SHAME: Pain is beautiful

There is nothing “scandalous” in “Shame”. Nothing prude, no audiovisual Viagra of any kind.

As “Shame” talks about Thanatos, rather than about Eros.
It does not follow love, it does vow death.
And it shows just how much wish for death does exist in that obsession of love (and of sex, of flesh, of climax, of pleasure…)…., in the wishes and obsessions that dominate our society.

The title is to remind us the biblical meaning of sex - as shame, in the process of losing one’s innocence.
The one for which its progenitors – according to the catholic faith- will be kicked out of the Terrestrial Paradise.

Steve McQueen, the Director, has defined the film as an enquiry on the sex addiction.




Brandon – in his thirties, rich and gorgeous- is the prisoner of his own sexual compulsion. He is an elegant professional in a perfect physical shape.

Yet underneath this perfect picture he nests a compulsive and solitary sex addict. He lives for sex.
He is not a joyful Don Giovanni, though: stimulated by cheap porn that fills up his computer or by chance encounters, Brandon practices a sort of mortuary sex, consumed without joy.
For him, sex is an action to effectuate with maximum efficiency.





It is efficiency that has turned him into a very successful professional; efficiency is what turned his apartment into a very well oiled machine, where everything functions, where nothing is misplaced, and where his sexual behavior must also be extremely efficient.

During his sex acts his partners are just objects to be paid, as they execute well aimed orders.
Or then there is just someone who agrees for a quickie after dinner, in a dark corner of the city streets.
It is a behavior that comes from far…

Would it be from an exaggerated fear of confronting women? We do not know.
Brandon disappears at the bathroom masturbating even during working hours. Or he incessantly follows erotic chats (with the help of technique, masturbation has become even virtual).

Giving pleasure has become to him unbearable. He unleashes himself into exaggerated nocturnal trips, in order to tire up and avoid to think about it.
McQueen offers also an artful threesome sex scene where the effects of vagueness are preventing it from looking vulgar.

If we consider “Shame” to be a documentary, we have to recognize its high formal achievement and the very sharp choice of the main actor, a handsome and striking Fassbender in a state of grace, with a body that rules over the sex scenes.

But “Shame” is rather a sort of prison movie.
Just that here prison exists in Brandon’s head and it is filled with sex, naked bodies, out of control impulses and ferociously chasen coituses.


The climax never offers him the requited pleasure, though. He lives those moments at the border of a terrible pain, a nameless and solitary suffering that plunges him nearer to Death than to Love.
A broken evolution that intertwines with the broken body and soul of his sister.

Her character, Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, is a sort of singer with high sensibility, reinventing in a blues version “New York, New York” (in fact the only moment of authentic seduction in this film).
How could she be so blind as to look for help near a person so bluntly insensitive?
And especially how could she be as deluded by her unfortunate choice as to cut her veins?
The vivid red of her blood shines a light of death over the imperial grey of the film…


The very dangerous border between fraternal behavior and the shadows of incest is never really explained, but repeatedly whispered...
It is violently suggested, though, here and then, as the tip of an iceberg, by several looks, or gestures, or through the framing of the two, often filmed from behind, or by very intense fragments of dialogue such as: “..We aren’t really bad, we just come from a very uggly place”...

The void of significants makes us believe it is all about the tragedy of the relationships between men and women. Would then the sexphobia of the Bible be triumphing after two thousand years?...

And what about the other women? Young women who excite him in the subway; sex workers that come home during the short lapses of time between two masturbations…

The only woman that is really drown to him, moved by a genuine interest in his persona, a work colleague, will have to bear the lack of success of a bad sex and the shame of disappearing as fast as possible.
Ashamed by an aborted sex act that is instead appreciated by the spectator, given that Brandon had made an effort with her, to the point of caring for her too much as to get violent…

With a painfull, desperate and sublime New York as a background, McQueen directs a sort of pain that has the smell and the taste of sex, a realistic kind of sex that becomes narrative, meaningfull and able to tell the story of the encounter between Eros and Thanatos. The two forces of Life, that explode on the face of Fassbender, deformed by orgasm, at the border of life and death, of pain and pleasure.

