FILM REVIEW: LA CHINOISE

In 1960, Jean Luc Godard burst onto the cinema landscape with his groundbreaking debut film Breathless, a huge critical and commercial success that ushered in the influential French New Wave momement.  One can make the argument that from his debut film onwards, Godard's 1960s work defined the entire turbulent decade.  Indeed, Godard has an astonishing 12 films from the 1960s in the prestigious Criterion Collection, which is perhaps the most respected DVD/Blu Ray distributor of classic and important contemporary films.

Jean Luc Godard

As the 1960s came to an end, Godard’s work became more experimental and politically radical.  Godard didn’t want to only entertain audiences; instead, he wanted to engage viewers in an active and cerebral manner.  As events such as the Vietnam War and the 1968 student protest movements dominated the social and political climate, Godard felt that cinema had to actively address these issues.  This led Godard to start making politically radical films such as Weekend, La Chinoise, and a series of works known collectively as the Dziga Vertov Group films.

La Chinoise is Godard’s most politically incisive work.  With its examination of Marxism and the student protest movement, La Chinoise is Godard’s ultimate manifesto on the politics of the 1960s.  It takes the same vibrant color palette of his less political films, such as Pierrot le fou and Made in U.S.A., and places it within a story of student revolutionaries in France during the late 1960s.  Most of La Chinoise takes place in a single apartment shared by a group of young students who are deeply dissatisfied with the government.

La Chinoise translates to the Chinese, alluding to the fascination that 1960s student intellectuals had with the ideas of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution in China.  These students were deeply influenced by Mao’s leadership role in the revolt of the proletariat class against the bourgeoisie.  Throughout La Chinoise, we see the students reciting from Mao’s Little Black Book, and even dressing in the traditional dark blue clothing of the Chinese peasant revolutionaries. 

Another important thinker that the students are influenced by is Karl Marx, who espoused a similar critique about the dialectical struggle between the proletariat and the elite classes.  However, while the students spend their days studying the works of Marx and Mao, Godard ultimately views their actions with disdain and skepticism.  For Godard, the students are hypocrites because while they talk about oppression and exploitation, they never actually leave their apartment to engage with the outside population that they claim to want to help.

Instead, as Godard reveals, the students spend their days isolated from the wider society, entertaining themselves with theatrical games.  In one scene, a student stands in front of the other students, reading aloud from the works of Marx.  The seated students holler and yell at the standing student, as if he was an actor performing for them.  Godard emphasizes this theatrical aspect of the scene further by panning back and forth from a distance between the standing and seated students, as if the viewer was yet another spectator of this grand theatrical production. 

In another scene, one of the students states directly that the Vietnam War is a performance made up of different actors, with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam as the three main players.  For these students, politics is just a form of distraction, or a way to entertain themselves without having to face the real world.

Thus, Godard ultimately views the students’ activities as being meaningless.  For Godard, it is futile to endlessly discuss political issues without taking any action.  And when the students do finally decide to take action, the result is equally misguided, as they ultimately resort to violence.

La Chinoise is a biting indictment of the deep gap which can exist between action and thought.  The students in La Chinoise espouse revolutionary thoughts, but their actions do not reflect this.  They ultimately do not succeed because in the end, they are members of the same class that they are trying to overthrow—the elite, bourgeois class.  Marx argued that a revolution must be carried out from the bottom up, as happened during the Cultural Revolution in China, not from the top up, as the students in La Chinoise are attempting to do. 

For Godard, bourgeois cinema seeks only to entertain, just as the students in La Chinoise seek to entertain themselves with theatrical games.  Instead, from the late 1960s and throughout the rest of his career, Godard sought to create a form of cinema that actively engages audiences, and forces them to view films in a new light.  Perhaps this is why many have chosen to ignore Godard’s wide output of great work after the 1960s, and to focus instead only on his earlier, more accessible films.  La Chinoise was Godard’s first film to completely divorce itself from the bounds of traditional narrative filmmaking, and to point cinema in a new, innovative direction.

FILM REVIEW: SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Olivier Assayas has always been fascinated with the youth and revolutionary movements of the 1970s, a period after the 1968 worldwide student protest movements which had a lasting impact in Europe.  In his previous two films Cold Water and Carlos, Assayas explored how the turbulent political and social events of the 1960s and 1970s influenced the lives of his various protagonists, whether they were young, idealistic teenagers, or infamous terrorists. 

