un woody a

DVD

COMEDIA EROTICA A UNEI NOPTI DE VARA/MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S SEX COMEDY

Un film de Woody Allen. Cu: Mia Farrow, Tony Roberts, Woody Allen, José Ferrer. Comedie, 88 min. - USA 1982.

Exista spiridusi? Ajuns la ultima lectie din curs, solemnul profesor Josè Ferrer nu mai are nici-o indoiala: spiridusii nu exista, lumea este guvernata doar de ratiune.

Si totusi, in numai cateva zile, in timpul unui week-end nuptial cu proaspata sotie Mia Farrow, personajul in cauza va descoperi ca lucrurile stau cu totul altfel. In tinutul provincial in care traieste verisoara lui Ferrer, Mary Steenburgen, circula un soi de curent de aer nebunatec. Poate si datorita gaselnitelor sotului verisoarei, un Woody Allen inventator de masini zburatoare. Sau poate datorita sosirii amicului medic Tony Roberts insotit de o prietena ocazionala, o infirmiera lubrica.

Patrunsi de incantatoarele peisaje filmate de maestrul Gordon Willis, stimulati de muzica lui Mendelssohn, jucandu-se de-a libertatea intr-un joc de schimburi amoroase a la Feydeau, cele sase personaje se cupleaza si se decupleaza, discuta la infinit, mimeaza tragedia vietii si a sexului.  Pana ce Ferrer alege definitiv tabara Erosului si cade in bratele infirmierei, devenind un spiridus.

Woody se mentine in tot acest timp cu mare discretie intr-un plan secund, de unde dirijeaza cu mare placere sarabanda iubirilor, cu o bravura superioara de scriitor si de cineast.

Intentia regizorului este clara: dorinta de a ironiza filmul bucolic, la limita povestirii romantice, si mai cu seama ocazia de a discuta din nou si din nou despre complexele sale sexuale. El-insusi joaca un timid care isi consuma toata energia in inventiile sale bizarre.

Lejeritatea texturii dramatice  a acestui film, perfectiunea intonatiilor si a ritmului, aceasta amuzata si radianta fericire a expresiei lui Allen nu se compara decat cu prea putine alte filme. Avem aici un mic film clasic.

Giulia DOBRE

david lynch the trap master

The Trap Master

David Lynch

Lynch’s eyes are eyes that don’t perceive things as we do. They are eyes that scan reality beyond its many traps… 

David Lynch is a multifaceted personality, not only  has he been drawing a cartoon column for the Los Angeles weekly for several years now, his work has also covered many fields of contemporary Art, from full-length Hollywood films, short films, TV series, multimedia shows, major commercials and videos, to even publishing a collection of writing. Who dares walk into his trap?...

“I would have wanted more things happening in my life. I’ve always known that nothing is what it seems, but I haven’t managed to find any proof…” says David Lynch ( born in Montana, USA, 1946). A unique filmmaker, he originally studied Painting, graduating from the University the Arts in Philadelphia, but soon felt a compelling urge to project the impossible pictures in his head onto celluloid. Ever since then, he has advocated cinematography in an experimental fashion, characterized by an obsessive and persuasive use of repetitive detail and lighting.

His works are organic traps, made of disconcerted, repulsive abominations, physical and psychological malformations and, in particular, sexual perversions, somewhat of a Lynchian trademark!

He has often admitted to his ambition of becoming a psychiatrist. Instead he chooses to make often complex narrative films, which are equally loved or loathed by the viewing public. As a largely independent creator, he has fulfilled many of his artistic aims; he worked on his first feature film Eraserhead as director, producer, scriptwriter, cameraman, editor and special effects technician. Lurching from one problem to the next, the film took a total of five years to complete. Eraserhead suffered from numerous financial breakdowns and was resurrected from the ashes several times. Lynch lost his house owing to serious debts, but was so engrossed and obsessed with his work that, unbeknownst to his film crew, he would spend his nights sleeping onset, removing all traces of his nocturnal presence in the morning.

His film style was very much established with this first production and it was seen as unique, in comparison with other contemporaries. The film director has acknowledged that he is largely alien to contemporary film culture…Lynch's work often uses repulsive and distressing imaginary. His films mock social triteness- the more subjects are portrayed as ordinary and stereotypical, the more anguished and unthinkable become the perversions concealed. With very few exceptions, these aspects continue to be common strands in Lynch’s film lexicon.

Eraserhead quickly grew into a staple and relevant classic film and consequently lead to significant offers from Hollywood. As a result, he was approached to direct The Elephant man (1980), produced by Mel Brooks. The film is charged with melodrama and was nominated for 8 Oscars: “it is the story of man who was a monster on the outside, but a normal and most remarkable man on the inside, whom you could fall in love with…” says Lynch. Proficiently shot in black-and-white, it is his only conventional film, perhaps a Hollywood prerequisite?

