Camille Claudel, 1915 (Bruno Dumont, 2013)

This was my first Bruno Dumont film, and I've heard it's something of a departure for casting so prominent a star as Juliette Binoche. On the evidence of this film, though, I'm not exactly rushing out to catch up on his filmography. Nakedly exploitative, the film relies on a cast of actual mental patients to hammer home the point that Binoche's sculptor does not belong in an asylum, lending the numerous close-ups of blank smiles or pained facial contortions a grotesque element that draws no humanity from their faces. Elsewhere, the blandly ascetic frames, suggesting no inner life, only the starkness of external patriarchy weighing down on the artist, suggest Bresson by way of someone who hasn't paid much attention to Bresson, and for all the didactic fuss the film attempts to make about Claudel's outrageous silencing, the camera itself only ever takes the point of view of the men.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Capsule Reviews: Other Men's Women, The Lovers on the Bridge, The Lady Eve, The Purchase Price

Other Men's Women (William A. Wellman, 1931)

Mary Astor herself called this picture a piece of cheese, but cheddar can be mighty sharp. Astor plays one of the men's women, the wife of a chirpy railroad engineer (Regis Toomey) who becomes entangled with his co-worker Bill (Grant Withers), a fall-down drunk who cleans up nicely. With only 69 minutes, Wellman doesn't have time to mess around, meaning Bill and Lily have to fall for each other with such passion they risk everything before most people can even ask what the other does for a living. Wellman's sturdy direction stands back to let the actors work, which isn't the best strategy given how unsalvageable some of the dialogue is but works best when the two men confront each other while working the same engine, the camera calmly letting the tension mount then somehow pulling back even more within the cramped space to capture their fierce, farcical fisticuffs. Things only get more darkly absurd from there, but then part of the charm of a good Pre-Code is the flamboyant yet gritty way things invariably go to hell. In the meantime, have extra fun with James Cagney literally dancing away with the show in a bit part and Joan Blondell as a diner waitress who is, except for Bill, strictly A.P.O.: ain't puttin' out. Grade: B+

Certified Copy

[Warning -- contains spoilers]

If there is a better film this year than Certified Copy, then I must rescind the statements I have made throughout 2010 of the abysmal quality of its cinematic offering. Thus far, the films that I have loved most I have embraced despite their flaws, falling in love with ambition (Inception), thematic richness (The Social Network) and plain ol' emotional attachment (Toy Story 3). Some of these works have at least flirted with the adjective "masterful," if for no other reason than some are the works of masters (The Ghost Writer, Shutter Island), but I had not yet seen a true masterpiece. Leave it to Abbas Kiarostami, the greatest living filmmaker in the world, to fill the gap.

While I rarely discuss any movie these days without going into spoilers (though I do try to save more elaborate talk for secondary reviews when it comes to new films), I must impress just how much of this film I will and must discuss in order to pen anything approaching a meaningful essay. I'm not talking about the questions over the film's real-or-fake narrative, which is as playful and exciting as it is wholly unimportant to gauging the film. I want everyone to go into this film with as little knowledge as possible, all the better to let its perfect blend of metafictional levity and insightful human drama hit with maximum impact.

At the halfway point of Certified Copy, the two main characters, an English art critic and writer (opera singer William Shimell, in his first movie role) and an unnamed French art dealer (I'll call her "Elle" like everyone else) enter an Italian café after debating the thesis of James' book. James steps outside for a moment, and the café owner remarks that they make a good couple; though the two just met, the woman does not correct the owner and launches into a discussion about the problems of keeping a marriage up after 15 years.

What sort of nonsense is this? Why would she do such a thing, and why would the man seemingly play along when he returns? In true Kiarostami fashion, these questions are indispensable to unlocking the central thrust of Certified Copy's intent yet pointless. There is a tendency for people to question which parts of a Kiarostami film are real and which are fake, which is a waste of time because it's all fiction. Granted, he blends documentary into the proceedings, but in doing so he makes reality fake. Of course, the flip side of that is that he makes falsity more real, and that dichotomy goes a long way toward building his status as the preeminent cinematic poet of his time.