In his latest film Something in the Air (Après mai), Assayas continues this exploration of revolutionary movements with an autobiographical story about a young man living in 1970s France.  Perhaps because Assayas is more at peace with himself, the frustration and nihilism of Cold Water and Carlos has been replaced by a more optimistic and blissful tone in Something in the Air.

The French title of the film, Après mai, translates to “after May,” referring to the May 1968 student protest movement in France, a major event in which students joined with laborers to stage a strike which brought the economy to a standstill.  The protagonist of Something in the Air is Gilles (Clément Métayer), a student in the early 1970s who joins a group of classmates in revolutionary activities to protest the corrupt activities of the French government.  All of their actions are influenced by the May 1968 protest movement, but throughout the film, Gilles struggles between his commitment to his political beliefs, and his artistic endeavors as a painter, and eventually as a filmmaker.

Indeed, this is the central theme of Something in the Air—the conflict between political conviction and the more individualistic path of the artist.  Gilles finds himself more drawn to the world of painting and the arts, while his friends drift steadily further into more dangerous political militancy.  

Eventually, as in Jean Luc-Godard’s film La Chinoise, the political activities of Gilles’ friends lead them to contemplate an act of violence.  Gilles, on the other hand, decides to devote his time to the arts.  For Assayas, what began as youthful idealism for French students during the 1970s ultimately leads to disillusionment. 

Gilles’ first girlfriend Laure (Carol Combes) becomes enmeshed in the political activites of the 1970s, culminating in a hallucinatory scene in which she imagines herself being engulfed in flames.  Later in the film, as Gilles attends a festival for experimental films, he imagines seeing Laure on-screen in a beautiful, sun-drenched field.  The message is clear—in the increasingly disjointed realm of political disillusionment, Laure’s fate is violent and hopeless, while in the realm of the arts, Laure finds herself in a world of beauty and optimism.  For Assayas, art in its purest form is free from all political didacticism, and is universal and unchanging in its eternal search for beauty and the truth. 

The very aesthetics of Something in the Air reflects this search for beauty in its truest sense.  Assayas hired non-professional actors for the film because he wanted to avoid the artificiality and theatricality of more professionally trained actors.  Instead, the performances in Something in the Air feel real and honest, resulting in a naturalism that is almost startling in its authenticity.  In an interesting subplot, the filmmaking collective that Gilles' new girlfriend Christine (Lola Créton) becomes involved in proposes to do what Assayas himself did in Something in the Air—to film the laborers in their natural settings without hiring any professional actors.

Similarly, Something in the Air is filmed in a straightforward, almost documentary manner, as the camera becomes a non-intrusive observer of the events it is capturing.  Many scenes are filmed from long and medium long shots, giving the actors a comfortable distance so that they can perform more naturally and without being aware of the presence of the camera.  This results in performances which feel natural and non-imposed upon. 

At one point, as Gilles attends a screening of political films, an audience member confronts the filmmakers about why they are not using a more radical, experimental style to tell their story.  The filmmakers respond by saying they want to make films whose form does not conform to the alienating, sometimes incomprehensible style of what they call “bourgeois filmmaking.”  Instead, they want to make films that mirror the real world in its truest form, just as Assayas himself is attempting to do in Something in the Air. 

Ultimately, with Something in the Air, Assayas is trying to return cinema to a more naturalistic realm, one which is free from political dogmatism and the constraints of traditional narrative filmmaking.  

The character of Gilles does not essentially change from the beginning of the film to the end, as is required for more traditionally oriented Hollywood style narrative films, in which the protagonist has to have some sort of character arc or encounter obstacles to overcome.  This is a very individualistic and even imperialistic form of filmmaking, one in which the central theme is that of the individual himself or herself, free from any help from the wider society, ultimately triumphing over and controlling his or her environment. 

It is interesting to note that many Western critics have complained that they couldn’t identify or empathize with any of the characters in Something in the Air because they weren’t portrayed as being individuals, or as being indistinguishable from the other characters.  This was done intentionally by Assayas to confront the more Westernized, individualistic form of cinema, and to show that we should view ourselves as being more attached to the collective environment, than as being individuals isolated from each other. 

This is also a more subtle way for Assayas to come to terms with the utopian ideas of the 1970s, in which the youth envisioned a future society where everyone was connected to each other in a universal collective.  This is an idea that still exists today, as revealed in the recent Occupy movement, and one which will continue to exist as new generations of youth struggle to build a more optimistic future.

FILM REVIEW: NIGHT AND DAY

The Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo has always been influenced by the works of French New Wave director Eric Rohmer, so it’s only fitting that he would eventually make a film set in France.  That film turned out to be 2008’s Night and Day, a brilliant and witty comedy of manners.

