary into a kind of fictional structure by observing his subjects and then arranging his film from over 180 hours of footage. The Vanda of the title is Vanda Duarte, one of the neighborhood girls Costa hired for Ossos, and she quite literally has invited him into her room. He shot there for six months, watching Vanda and her sister Zita freebase smack, before moving over to another house where a group of male addicts were living. There is little by way of narrative construction here, the only central conflict is that the Portuguese government was demolishing the Fontainhas slums while Costa was shooting. The sound of destructive machines is a near constant throughout In Vanda's Room, but our actually seeing the work is rare. In Vanda's Room is all about what is going on inside, not the external stimuli that causes the retreat into a dark room and the hazy smoke of narcotics.

Not much happens here in a conventional sense. Most of the movie features the characters in conversation, sparking up or waiting to spark up. The most action we see comes from nervous habits--Vanda scraping at the phone book, the boys "cleaning up" their home. Costa stands back and listens, and he captures many stories about what is going on in the barrio--there are robberies, deaths, arrests--but again, these all happen outside. In Vanda's Room makes an intimate whisper of the poverty and despair. It leaves us to wonder exactly what we are supposed to feel. Is Costa looking to elicit sympathy? Empathy? Am I wrong for being judgmental? I was sick of listening to Vanda and Zita by the end, sick of their pointless stories and angry outbursts, nauseous watching their bodies deteriorate and listening to Vanda's foul coughing. The boys are falling apart, as well, but we never get to know them in the same way. Should we even be watching this? I feel like an accomplice to ghetto tourism.

The closest Costa brings us to reflection or exposition are scenes when neighborhood men enter Vanda's room. One sits on her bed holding a bouquet of flowers, looking like somebody's grotesque idea of a suitor, talking about his past addictions and his health problems, and seemingly not self-aware enough to admit current addictions. Another gets philosophical with Vanda. She concludes that the lives they have are the ones they chose. Her most poetic utterance, though, comes at the start of their stoned chat, when she assures him, "I'm not sleeping, I'm listening." In other words, she is not blind to her own situation, she is merely awaiting the moment when she must do something about it. The demolition we hear will eventually get to her door and Vanda will have to leave. Fontainhas and its citizens are decaying as one.

The DV allows Costa to get right in the thick of real life. With no crew encumbering him, with no equipment limiting his space, he can actually shoot inside Vanda's bedroom or from a vantage point down the alley or in a dark crack den with only one candle to see by. It also serves him well when the spaces open up, as they do in Colossal Youth (2006; 156 minutes). The third film in the series picks up in the transformed Fontainhas, now an unfamiliar limbo. The relocation efforts have put the people of Fontainhas in newly constructed, sterile tenements. The high-rise apartment buildings reach to the sky, towering over the displaced. Where once they were cramped and buried in their own poverty, they are now small amongst the government's attempts to mask that same poverty. There is also a lot of white--the outer walls, the inner walls--and it makes the people look like stains against the too-clean backdrop.

The change in the slum has served to break up the community at this point. Costa introduces a new character, Ventura, an old man who wanders the streets visiting his many offspring. His wife has left him (we see her wielding a knife on her way out in the very first scene), he no longer has employment, and he doesn't have a place to live. A civic worker keeps visiting with him and showing him apartments, but Ventura demands a bigger space. He wants enough rooms to house all of his children. He can't give a definitive number to his brood. It's a symbolic distinction. Ventura wishes things were the way they had been before everyone was broken apart, gentrified, relocated.

Some of the same people we saw in In Vanda's Room return, including Vanda Duarte. She is now a mother, married, on methadone, and nearly unrecognizable, having aged six years and gained weight. We also see the man she shared the conversation about life with. He has totally cleaned up and is selling furniture. Sadly, we are also informed that Zita has passed away.

The cat's cradle of yarn from Vanda's Room is replaced in Colossal Youth by a love letter Ventura continually dictates to his friend Alberto "Lento" Barros. Lento asked Ventura to write it for him, and Ventura is requiring that Lento memorize it. It's full of flowery language about a reunion and renewed strength. The poetry speaks of a life joined back together and a positive future. It's an exercise in futility, however; even if a coup d'état hadn't cut off the mail, Lento can't write, so he can never put it to paper.

