The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

The following is my belated February entry for Blindspots.

Jacques Demy announces the “movie”-ness of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg from its opening iris shot, a silent-era throwback that begins the film with an effervescent charm. That carries through to the credits, played when the camera tilts from its view to a shot looking straight down as people walk by carrying umbrellas. Demy further stresses the artificiality: as the credits roll, people walking under red umbrellas move across the screen one at a time in seemingly random directions (but always perpendicular to one side of the frame). Then, when the title credit flashes, Demy changes up the color-coordinated but distinct individuals with the sudden appearance of a row of people holding umbrellas of different colors. The spontaneity of movement and uniformity of color inverts, but neither arrangement is any more real than the other.

Demy plays up the immaculate, cinematic construction of the musical throughout the film, casting Cherbourg in outlandish pastel palettes of purples and greens and converting all dialogue to song. (In another bit of directorial control, Demy overdubs his actors with professional singers.) Yet for all its bright color tones and the swing of Michel Legrand’s brassy score, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg tells a decidedly downbeat story, one flecked with an honest appraisal of social constraints placed on people personally, financially and politically. Where similarly bitter subject matter for musicals has been communicated through excessively revisionist cruelty (Dancer in the Dark) or styleless vacuity (Les Misérables), Demy maintains all the elements common to the genre and, more impressively, keeps them all in sync.

A Christmas Tale

Nothing in A Christmas Tale is so bold and funny as its title, a decidedly bland arrangement of two words and an indefinite article that suggests that this is a Christmas movie comme les autres. Any such notion gets chucked out of the window in the first half-hour of this dreamy 151-minute family drama, and while it may look like your average family troubles melodrama on paper, nothing about Arnaud Desplechin could ever make an average movie.

In fact, if I look to some prior reference as a base of comparison, I would have to bypass all the saccharine holiday flicks and go straight to two clear antecedents: Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums and Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Fanny and Alexander exerted at least an indirect influence on Desplechin's prior Kings and Queen, what with its usage of ghosts to flesh out a family crisis and existential doubt, but the entire structure of Bergman's most personal opus informs A Christmas Tale, albeit tinged heavily with Anderson's deadpan sense of the dysfunctional elite.

As with the characters in both Anderson and Bergman's films, the Vuillard family is wealthy (though not nearly to the extent of the Tenenbaums or the Ekdahls), highly-educated and aloof. Desplechin opens with a shadow puppet play recounting the family's history, of a couple, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) and Junon (Catherine Deneuve, in one of her finest roles), who had a son and a daughter. The boy, Joseph, developed a rare disorder, contracted leukemia and died, leaving behind his sister, Elizabeth, as the eldest child to two younger brothers, Henri and Ivan.

We then see the two dominant members of the family in the flesh separately: Junon, who collapses in her home, and Elizabeth, who expresses her inchoate rage and misery to her husband. Desplechin flashes back six years to gather all the family in one place: a courtroom. The middle child, Henri (Mathieu Amalric, proving once again that no one can play a drunken sophisticate quite like him), has gone bankrupt, and Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, who co-starred with Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) agrees to help bail him out, on the condition that he never contact her again. We don't know why she hates him so, but a desperate Henri agrees, only to find himself shunned by the rest of the family.

Six years later, whatever animosity exists between the two siblings is but one thread in the tapestry of dysfunction: to regale you with but a fraction of feuds, secrets and pettiness besetting the Vuillard family would waste words and would have no effect on those who have not seen the film, as a mere list of names and grievances carries with it no impact. It would also place in your minds a pre-conception of the nature of the film, likely leading to a conclusion that A Christmas Tale is a film of family hijinks and loud yelling and terribly pedestrian comedy as we Americans have come to expect from holiday entertainment. But Desplechin wrings laughs from the darker moments and gives severity and depth to the lighter ones.

