FILM REVIEW: Les petits mouchoirs (Little White Lies)

Directed/Written By: Guillaume Canet

Starring: François Cluzet as Max, Marion Cotillard as Marie, Benoît Magimel as Vincent, Gilles Lellouche as Eric, Jean Dujardin as Ludo

And yes, I’m now officially pretentious enough to call French films by their original French titles. Bite me.

Guillaume Canet, primary creative force behind 2007’s incredible Ne le dis a personne, follows up his warm, humane thriller with an equally sentimental, if sardonic and occasionally brutal, meditation on the pettiness and selfishness of humanity.

Having taken cues from Canet’s breakout effort, I expected this film to take its time with its character development before gaining momentum, but mostly it just took its time. Les petits mouchoirs is heavily weighed down by the generous proportion of filler scenes (eg. Marion Cotillard, Oscar-winning actress, hurls vulgarities while being dragged around on a life raft at high speeds). I understand that Canet’s idea was to demonstrate as many instances of dumb fun as possible to make the ending sequence more poignant, but this is something that can be easily conveyed in a third of the screentime dedicated to pointless showcases of cheap thrills. Furthermore, there are just too many scenes of random scenery and of the characters staring wordlessly out of car windows. In movies that thematically explore the oppressiveness of ennui or the aimlessness of transitory routines, these scenes would by default be imbued with depth and poignancy. However, Canet seemingly just incorporates it because it seems like a cool, arthouse chic thing to do. His characters are obviously not thinking about Ludo, their dying friend, and no amount of wordlessness will be able to create any semblance of depth. Not in these scenes, at least. Many arthouse films tend to be slow-moving too, but the difference is that they — the good ones at least — are consistently slow. This film starts out startlingly quick, then immediately becomes artfully slow. That I can deal. It then slowly, deliberately builds up to the climax, and suddenly launches rapidly, aimlessly into the (unsatisfactory) ending. Now that; I can’t. This film has spectacularly poor pacing, and the indulgent filler scenes do much to make it so much more painful that it should be.

I have two problems with this film’s use of music. For one, it contributes nothing to the script. In Sofia Coppola movies, there too are many wordless musical interludes, but they are often the most revealing scenes of all. Coppola has a magical way of turning pop tunes into achingly poignant portraits of underlying emotional tensions; in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, for example, The Strokes’ ‘What Ever Happened’ reflects Marie Antoinette’s longing for Jamie Dornan’s character, while Aphex Twin’s “Jynweythek Ylow” reflects her sense of claustrophobia and tentative unfamiliarity upon being forced into a role she never really learned how to play. Here, the music instead often feels like superficial attempts at making the filler scenes seem prettier and thus more meaningful. Secondly, music here is too often used to provide some obvious emotional direction to ‘complement’ that of the script, and invariably comes across as insulting in its unequivocal redundancy. Does Canet think so lowly of his audience that he feels the need to teach them how to feel when viewing different scenes in his film? Or does he genuinely think that musical interludes that in no way contribute to the overall quality of the film are artsy and awesome? Who knows.

The best scene in the film is the one when Marie’s bearded hipster boyfriend Elliot comes over and sings for them. It’s perfectly embodies what the film should be: a quiet reflection of their own lives and humanity while Ludo lingers over them like a disembodied spirit. If the film in its entirety were to be homogenized by the same restraint and reflective introspection that grounds this particular scene, it would be so much better.