The immediate and general success received from critics and public alike, allowed Lynch to ret` 11        ``1                                                                                                                                                 urn to filming his obsessions. Although an accessible and a commercial success the roots of the film convey the subjective sensations that would feature heavily in later projects.

Dune (1984) was an unfortunate financial disaster. For the artist however, it represents a return to several of his obsessions and fixations. The result was a ambitiously vast project, in which the director attempted to depict science fiction fantasy. He made in depth characters studies with screenwriter, Anthony Masters (A Space Odyssey, 2001) before casting, in order to construct the vision of a futuristic dystopia. The film took an exhausting year to shoot, using four different teams, over 16 locations, involving over 600 people; with six months of actual shooting followed by six months of special effects editing.

Blue Velvet is notable for Dennis Hopper's violent portrayal of Frank, a disturbed character and fittingly well cast, who acts alongside a harshly criticized Isabella Rossellini, Lynch’s lover at that time. Once again, the director’s themes include mind traps, delirium, monomania and sadistic cruelty! Excluded from the Venice Film Festival on the grounds of unwarranted pornography the film deals with the succumbing of one’s desires. Cinema has often depicted that behind the cheery smiles of small town life there often lies a dark underbelly. The film was among the first in its genre to inform us that we might actually live next door to monsters. The protagonists in Blue Velvet, Jeffrey and Sandy, two young people from the small town of Lumberton, become eager participants in the increasingly disturbing narrative. Intrigued by a beautiful club singer (Rossellini), they play detective and begin observing her private life. What sparks their curiosity is the discovery of a human ear, which, like all moral citizens, they immediately hand over to the police.

Wild at Heart, released in 1990, despite catcalls and barracking at Cannes, scooped the Palme d’Or aided by Bertolucci’s strong influence. The story portrays a series of eccentric and mysterious characters and is perhaps Lynch's most radical and primeval film! A “wild heart” breaks through from the obscure chamber of the unconscious, infused with raging violence; a metaphor as plain as a meteor shower. It remains, however, the work of a moralist, but one toying with the object of his own mortality. Images of  splattered blood, blown out brains, horrific street accidents, Lolita-like seedy motels, a running dog with a hand between its teeth, flies swarming above a puke stained sidewalk, a monstrous looking woman with long, stiletto-like nails, powdering her face…

In spite of his reputation as an experimental film maker, Lynch  became well-known to the general public through the TV series Twin Peaks, co-written and produced with collaborator Mark Frost, consisting of a pilot-episode and a further thirty episodes. Twin Peaks was a significant production that shook the TV industry. It was a soap-opera of a higher class, realized, supervised and directed by Lynch himself. A groundbreaking TV film…

In 1992 he attempted to offer some kind of explanation to the TV series in the film Twin Peaks - Fire Walk with Me. Lynch's film was a “prequel” to the TV story. The question: who was the real Laura Palmer?

Lost Highway, released in 1998, was generally misunderstood by public and film critics alike. A decipherable film, often complex, but extremely innovative: “My film is made up of nightmares.  I am scared of many things and am particularly frightened by people’s mouths and teeth…”

Like a psychotic Ovid, Lynch again leads us over the shifting sands of perpetual metamorphosis. The Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction is now rendered obsolete; the barrier between the self and the non-self takes on the consistency of nightmares. Today we can have a name, Lynch says; a body and a house, but tomorrow we might have another name, another body and another house. The woman I’ve loved and killed is still laughing in her vegetative state…The street I’ve lost for ever is the one we are currently crossing…The film pertains, to a certain extent, to several contemporary physical theories according to which our time is paralleled by an infinity of separate existences of which we have no knowledge, but that already encompass us. Sometimes a dream breaks through; a greeting or a sign, and then, just for a few seconds, our worlds intermingle, revealing our unknown, parallel lives. Like a head-on collision between two trains on the same track in the night. The self is a bottomless glass, Lynch has said…

Mulholland Drive (2001) is a jigsaw puzzle portrayal of the twentieth century phenomenon known as L.A. Taking its title from a street sign that has become a cultural Hollywood landmark. The winding road that leads up from the city becomes host to unfolding series of events, ranging from horrid to bizarre, from hyper-real to surreal and from the comic to tragic. It is a love story set in the city of dreams …The movie depicts mysteries and narratives in typical Hollywood fashion, imbued with Raymond Chandler’s dark romanticism; of a city with palm trees, dangerous corners and dark secrets; a love story with two girls (a blonde and a brunette) caught up in a intricate plot played out in the city of angels.

Lynch refuses to observe the canonical spatial and temporal coordinates of fiction. Like an alchemist, his deliberately subversive films aim to highlight the fact that reality is all but an illusion (precisely in the same way Bunuel evoked liberty), and that any representation remains under the reign of the unconscious (the same lesson that contemporary literature has taught us, in particular from Joyce onwards). 

The creator of Twin Peaks is today an older, still energetic film director; a filmmaker attempting to trace the sources of his inspirations with each new project. He remains a well-rounded artist, a postmodern Duchamp, who uses cinematography as a facilitator for various artistic languages.