It's important, however, to know that Junon collapsed at the start because she suffers from the same blood disease that took her first son's life. She's a practical realist who knows how slim the odds are, yet she clearly feels something under her resignation, as she invites the entire family for Christmas, something she clearly hasn't done since they splintered six years ago. But does she invite them because she wants to see her family back together or if she just wants to comb her progeny for a possible match for her rare blood phenotype in order to receive a marrow transplant. All signs point to the latter, as everyone shows up to Abel and Junon's house with blood test results.

Desplechin loves to point out the artifice of his films: A Christmas Tale opens with that puppet show, it employs irises to highlight action and introduce characters, inserts titled chapters and features numerous scenes of characters speaking directly to the camera. There is even a moment of Henri reading a critical letter he sent to his sister that openly recalls the note left by the dead father in Kings and Queen. Yet the self-reflexivity has the opposite effect of the Brechtian alienation effect Godard so dearly loved, drawing us in closer with its trickery. The soliloquies to the camera have the effect of generating intimacy, as if they are confiding in us, yet these scenes do not stick out as theatrical because these characters are so brutally honest with each other.

Take one of the best scenes of the film, in which Henri and Junon smoke out in the snow-covered backyard. They flatly describe how they don't love each other, discussing their distaste without boring us with a list of past moments that would have no connection to the audience. Yet there is affection in their voices, as if they've become so used to sniping each other that a true love exists under their harshness. Junon later takes Henri's girlfriend, Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos, playing a wry, schadenfreude-prone version of Erland Josephson's Jewish observer Isak in Fanny) shopping and mentions that she hates Ivan's wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve's actual daughter) for taking away the child she loves and expresses approval for Faunia for taking the one she doesn't.

That sort of straight-faced contempt fuels much of the film's dark humor; Henri shows Faunia photos of his dead wife, who died in a car accident, and his girlfriend responds, "She was pretty." "Lousy driver," Henri responds, without missing a beat. Desplechin never plays up the penchant for any one of its tangled plots to lead into cloying self-pity and cheap emotional manipulation, admitting that, yes, sometimes families suck, but you've just got to laugh and keep on living.

Like Kings and Queen, A Christmas Tale is lengthy, but it never loses momentum. Desplechin structures a largely plotless airing of grievances with precision: he presents the psychological issues of Elizabeth's troubled son Paul almost like the trailer for a thriller, with quick fades to black punctuated by bursts of action. His hand-held shots are at times distinguishable from more formal shooting only by the extremity of their angles. He does not have his colleague Assayas' smoothness with the camera, but Desplechin somehow gives verisimilitude to his arty technique. Like Scorsese, he's so adept at combining style with substance that his most self-indulgent moments are inseparable from the content of the film.

I found myself moved by the ending, which is weird because I'm not entirely sure what the hell happened. Like the rest of A Christmas Tale, it's both dark and warm-hearted, not given to easy explanations and capable of finding humor, pathos and redemption in anything. Perhaps the key to unlocking the film lies near its midpoint, as Elizabeth receives a golden heart charm from a family friend, and Desplechin zooms in on it as the screen fades to a shot of the Vuillard home's exterior. It may be somewhat hollow and coated in materialistic sheen, but this family has a heart, and without it Desplechin couldn't have made one of the most strikingly original entries into one of the most overplayed genres in film.

Kings and Queen

Charting the various literary sources, mythologies, psychological studies and cinematic antecedents that inform Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen is a fool's errand, more useful in establishing the critic's own range of knowledge than linking all the influences to some narrative importance (read: I am mocking people who are smarter and more well-read than myself, which is a hell of a broad swipe). Taken as a whole, however, these influences reveal the broad size of the film's canvas, Desplechin capturing these little winks (and occasionally vital building blocks) with the same loving detail with which he photographs the mad characters of this melodrama.