Although the script does admirably craft a number of believable, complex characters, it still fails to make the two wives and Antoine convincing enough for anyone to care about. Isa’s secret ‘slut’ Internet romps are an immensely interesting development, but Canet doesn’t even address it. How wonderful would it be if Isa and Vincent both realize that their marriage is loveless, and that they shouldn’t need to feel guilty about their own ‘twisted’ fantasies? But Canet completely does away with this, and that’s a disappointing directorial decision. Benoît Magimel is a brilliant actor, as witnessed from his nuanced performance in Michael Haneke’s psychosexual masterpiece The Piano Teacher, but the screenplay reduces him into a caricature of a reborn gay man in a loveless marriage. Admittedly, his bold dramatizations and Francois Cluzet’s looks of horror make the gay jokes more tasteful and humorous than most, but Canet dismisses Vincent as a comic device instead of sensitively exploring his psychology. Compare Canet’s Vincent to Kushner’s Joe from Angels in America. Note how Joe is tentative, conservative and too self-hating to reach out for what he wants. That’s the logical progression for someone who has spent his entire life in the closet or in self-denial. Canet’s Vincent just leaps out with unrealistic, farcical abandon. It’s insulting, and inexcusable. Antoine too suffers from the same problem. His self-indulgent moping in the first half of the movie is used relentlessly as comic relief, then when he finally has a big emotional scene, we’re supposed to empathize? Better luck next time, Guillaume.

The opening scene with Ludo as well as the extended hospital scene fail to bear any real significance; Ludo himself is also not as prominent as he should be. Wouldn’t the film have been more poignant if everyone was secretly affected by Ludo being in the hospital, but was outwardly trying to have fun because that was what they had initially agreed upon, or because they’re heavily in denial about how screwed up their lives are? The ending sequence supposedly proves how much the characters actually love Ludo, but Canet doesn’t make use of that love throughout the rest of the film. Wouldn’t it have been a smarter, more complex irony if Jean-Louis was right about their lies, but wrong about how they felt about their vacation being more important than Ludo or how they were unaware of their own pretensions? Instead, in an incredibly trite, obvious move, he makes Jean-Louis the center of morality, Canet’s de facto mouthpiece, and criticizes (with absolutely no ounce of self-awareness) their choices. Jean-Louis himself never visits Ludo, and Jean-Louis himself has fun with the other characters. If he’s so annoyed by them, why didn’t Canet suggest so before? His sudden burst of lucidity and awareness seems…well, just too sudden. And very forced. How can a director just use a character so nonchalantly without considering the implications it has, or how arbitrary it might seem? I think it obvious that Canet has artistic direction, but he just seems superficial and clumsy here. It’s really very disappointing.

Luckily though, Canet is too good a filmmaker to make a film without any redeeming factors. Here, he proves that with strong source material, he has the sensitivity and awareness to create compelling characters (namely Marie, Max and Eric) that are so brutally spot-on in their construction that they threaten to eclipse the film in its entirety altogether. It’s just a shame that after pouring so much insight (Eric’s fear of singlehood and his semi-awareness of his laughability, as well as Marie’s fear of conflating sex with love are particularly wonderful) into them, Canet just allows his characters to dangle, suspended in a space of perpetual immobility and inconsequentiality. It’s also pretty damn hilarious, and is one of those rare, preternaturally intelligent films that, when it actually does work, manages to strike a balance between humor and drama. The cinematography is characteristically beautiful. Canet uses awkward silences to wonderful effect. ALSO, YOU GET TO SEE JEAN DUJARDIN IN DRAG. Even as a woman, he is still abominably adorable. Ultimately, this movie is an idiosyncratic blend of dysfunctional relationship drama and self-knowing wit, and is smarter and more realistic than most films in the same genre. It just harbours too many disappointments to leave the viewers with much more than ambivalence.

I think the fundamental problem with the film is perfectly embodied in its ending, which is indulgently sentimental, tonally disjointed and aimlessly drowned out by emotional music. It makes the film seem like a deeply moving meditation on the power of friendship, when that’s hardly the film it starts out to be. How can one really appreciate this film if even the director doesn’t know what it’s about?