Lynch now utilizes the digital with the same experimental zealousness that typified his early film works. The fruits of his outstanding evolution are particularly visible in his latest masterpiece, released in Venice last year and currently being screened in Romania, perhaps his Austerlitz- INLAND EMPIRE- another fascinating visionary puzzle, paying heed to the unrestrained power of cinematography. The title bears the name of a residential area on the edge of Los Angeles, buy also hints at our boundless inner world. Depicting the chaos of the human mind with free flowing images, thoughts and feelings, the film focuses on isolated clusters of narrative, making it difficult to follow; our only option is to succumb to the dreamlike narrative flow of the subconscious.

Just like in Mulholland Drive, we find ourselves once more in the urban anonymity of Hollywood, the setting of what can be defined as a true love-story. Here, lovers find themselves lost in a maze of their own frenzied passions.

In typical Lynch fashion, Hollywood tears roll visibly down the cheeks of his protagonists (an ironic reference to melodrama, an obsolete genre, artificially kept alive through layered clichés). Locked in a room, Polish housewife Susan Blue cries as she watches a sort of soap opera with giant rabbits. The other female character, Nikki Grace, a Los Angeles actress, strives to star in a remake of a Polish film, left unfinished due to the actors’ mysterious disappearances.

Laura Dern, recently returned to the Lynchian circle after her intense performances in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, plays both female roles with fine distinctions. Trying to uncover these mysteries without a key (the trap laid by Lynch  is that he dares the public not to look for the key!), this Dantean Beatrice, lodged in the very Inferno of a parallel dimension, manages to unlock some intriguing doors…that might have been better left locked!

Nikki is hassled on the street and takes refuge in a darkened room. Lynch also references a section from Jacques Tourneur’s classic horror film, Cat People.

Throughout the many narrative obstacles, the character’s journey unfolds within the boundaries and depths of a dream, in a final, desperate attempt to escape this mind-maze, in an attempt to earn the right to love again…

In this respect, this puzzle can be interpreted as a longing for warmth, for love. It is a film about lost feelings in an America where they cannot be retrieved nor contained in a web of pathos. Like many of Lynch’s films, this is also homage to femininity, situated between a classic tragedy and a musical, even depicting a choir of motherly whores dancing and singing on a Hollywood boulevard…

We must always keep in mind however, that the all-powerful master in INLAND EMPIRE is Evil; the genuine, unfathomable entity that often underlies Lynch’s clouded mysteries. For there is no solution for Evil! And this drama is imprisoned between these walls, very close to the heart and themes in Lost Highway.

Resembling some of Beckett’s writings, the story seems to remain untouched, hinting at interiors and exteriors still unexplored. It is the celebration of the hallucinatory and an absurd awakening of the senses. They burst within the frames of the film and gradually dissolve before our eyes…

Lynch is perhaps autobiographically reflected in Kinglsey Stewart’s character (played by a charismatic Jeremy Irons), who doesn’t refrain from attempting to complete his cursed film.

Nevertheless, characters such as Laura Dern’s husband (played by Justin Theroux), mirror the emotional feebleness of a world that has lost the possibility of true romance. Lynch however, is left with his love for the Cinema; a cinema able to ensnare both the body and the mind of fans and enthusiasts; a cinema that enacts DREAMS and their unfolding truths. 

INLAND EMPIRE is a fantastic and fabulous film, the ultimate item of fiction where all things and all identities are trapped with no escape. Mulholland Drive opens with a dance; this time it is a dance the ends the film, set to the music of Nina Simone’s Sinner Man.

By creating a film free from any commercial constraint, Lynch invites us to partake in his studies. The author celebrates the spectral and the traps of a secret sexual desire. He honors characteristics that reach the collective imaginary, that compel us to question the world and its language, as we try to escape the everyday routines that contaminate our minds!

Lynch’s stream of consciousness erases all human hesitation in order to prepare us for a journey with no half- measures, probably seeking the second half of our familiar world, which we can only sense in the films of this ARTIST, whom, no doubt, we will continue to love to the bitter end.   

Giulia Ghica Dobre

Published OMAGIU Magazine

cottbus film festival 2010-review

Strenous job being a child nowadays in the East! At least this is the laborious demonstration of the filmmakers that attended the competition section at the latest Cottbus Eastern European Films Festival……

Filmmakers that fear, most than anything else, about the faith of children. Not anymore as part and as toys of the societies they live in, traumatized societies for many more years to come, but rather as paraphernalia in the merciless hands of destiny. Filmmakers from an Eastern side of Europe where the roughness of Reality reaches the dimensions of ancient tragedies, where destiny remains almighty and unaffected, unpredictable, and overwhelming.