Wait, let me back up. Kings and Queen cannot be so easily shoehorned into a single genre, and certainly not into a single cinematic style. At the start of the film, Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a gorgeous woman who walked out of Botticelli painting and somehow set herself up as a French bourgeoise, speaks in an interview that can only be for the audience. She presents herself as contented and blessed; she's twice-divorced but has found someone she feels is "Mr. Right." This semi-diegetic segment only reveals her capacity for self-deception, however, as her life begins to crumble as soon as the narrative properly begins.

We discover that her first husband, Pierre, impregnated her and committed suicide. Perhaps out of guilt and grief, she rarely sees the son, 10-year-old Elias, that resulted from the relationship. Her second husband, Ismaël, was unfaithful and caused her to leave. Her third, Jean-Jacques, is emotionally and physically distant but rich, which seems to be all Nora really wants from a man at the moment. As we will eventually discover, none of the three is or was ever truly her husband, and all are incompatible with Nora in some way.

The only man she ever loved without reservation is her father, Louis (Maurice Garrel), who complains of stomach pains and heads to the doctor. They operate for an ulcer but instead find cancer, and the doctors tell Nora that his days are numbered. Desplechin juxtaposes her unbridled grief over the news and the continuing trials of her father's pain with the breakdowns of her other relationships; with the latter, she maintains a regal, queenly poise throughout, emotional but collected. With the former, she can barely keep up her façade, her emotional wall breaking at inappropriate times.

The drama of Nora's story is contrasted with Desplechin's look at the current predicament of Nora's second beau, Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric). A brilliant violist, Ismaël owes 700,000 francs to the French IRS and is stirred from blast hip-hop in his apartment by two hospital staffers (whom he dubs Prospero and Caliban) who've come to take him to a mental ward. This scene is both wildly comedic and humanizing, as Desplechin and Amalric temper the abrasiveness of Ismaël's refusal to go along with the staffers with a quick look inside his apartment at a noose and Amalric's deflated delivery of "I just need to know that I can do it."

Whereas Nora hides her foibles behind her stoic mask, Ismaël is a torrent of madness. In a conversation with the hospital psychiatrist (Catherine Deneuve), he launches into a misogynistic tirade about how women have "no souls." In one riotous scene -- set to hysterically jaunty jazz music, no less -- Ismaël raids the hospital pharmacy to hook his lawyer up with some meds. Amalric finds the perfect note for the character, indulging in such farcical activities while presenting Ismaël's madness with a believable humanity. While committed in the hospital, he meets Arielle, an attractive young lady in the hospital for yet another suicide attempt, and the two find comfort in each other's madness.

With these disparate stories, Desplechin crafts a world as richly layered as an Altman or early Paul Thomas Anderson work, jumping across perspectives to chart the mad, mad world we've all made for ourselves. Yet where Altman roamed his characters' lives with a decidedly ironic view, Desplechin succeeds in adding a believable emotional core where Anderson's Magnolia attempted the same but fell into OTT melodrama. Devos plays Nora as a Hitchcockian ice-queen (it's no coincidence that Catherine Deneuve's character instantly takes Nora in when she comes to the office) undergoing a Bergmanesque crisis of personal faith. She's sympathetic even though she drove one lover to suicide, neglects her son and worries more about her image than her mental state. When she at last breaks down completely, Louis' home nurse acts as our stand-in as she attempts to comfort Nora, who simply waves her (and us) away, unable to bear the thought of someone seeing her emotionally naked. Amalric, on the other hand, can place all of Ismaël's swirling emotions on display -- raging at the world in eloquent, well-read tirades, spontaneously breakdancing, detailing erotic dreams with his anti-Freudian therapist (whose very name strikes fear into the hearts of the hospital staff) -- and if anything we can sympathize with his arrogant madness more because he's venting his sins as Nora internalizes hers.