KevinScale Rating: 3/5

FILM REVIEW: Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One)

Directed By: Guillaume Canet

Written By: Guillaume Canet and Philippe Lefebvre

Starring: François Cluzet as Alexandre Beck, Marie-Josée Croze as Margot Beck, Gilles Lellouche as Bruno

Let me just say that I’m definitely not a big fan of thriller movies. I mean, it’s not like I’m one of those people who only watch slow-moving philosophical films and constantly deride the rest for their vapid superficiality; it’s just that too many (inept) filmmakers tend to think that thriller films get to be unoriginal and formulaic simply because they are by nature, mainstream films. If they aren’t spectacularly clumsy (Taylor Lautner’s abominable Abduction), then they are spectacularly absurd (Ballistic: Ecks VS Sever) or spectacularly predictable (Aronofsky’s Black Swan). Of course, every genre attracts their own fair share of morons: arthouse films are often bogged down by incoherent pretensions and comedy films often descend into brainless, aimless camp. But at least you don’t have to sit through painfully long sequences of gratuitous suspense and arbitrary explosions. Noise, in the right hands, is a powerful instrument that can effectively build and release emotional tensions (David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Lost Highway are excellent showcases, even if they aren’t actually very good films). In most thriller films, however, noise is a ploy to distract the audience from the sheer stupidity of the uninspired plot. Thriller films also seem to attract tons of horrible screenwriters (The fantastically awful Resident Evil film series), which inevitably translates to flat, inhuman characters and lackluster (if any) comic relief. Of course, there are occasional thrillers with an abundance of suspense, inventiveness, (Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is magnificent) humanity and wit (Joss Whedon’s Serenity adroitly alternates between fall-down funny dialogue and tear-jerking sincerity), but few manage to sustain an atmosphere heavy with suspense and longing as well as Tell No One, one of the most well-made films — and certainly the best thriller film — I have ever seen.

For starters, the acting is absolutely brilliant. Bruno is played with unpretentious, thuggish machismo, but Lellouche never allows his portrayal to descend into a flat, unintentional parody. When he brings his weak son to the hospital, he is necessarily flustered and aggressive, but when his son is taken from him into the emergency room, he momentarily does away with his tough-guy image and subtly reveals himself to be an ordinary, helpless, vulnerable father. When he then suddenly reverts back into his gangster persona, what easily might’ve become an inappropriate attempt at comic relief is instead imbued with fear, tension and poignancy. When Bruno swiftly guns down Beck’s female captor, he doesn’t take any shots more than necessary, and is visibly shaken afterwards, because he is a person who knows what must be done although he has too much heart to not feel bad about it. It’s a very delicate balance for an actor who is not given very little screentime to explore his character’s depth, and Lellouche definitely deserves some major props for bringing so much humanity to a role that would’ve been otherwise dismissed as an expedient plot device. François Cluzet, the film’s scared, unwitting hero, deserves an Oscar nod (at least) for his no-bullshit performance as a heartbroken doctor whose love for his wife is so strong it manages to ground an entire film. For all his bravery and perseverance, he never once projects superhero-esque fearlessness, because Cluzet is too smart to think that the film is about Alexandre Beck. This is not a film that seeks to celebrate the stuntwork of its protagonist — that would be absurd; this is a film that celebrates the love between two people, and that incidentally, inadvertently provides a thrilling, suspenseful ride. Even when Cluzet does some genuinely crazy shit on a highway with a fuckton of speeding vehicles, he is tentative but insistently goal-oriented, scared but seemingly ignorant of his own fears. And when he reads his wife’s email in an Internet café, his eyes sparkle with a pure, delicate joy that is very rarely captured on film (Charlie Chaplin’s iconic smile at the end of City Lights comes to mind). That said, everyone in the supporting cast too pretty much gives uniformly excellent performances — especially Alex’s sister and her wife.

The cinematography in this film is quite wonderful. I especially liked its frequent use of single-camera tracking shots. Thrillers tend to overuse static multi-camera shots, because it is apparently the general consensus among half-wits that continuous, rapid changes in camera angles result in the effective buildup of tension and suspense. What’s also very appealing is how Canet effortlessly churns out a fuckton of throwaway visual symbols, which is something more often seen in arthouse films than in any other genre. For example, when Alexandre and Monica drive into a road tunnel, for example, the camera follows them and slowly blacks out, preparing us for a new act, and for the beginning of Alexandre’s real journey to discovering what happened to his wife. It’s a very simple thing to do, but it’s just very uncommon for thrillers (in particular) to display the same visual smarts as Tell No One does. The use of lighting here reminds me very much of another french film Irreversiblê, which too alternates between gentle, golden lighting and harsh, neon and fluorescent glares. But what’s so fantastic about Offenstein’s visual style is not just that he appropriates what Canet loves about the indie arthouse scene and seamlessly incorporates it into a fast-paced mainstream thriller, but that he uses a wide variety of different shots and effects, and opts for maximum visual impact over stylistic consistency. It makes the film less visually recognizable, but it also focuses one’s attention on the plot and characters (which are abundantly substantial), and helps us keep up with the film’s rapid pace.