Giulia DOBRE

February 2012/July 2012

TOURNEE, director: Mathieu Amalric (most moving french movie seen in past years)

The film of Mathieu Amalric, the actor, the writer and the director, breaths off the melancholia of a cinema telling of theatre and shows.

TOURNEE suggests an Altmanian tone and warmth, in a marvelous film that induces dispersion and chaos.

Reality here is only described through contrasts.

It is a wild, poetical, diverting, exhilarating, desperate, insolent and miraculous filmic gesture!

Joachim the Producer lived far from France ever since he decided to abandon all and change life. He is now back with a New Burlesque theatre company, which gathers 5 charismatic strippers  that inflame their public with ironical inventions and sympathetic sensuality.

 

They tour around coastal French towns, while Joachim races to find a Parisian theatre and his own lost life.

Their trip is full of colorless “no-places” which make their life peculiar and a lot less glamorous than one could think. 

The voice is almost of a documentary, and it allows the director to note at the same time the joy of those performances, and that other France, one  that is not on the postcards.

Between two cities, between two shows, pop out the anxieties of this man. A man for whom it is impossible to rehabilitate with his past, including with his sons.

A man  happy with his new family that allows him to live without remorse and which asks for so little in exchange. Just for another place where to evolve.

 As Amalric knows it very well: that is the life of a performer.

The invisible landscape of this tour, devoured by the gloomy nights filled with alochool and with casual and saddening sex, tell us about the unpredictable dynamics of these characters.

Their living space is always an equal amount of trains, cars and hotels, that repeat themselves ab infinitum.

For these modern and yet anachronic women it is impossible to resist the temptation of breaking the schemata and filling up their inner voids with new voices and theatrical gestures.

TOURNEE circles amazingly subjects as the solitude of middle aged people, the solitude of performers, or what happens when falling out of love, out of interest, out of success, or out of life.  Of what happens when the lights are turned off and you are alone in your room, facing yourself, facing the void...

It tells of the mechanism of desire, of its origins and its evolution.  Of its (im)possible fullfilement...

 It borders feelings and meere phisicality, first or second degree, the full understanding of "what you see is what you (don't) get"!....

It paints the limits between youth and adult age, between a fit body and a body with history, between home and elsewhere, between existing in the present or holding back to the past....

TOURNEE is  a film about the intimate and visionary story of several men  women, fathers, wives or mothers, show people, aging men and women, who try to run their life using the context.

A context that do not match their children anymore, of whom they do not remember birthdays or addresses, to which they do not know to tell stories anymore, at night.

They are out of match with their friends, who end up by abandoning them. They are out of match with money, too, missing when they need to achieve their dreams.

In this exaggerated rhythm of life, the background music or the TV screens become the sign of an indistinct reality, where none of these characters could recognize themselves.

So they prefer to turn them off, and try to change, for a night, for yet another night, the colors of their surrounding world.

 In a heartbreaking attempt to make the show go on, to arrive at their next theater and evolve in their next show, until the lights will eventually be turned off….

Giulia Dobre

remastered on July 14th 2012

de rouille et d'os (rust and bone), c.2012/ Director: Jacques Audiard

 DE ROUILLE ET D'OS is a love story.  Hardly gentle, it tracks an unlikely love affair between contrasting people hurled together by harsh fates: a legless young woman and a second-rate boxer.

A study of two disabled people -- one physically, the other emotionally -- and the extreme states to which they must be pushed in order to connect.

 Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), homeless and poor, with a five year old son he barely knows, moves from grim, urban northern France to the sunny Provence.

Working as a night-club bouncer, the muscular Ali rescues Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) from a drunken brawl.

Attractive and seemingly confident, she trains killer Orca whales who perform for the public at Marineland. But one show goes badly wrong; she is attacked, loses both legs (convincingly, thanks to remarkable special effects), and is left wheelchair-bound.

After a while, she calls Ali.

At this point Audiard’s main theme — physicality in various forms — emerges.

Ali is fighting, and wins money from bloody, illegal bouts. He also enjoys fast, casual love-making.

Yet  he is very considerate with Stephanie, helps her rediscover the joy of swimming and   the consolations of sex.

She responds to the giddy euphoria of infectious pop music, bopping in her wheelchair to the B-52s’ Love Shack, and rehearsing upper-body whale-training moves to Katy Perry’s Firework.