With these two characters serving as checkpoints, Desplechin uses Kings and Queen to examine what defines us, perhaps not as humans but at least in terms of social perception. Arielle is a white Frenchwoman, but people refer to her as "La chinoise" (the Chinese girl) because she's studying sinology, a sobriquet not used for the pharmacy's Asian clerk. A recurring motif of the story involves the idea of adoption: Nora, desperate to find a father figure for Elias (and perhaps someone to do the child-rearing for her), asks Ismaël to adopt him as the boy always liked Ismaël best. Desplechin subverts our expectations of the difference between biological relation and adoption, though, with an extraneous but vital scene. Ismaël visits his Alzheimer's-stricken grandmother, who recognizes her grandson but cannot remember if he's related by blood or adoption. His mother says that she gave birth to Ismaël, and the grandmother is happy. But when Ismaël's father, whom the grandmother also recognizes, reminds her that she adopted him, without batting an eyelash she responds, "Well, that's good too." Near the end, Ismaël declares his love for Arielle while wearing a Musketeer cape, and suddenly his expression of madness becomes a symbol of the noble heart beneath his rough exterior. Desplechin doesn't care so much about the labels we assign ourselves or are assigned to us but what they might mean to the people they label. In his world, people don't abandon labels but create them through their actions and passions and not through skin color or lineage.

An exception, though, is gender. When Nora gave birth to Elias, she could not place Pierre's name on the child's birth certificate because the couple were unwed and he died without leaving any indication that he would recognize the child as his own. Obviously, the female cannot deny the child that comes from her wound, and the stress of wondering if her child will be "accepted" perhaps informs her ongoing struggle to assign him an documented father figure. Elias, Pierre, Ismaël and Louis make up the titular Kings of the story, and all have an emotional freedom not afforded to the Queen, who must keep her poise even as her world crumbles around her.

For all of these profound statements, however, Desplechin has a touch of the trickster about him, and Kings and Queen teems with moments that play with our usual expectations. His shots of Nora tend to be hand-held and erratic compared to her cool exterior where the explosive Ismaël's shots are more refined, the camera mounted on a stand or a crane. When Arielle describes her suicide attempt to Ismaël, Desplechin inserts a brief shot of her making a crude, joking face that may or may not be real but is an insight to her inner turmoil nonetheless. Returning the Bergman connection I made earlier, Kings and Queen features appearances from ghosts that recalls the master's Fanny and Alexander. Two ghosts feature in Nora's story: the first, her lover Pierre's, is forgiving and mature in death where he wasn't in life.

The second apparition offers the film's most powerful sequence; Louis' disease finally takes its toll, and Nora cleans out his residence after the funeral. Nora finds a letter addressed to her in his unfinished manuscript, but instead of playing the usual, trite voiceover, Desplechin cuts to a vision of the father sitting in a room so spare it's unsettling. He recites the contents of the letter directly to the camera, damning his daughter's hypocrisy and vanity with such stunning force that even Garrel's barely emotive, even somewhat wistful delivery is as scathing as the loudest screams. Around the same time, Ismaël, rehabilitated and released, must field a similar attack from the lead violin in his quartet. Both characters richly deserve the tongue-lashings they receive, but we take no pleasure from these diatribes, nor does Desplechin intend or want us to do so.

Kings and Queen opens with a retelling the story of Leda, a Greek woman seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan. Nora buys a painting depicting the story for her father, a Greek professor, a symbol of her Electra complex hilariously suggested by Louis' publisher as the cover for the book that will eventually contain Louis' scalding letter. This joke is so layered into the story that I didn't even catch until I went and watched this a second time, which I did almost immediately after watching it the first. There's also a broadly comedic moment just after that devastating monologue by the dead father, in which Ismaël reconnects with his own father, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), just as some youths attempt to rob the tough old man's grocery. The resulting failed robbery is brilliant in its dark humor, and only funnier when you place it in the context of what came before it.