It's hard to tell if there is hope to be found in the Letters from Fontainhas trilogy. Is survival enough of a happy ending to make these films about the durability of the human spirit rather than wallowing in our most dismal of lows? Writing about In Vanda's Room in the accompanying booklet, Thom Andersen notes that the last sound we hear before the credits roll is laughter. Colossal Youth's penultimate scene shows us a park, the first signs of nature we've seen in any of the films. It's idyllic, sunny, healthy. The last shot shows us Ventura and his granddaughter, the young and the old, the granddad at rest and the child at play. Surely these are meant to give us some belief that regardless of what these people go through or are put through, they will carry on.

While making Colossal Youth, Costa shot two more short films that came out in 2007. Originally made for an anthology film called The State of the World, Tarrafal (17:43) is a piece that takes place in the wilderness just outside the city, and it is a glimpse of a man (José Alberto Silva) who is being deported back to Cape Verde in Africa. The title refers to the name of a concentration camp that Portugal once had for African prisoners, and a feeling of dread looms over the whole film. There is also a weird nostalgia, a sense that the man's family would like to return to their home, just not under these circumstances. Stories they tell each other illustrate a healthy fear of authority as the bringers of death.

Colossal Youth's star Ventura also appears in Tarrafal, and footage from the same shoot as Tarrafal is reconfigured to show scenes from his point of view in The Rabbit Hunters (23:112) (also made for an anthology film, this one called Memories). This is the first place in the Costa films where an element of mysticism may be inserted into the narrative. Tying it back to the stories of death in the other short, we learn that the deported man's father, who lingers around Tarrafal, may in fact be a spirit that is hanging around with Ventura. Calling him a "ghost" could also be metaphor (there is also a story in Colossal Youth about a man whose funeral is being planned prematurely), but in either case, his preoccupation is with wrongs done to him in life and the confusing circumstances that lead to his current state. The Rabbit Hunters suggests that that the afterlife may be no more a reward than living.

There should almost be some kind of patience test required before you crack open Criterion's Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa. If you score high enough, then the three movies contained inside are for you! Costa's reductionist style is like Neorealism to the Nth degree, and his ramshackle narratives are not going to win over a mass audience any time soon. His portraits of the Lisbon slum from which the boxed set takes its name give us a look at poverty and the despair of the dispossessed up close, but there is an inherent distance that suggests we can never fully understand their world unless we live in it. In some ways, I think writing about Costa's movies is actually more interesting than watching them, because things came together for me in the process that I didn't get while I was struggling to get through the movies themselves. The extras included in the set help open up the art, making them essential viewing unto themselves--a rarity in DVD extras these days. If you take the time with Letters from Fontainhas, you will find some reward, you're just going to have to earn it.

Trailer for In Vanda's Room.

Trailer for Colossal Youth.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

CHANTAL AKERMAN IN THE SEVENTIES - ECLIPSE SERIES 19

Before Belgian director Chantal Akerman redefined experimental feminist cinema with her scathing and insightful Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the young artist had to undergo a pilgrimage. It was one that required her to travel great distances both physically and artistically. It's this pilgrimage that is examined in the new Eclipse Series 19 boxed set, Chantal Akerman in the Seventies. Five movies on three discs, this collection looks at Akerman's career before and immediately after Jeanne Dielman, and taken all together, they create the image of a developing talent finding her cinematic voice.

DVD 1 of Chantal Akerman in the Seventies falls under the umbrella of "The New York Films." These are three no-budget explorations by a young woman in a strange city. Akerman left Brussels for New York in 1971. She was twenty years old, and though she had begun to make short films at home (one of which, Saute ma ville, can be seen on the Criterion edition of Jeanne Dielman), her new locale and the simultaneous feelings of acceptance and displacement that it inspired opened up a whole new world for her. The three movies represented here, released in 1972 and 1976, are collections of footage she shot around the city during her stay there. Ensconced in the underground film scene, she pushed herself to find new methods of expression.

Leading the set is La chambre (1972; 11 minutes), a short formalistic exercise. Working with her long-term collaborator Babette Mangolte on camera, Akerman stars as herself, the lone figure in a small apartment. The entire film is shot from one position, the camera situated in the center of the lodging, slowly circling the room, capturing the details and the filmmaker in repose with each pass. The only thing that changes is Akerman--who is in bed, sits up, and eats an apple--but as the image goes round and round, it compels you to look, to pay attention to the details and seek out other changes, other tell-tale signs of life. The movie itself is entirely silent (as in no soundtrack, not even a trace of ambient noise), as is its follow-up, Hotel Monterey (1972; 62 minutes). The second movie is a series of images taken at the titular hotel, a rundown building in Manhattan.