Slyly, Kiarostami plants the idea that these two are a couple from the start. Binoche takes her teenage son to listen to James' lecture, but the spoiled brat complains of hunger and makes his mom leave almost immediately. She leaves her number with a friend to give to James, and when they meet, each comes off as slightly confrontational from the start. She attacks the premise of James' book, which stipulates copies of original artistic works have their own value based on the perspective of the copier. The discussion, framed, naturally, within a car traveling through the pastoral Italian countryside morphs from Elle asking for clarification on James' ideas to a debate about them to a more personal spat that frames the two as a stereotypical "old married couple."

Just as that thought enters your head, Kiarostami literalizes it by having Elle start the lie, which James bizarrely maintains. Suddenly, the aggressively flirtatious attitude between the two characters jumps into the advanced stages of a relationship, with Elle berating James for neglecting her and her son and him defending his absences as work-related. As they continue to walk around a quaint Tuscan village, the pair only get more savage, and both look increasingly immature. At an early dinner, Elle excuses herself and goes into the bathroom to plaster on lipstick and gaudy earrings, smoothing her face yet ironically robbing the 46-year-old of her ageless grace and beauty. She emerges as a child who got into mommy's accessories, and she might as well be going to a tea party with stuffed animals for the regression she displays. For his part, James turns into a petulant cad, flying off the handle for as innocuous a comment as Elle quietly saying she likes the wine he disparages.

Their bewildering behavior represents a stylistic departure for Kiarostami, as it enters into a melodrama far removed from the naturalism of his previous films. Rarely has Binoche been so animated, and she's one of the most effortlessly extroverted actresses on the planet. She's pushy, manipulative, happy, sad, quiet, loud, aggressive, defensive and various other adjectives to boot. She and Kiarostami have been friends since the '90s, and the director has been looking for the chance to put her in one of his movies for years. The wait was worth it: the idea that Kiarostami complicates the narrative just to make a cryptic puzzle have not addressed how openly and completely Binoche fits her performance to every twist and turn, clearly aware of what the director was trying to do.

For all her theatrics, however, Binoche continues a thread Kiarostami has been developing for years, that of the challenges facing women. Working in his native, restrictive Iran, Kiarostami bumped up against the lines of censorship with his depictions of women, but he never defined his female characters through anything as simplifying as region-specific oppression. When he examines the plight of women, he does not stop with the hijab and honor killings, he looks at broader emotional oppression by men. For James to so quickly defend leaving home for extended periods of time to leave Elle to raise their son by herself demonstrates how even the supposedly enlightened intellectual class can give career preference to men. After Shirin equalized Binoche with the cast of Iranian women and presented a universal male patriarchy as an enduring problem, Certified Copy digs deeper into the emotional tumult of not being openly oppressed or discriminated against but subtly manipulated for years, and the range of Binoche's expression reflects how complex the reactions to such confusing reduction can be.

At the same time, Kiarostami scores a coup with the film by setting it from the woman's perspective. The nosy, aggressive questions Elle's son prods his mother with at the start can obviously be explained by Elle's own confrontational nature. But Kiarostami is not blaming the mother for corrupting the son so much as illustrating the issues that can arise from a single parent situation, a subject that courts its own controversy until Elle tearfully speaks of how hard it is to play both roles to raise a child. Besides, for all the kid's distracted noodling with a cell phone, he's quite perceptive, and he realizes as he looks at his mom during the opening lecture that she is planning to seduce James. Her actions are manipulative, to be sure, but never cruel, and the director finds a way to deliberately pace what we know about the character without making her a bitch until the last 10 minutes. I've seen so many examples of this in contemporary cinema that I'm at a loss to explain just how Kiarostami brushes against the traps of Western filmmaking and casually inverts and subverts them. Here is a movie that answers the male gaze with the female gaze, replacing sexual lust with conflicting romantic emotions that seem to confuse more male critics than female ones because we're not used to this level of sophistication when thinking about an object of desire.

Binoche's performance is insightful and believable, but it also plays on the artifice of cinema. Shimell, on the other hand, is so stiff and unaccustomed to dramatic acting that he also points out the falsity of it all. Kiarostami slyly doesn't use Shimell's singing talents, nor even the melodramatic chops he no doubt he picked up performing opera. That would be too obvious. Instead, Kiarostami uses Shimell the way he does any nonprofessional actor, to get a more natural performance. Shimell plays the straight man off Binoche's complex emotional range, and even his broader moments of anger look simplistic compared to Binoche. This can partly be explained as the natural result of a person out of his element working alongside one of the world's greatest actresses giving one of her best performances, but it's also all part of the plan. If Binoche examines Kiarostami's divide between reality and fiction by keenly understanding what the director intended in nearly every shot, Shimell does so by being as lost as we are. If Binoche doesn't look like she's acting even while doing Sirkian cartwheels, Shimell makes it blindingly obvious, and that, ultimately, is the clue that decides whether the two are a real couple.