That warped mélange of comedy, drama, formalist technique and New Wave unpredictability results in one of the most rewarding films I've seen of the last few years, almost as complete in its world creation and critique as Edward Yang's Yi Yi. He extracts the best from his actors, and together they chart character evolutions so masterfully paced that you don't realize someone has changed until something wholly unlike that character is revealed. Ismaël, initially a childish, narcissistic bundle of nerves, is allowed the film's most bare moment of wisdom at the end, as he imparts advice upon young Elias. "You need an extra adult to help you grow,: he says, "so you're not shut up in the love between parents...and children." With his beautiful, protracted speech, he breaks the child free of the trap that ensnared the boy's mother and grandfather, and we look to Elias' future with hope. How wonderful it is that we do the same with the adults, too.

Repulsion

Roman Polanski's English-language follow-up his acclaimed debut Knife in the Water is in some respects one of the all-time great horror films. More than almost any other psychological thriller, it so effectively portrays its protagonist's madness that it leaves the audience itself unsure of their own sanity. In other ways, Repulsion is a great but spotty movie that clearly demonstrates its director's relative inexperience. However, I believe that Polanski overcomes his early shortcomings by placing us within a firmly subjective point-of-view, one that continues to grip me even when I spot the cracks in the story.

As with all great horror films, Repulsion can sum up its plot in a sentence: an unbalanced woman comes undone over a brief period of time alone in an apartment. However, all great horror films must also flesh out their basic stories with proper scares and, just as important, solid characters outside of the villain. Repulsion must make doubly sure of this, because it contains no tangible villain.

Polanski succeeds in his endeavor, chiefly through a combination of New Wave photography and a textbook-worthy usage of sound. Carol, a shy, withdrawn beauty, works at a beauty parlor where her unkempt hair and nail biting are constantly at odds with the permed and manicured clients she serves. She works there with her sister, Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), and the two struggle to pay the rent -- though looking at the lavish decor of their sizable flat, I would venture to say that they aren't as crushed by society as living beyond their means. When the camera follows Carol through the streets, it moves in a decidedly realist, New Wave style. Shots within the apartment tend to be either static or steadily moved. In both scenarios, Polanski frames his shots with precision, making subtle use of shadow to convey the impending nightmare. The most striking element of his direction and Gilbert Taylor's cinematography, however, is their ability to frame every single shot to mask part of Carol's face. It reminded me of how Polanski isolated the flawed eye of Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown, and they both evoke similar, albeit different, character traits: the shadowing of Chinatown reflected classic film noir moral gray, while the jagged masking of Carol's face displays her growing madness.

But sound, more than images, set the tone of the film. Not much happens for the film's 40 minutes, which chiefly consist of repetitive scenes of Carol's discomfort with those around her. The only inkling of what's to come lies in its audio: an ever-dripping tap, other apartment complex residents moving about outside the flat, ticking clocks echo ever so faintly in the background, a far cry from the in-your-face approach that would define future uses of these same sounds. Even with remastered audio, these noises are barely perceptible, because Polanski did not want them to dominant the scenes.

It all changes when Helen leaves with her boyfriend for a holiday in Rome; Carol begs her sister not to go, as Helen is the only person with whom she can communicate. Without Helen to guide her from place to place, Carol is at last alone with her demons. Things spiral slowly at first: Carol fills a tub until it overflows, then simply leaves it. She prepares a rabbit for dinner, only to leave it in disgust (she displayed an earlier aversion to food in one of the film's first scenes). Shots of this slowly decaying animal, as well as rotting potatoes, become the most solid indicators of passing time as Polanski moves deeper and deeper into Carol's point of view.

Sexual frustration and aggression defines several of Polanski's films (Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown), and the director builds his script on the same foundation. At the beginning, Carol cannot sleep at night after she overhears Helen and her boyfriend making love; when Michael leaves his toothbrush and razor in a glass in the bathroom, Carol approaches them as if hazardous waste and finally dumps them in the bin. Once alone, she spots a figure of a man in her mirror, who attacks and rapes her in her dreams. This insight into her past and lingering trauma is horrific enough, but she must face a real rape in the present when the landlord comes for the rent. Initially curt and offish, he softens into a lascivious grin upon realizing what a fragile girl he has alone in the apartment. In a fit of crazed fear, Carol slits the landlord's throat with Michael's razor. This is actually her second murder; earlier, she slew her hapless, unwanted suitor Colin with a candlestick. The film's final shot suggests that the rapes that haunt her were actually perpetrated by her own father, which casts further parallels with Chinatown. (I'm not one to hold an artist's private life against him, but the prevalence of tortured, sexually abused young women in Polanski's early work can make it even more difficult to watch as it draws open comparisons to Polanski's own troubled life.)