Hotel Monterey begins by spying on the lobby, looking at the people coming and going, before moving up the elevator and picking up stationary shots of quiet hallways, a few guests in their rooms, and lonely stairwells. The photography, again by Mangolte, is beautiful and painterly. (The box description compares it to Edward Hopper, and the dark color schemes definitely bring his work to mind.) It didn't really hold my interest, though. I don't have the patience for an exercise of this length. I even put music on in the background to try to keep myself from drifting. (Abel Korzeniowski's score for A Single Man.) I get what Akerman is doing, the way she is manipulating the passage of time in order to create a sense of space, eventually moving beyond the interior and out into the exterior, but Hotel Monterey lost me.

Random footage is put to better use in News From Home (1976; 86 minutes), in which Akerman juxtaposes images of New York with letters her mother wrote to her when she first left home. The director and her camerawoman, alongside additional camera operator Jim Asbell, shoot all over the city, taking in vacant lots, buildings, traffic, and subway crowds alike. We watch as life moves in front of the lens, with people often looking back at us as we stare at them, and the noise of the city quietly bleeds out of the speakers. Intermittently, Akerman shares the letters, reading her mother's passive aggressive missives with a detached tone. There is something unnerving and maddening about hearing this distant woman guilting her daughter to come home while also witnessing Akerman's great love for her new locale. The snippets of news from Belgium emphasize the distance and the longing for the familiar, evoking a sensation of being in two worlds at once.

For her first full-length feature, Akerman embraces the most timid of narrative structures. Je tu il elle (Me You He She) (1975; 86 minutes) is a black-and-white portrait in three acts. Act One, a woman named Julie (played by Chantal Akerman) locks herself in an apartment, where she lazes about, eating from a paper bag full of sugar and writing and rewriting a letter to an unknown lover. Act Two sees her impulsively leave the apartment and head out on the road, where she hitches a ride with a trucker (Niels Arestrup), whom she fixates on but who only shares his abstract philosophy on love after she gives him a hand job. Act Three shows Julie arrive at the apartment of her girlfriend (Claire Wauthion). The two have a romantic dynamic that toys with need and denial: one expresses need, the other denies, then switch. This culminates in fidgety lovemaking, a kind of naked wrestling match.

Akerman is messing around with space and time here, as she did in Hotel Monterey. The shots are long, and they compel us to linger on specific details. This is particularly pronounced in Act Two, where the focus of Benedicte Delesalle's camera is regularly off of Julie and on the trucker's face. She watches him diligently, almost obsessively, and in a scene where the driver shaves his face in a public bathroom, the way we see Julie staring at him with her gaze also reflected in the mirror suggests she is looking as intently as she expects her audience to. In Act One, the director establishes a disconnect between decision and action, effectively recreating Julie's sluggish mind by conveying her thoughts in voiceover first, then showing her acting on those thoughts a few moments after they have passed.

Essentially, the director is exploring her relationships with herself, men, and women, examining how she deals with each. At least how I interpret it, she is expressing uncertainty and frustration with her own ability to be on her own. The sugar is a childish sustenance, the inability to get the letter right suggests complications with self-expression. Men are seen as a convenient way to get along, but they are ultimately more concerned with their own needs, and the way the driver only speaks about his feelings following orgasm makes him seem like an overgrown child confessing to his latest maternal stand-in. On the other hand, Julie is predatory and forceful with her girlfriend. Is this maybe the ex that she has been writing to? Is she as incapable of tenderness as the truck driver? Like him, she only calms when the pleasure is focused exclusively on her.

Like all of Akerman's films, there is no point in Je tu il elle where the author turns around and says, "Okay, this is it and this is what it's all about." Her experiments with framing and shot-length and her unconventional story set-ups are meant to provoke, and sometimes the response is delayed--just as it was for Julie locked in that apartment. Meaning never hits you all at once, particularly in this film, where the three parts are so distinct. It's like an entrée with a trio of individual flavors, all of which stand alone, but once you've scooped them into one big bite, a new, complete flavor reveals itself.