Yes, it's all a fake, as is revealed vaguely but unmistakably at the end. The ending snaps all the pieces into place, not of the film itself but of the clues that allow one to unlock its meaning. The question people should ask of the film is not whether Elle and James are for real, it's who was right about the artistic merits of James' thesis. The ending lets us understand that Elle planned her game to test James' contention that copies have their own worth, but also to get out her frustrations over being abandoned. When the game first begins in earnest, Elle jokes with the café owner that James does not speak another language. Yet when Elle gets so emotional later that she slips into French, and James responds in kind. By altering his language, James fits better as the copy of Elle's ex-husband, and his stiff movements are the sight of an unprofessional actor acting as a character who in turn acts for an audience of one.

By the end, the positions of the characters have reversed. In projecting all her hangups onto the copy, Elle falls in love again and desperately wants to rekindle her old relationship with this new copy. She has made James into a clone of her husband, but she and James have also made this replication different enough that she can fall in love with the man she hates. But James can see the emotional distress in her, and while he clearly feels tempted by Elle's seduction -- we are talking about Juliette Binoche here -- he cannot bring himself to torment her with a specter of past love. Where she at last believes in copies carrying their own emotional weight, James, who says at the beginning that he wrote his book to convince himself of his own idea, realizes that he cannot be someone else's copy without being their projection, not his own. Ironically, by rejecting his premise at last, he commits the final act necessary to make him a perfect copy of the ex-husband: he leaves Elle.

This driving conflict fits squarely within Kiarostami's canon, built upon the dividing line between reality and fiction. What is most amusing about Certified Copy is the way that he uses his first European film and the freedom it entails to make a movie that only looks different from his previous, restricted movies in the clothes that Binoche can wear. Marilyn Ferdinand, one of the best movie bloggers around, noted something I had to go back and check: when the two characters visit a church in Lucignano where loving young couples pledge eternal love on a gilded tree branch -- one of Kiarostami's more devilish touches, given the embittered duo he focuses upon -- a bride in the background squirts eye drops in her eyes. When James goes inside and the camera cuts back to the bench he was sitting on, that bride sits there now with tears rolling down her cheeks, but we know they're fake. It's a light touch, as nearly all touches in a Kiarostami film are, but it broadens the scope of his inquiry on fakes, not letting the entire story rest on the fractured perspective of a troubled woman. Even the content rearrange themselves to make copies of what they think they should be, the bride genuinely happy but wanting to seem happier to fit to the image of the wife who cannot contain her joy.

Actors will pick apart Certified Copy for years, because it says more about the profession than any film made in at least a decade. The caliber of Binoche's performance will certainly be studied, but more importantly, the film has a great deal to say about the profession. Actors play copies of people, either of real figures or fictional characters who are composites of real people (or of previous fictional characters themselves based on real people). But they are also human themselves. They process and perceive the fiction, thus aligning them with the audience, who become background characters, trying to figure out this couple along with everyone else. The most amazing aspect of Binoche's performance is not how well she follows Kiarostami's emotional and artistic themes but the manner in which she allows herself to lose the thread at the end as Elle's grand scheme falls apart when she gets lost in her own labyrinth. The bravest and most compelling thing she can do is lose track of where she's supposed to be at the exact right time.

"Art is not an easy subject to write about," James says in his opening lecture. "There are no fixed points of reference, no immutable truths to fall back on." Certified Copy is itself a sterling replication of the European, romantic art film, drawing on Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy and Richard Linklater's Euro-centric Before Sunrise. He even throws in a bit of Bergman's Persona into the mixture. In the process, however, he proves James' thesis by adding his own indelible spin on it. Using his usual shot/reverse shot structure, Kiarostami gently reconfigures the perspective of the film, starting with James speaking before cutting to Binoche arriving, then to the son's view as he watches his mom whispering conspiratorially to her friend. Yet when James arrives, the POV clearly shifts to Elle as she begins molding her image of James. Even European films, generally the ones with the best roles for women, are masculine, and Kiarostami makes a film some have misread as a sellout, festival-friendly movie into a more feminist movie than nearly all European romances of similar stripes. It's a bold response to those who say there are no more ideas for movies, that all movies are just rip-offs of something else: as long as someone brings something new to the table, it's valid and unique, regardless of whether it's "original."