Night and Day takes the European feel of his Korean set films and places them in Paris, which was the setting for many seminal films from the French New Wave era, such as Suzanne’s Career, Masculin Feminin, and The Mother and the Whore.  Like these films, Night and Day is a nuanced and cerebral film that contains long, extended shots of dialogue set among the cafes and apartments of Paris.  Indeed, the city of Paris becomes a third character in the film, one which both constrains and liberates the central characters.

Night and Day is about Seong-nam (Kim Yeong-ho), a middle-aged, married painter living in Korea who gets in trouble with the law when he is caught smoking marijuana.  He flees Korea to live in a hostel in Paris, where he meets and falls in love with Yu-jeong (Park Eun-hye), an attractive, much younger art student.  A moral dilemma ensues as Seong-nam finds himself steadily more obsessed with Yu-jeong, while trying to remain faithful to his wife, whom he calls every night. 

Unlike the more romantic version of Paris portrayed in American films like Midnight In Paris and Henry and June, Night and Day presents a more realistic and grounded portrait of the French city.  Hong Sang-soo is more interested in exploring the everyday, mundane life of Paris, carefully observing Parisians in the park exercising or buying medicine at a drugstore, than in presenting an overly sentimentalized portrait of Paris as a city filled with bright lights and romantic encounters. 

Night and Day was Hong Sang-soo's first film shot in digital video as opposed to film, creating a more documentary-like look.  This resulted in the more naturalistic tone of Paris that Hong Sang-soo was going for.

The only time we see anything close to the cliché of Paris as a city of lovers is when Hong Sang-soo films a Parisian couple on a bench kissing, but this scene is shot from a distance and in the dull brightness of the day, removing the scene from any romantic connotations. 

Indeed, virtually all the outdoor scenes of Paris are shot during the daytime, giving the film a more prosaic view of the Paris streets.  Hong Sang-soo further distances himself from shooting the City of Lights during the more romantic nighttime when a character tells Seong-nam that it is difficult to distinguish night from day during the summertime, due to the long duration of the days. 

This inability to tell night from day also symbolizes the disconnect that Seong-nam feels as an expatriate living in a foreign country.  Not only is he separated from his wife in Paris, he also becomes separated from his desires in his pursuit of what he realizes is an unobtainable woman.  The art student that he chases, Yu-jeong, even tells him at one point that she cannot have a relationship with him due to his marital status.  Paris is no longer a mythical city where romance blooms for Seong-nam; instead it has become an emotional prison.

Thus, Hong Sang-soo is not only demystifying the overly romanticized portrait of Paris which so often occurs in American films.  He is also revealing the futility and messiness of relationships, where love is possible, but not without real-life consequences and emotional turmoil.  This deromanticization of love is a topic that Eric Rohmer also explored, most famously in his “Six Moral Tales” films. 

Both Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo use film as a means of portraying male/female relationships in a more realistic manner.  They know that oftentimes the desires of men do not match those of women, and vice versa.  This central fallacy of love leads more often to heartbreak and misunderstanding than eternal bliss, as portrayed in Hollywood romantic films. 

Night and Day is like an existential version of the Hollywood classic An American in Paris, minus its lavish musical numbers and brightly lit shots of Paris.  Indeed, by making his main character a painter and a foreigner in Paris, Hong Sang-soo seems to be paying tribute to the similar struggling painter and expatriate in An American in Paris.  In place of music numbers, Night and Day has long, clever scenes of dialogue, which at times feel like music numbers themselves with their elaborate back and forth banter, and inventive wordplay.  In place of the ebullient Gene Kelly, Night and Day has a brooding, emotionally awkward protagonist. 

The post-modern cinematic simulacrum has come full-circle—French New Wave filmmakers paid tribute to classic Hollywood films, Hong Sang-soo and other members of the Asia New Wave paid tribute to French New Wave filmmakers, and now Hong Sang-soo is paying tribute back to Hollywood classics. 

While the Korean character in Night and Day doesn’t quite fit in with his new Parisian surroundings, Hong Sang-soo’s filmmaking style is a perfect match for his new French setting.  Like French New Wave pioneers such as Eric Rohmer and Jean Luc Godard, Hong Sang-soo is able to make a film in Paris which doesn’t gloss over and overly romanticize the mythical city. 

Instead, like his European counterparts, Hong Sang-soo has made a sophisticated, intelligent film that presents a well-rounded and realistic portrayal of the eternal emotional dance between men and women.