Sometimes, Tell No One is admittedly almost a difficult watch in its speed, especially because there are many characters that we are expected to care and know about, and few of them have much screen time. But then again, it’s also really nice that we finally have a thriller that challenges the audience to be fast enough to catch on, and that has a pace that reflects the emotional discordancy of its protagonist. After the first 10 minutes or so, almost every piece of dialogue is important; if not to expose inner emotional tensions, then for future plot purposes. It’s a little insane, I know, but it keeps you perpetually on your feet – which is exactly what a thriller should be. There’s a lot of suspense, and there’s a constant need for emotional catharsis, but the payoffs are never as radically dramatic as lesser directors would have. Instead, Canet almost forgets about the audience (that’s a good thing here) make his world believable. For all its rapidity, the film’s speed never eclipses its important, humane moments. Canet is a director who understands the need for space, and deals with his characters’ emotions with grace, delicacy and finesse. When the film opens, he dedicates a substantial amount of time to small talk, because he doesn’t really think that heart-stopping action can be the main point of any film. He gives Alexandre as much time as possible to reflect on his life and his love for his wife. He gives Margot ample time to wordlessly reciprocate that. He gives Monica and her wife ample time to carve out individual identities. He never rushes them at all, because he knows that this will only be a special film if it is visibly driven by character and not by plot — and it is a very, very special one indeed.

Criticisms would probably be directed to many of the films unanswered questions: Will they ever explain Laurentin’s death to his wife? Does she already know his plans? Will blame Margot for his death? How will Margot live with that? But to get caught up in questions would severely diminish the point of the film. Canet opts to dispense with the questions, because he doesn’t want to make a film about moral ambiguity; he wants to make a film that celebrates love. It’s a very romantic gesture, and some would find it overly sentimental, but I’m a sucker for sweet things.

Ultimately, Tell No One isn’t a particularly deep film, and it is firmly grounded by the love between two people – something that has been worn of its novelty since the dawn of literature. But it does have an engaging premise, powerful performances, a mindblowingly complex plot, a brilliant director and a great crew to boot.  I haven’t watched Canet’s Little White Lies yet, so I don’t know how bad his ‘bad’ gets (the film was something of a critical bomb) but I mean, even if Tell No One were to remain his only good film, Canet would still have a place among the new generation of film greats.

KevinScale Rating: 5/5

FILM REVIEW: Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats)

Written/Directed/Edited By: Xavier Dolan

Starring: Xavier Dolan as Francis, Niels Schneider as Nicolas, Monia Chokri as Marie

