Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

La Frontiere de l'aube  (2008)

The French title of Philippe Garrel’s film in competition here is La Frontière de l’aube; the English translation in the Cannes guide is Frontier of Dawn, but the subtitle at the beginning of the film read, The Dawn of the Shore. Neither title gives any indication of what this film is: a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge.

I have to wonder if those critics who dismissed James Gray’s Two Lovers earlier in week will bother to grapple will the similarities between that star-studded American production and Garrel’s infinitely cooler, warm-toned black-and-white capital-A work of Art. On paper, they’re essentially the same film: a Jewish photographer falls for a difficult, substance-dependent blonde; even though that relationship is clearly doomed from the start, it haunts him and prevents him from happily settling into a domestic routine with a still-beautiful but less troubled and exciting brunette. The big difference, at least narratively speaking: in Gray’s film, as the director told Andrew O’Hehir, the protagonist ultimately “does choose life.” Spoiler alert! The resolution to Garrel’s story is the diametric opposite.

Movie star Carole (Laura Smet) is living half a world away from her filmmaker husband when she meets Francois (Garrel’s son Louis, his eyes dark, as if eyelinered naturally), a photographer who comes to her hotel to take her picture. It’s not clear if Francois is a journalist or an artist or what, but the project seems to take him weeks to complete, and by the second photo shoot, Francois and Carole have fallen into bed. They pledge undying love, but the sharp violin/piano jazz-horror score alerts us right away that things aren’t going to work out. Gin-swilling serial suicide attempter Carole seems destined to go the way of Frances Farmer, and though she seems convinced that Francois can save her from herself, he can’t stop what’s coming for long.

After Carole’s husband comes home suddenly and just misses catching Francois in her bed, Francois leaves and, despite Carole’s pleas, stoically refuses to come back. Carole’s heartbreak leads to a swerve into Shock Corridor territory. Meanwhile, Francois takes up with the lovely but fairly normal (and thus comparatively boring) Eve. A year after Carole violently exits the picture, Eve becomes pregnant; just as Francois has accepted that he’s about to become a father, the spectre of Carole comes back to try and drag his happy home life into the grave.

Perhaps because there are more than a few members of the press corps who could be described as socially awkward Jewish males, there’s been a lot of attention paid to the fact that in Two Lovers, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character is able to push Joaquin Phoenix’s as far as she does because she embodies his bad girl shiksa fantasy. When in that film, the nice Jewish boy threatens to abandon his family and local community in order to run off with the dangerous blonde instead of settling for the sensible match of his same background and faith, it might be a mistake and it might be a dissapointment to his parents, but it’s hardly a tragedy of biblical proportions.

Garrel’s film takes the mystical threat of the shiksa far more seriously, literally turning her into something out of a horror-movie as the film morphs from classical, almost slight romance to a serious meditation on love, faith and eternity. Garell tells us twice that Francois is Jewish––once directly, once implicitly (Francois thinks talk of concentration camp survivors if fit for pillow talk; amazingly, Carole agrees). Taking place in Paris, far outside Two Lovers’ world of Brighton Beach second-and third-generation immigrants, this information only seems significant after the final scene. At the risk of giving away more than I’d like to, the film’s denouement requires its Jewish protagonist to believe in an afterlife.

When confessing his bind to a friend, the friend has no sympathy for Francois’ inability to concentrate on his impending nuptials and push Carole out of his head. “Bourgeois happiness,” says the friend. “Scary, isn’t it?” Apparently, it is–it’s such a prominent fear that it’s become the subject of two films in competition at Cannes in the same year. I like both but they’re such stylistic polar opposites that I imagine that most critics will champion one and bash the other. For me, the borderline-genre elements of the Garrel film make it the more interesting specimen. There are shots in this film’s second half that are scarier than anything I’ve seen in a horror film in recent years––without the aid of any effect more special than a basic optical print––and simultaneously, incredibly moving in their invocation of a love that won’t die. Or, at the very least, refuses to abide by traditional boundaries of love and death.

Quentin Tarantino gave a two-hour chat about his films today in Cannes. I typed as fast as I could. Please excuse any typos that I didn’t catch.

2:30 pm: One of the things that’s been slightly blown out of proportion is that I gained in my film knowledge at Video Archives. No — i was HIRED at Video Archives Because I was a film expert.

Influences starting out: Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Howard Hawks. Brian DePalma was like my rock star. I spent a year and a half going over theTV Guide looking for movies by Hawks. They played 80% of his sound films on LA TV.

