Last Tango in Lille

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color begins with a discussion of Marivaux’s The Virtuous Orphan: Or, The Life of Marianne in a high school classroom in Lille. The very sizing up and choosing of potential romantic partners constitutes the nature of the discussion, which eventually brings up the question of free will or predestination. Of course this is the foreshadowing for the seemingly fortuitous initial encounter between Emma (Lea Seydoux), an artist and art student and Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos), a high school student. When we first spot Adele in a series of crosscuts, she seems to move around like a random atom, her progress in life only subject to her preternatural appetites, which include boys, girls and food. However, the conflict between free will and determinism quickly gives way to a debate over appetite versus taste—which can, when you think of it, be looked at as one refinement of the earlier question. As Adele's appetite for women drives her to Lea, the gourmand turns into a bit of a gourmet with Sartre’s famous dichotomy between existence versus essence, the art of Schiele and Klimt and the films of Louise Brooks appearing as citations along the way. But is this haute cuisine, cuisine bourgeoise or merely fast food? The answer is that Blue is the Warmest Color is all three and that is what creates its daunting complexity. It’s surprising that Camille Paglia didn’t have a cameo, at least at one of the artist soirees since the eroticism of the sex between Lea and Emma dwarfs any heterosexual sex scene that has appeared in either porn or straight films. If Paglia’s Sexual Personae argued that male sexuality played a poor second fiddle to the power of the feminine drive, then Kechiche’s movie is the  graphic proof of her point. And yet this might be called the fast food element of the movie to the extent that all passion is predicated on impossibility and Kechiche’s lovers fall into a long line of tragic victims of sensibility including Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary (the eponymous Emma after whom Kechine’s character is named). Amongst the many references in the film one can’t help but think of Last Tango in Paris. Exarchopoulos has the late Maria Schneider’s lips and hair style (with a bang covering her face throughout ) and like the character Schneider played in Last Tango, Adele is a child in woman’s form. Significantly, and to the chagrin of her older more sophisticated lover, who is constantly trying to Pygmalianize her (class and class consciousness are yet one more level of concern in Kechiche’s ornate tapestry), by getting her to change her career objective to something more creative, Adele has immersed herself the field of early childhood education. Blue is the Warmest Color won the Palm D’Or and only the French could have produced such an erotic film that also is an extended philosophical discussion out of the pages of Pascal and Montaigne. The film could have been shot at the Ecole Normale Superieur. Rather than Blue is the Warmest Color the film might better titled Last Tango in Lille. But make no mistake, the delicate and complex layering and sensations of this particular confection definitely qualifies the final product as haute cuisine. The palette of emotions Exarchopolous is able to draw upon is extraordinary. Her cheek moves involuntarily in a nervous tic as she begins to fall apart. One should also note that besides Lea Seydoux’s character being named Emma, the movie takes place in the north of France which is Bovary country.

Rachmaninoff, Pachelbel, Delerue

                                                                                        Johann Pachelbel

Pachelbel’s Canon in D was the sound track for Ordinary People and then there was The Last Metro, a movie that came out the same year and featured a score by Georges Delerue that was equally haunting, though neither of these movies was to outdo David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which featured the mother of all scores which pulled heartstrings, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 in C Minor. Ordinary People was about the breakup of a marriage after the death of a child and despite the themes of loss that the music conveys within the context of the movie, the composition is clearly baroque and in fact recalls Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The Last Metro was set during the occupation of France and deals with survival. Brief Encounter, which premiered 35 years earlier, in the final days of the war, was about a romance predicated on impossibility. Ordinary People and Brief Encounter are about despair and the music, though not Wagnerian, partakes of the Liebestod, that characterizes Tristan and Isolde. The Last Metro conveys a similar yearning, yet it soars resplendently reflecting romantic transcendence rather than agony. Ordinary People can probably be credited with a revival of interest in Pachelbel. And undoubtedly Rachmaninoff  and George Delerue found new audiences because of the soundtracks for Brief Encounter and The Last Metro. But was it pure coincidence or was there something in the zeitgeist that produced two of the most memorable film scores in the same year of film history?

The Master Builder at BAM

If you didn’t know Ibsen’s The Master Builder you might at first think that the character played by John Turturro in the current production at BAM was someone who had an exaggerated sense of his self-importance. In fact, Turturro’s Solness bears an unpleasant resemblance to another architect. Robert Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, rendered by Gary Cooper in the King Vidor movie. And if we were looking for referents in contemporary culture then the sexualization of Solness’s muse Hilde Wangel (Wrenn Schmidt) and his amanuensis Kaja Fosli (Kelly Hutchinson) could easily recall Fifty Shades of Gray. Of course a helluva lot more is going on in both the play and in Andrei Belgrader’s direction, but there’s something in Ibsen that conduces to the kind of distortion that sees the romantic conception of the uncompromising artist as form of bombast and tyranny, with those surrounding him as submissives. The play can easily be turned into The Masturbator rather than The Master Builder. The very name Solness, the state of “soul ness,” sounds like an iteration from one of the great German idealist philosophers. When you step into late Ibsen, you enter the world of aspiration, in which being is trumped by the notion of becoming, and happiness is the price one pays to create  “castles in the air”—the expression Hilde uses to describe her master builder’s calling. The German word for passion is Leidenschaft and leiden means suffering, a kind of suffering that can lead to the ultimate sacrifice, the famous Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde. The recently released Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner contains scenes for a work in progress of The Master Builder that has been going on for years. It reveals another approach to the play, based upon conversation and devoid of hyperbole. Freed from the burden of melodrama, Ibsen’s play becomes as complex as say a Bergman movie.

Melancholia

Lars von Trier is a party pooper. Dunderheads don’t you get it? The whole performance at Cannes was a set up. It’s Melancholia played right before our eyes. Here he is in the limelight at Cannes, creator of Dogma, lionized with Kirsten Dunst, his star at his side, and he reprises the role she's just played in the film. He makes anti-Semitic remarks and finds himself banned from Cannes. Similarly Justine, the character Dunst plays, throws her whole life away, rejecting her marriage and the employer who has just given her a promotion to art director, at the agency at which she works— remaining loyal to the spirit of her depressive mother (Charlotte Rampling) who has instilled in her a deep and abiding hatred of life. All of this mind you while Wagner’s famed Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde plays again and again and again, underscoring the death in life which constitutes what amounts to a passion or calling for her. The lighting is spare and real and so is the message that that there is nothing, no transcendence, no life beyond the aberration known as existence—nothing except, art. The initial montage sequence is a homage to Bergman’s Persona. In Persona you are dealing with an actress who’s had a psychotic break. Freud defined melancholia as a response to loss which includes a lack of interest in the outside world. The close-ups of Dunst’s face in the early montage of Melancholia evince the shrinking from the will to live characteristic of the condition Freud describes. The  planet on a collision course with earth that constitutes the second movement of the film is called Melancholia, but it’s as if the catastrophe had already occurred to Justine before the collision ever takes place. She is suffering about something which has yet to be, a brilliant little touch on von Trier’s part  (there is another particularly brilliant directorial touch in the little piece of wedding cake on Justine’s face that precedes the breakup the marriage on the very night it’s begun). The parallels with Persona continue in part two of the film which, along with the collision, is devoted to Justine’s sister Claire. If Justine is afraid to live, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is afraid to die, but like with Bergman’s nurse and actress the roles switch and then with the big ball of destruction called Melancholia hovering overhead, Justine is exultant. She is finally in her element. As the world comes to an end, Justine becomes a latter day Grand Inquisitor, The Grand Facilitator, helping her frightened sister and nephew to die.