The couple negotiate their relationship clumsily (Ali is not an emotionally literate man) and it takes more crises to advance it.

 Audiard shoots largely in a series of jagged, startling images.

Cotillard and Schoenaerts give heavily internalized performances marked by sporadic physical outbursts involving athletics and a lot of exciting sex.

But one scene is quietly breath-taking: Stephanie returns to work, summons a whale to her through an aquarium’s glass wall, and coaxes it to follow the movements of her body.

Parallels can be drawn with Javier Bardem’s Biuitiful :  both show the  underbelly of their chosen settings, both deal with a devastating bodily trauma for central characters, and both also have a visceral nature to them that is profoundly affecting.

(Biutiful was one of my favorite films, and certainly one of my favorite performances.)...

This is a film of genuine power. Rust and Bone may not be for everyone. But it is a complex and  assured piece. 

giulia d

july 2012

El Lenguaje de los machetes

 

With The Language of Machetes (El Lenguaje de los machetes), Kyzza Terrazas brings a film that has been long awaited by several successive generations. Generations that were waiting for an artist, and especially a filmmaker, to express so properly, and without any judgement, the terrible ‘mal de vivre’ that we/they all experience.

Tarrazas’ film circles around a couple composed of a troubled journalist and a sado-masochist punk rock singer.

They have a grueling time finding out who they are, if they really care about their professions, and how much they can expect from society and also give back to it.

Where does their own fight (both with themselves and with the existing powers) start and how long should it last?

Both characters feel a deep unease, as if the skins they inhabit were too limiting.

They sound and act like apocalyptic spirits. As the director puts it:

“Love, the desire to transform reality and failure in both are thus the main themes of “El Lenguaje de los machetes”.

It is a film of traces. Of disheveled gestures…Of frontal war. A case of nostalgia for utopia…”

Therefore, though very in love with each other, the couple swings between extreme passion and annulment, between profound declarations, projects, and solitude.

There is a lot of suffering for these characters, a lot of failure, both as spectators of a society where violence is omnipresent, and as persons unable to take a major step in their relationship.

They suffer to such an extent that they decide to play a final act in the comedy/tragedy of their life, attacking one of the most important symbols of Mexico and its colonization.

El Lenguaje de los machetes is a film that softly swings around the opposition between Mexicans of white/European origin, the direct and financially privileged descendents of blond and blue-eyed colonizers, and the local populations who still live a sort of slavery.

But it also expresses the miscommunication between urban and rural mentalities. For the latter, all change should come through bloodshed, through a heavy violence that fills the air.

Music is perfectly employed in El Lenguaje de los machetes, for sheer emphasis in some key moments.

The camera work is all built on the contrast of lights, colors and tones.

It is without a doubt a film that has touched its public, and we can only salute the emergence of an original and breezy filmic philosopher such as Mr. Tarrazas (already the author of two volumes of short stories).

CAND MAMA E UN TATA



PROMETHEUS

 Regia: RIDLEY SCOTT
c. 2012

Terra, anul 2089. Doi oameni de stiinta, frumosi precum Barbie si Ken, descopera picturi murale primitive care confirma legaturile cu civilizatii de departe. Pornesc pe noua « harta » a cosmosului ca sa afle cine sunt acei « ingineri » primordiali.  Prometheus, gigantica lor nava spatiala finantata de un miliardar excentric (cum altfel ?),  o are drept capitan pe Charlize Theron, un echipaj colorat si un majordom robot si cinefil ( Michael Fassbender), o incrucisare intre Pinocchio si replicantul din  Blade Runner.

Planeta pe care debarca este minunat desenata de catre Scott, care are un Master in Pictura. Cunoscuta sa obsesie pentru detalii functioneaza aici perfect in a reda un templu urias cu gigantice sculpturi umanoide, in timp ce o substanta neagra pare sa infiltreze totul.  Aici echipajul va descoperi originea civilizatiilor teriene, inspiratia perfectiunii statuilor grecesti, fiinte flasce si malefice, si misterul unui bizar umanoid descoperit in fapt in primul episod ALIEN.  

Mai putin claustrofobic decat orginalul, Prometheus descifreaza cateva mistere, insa si lanseaza multe altele. La 77 de ani sir Scott are ambitia de a se interoga insistent asupra originii omului.