I would recommend that anyone who wants to direct join an acting class. That should be your first stop. If you do a scene with a class member, you then direct the scene. Everything I learned about writing, too, I learned by acting. I use acting adjectives when I write. Because the whole idea of acting is to get lost. It also taught me about the camera. I took a class in camera technique for actors with James Best, from Shock Corridor. Well, in teaching me acting for the camera, he started teaching me about the frame. So then when I watched the movies I loved, like Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, with a little more knowledge of camera, I could see what those guys were doing. And once you start doing that, it’s only a short step until you’re composing shots of your own.

2:46: I did this kind of silly comedy called My Best Friends Birthday. I borrowed a 16mm camera from an exploitation filmmaker, funded by Video Archives. Cut to the next 3 years, we’re working on it on the weekends. At the equipment houses, we’d rent stuff on Friday and it would be a one day rental until Monday, and we’d just shoot shoot shoot, all weekend! I gotta tell you, I think trying to make a feature yourself, with nothing, is the best film school you can have. More than going to classes and begging to use their crappy equipment…if you took the money for film school and said, “I’ll take that money and make feature,” that will be your film school. If you’re me, you’ll throw it away, but you’ll have made a feature. If you’re Robert Rodriguez, you’ll be a star!

[On attending the Sundance Workshop before Reservoir Dogs] I go to Sundance, Reservoir Dogs is already set to go, we’ll be leaving Sundance and going into production. I liked long takes, I was a huge Godard fan. So I do one of the scenes from the movie, the one where Mr Pink is like, “Is taht a fucking set up, or what?!?” I set it all up in long takes. They tell me at Sundance, we want you to get out of this whatever YOU want out of it.” So I do. John Amiel, Monte Hellmann were there…and they hated my scene. Stephen Goldblatt, the cinematographer, said, “Not only is this horrible, but what’s really frightening is, you’re going into production. If you do this, they will fire your ass.” They have a meeting with me, and they just start talking about how I can’t do what I did. Like, “We ALL liked Godard, but enough!”

So I get my ass reamed, and take a long solitary walk. And I go, you know what? I liked my scene. It’ wasn’t like they were mad at me for experimenting, it was like they thought I didn’t know any better. So after dealing with all that, they leave. The next group of resource directors come in, and it’s Terry Gilliam, Volker Schlorndorf )sp?) and Stanley Donen. And Terry comes in and goes, “Ahhh! Your scene, just great!” And never in my life have I experienced black to white, just like that. And Wolker comes in and was like, “Oh, our little genius!” And I took another walk, and I was like, “you know what? That’s going to be my career. People are either gonna really like it or really hate it, and that’s the way it’s fucking gonna be.”

They show the first scene from Reservoir Dogs.

DePalma always used 360s to emphasize love. I don’t use it for that reason. But as time has gone on, I’ve had a million directors come to me afterwards, whenever they put a bunch of people around a table, they want to circle the camera aroudn it, and they say, “We can’t do it — it’s Reservoir Dogs! You’ve taken it from us!”

There were 360s before, but they weren’t so close. Here you actually lose the film for 10 seconds or so, you go to black on someone’s back and come out on Buscemi’s face on the other side of the table. You do that enough times and it all comes out okay. But that was also a case where being in the scene was crucial for me to understand what’s going on. If I had just been in the crew, I never would have known the vibe in that circle. And I knew I could never break that circle. And I was not getting up once we started. And I could monitor how everyone was doing. I could gauge the equilibrium. If I wanted to end the day w/a couple of close-ups, I knew who to go to, who had it going on

I did 2 weeks rehearsal on RD, and it was te best thing I ever did, because it’s an acting movie. I said, “If we do a 2 week rehearsal, this is going to save us so much time.” And it actually was. But one of the things that was so great about that rehearsal: we became the dogs. For the entire 2 weeks, I was worried abut being fired, for the simple fact that I had never been good at anything before. EVERYTHING had been a big build up to a letdown, so I thought it was too good to be true. “oh man… do they let people like me make movies?” But after the rehearsal period, I knew that I couldn’t get fired, because the other actors wouldn’t have let it happen, because we were the dogs.

3:06: When I started writing, when I was in acting school, I would do scenes from movies I saw. I didn’t have access to scripts, but I’ve always had a really good memory. So I’d see a movie, and I’d remember the dialogue, so I’d write it down, and anything I couldn’t remember, I started filling in. And I started filling it in more, and more, and more…and eventually a kid in my class said, “Hey QT, you’re a pretty good writer.” See, I had done a scene from Marty, and had added a monologue. I added a monologue to Paddy Chayefsky. And they guy got a copy of the real play and was like, “Where’s that monologue? It’s as good as anything Paddy Chayevsky wrote.”