Catherine Deneuve had been working for less than a decade before she landed the role, and was barely in her 20s at the time. However, she, like the director, overcomes her inexperience with a commanding performance specifically designed to alienate. She and Polanski craft Carol into an ice queen worthy of a Hitchcock film. Carol, like Evelyn Mulwray or Rosemary, works as a brittle, unapproachable beauty but Polanski differs from Hitchcock in his ability to add dimensions to his blondes. That the reasons for their coldness always trace back to terrifying sexual abuse is disturbing and even facile, but it's hardly less sexual than Hitchcock's brazen fetishism.

I first saw Repulsion earlier in the year, on a DVD from Netflix of such low quality I thought perhaps the previous renter loved the film so much he made a shoddy copy and mailed that back. The image was so blurry, so grainy, that I actually stopped paying any attention to the film, and when I finally noticed that the film had ended, I just popped it back in the envelope rather than give it another chance. At last, Criterion once again obtained the rights (it produced a laserdisc in the early '90s), and their reissue, though not on the level of their restoration of The Seventh Seal, is a revelation. I can now see the cracks in the makeup of Carol's pushy, gabby salon client, which reflects the cracks seen later in the apartment (which of course serve as a visual cue of Carol's mental state). Some parts of the film will always look soft and grainy (Polanski calls it the "shoddiest" of his works in the commentary), but now the visuals pack all the power they once did.

Thank God for this remaster, as some shots are the best in Polanski's canon: the extreme close-ups of Deneuve's eyes in the opening credits as Maurice Binder's titles roll over them like razorblades, a possible reference to surreal cinema touchstone Un Chien Andalou, perhaps (Polanski says that if such a connection exists, he is unaware of it). Hands emerging from the walls to grab and grope at Carol. That's a fine special effect, particularly on the film's low-budget, but I enjoyed two much simpler moments: both of the murders in the film contain some of the most realistic looking blood in black-and-white cinema. Polanski notes in the commentary that he hated the thick look of chocolate syrup used as movie blood for monochrome pictures, and he and a crew tried various concoctions until they found one that looked enough like the real thing. The shot of Carol placing Colin's corpse in the still-full tub is all the more haunting for the gentle way the blood flows from his mouth and clouds the tub, and I loved the fact that the landlord does not immediately spurt blood when Carol slashes him with the razor, as blood never pours immediately from a razor cut.

The most interesting insight of the accompanying commentary track comes when Polanski dismisses critics who label his work as pessimistic and cynical as lazy, stating that no-one who'd survived as many setbacks and horrors as him couldn't have at least some optimism. That opinion is indirectly supported by Deneuve (who recorded her input separately) when she offers her take on Michael picking up Carol and taking her out of the apartment at the end: to her, this shot shows Carol taking comfort in a man, too tired and destroyed to recoil and attack him, thus allowing her to experience a male's gentle side (Colin, too, was kind, but she never let him close enough to see it).

Repulsion continues to exert an influence upon horror filmmakers today, though few appear to have learned from its example. Psychological thrillers these days ruin their plots through over-explication or cheap scares. Repulsion has its share of jump scares, but they're filmed with New Wave-inspired inventiveness and buoyed by a disorienting audio track that utilizes more than mere instrument starts to make your heart skip. Everyone who wishes to make a horror film should pay heed to this enduring classic, and a note Polanski gives over a shot of a slight nick on the primping client's finger played up to maximum effect: "Little things can be as horrific as cutting off heads."