I plan on gushing relentlessly about this film afterwards, so I’ll get the bad stuff out of the way first. Like most contemporary art films, Heartbeatsis occasionally weighed down by crowded, over-enthusiastic stylistic flourishes that sometimes border on tiresome. In the first half, slow motion is used hypnotically to hypersensualize Nicolas, the enigmatic sexual core of the film, and to underscore subtle ripples of tension that would’ve been overlooked in real-time. The excessive use of slow motion here is not only endearing in its overt poeticism, but also makes for some awesome LOL moments. In the second half, though, the use of slow motion stops being cute and starts becoming irritating, and comes across as a half-baked attempt at stylistic consistency that never succeeds at becoming more than a self-indulgent pretension. The slo-mo sex scenes are particularly aimless. The use of saturated neon lighting in the post-coital bedroom scenes immediately recalls Cam Archer’s Wild Tigers I Have Known, but while Archer knowingly uses it to create a separate space for Malcolm Stumpf’s most intimate confessions, Dolan simply uses it to make his film prettier. The script could’ve appropriated Bergman-esque candor to give these scenes more emotional weight and relevance (as they are, they don’t add much at all), but instead Dolan insists on homogenizing Heartbeats with pensive, wordless ambiguity, which is a decision that falls flat here. The use of flashing lights in the club scene when Marie and Francis are staring at a celebratory Nicolas begins too as something interesting, but the sheer excess of its application causes the scene to descend firmly into nausea territory. I mean, I really appreciated its use over the Marie/Francis stills, but it mostly just made a long, redundant scene an irritating, long, redundant one. The main plot is interspersed with various ‘confessional’ scenes (they’re hardly as intimate as Dolan would like to think), and a lot of them are excessively long and bewilderingly redundant. For example, one ‘confessor’ describes the entire Kinsey scale (wrongly, I might add), and the movie just progresses nonchalantly to the next scene. There is no punchline, no explanation, no practical use and no emotional relevance. Mostly, I’m a fan of non-explanations — but only when the script is already intelligent enough to hint at some kind of depth. In such scenes, the script is as superficial as the direction, and that’s inexcusable. Much of the film’s flaws must be attributed to Dolan; although he has much to convey and has demonstrated the ability to do so in a marvelous manner, his stylistic sensibilities are half-baked and his understanding of infatuation — which the movie depends on for its depth — is unimpressive. That said, Dolan was 19 years old when he did this film. NINETEEN. This is incredible, considering how much I like this film.

For starters, the acting here is absolutely superb. Xavier Dolan’s Francis reminds me a lot of Peter Dinklage’s Oscar-worthy turn as Finbar McBride in Thomas McCarthy’s The Station Agent, in that both of them are extremely complex, challenging creations that never reach out to the audience, and that bravely keep their emotions in check. Francis is child-like, awkward, self-aware and needy, but he is also ridiculously adorable, stylish and confident. He is tactful enough to be reserved in his affection towards Nicolas in front of Marie, but is brimming with enough adolescent angst to be angry at himself for it. He is mature enough to know what he wants, but not mature enough to accept it when things don’t go his way. Marie is a comparatively accessible character; she shamelessly goes for what she wants and isn’t self-aware enough to disguise her intentions like Francis. She is comically prudish, and wears pearls and vintage dresses for extra class cred, but isn’t actually classy enough to hold up her dignity like she can her immaculate hair bun. Niels Schneider’s Nicolas, who is casual, confident, cultured and effortlessly sexy, is a stunning exercise in subtlety. There are so many scenes when Nicolas could’ve potentially become an arrogant asshole, but Schneider takes care to never cross that threshold. Throughout the entire film, and even after he nonchalantly ‘breaks up’ with Marie and Francis, Nicolas is always sympathetic and always loveable. That’s an incredible feat for an actor. Anne Dorval, who makes a particularly memorable cameo as Nicolas’ bohemian mother, is quite magnificent too. She curses, flirts, leaps from self-conscious pity to casual abandon, and offers a brief peek into uncharted depth, all in the span of under 3 minutes. Her lines, to Dolan’s credit, are jaw-droppingly incredible. While Viola Davis’ similarly short cameo in Doubt had her spew out unmemorable lines in a memorable way, Dorval spits out excellent turns of phrases that are so inadvertently, insidiously powerful that they linger in the corners of Francis’ mind until the near-end of the film.