The final film in Chantal Akerman in the Seventies - Eclipse Series 19, Les rendez-vous d'Anna (1978; 126 minutes), was made after Jeanne Dielman and also after News from Home. Both of those films play their part in influencing Les rendez-vous. This semi-autobiographical film follows a successful filmmaker named Anna Silver (Aurore Clement) on a trip to Germany, where she is showing her latest film (Jeanne Dielman?). When she arrives at her hotel, a message from her mother (Lea Massari) is waiting for her. It seems Mom has been trying to get a hold of her daughter for some time, and the communication that we are privy to is very much like the real letters Akerman received from her own mother. "Where are you? What are you doing? Why don't you contact me?"

Like Je tu il elle, Les rendez-vous is structured as a series of encounters. There is the man she meets at her film premiere (Helmut Griem), a sad single father and cuckold; the older family friend (Magali Noël) she meets at a train stop on her way to Brussels; the stranger on the train (Hanns Zischler); and eventually her mother and a former lover (Jean-Pierre Cassel). Anna is another of Akerman's blank canvases, a woman we get to know by the way she reacts to these various people and how they react to her. There is an obvious parable here about how a creative person feels isolated and misunderstood. No one gets Anna as she is, they all want her to fit a role they have for her in their heads. The German one-night stand wants her to fit his romantic ideal, while the old friend speaks to her of marriage and children, encouraging her to accept the norm that is expected of all women. In all these encounters, the other characters are somehow tied into history, both international and personal. Europe, it seems, has made as many bad choices as the individuals seen here have in their love lives. Many of the characters, including Anna, have been displaced. They are looking for life somewhere other than where they are. Even her ex, Daniel, wishes he could abandon everything and disappear--and he's the go-to guy! The safe place to return to is not so safe, not so stable.

There is a formalism to the acting in Les rendez-vous d'Anna that reminds me of Robert Bresson and his theory about actors as "models." The performances are stiff and deliberate, with the actors sometimes visibly spotting their marks and going to them. They speak with little inflection, and stand up straight, positioned with intent. Akerman and cinematographer Jean Penzer frame them in static, straight-ahead shots. If it's a two-person conversation, they stand equidistant from one another, either face to face or looking off into the same direction, the camera remaining locked. For all the movement in their lives, they are stuck in the moment, only Anna keeps going.

The irony for Anna is that the only person she connects to, a female fan she met in Italy, is the one person she can't grasp. While everyone else is trying to hold her, this other woman is constantly beyond her reach. She can never get this lover on the phone, and her journey back to Brussels and then Paris only puts more distance between them. Anna opens up about this to her mother as the two of them share a bed in a hotel near the train station. In a weird way, it's another one-night stand, and it's our one true glimpse at Anna's interior, a confirmation of the loneliness and grief we imagine follows her around. The fact that she asks her mother to get a hotel room rather than going back to their house indicates that Anna is only comfortable with transient things. She can't accept anything permanent, and even when she thinks she knows what she wants, she realizes she doesn't want it once it's available. Thus, she sends away the man in Germany before they have sex, or when she and the family friend, Ida, go in search of food, Anna decides she is not hungry as soon as they step through the restaurant doors.

News from Home ends with an extended shot of leaving New York City. Filmed from the back of a boat, we watch as the traveler gets farther and farther from the shore. It's one move in a journey that began prior to La chambre when Akerman left Brussels for the Big Apple. It's one that is turned to metaphor in Je tu il elle, and that is completed by the cycle of the successful filmmaker Anna passing through various stops in her life in Les rendez-vous d'Anna. The mother's letters receive their response and personal questions about art and sexuality and personal connections are at least broached, if not answered.

When Anna returns to her homebase of Paris, she returns to an old lover, a la Julie. There are also visual echoes of the New York films--shots of Paris passing taken through a taxi window, the empty hallway of Anna's apartment. For the first time in the movie, she reaches out to someone else, attempting to literally nurse her love back to health by taking care of a feverish Daniel. Yet, illness is its own "other state," and he rejects further advances. In the end, she is back home, alone, listening to the disembodied voices on her answering machine, the phantoms that have tried to touch her, but all said and done, she is still nowhere. "Anna, where are you?"

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.