The depicted children of those fierce movies I have just seen last week in Cottbus are subjects to profound mutations. Their relationships with their parents, to society, to other children are subjected to a sort of over democratization. Suddenly they are not treated, by any of these connectors, as kids anymore. At some point in the story they become partners, adults, employees, collaborators. Their innocence, the few bribes that are left after years of traumas, gets buried under layers of toughness, emancipation and rudeness, selfishness and combat.

Such is the case of the Tbilisi based director Dmitry Mamoulyia: DRUGOYE NEBO(“Another Sky”). Initially just another accessory to his father’s life, when they leave their Georgian desert and head to Moscow looking for the disappeared mother, he finds himself propelled into the responsibilities of an adult. He becomes independent in the way he spends time from his father, then soon he will have to earn a living. Doing hard work in a factory for a merciless boss, this quiet boy will be sent to the hardest part of it all. After a short attempt to escape the violence of that drastic job –cutting proud young trees in the middle of a forest – death catches him from behind. Or rather his destiny. Just as much as in the sublime analogy with the proud tough trees being swept away from their roots, cut and cleaned and ordered by alien like machines. In less than a minute. This tragedy can only be observed by a secluded and silent father, powerless, lonely, and distraught.

Between parents and children there is a disconnexion, a fissure impossible to overcome. As in the Romanian film OUTBOUND (“Periferic”). Here an absent mother for years-because of her incarceration- comes back to the real world. With enormous naiveté she tries to recover emotionally and effectively, her eight years old son. After years spent in the orphanage, after years of sexual slavery and abuse, this child is now an insensitive being, disconnected from reality, living a sort of trance which should be for him the only manner of enduring the unbearable. They will employ a lot of time and aborted situations before weaving a tiny connection between them, thinking of a better future life. And the mother, with a sort of infantile bravado, is boasting with a huge amount of money in her purse ... the result, given the earlier ordeals of the child, can be only one: he takes all the money and forsakes his mother while she sleeps, in a train that goes further on, to a destination to which he does not want to be a partaker.

The Serbian movie BELI, BELI SVET (“White, white world”) prefers to investigate what happens with children that have barely been taken cared of while young, at an older age, on the very first steps of adulthood. The childhood traumas and the adulthood discoveries of hidden parenthood, unlawful sex and chaotical life, can only spin the female main character to murder. The young woman twists her fate with an oedipal kind of upheaval, in an ultimate gesture of annihilation of the father figure. A father that turns out to be also the father of her own child…

What exactly is the lever that spins these young European directors to inhabit such ominous stories? Where are the comedies, the love stories, where is even the famous eastern European black humor? It seems like these directors have reached the pick of their despair and wish to set a thorough alarm for everyone who cares about the evolution of the eastern societies. A social, political and financial turmoil is stirring these countries now, and unfortunately that is the environment where, at an individual level, people should find their own path. In a society that has stopped, for half a century, to interrogate itself on what is an individual, what are the relations he should have to his family, to the others, to himself.

A few years ago a dreadful drama happened in Poland, involving two adolescent brothers that committed the ultimate murder. The film MATKA TERESA OD KOTOW (“Mother Teresa of Cats”)  retraces the atrocious facts in a revolutionary evolution of the story, starting with the post-factum events and trying, backwards, to understand, or at least to set the frame for the reasons, the antecedents of the final one way drama. In a bourgeois family of a Polish unperceived town the mother is an energetic, fine-looking and sensitive person. She has two adolescent sons, and a young daughter. The middle son who is 11 finds himself under the diabolic spell of his elder brother, a young man accused by everyone of being evil, lost, damaged. The absent father- he fights in Afghanistan, the love their mother distributes more to her growing amount of stray cats, a dull life in a dull society, all that impelled the two boys into isolation, into a sort of aggressive autism. The rapid remedies they find or are offered do not have the power of filling the void they feel. And without knowing we assist at the very moment when they conceive murder like anything else, murder as a normal sollution to their mal de vivre…The murder of the only person that still cares for them, their mother…

In the vortex of adults’ deals and lives, children find themselves misplaced and alone, sometimes lesser than merchandise. Such is the case for the tchetchen child from the Russian film OBRATNOYE DVIZHENIE(“Reverse Motion”). In a society dominated by crime, this foreign child is an object that many claim. The Mafia wants him for using his labor power and because he knows a few gory secrets; the mother of an absent son that fights in Afghanistan wants him in order to fill up her motherly void. Subject to torture, but still filled with dignity, the child starts to re-learn the alphabet of civilization and of childhood. He becomes a cherished and wanted child, and loves his new part. He fills up an empty spot, until the soldier returns. And then, Destiny catches up on them all. The one that comes back to an already occupied place will be evacuated. In an almost silent movie, the end can only bring another soundless and definitive moment!