3:12: [difference between Reservoir Dogs opening scene, credits, second scene, where Tim Roth is bleeding in the back of the car] You know they had breakfast, you know that something drastic has happened between the two. And now you’re just playing catch-up.

I wanted to show that as much fun as the guys are in their suits and the cool things they say, the violence is very real. Bullets aren’t movie bullets. It’s real. If you’re shot in the stomach, your gastric juices are released, it’s an incredibly painful experience, it’s a slow death and it’s painful all the way. So I was going to try to dramatize that. So we were like, “How do you do that?” And we just went for it.

If I had any inspiration for that scene, at the time I was into that moment in Casualties of War, when the black soldier gets shot and Sean Penn is trying to him in the helicopter. There’s a tremendous amount of tenderness there. I even stole a line––Sean Penn says, “Look at my eyes, I’m gonna hypnotize you.” I stole that.

Show “Royale with Cheese” scene from Pulp Fiction. You can hear Quentin laughing at Sam Jackson.

There are 3 things that I tend to do a lot. One is that I make things funny that aren’t funny. But another is that I do these big huge scenes. I tend to go someplace and you’re there for 20 minutes and they’re little movies onto themselves. Usually there’s tension and it’s growing, and usually it explodes. I’m a big fan of setpieces.

I had never been anywhere. I was broke through almost all my tow, I didn’t make this until I was 29. I never had been anywhere. So when we finished RD and we showed it to Sudnace, I go, “I’m going to Europe! And I’m not going for 2 fucking weeks, I’m going for the whole summer!” When Cannes happened in May, I just took the train from Amsterdam. That was my European time, of just living, writing Pulp Fiction, going grocery shopping and all that stuff. But naturally being an American, I kept putting everything under a pop cultre microscope, and the things that were funny were the things that were different. So Vincent did that, too.

This is where my computer battery died. I continued to take notes by hand, but obviously this guy talks too fast to really keep up that way.The one memorable moment that I was able to get down pretty much verbatim: the moderator asked him why he likes to use pop music in his movies instead of original score. And Quentin said…

I just don’t trust any composer to really do it. Who the **** is this guy coming in here, putting his shit over my movie? What if I don’t like it? And if I was in a situation like that, chances are, I WOULDN’T like it. **** that!

Under discussion:

Synecdoche, New York  (2008)

Che  (2008)

I didn’t see Che. Last night was the first night since I’ve been here that I had an opportunity to go to bed at a reasonable hour and, after a week of dozing off in screenings on three hours of fitful sleep, I took it. Regrets? Reading the recaps and reviews, I have a few. I mean, if Anne Thompson is right, the Cannes cut will, like the Cannes cut of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, never again see the light of day. Comparing Che to that film and others which were brought to Cannes straight out of the oven and half-raw, she blogs:

The good news: there is plenty of fine material here to be edited into one releasable long dramatic feature…One thing is likely: it will not be released as it was seen here. And it will not sell overnight–unless a distrib promises to help Soderbergh to find his movie. It seems that Peter Rice of Fox Searchlight, Daniel Battsek of Miramax and James Schamus of Focus knew that they didn’t need to see the movie before they left town.

David Poland has no love for any blogger or journalist who “felt compelled to offer their opinions way too early,” thus increasing the chances that “Soderbergh cuts the film under Cannes pressure - even though there is no consistent correlation between Cannes response and US release success.” But David was in L.A. He didn’t have the experience of being placated with a perfunctory sack lunch in between Che chunks; he didn’t wait for an after party shuttle that never arrived. He’s suggesting from afar that critics actually take a day to sort out how the external factors surrounding the screening made the feel from what they think about what was on the screen.

It’s a nice thought, and maybe in a perfect world or another time, but at Cannes in 2008, where no one’s buying anything but IFC and the stuff they’ve bought would be unreleasable for a different studio (I love Summer Hours, Un Conte de Noel and The Pleasure of Being Robbed, but these are not highly commercial films), 100,000 people have spent the better part of two weeks waiting for a breakthrough. They didn’t get it, and unless Synecdoche, New York turns out a lot better than early word would suggest, they’re not going to get it. People are tired, and just submitting to the Che experience was apparently quite an ordeal. This is an emotional situation, and the reaction came loud and it came quickly. Maybe that’s not how it should be. But it is what it is.

In related news, Benicio Del Toro and Steven Soderbergh are about to do a photo call and press conference. I’ll post what I can before I have to run off to wait in line for the Quentin Tarantino presentation.