 Filmul este cladit intr-un soi de fascinant dialog intre dogma crestina si divinitati pagane, intre originile omului conform Bibliei si evolutia darwiniana.

 Scott pune in scena aici o planeta neagra si o super rasa tehnologizata.  Rezultatul este macar interesant, daca nu de-a dreptul fascinant, cu cateva scene de horror claustrofobic sau secvente de « posesiune » aliena precum cea in care Shaw,  fabuloasa  Noomi Rapace, isi efectueaza singura si fara anestezic o operatie de cezariana… !

Companion de scena de acelasi inalt nivel ii este Fassbender si androidul pe care il interpreteaza. David este servil, amoral si infantil, si manipuleaza tastele holografice precum un personaj spielbergian intr-un roman de Isaac Asimov. Precum Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, el isi cauta creatorul care, de aceasta data, este acelasi care a creat Omul.

"De ce Omul a creat Robotul?", intreaba David pe unul dintre oamenii de stiinta ai echipajului. Care ii raspunde: "pentru ca  putea s-o faca"; iar robotul ii raspunde: "nu te-ai simti frustrat daca si creatorii tai ti-ar raspunde la fel ?".

 Scenaristul Damon Lindelof (din echipa scenaristilor lui « LOST ») il ia pe ALIEN drept pretext pentru a povesti o drama SF, adesea simplista.
Problema scenariului este ca a evitat adesea, ba chiar a ocultat principalul atu al povestirii,  si-anume FRICA.

 Intr-o situtuatie unde viata si moartea sunt constant legate, creatia si distrugerea sunt cele doua fete ale aceleiasi intrebari.

 Intrebare care gaseste in film mai multe raspunsuri logice, incepand cu secventa sa de pre-generic, de un vizual halucinant.

Nu suntem noi oare, in definitiv, unicii martori, la inceputul si la sfarsitul filmului, la doua momente cheie, majore in functionarea acestei saga ?

Ultima secventa este adevaratul climax. O juisiva scena finala care este in acelasi timp fondatoare. Imaginile de o claritate Nordica, pe malul unei cascade uriase, ne arata caderea, in ambele sensuri, a celui care devine Tatal Creator, Alfa si Omega, simultan. ….Sau cum, dupa distrugere, se naste emanciparea….

 Giulia Dobre

Festival Repport: CInelatino-24emes Rencontres du Cinema Sud-Americain de Toulouse, 23 Mars-1er Avril 2012

TOULOUSE 2012

Cinélatino Toulouse 2012

 Nowhere could the gentle yet bright sunshine of spring spice up a film festival more than in Toulouse, the pinkish-ochre citadel of the Southwest France.

Rencontres de Toulouse celebrated its 24^th edition with a fresh programme of brand new films. For every production from each of the festival's sections, there was a full house made up of a joyful crowd of international students, academics, culturally-aware ladies enjoying their second youth, ancient quixotic revolutionaries with white beards, sharing their observations in the mellifluous accents of the South of France.

The surrounding joie de vivre was not matched, though, by the new Latin American films the festival presented.

The very young directors of these productions are still beginners, and chose to treat topics which mainly express their personal worries and social engagement. There were no half measures in these films: they were breathless and stubborn. Their characters are very young: students keen on ideology, who make unambiguous and excruciating choices, who are immersed to the bones in the transgressions of the society in which they live. They are callous worrywarts who do not complain or head for greener pastures; instead, they prefer to solve problems, to be an active part of the agora, to explain and be explained, even to refuse and to destroy.

The first feature of Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, From Thursday to Sunday (De jueves a domingo) chose to investigate the crumbling marriage of Ana and Fernando. Bitterness and lack of communication fill in every space in what ought to have been a relaxed and sentimental journey they had with their kids, in order to find a land belonging to the father's family. The couple have fallen out of love, and the bare lands they travel through mirror their relationship. The sweet magic of their children's behavior, with their questions, answers, funny situations and spontaneity, cannot repair the broken bridges. The father has already rented another apartment; the mother encounters a friend from her active and colorful youth and seems to confide in him far more than in her husband.

Their 10-year-old daughter observes everything, understands partially, suffers and yet tries to plan for a near future together, projects to pursue with both parents. And here is what triggers the empathy of any spectator from any part of the globe: it is an experience of life where a child observes with his own, incomplete yet unbeatable lucidity a world made by and for adults.