The adolescents of TILVA ROS (“Tilva Rosh”), another Serbian movie that made a stir lately in several festivals, are in a full process of understanding who they are and what their situation is in the up-side-down world around them. They are annoyed kids coming from socially frustrated families. They all have unemployed parents who struggle to earn money with bizarre kinds of businesses. Between innocence and cruelty, these misguided children think they are free. They do not find any real answers, and may be this is also due to the vacuous story it has been build around them in this film. Even though they ask themselves questions, even though they experiment incessantly, they still do not find any answers. The plot, though, could have worked as a real engine for that, as two best friends fall for the same girl. But it didn’t. These children will just spend their days riding their skateboards, inventing ludicrous Jackass like stunts they can shoot with their video camera and then edit up; they drink beer and smoke marijuana, and are even willing to inflict pain on each other, just to feel they have invented something different and out of their daily routine. This is a film that could have been fresh and natural, but instead is not more than a pointless film about, ultimately, blank characters.

After twenty years of democracy, eastern European directors seem to be less social insurgents, than attentive and apprehensive fathers. And this can only be interpreted as a positive sign!

Giulia DOBRE is a Film Critic based in Bucharest-Romania. Works as a Free-Lance Cultural Journalist

catherine breillat(engl+rom)

DANGEROUS RELATIONS

By Giulia Ghica Dobre

 

         Playboy magazine came out in 1953, and along with it so did contemporary pornography. This commerce of sexual fantasies has never stopped flooding the media ever since. Breasts, butts or lips fetch huge prices. The “X” is now an ordinary thing. Rocco Siffredi advertises clothing. Pornographic imagery has already become part of our cultural references.

         For the last couple of years this exclusively masculine sphere has been taken over by a couple of women, particularly French, but also Japanese to a certain extent, who are enormously popular among readers: film director Catherine Breillat or writers Catherine Millet and Virginie Despentes, who more or less flirt with pornography and debate freely on topics such as sex.

         Every society up to the day has produced images of sexuality, whether noble or vulgar, more delicate or more intense. The essential point in approaching such images lies in setting the boundary between eroticism and pornography.

         With the release of her film “Romance”, notorious film director Catherine Breillat named the three conditions making an X movie: the coitus, the ejaculation and the fellatio.

         Desire has now ceased to be either sacred or secret. We are entering an era devoid of the slightest trace of fever or mystery that offers only poor quality sex.

         Breillat however tries to build stories around extreme sexuality, around the mechanism of desire, around the question of power in couples and in sexual experiences. Each of her films arouses great controversy, causes anxiety or, on the contrary, enthralls and fascinates the onlooker.

         Four years ago, while governmental censorship was in full swing in France, the infamous Catherine Breillat was releasing her 10^th film: The Anatomy of Hell. Here we come across porn star Rocco Siffredi playing the role of a hunk with feeble intellectual ambitions. As his partner he has the attractive and stirring Amira Casar, whose graciously depicted curves call to mind Goya’s The Nude Maja. Catherine Breillat is filming sex in close-ups just as Gustave Courbet painted “L’origine du monde”. It is, after all, a film concerning painting and religion, the sacredness of the woman. It is a chamber piece where a woman pays a man to look at her while she is not to be looked at…

Gripped by her zeal to surpass the boundaries separating the trivial from the sacred, Breillat sometimes stumbles away: the scene depicting Rocco greedily sucking the woman’s tampon dripping with menstrual blood is expiatory! But the film maker tirelessly carries on in her quest for the ultimate truth.

         From “Romance” to “The Anatomy of Hell”, the works of this French woman have always been defined by use of cutting adjectives. A red, burning aura seems to be surrounds her like the eternal Hell fire.

         Catherine Breillat published her first novel at the age of 17. It ended up being immediately banned to underage readers. She wrote some other several novels, featured in “Last Tango in Paris” and released her first film in 1980, which is still banned today in cinemas, being only tolerated in special theatres…All her films revolve around the same subjects, a sort of “Beauty and the Beast”: Love makes us beautiful, not ugly.

         To Breillat’s mind it is neither sex nor unbecoming sexual practices that make us who we are. The outrageous confusion of modern world looks at sex as the preceding and defining state of the human being, whereas in fact it is rather something of the ordinary. Sex is a deal you offer to someone and which you have to assume when the right moment comes. Always do things never done before. Failure, Breillat argues, isn’t about not being able to close the deal, but about never starting it in the first place.

         Breillat’s women have 1000 faces. The male world is simple, always depicted in black and white. A well-settled and peremptory world like religion, an overpoweringly masculine and vigorous world, divided between good and evil. Yet the true reality that Breillat seeks to pinpoint in her films is the clash between the two apparently divergent extremes.

         For instance, the yearning to be abused is mingled with a desire for purity. In “36 Fillette”, 15-year-old Lili is on holiday with her parents in Biarritz. She is outrageously flirting with a forty-year-old playboy. They are intertwined by an ambiguous bond, vacillating between seduction, frustration and refusal. For Lili this period represents a compulsory passage through that no man’s land called adolescence, the anxious life of a fourteen-year-old, a time when the woman wishes to cut herself loose form her girlish body, but fails. Her sole escapist comfort in the dreadful camping where she has to spend her holiday is an endless fling from one disco to another.