But enough about the acting; can we just talk about the magnificence of Xavier Dolan’s direction? The sheer range of his influences is incredible — and made even more impressive by his age. His predilection for dramatic romanticization harkens back to indie Gus Van Sant circa My Own Private Idaho, his employment of music and wordless ambiguity is derivative of Sofia Coppola, his inventive use of the camera is an obvious product of watching Jean-Luc Godard films, and his use of saturated colours reeks of Pedro Almodovar. AND HE’S ONLY NINETEEN. *swoon*

One of my favourite scenes is the one where where Nicolas and Francis laugh at Marie’s retirement after they flirt over marshmallows, not least because its use of dramatic irony is utterly stunning. Nicolas laughs because of Marie’s prudishness, and Francis laughs because of her jealousy; but in that moment when they’re laughing together, the reasons don’t matter — what matters is that their laughter functions as an assertion of solidarity. Meanwhile, the audience laughs because of the tentative awkwardness in Francis’ laughter. Towards the end of the film, we realize an even bigger irony that makes our initial reaction to this scene seem silly. SO MUCH GOING ON — and I think this scene pretty much sums up what I love about this film. Dolan employs simple, often even cliché film elements, and uses them as springboards to explore the inherent tensions and assumptions in relationships, bestowing them with new depth and significance. And while his scenes don’t actually provide any groundbreaking insights into human nature, they do much to expose the absurdity of our desires and the distorting lens through which we gawk at the subject of our infatuations. It’s not a particularly deep move on Dolan’s part, but it does make for good entertainment with an added dimension of satisfactory depth. I mean, I do appreciate films that are intellectual in both execution and content (RE: Certified Copy, The Silence), but such films are often solemn and inaccessible, and descend (for some) too much into philosophical meditation, and rarely provide as much fun as Dolan does here.

There have been many accusations directed at Heartbeats about its unoriginality, especially since many artsy gay male filmmakers (yes, Dolan is gay) tend to incorporate a similar brand of narrative disjunction, stylistic beauty and surrealist excess into films about sexuality and love. Of course, Dolan by far seems to be the most promising, but he is undoubtedly in the line of a genre with distinct conventions, and some are bound to find Heartbeats an uninspired rehash of pre-established conventions. I have much to say about this, because I think Dolan’s use of clichés is deliberate and self-knowing. Wild Tigers I Have Known, an extremely similar film, incorporates incoherent, near-irrelevant pixellated shots of children swimming and close-ups of tigers, mostly because it looks pretty and fills up space. Heartbeats, on the other hand, never once feels incoherent. It takes arthouse clichés and gives them meaning; it takes empty stylistic flourishes and fills them up with unrequited longing. This, of course, is supposed to be a parallel to how Heartbeats as a movie exposes and explores relationship dynamics. To be fair, I don’t think Dolan does all this very well, but I attribute this inadequacy to Dolan’s hitherto inability to harness his true potential, rather than to his general inadequacy as a filmmaker. Perhaps I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps my doing so is premature and unjustified, but the self-parodying highs of this film are much too brilliant for me to think that I’m underestimating his intelligence.

A lot of criticism has also been directed towards the superficiality of the characters and plot premise, although I think the former exists mostly only because critics tend to be dissatisfied with characters that don’t smother us in their personality and troubles. Francis and Marie are both characters that never quite reach out to the audience, because they want the audience to reach out to them. The protagonists of Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere are both equally emotionally stunted, and critics have lashed out at them too for it — but their introverted lack of expression does not in any way mean that they don’t feel and think as we do. Just because there is no confrontational, confessional scene where they divulge every inch of their composition, does not mean that they have no depth. In Heartbeats, character depth is something that is explored (albeit tangentially) by subtleties in the actors’ facial expressions and in the insidiously powerful scriptwriting, even if this is not particularly apparent. Moving on. I can’t defend the weakness of the premise, but I do think that Heartbeats exemplifies how a film with an awful premise, if well-executed, can still be a good one. I too was skeptical about a film revolving around a love triangle, but Heartbeats is poetic, sensitive, delicate and witty enough to make an impact.

Generally, I’m quite skeptical towards new queer cinema, because the films produced are almost always excessively campy, self-indulgent and aimlessly outlandish (RE: Wild Tigers I Have Known, Were The World Mine, Shortbus). Dolan too occasionally has moments of excess, but he also has a rare (for gay male filmmakers) appreciation for subtlety and depth. Here’s hoping he’ll move forward in an appropriate direction and make new queer cinema something worth caring about.

KevinScale Rating: 4/5