Sotomayor does not judge. She simply allows the stories to unfold around her characters, just as the camera records their adventure in the wild, with distance and objectivity. Yet the freshness and intensity of the acting cannot make up for a certain ambiguity in the writing. The spectator is barely absorbed and feels too little for these characters that most of the time seem to rehearse a play of their actual life, rather than living it fully.

The lack of audience empathy continues with A Secret World (Un Mundo Secreto) by Mexican director Gabriel Mariño. The film follows the personal journey of a high school graduate, a journey which sees her move from saying YES to every request to finally refusing and saying NO when she needs to. She is a dreamer and a promiscuous girl, who hopes to find her path by breaking out of the circle of her acquaintances and getting away from her normal habits. She therefore embarks on a trip from Mexico City’s urban chaos to the deserts of Sinaloa and the vast ocean of La Paz. She is just a girl lost in a world of strangers, where even her mother and close friends care for her for the wrong reasons: there is a profound lack of affection in her life. By the last shot, something has changed, though, as suggested by the inverted position of the camera.

The dramatic construction is destroyed by a long series of close-ups and playing games with the focus.

This is, unfortunately, a notable characteristic of the majority of new Latin American films at Cinélatino: an almost maniacal game of lenses that involuntarily excludes the audience from the action, instead of implicating them even more! I must say, too, that I was disturbed by the films' excessive use of music, which makes the film more of a visual companion for the predominant text of the songs. It leaves an impression of a playful film made during the director's film school years.

In To the Sky (Al Cielo), Diego Prado orchestrates a scenic and minimalistic drama. His teenage male character is a person that finds a way to bear the world, his family, his school, even his friendships, none of which give him much to say. Finally, one day he meets another boy as shy and creative as himself, and love springs. He finally finds words to say and decisions to take. Diego Prado adopts a rare and fresh tone in telling this story, set in the lush town of La Plata. The minor everyday gestures of this boy’s life are shot in a marvelously unpolluted manner. The happy ending comes without extravaganza: it’s just a very refreshing moment for the viewer.

South American films of the past year seem to be even more aware than their predecessors of the social turmoil the directors and their characters live in. 3 of the films presented in competition are organized around political disobedience, ideological power games, or even the total abandon of any social fight. The Destruction of the Ruling Order (La destrucción del orden vigente), a film by new Argentinean film graduate Alejo Franzetti, follows the misdemeanors of a pretty young woman through the rebellious underground groups of Buenos Aires. Between punk rock, heavy drugs and endless anarchist statements, the character trips from life to death and back again. It was a rather appealing subject for the author, who ultimately failed in his artistic journey for wanting to express too many subjects, too much in a limited timeframe.

In spite of his absolute mastery of directing, another young Argentinean director, Santiago Mitre, fails to move the audience and take them along on his journey with his excessively dense film, The Student (El Estudiante). Portraying situations that are complicated and very much particular to Buenos Aires' academic environment, extremely calculated and with overwhelming dialogue, this film renders the complex web of personal ambitions and maneuvering that fuels campus political life. The actor Esteban Lamothe is a revelation as Roque, living and breathing his lead role with understated confidence. And yet the vast complexity of the relationships and the games of power make us disconnect and lose interest about halfway through the film.

With The Language of Machetes (El Lenguaje de los machetes), Kyzza Terrazas brings a film that has been long awaited by several successive generations. Generations that were waiting for an artist, and especially a filmmaker, to express so properly, and without any judgement, the terrible ‘mal de vivre’ that we/they all experience. Tarrazas’ film circles around a couple composed of a troubled journalist and a sado-masochist punk rock singer. They have a grueling time finding out who they are, if they really care about their professions, and how much they can expect from society and also give back to it.

Where does their own fight (both with themselves and with the existing powers) start and how long should it last? Both characters feel a deep unease, as if the skins they inhabit are too limiting. They sound and act like apocalyptic spirits. As the director puts it: “Love, the desire to transform reality and failure in both are thus the main themes of “El Lenguaje de los machetes”. It is a film of traces. Of disheveled gestures…Of frontal war. A case of nostalgia for utopia…”

Therefore, though very in love with each other, the couple swings between extreme passion and annulment, between profound declarations, projects, and solitude.