         Almost 18 years following its release, “36 Fillete” has lost nothing of its initial pandemic effect, and appears to us now as a daring forerunner of the libertinage dominating today’s cinematography. It is a film where Breillat did not refrain from setting the language free, moving towards a harsh and full-fledged defiance, assuming the risk of being criticized by her contemporary intellectuals. Even today the film is forbidden to minors under 14, on account that it toys with a taboo incest between a fourteen-year-old girl and a forty-year-old man.

         Nevertheless Breillat employs her fine writing skills in directing the film, making us share the doubts and inner turmoil of a frightened girl, anxious about losing her virginity. Using her black baggy clothes like an armor to hide in, Lili is battling primarily against her own will.

         Ever since this film, Breillat has been using an imaginary icon which will recur in her subsequent films, namely the portrait of the woman split in two, oscillating between sex and her feelings. The little girl says no, but her body says yes…The adult on the other hand, apart from the violent initiation into sex, reveals his own flaws and incessantly manifests his vicious attraction towards her fresh look.

         In “Romance” we can instantly feel that somehow the story comes second. The film sets off from a profound theme, namely it doesn’t say anything. It is the story of a teacher, Marie, who meets Paul, a man who is in love with her but doesn’t “consume” her physically, until she subsequently meets another man who loves her and sleeps with her. Beyond the ordinary limits of sexual decency…

         Last year Breillat made her debut at Cannes with her first vintage film: “Une vielle maitraisse”. Just as the other previous films, sex is rather told than made. The VERB becomes the true vehicle for fantasy and at the same time the object of an unremitting analysis. It is an adaptation of one of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novels, which Breillat interprets without any trace of irony and distance, but in perfect empathy with the author’s vision. It represents the ideal union of this 21^st century rebel and the 19^th century dandy.

         In this film Breillat reflects upon the light-heartedness of feelings uniting, but also separating men and women. Libertine Ryno de Marigny must marry the delicate Hermangarde, a beautiful and respectable aristocrat. But Marigny has spent the last decade of her life succumbed to the charms of an Italian woman (Asia Argento), engaged in an ardent affair that nothing can soothe. The characters’ at the pitch of their excitement are not depicted by means of naked bodies or strong language. Instead Breillat rather chose a temperate approach, with the sole exception of a few excessive scenes posted at the edge of the imaginary, such as the one depicting Marigny and the Italian woman making love in the dessert by a great fire, where the child symbolizing their union burns.. The main techniques employed are the celebration and search of key moments, such as hypocrisy and sometimes uncontrolled lies, such as the triumph of the ultimate destructive passion.

         Her latest film she has only finished shooting, bares an authoritative title: BAD LOVE. It is a story about the film-making industry than ends as roughly as an uppercut. Vivian Parker (Naomi Campbell) is an awe-inspiring, inaccessible star. Following a casual affair with an impoverished cinephile, she changes her telephone number several times, he becomes obsessed with her and phones her incessantly. Catherine Breillat tries to pay heed both to the masculine and to the feminine psychology in this film, switching from one character to another, providing explanations, stories and expurgations. It is a story of a passion moving towards insanity. It is a metaphor for class struggle, for the strange collision between men and women against a background of cultural differences (he is very keen about his Chinese traditions and culture in general whereas she is the poor rich and whimsical girl). It is a film that speaks of love and sex in all their instances, those that make a woman yield to a man, and a man to a woman. Harsh, cruel and daring, the film is not often romantic. 

         This cineaste’s will is to film BEAUTY. The beauty of bodies, of faces and of the film industry. Make all that stand out in a unique film in comparison with the other arts. It is the reason behind her recording of every gesture and every word like a ritual, like a sacred act. All her films have a strange breath about them, as if coming out from a remote age. They have no metaphysical layer, but merely the search of a constancy and transcendence of the feeling uniting the two sexes. In this respect, Breillat consolidates her position within the sphere of cinematography, distancing herself from the trivial living paintings or from the pornographic scenes of filmed theatre. Breillat has managed to build a realm tangled with doubts and questions, and leaves the plenty of room for us to carry on with its exploration.

By GIULIA DOBRE

Catherine B: LEGĂTURI PRIMEJDIOASE

De Giulia Ghica Dobre

Revista Playboy a apărut în 1953, şi o dată cu ea pornografia contemporană. De atunci, acest comerţ cu fantasme sexuale a invadat media. Sânii, fesele, gurile se vând bine. “X”ul a devenit ceva banal. Rocco Siffredi face reclamă la haine. Imaginarul pornografic face deja  parte din referinţele noastre culturale.

De câţiva ani acest domeniu exclusiv masculin a fost preluat de câteva femei, mai cu seamă franţuzoaice, dar şi multe japoneze, cu mare success la public: regizoarea Catherine Breillat sau scriitoarele Catherine Millet si Virginie Despentes, care flirtează mai mult sau mai puţin cu pornografia şi care vorbesc deschis despre sex.

Toate societăţile de până acum au produs imagini ale sexualităţii. Nobile sau triviale, mai ascunse sau mai zgomotoase. Întrebarea esenţială, însă, în abordarea acestor imagini, este cum definim eroticul, şi cum pornograficul?

Cu ocazia filmului său “Romance”, scandaloasa regizoare Catherine Breillat enunţa că cele  3 condiţii care fac ca un film să fie etichetat drept “x” sunt: coitul, ejacularea şi felaţia.  

Dorinţa, de-acum, nu mai este nici sacră, nici secretă. Fără febrilitate şi fără mister intrăm într-o epocă în care sexul nu mai este de calitate.  

Breillat, însă, încearcă să clădească poveşti despre sexualitatea profundă, despre mecanismul dorinţei, despre jocul de putere în cuplu, în întâlnirile sexuale. Fiecare film al său ridică polemici, agasează, sau din contră, pasionează, fascinează.

In plină perioadă de cenzură guvernamentală în Franţa, controversata  Catherine Breillat îşi scotea cel de-al 10-lea film: “Anatomie de l’enfer”, acum 4 ani. Îl regăsim acolo pe starul porno  Rocco Siffredi în rolul unui frumos armăsar cu veleităţi intelectuale. O are alături pe picturala şi tulburătoarea Amira Casar, ale caăei rotunjimi atent filmate evocă pânza “Maia goală” de Goya. Catherine Breillat filmează sexul în gros-plan precum a pictat Gustave Courbet “L’origine du monde”. Întrucât în acest film este vorba despre pictură şi despre religie, despre sacralitatea femeii. Este o piesă camerală, în care o femeie plăteşte un bărbat pentru a o privi acolo unde nu este de privit…

În nebunia ei, Breillat calcă pe firul subţire care delimitează trivialul de sacru. Uneori se împiedică: scena în care Rocco suge cu nesaţ din tamponul intim plin de sânge menstrual al doamnei este expiatorie! Însă regizoarea îşi continuă căutările cu încăpăţânare către adevarul ultim.

De la “Romance” la « Anatomie de l'enfer », operele acestei franţuzoaice au fost întotdeauna definite prin adjective sulfuroase. O aură roşie, arzândă, o înconjoară, precum flăcările Infernului etern.  

Catherine Breillat şi-a publicat primul roman la 17 ani, imediat interzis cititorilor sub 18. Mai scrie câteva cărţi, joacă în “Ultimul Tango la Paris”, iar în 1980 scoate primul film, încă interzis pe marile ecrane şi tolerat doar în sălile speciale…Toate filmele ei au reluat apoi aceeaşi idei, un soi de “Frumoasa şi Bestia”: Iubirea ne face frumoşi, şi nu contrariul.

Pentru Breillat nu sexul, sau practicile sexuale degradante definesc cine suntem. Revoltătoarea confuzie a lumii moderne este de a crede că sexul precede şi defineşte o fiinţă. Când în realitate nu este decât ceva extrem de banal. Sexul este o afacere pe care o propui cuiva. Apoi trebuie doar să-ţi asumi. Să cauţi mereu lucruri care nu s-au mai făcut. Eşecul, în viziunea lui Breillat, nu este de a nu reuşi să termini această întreprindere, ci de a nu începe niciodată.

Femeile lui Breillat au 1000 de feţe. Lumea masculină este una simplă, definită mereu în alb şi negru. O lume tranşată şi tranşantă, precum religia, o lume masculină şi virilă, împarţită între bine şi rău. Însă adevărata lume pe care Breillat doreşte să o ilustreze în flmele ei este confruntarea celor două extreme care aparent nu se întâlnesc niciodată.

De exemplu, dorinţa de a fi pângărită, cu dorinţa de puritate. În “36 Fillette”, Lili, 15 ani,  este în vacanţă cu părinţii la Biarritz. Flirtează intens cu un playboy de 40 de ani. Între ei se ţese o relaţie ambiguă, care balansează între seducţie, provocare şi refuz.  Pentru Lili această perioadă este o traversare obligatorie a acelui no man’s land care este adolescenţa, viaţa la 14 ani, o perioadă incertă în care femeia doreşte să îşi părăsească corpul de fetiţă, însă nu reuşeşte. Singura scăpare din sinistrul campingului în care trebuie să-şi petreacă vacanţa este pentru Lili flirtul continuu, din discotecă în discotecă.

După aproape 18 ani de când a ieşit pe ecrane, “36  Fillette” nu şi-a pierdut nimic din virulenţă,  şi ne apare astăzi ca un precursor îndrăzneţ al libertăţii care domină astăzi cinematograful. Un film în care Breillat nu a ezitat să elibereze şi limbajul, mergând către o îndrăzneală crudă şi sănătoasă şi asumându-şi riscul de a fi criticată de intelectualii epocii. Chiar şi astăzi filmul este interzis sub 14 ani, pe motivul că flirtează cu tabuul incestului între o fetiţă de 14 ani şi un bărbat de 40.