There is a lot of suffering for these characters, a lot of failure, both as spectators of a society where violence is omnipresent, and as persons unable to take a major step in their relationship. They suffer to such an extent that they decide to play a final act in the comedy/tragedy of their life, attacking one of the most important symbols of Mexico and its colonization.

El Lenguaje de los machetes is a film that softly swings around the opposition between Mexicans of white/European origin, the direct and financially privileged descendents of blond and blue-eyed colonizers, and the local populations who still live in a sort of slavery. But it also expresses the miscommunication between urban and rural mentalities. For the latter, all change should come through bloodshed, through a heavy violence that fills the air.

 Music is perfectly employed in El Lenguaje de los machetes, for sheer emphasis in some key moments. The camera work is all built on the contrast of lights, colors and tones. It is without a doubt a film that has touched its public, and we can only salute the emergence of an original and breezy filmic philosopher such as Mr. Tarrazas (already the author of two volumes of short stories).

Employing a more classical manner of filming and storytelling, Stories That Only Exist When Remembered (Histórias que só existem quando lembradas) and another Brazilian film, Southwest (Sudoeste), tell poignant stories of lost and almost mythical generations of Brazil’s provinces. Telling about smaller or greater pains that have been buried, as well as more and less important misdeeds, these two films offer some very well crafted images.

Stories That Only Exist When Remembered explodes with lush legions of green that emphasize the moribund world that it examines. In a remote village cut off from civilization, where trains have stopped arriving, lives Madalena. She is an elderly woman lost in her past, writing letters every day to her long-dead husband. Audacious actress Sonia Guedes plays the intense Madalena. She knows exactly what to expect from life, is totally aware of what she has lost, and determined to confront each and every day with acts of near sado-masochism in order to continue to live.

Her life, like that of the other villagers, is an uninterrupted routine until the day that Rita, a young photographer, arrives. Rita builds a gentle bond with Madalena, and becomes the conduit between past and present, vision and memory, lost and found.

SUDOESTE has chosen a Dreier-esque black and white, shadowy type of image, with a coarsely grainy film stock, in order to uncover implied stories of incest and repeated abuse. It looks like an ancient Greek drama filmed by a playful spirit, where expressionistic faces glide between real and dreamlike worlds. It is an emotive film, a magic parable about a woman who lives her life in just one day. The traveling camera that glides through long takes; the lateral black-and-white shots and the repetitive background sounds of Eduardo Nunes' feature debut evoke memories of the cinema of Andrei Tarkovski, Alexander Sokurov or Béla Tarr. It is a complicated world, offering a mesmerizing embrace of real life and obscure times. Here, Nunes captures what lies behind the visible, in a narrative that alternates between Christian and non-Christian beliefs and magical stories.

A few years ago, the Argentinean Armando Bo co-wrote with Alejandro González Iñárritu the award-winning Biutiful. For his own first feature Bo has chosen the path of classical narrative. With very murky humor and perfect rhythm, he tells the story of a singer from Buenos Aires who deeply believes that he IS Elvis Presley. Seen through his eyes, Buenos Aires seems a city awash in celebrity look-alikes: there's a Steven Tyler here, a Gene Simmons or a Barbara Streisand there.

The downside of pursuing his passion is the loss of his family - a failed marriage with Alejandra (Griselda Siciliani) and estrangement from his daughter, named of course, Lisa Marie (Margarita Lopez). When his wife and daughter are involved in a car accident, the crisis situation brings them together, forming new intense ties between father and daughter. This new-found love and meaning, though, seems not to be enough for this colorful character, as he follows his determination to live and die just like his idol. During this last chapter of the film, questions araise in the spectator’s mind: is this character for real? Is he really insane? The writer-director achieves here one of the most stirring psychological portraits seen in recent years, sustained by flawless direction skills and by dazzling acting. Everything is filmed as in a state of grace, intentionally avoiding dirt, self-pity or violence.

Latin-American indie cinema of the past year remains, in general, at an elementary level, but some directors offer whiffs of promise that are deeply commendable and worth following.

Giulia Dobre

FIPRESCI JURY

Cinélatino- 24emes Rencontres de Toulouse, 2012