Filmând însă cu fineţea ei de scriitoare, Breillat ne face, în film, să împărţim îndoielile şi zbuciumul fetiţei, speriată şi excitată de ideea de a-şi pierde virginitatea. Ascunsă în spatele hainelor ei negre şi largi precum în spatele unei armuri, Lili se zbate mai cu seamă împotriva ei-însăşi.

Încă din acest film Breillat utilizează o imagine onirică ce va reveni în toate filmele ulterioare, şi anume aceea a femeii tăiate în două, divizată între sex şi sentimente. Aici fetiţa spune da cu corpul, şi nu cu capul….Şi cvadragenarul îşi arată, dincolo de iniţierea foarte brutală în sex, propriile falii, şi îşi mărturiseşte neâncetat atracţia maladivă pentru această prospeţime.    

În “Romance”, simţim imediat că povestea este un soi de accesoriu. Filmul povesteşte ceva foarte profund, şi anume nu povesteşte nimic. Este povestea lui Marie, o învăţătoare, care îl întâlneşte pe Paul, care o iubeşte dar nu o “consumă” fizic, pentru ca apoi ea să întâlnească un alt bărbat care o iubeşte şi se şi culcă cu ea. Dincolo de limita pudorii obişnuite în relaţiile sexuale…

Anul trecut la Cannes Breillat a debarcat în competiţie cu primul ei film de epocă: ”Une Vieille maitresse”. Precum în filmele precedente, sexul mai mult se spune, decât se face. VERBUL este adevăratul motor al dorinţei, şi în acelaşi timp este obiectul analizei neântrerupte. Este o adaptare după un roman al lui Barbey d’Aurevilly, pe care Breillat il citeşte fără ironie sau distanţă, ci în perfect acord cu viziunea acestui scriitor.  Este uniunea ideală intre această rebelă a secolului al XXI.lea şi dandyul secolului al 19-lea.  

Breillat meditează aici despre prăpastia sentimentelor care  uneşte, dar şi separă bărbaţii şi femeile.  Libertinul Ryno de Marigny trebuie să se căsătorească cu delicata Hermangarde, o frumoasă şi respectabilă aristocrată. Însă Marigny trăieşte de zece ani sub şarmul demonic al unei italience (Asia Argento),  o pasiune pe care nimic nu o poate calma. Super-excitarea personajelor nu ne este aici transmisă prin facilitatea unor trupuri goale sau prin acerbii verbale. Breillat a ales mai degrabă calea temperării. Cu doar câteva excese, la limita oniricului, precum scenele cu Marigny şi italianca făcând dtagoste în deşert, lângă un mare foc pe care arde un copil ieşit din uniunea lor…Mijloacele care predomină sunt aici reţinerea şi căutarea momentelor cheie. Precum ipocrzia şi minciuna uneori involuntară, precum triumful pasiunii totale şi destructive.

         Urmatorul ei film, abea terminat, poartă titlul peremptoriu de BAD LOVE. O poveste din mediul cinematografic care se termină dur ca un uppercut. Vivian Parker (Naomi Campbell), este o star sublimă şi inaccesibilă.  După o întâlnire fugară cu un cinefil fără bani, în care îşi schimbă numerele de telefon, acesta face o obsesie pentru ea şi o sună neâncetat.  Catherine Breillat încearcă aici să respecte psihologia masculină şi pe cea feminină, trecând de la un personaj la altul, plină de explicaţii, poveşti, exorcizări.  Povestea unei pasiuni care duce la demenţă. Un soi de metaforă a luptei de clasă, a bizarului război între bărbat şi femeie, pe fondul diferenţelor culturale (el este foarte ataşat de cultura lui chineză şi de cultură în general, ea este sărmana fată bogată şi capricioasă). Un film despre iubire şi sex sub toate formele, acele forme care determină o femeie să se supună unui bărbat, şi barbatul unei femei. Sulfuros, crud şi îndrăzneţ, filmul este arareori tandru.

         Dorinţa acestei cineaste este de a filma FRUMUSEŢEA. Frumuseţea corpurilor, a feţelor, a cinematografului. Toate astea prin ceea ce are filmul unic, în raport cu celelalte arte. De-aceea ea înregistrează fiecare gest, fiecare cuvânt ca pe un ritual, ca pe un act sacru.

Lucrurile capătă în filmele ei o rezonanţă bizară, suspendată în-afara timpului. Fără metafizică, ci doar cu căutarea unei permanenţe, a unei transcendenţe a emoţiilor care unesc cele două sexe. Prin acest gest Breillat rămâne pe teritoriul cinematografului, şi se îndepărtează de simplele tablouri vii sau de bucăţile pornografice de teatru filmat. Un teritoriu împânzit de îndoieli şi de întrebari, unde Breillat nu ne închide nici-o uşă, ci ne lasă deschisă căutarea.