And just as it is a copy of European films that differs slightly until everything adds up to a unique vision, so too is Certified Copy a typical Kiarostami film that is in no way typical. Shot on digital but printed on 35mm, the film blends the methods of capturing film, literalizing the artistic dichotomies the director's work embodies. Once again, the director uses a return to cinema to poke fun at those who wanted him to go back to making features instead of experimental ventures. But the biggest breakthrough, even for a director as emotionally attuned as Kiarostami, is the heightened humanity. After making so many films about people in cars, the world visible only as it rolls over a windshield vertically as if we're seeing film run through a projector, Kiarostami inserts a little joke to his knowing fans when the two get out of the car and join the world, making their story so much harder to untangle. But that's because he's finally inserting his characters into a larger story, a clear reflection of his own steps into a larger world by making films outside of Iran (he's already scheduled to make another film with Binoche). His films have never been insular, but that have been personal. Here, he realizes how much he can expand while still retaining the individuality of his emotional explorations. He already condensed the world's complexity into the sandy Iranian countryside; now, he throws away the microcosm and works within the real thing. And only Kiarostami could make such a transition and still give off the impression that the world cannot contain all that he has to say about it. Shirin dealt with the contrast of collective and individual reaction to film in minimalist terms, and here he explodes them in a narrative as complex, dubious, rewarding and frustrating as life itself.

Certified Copy probes at the emotions of a relationship, the pain of loss and the idea that there might only be one person out there for us. The idea of a soulmate is so romantic, but if you ultimately separate, doesn't the possibility exist not that the right person is out there, but that you couldn't even make things work with your fated partner? That is an excruciating thought, and one Kiarostami dispels only after he drains Binoche; only when we've all cried it out can we move on and realize that the most useless and unhelpful of breakup maxims is actually true: plenty of other fish in the sea. Church bells ring at the end, possibly funereal as James leaves. But the peals also emit a hopeful tone; it's the start of a new day, and perhaps another couple is getting married. I've heard some compare Certified Copy to the screwball comedies of old, The Philadelphia Story and so on. If there are any screwball antics here, they exist solely on the meta level as Kiarostami messes with narrative coherence and fulfills the wishes of his critics as he subverts them. But the comedy of the film is quiet, as is the melancholy, and when it all comes together in the final moments, Certified Copy stands as the latest proof that Abbas Kiarostami has no equal, and whatever else may be said about these sad times, we are lucky to be alive in an age where a master continues to work.

Shirin

It has been said many times over that the best seat in the house in a theater is at the very front, looking back at all the upturned faces. Truffaut best epitomized this in The 400 Blows with his evocative shot of kids watching a show. Shirin, at once Kiarostami's return to cinema after spending the first decade of the new millennium with increasingly minimalistic films shot on digital cameras and a continuation of those movies, takes this notion to an almost experimental endpoint.

Ostensibly a film about the classical Persian, romantic myth of Shirin and Khosrow, Shirin is instead a film about an audience watching a film about the romantic myth of Shirin and Khosrow. This setup naturally fits within Kiarostami's oeuvre of dividing the line between truth and cinema, yet Shirin does not employ the alternating documentary and fiction that complicates and deepens the narratives of his best work. Shirin is purely fictional, yet its falsity is more real than some of the genuine images Kiarostami has captured over the years.


Armed with 113 Iranian actresses (and Juliette Binoche, appearing in a cameo while she was in Iran to discuss working with the director on his subsequent feature), Kiarostami creates a film so simple that it borders on the avant-garde: we pick up the details of the movie from the soundtrack and, when that fails, from the reactions of the women watching the film.

In the process, he constructs a movie without really making one. Kiarostami shot the actresses without them knowing what they were meant to be watching; he even shot some of them in his house. He used similar techniques to get the reactions of characters in previous films, particularly in his many scenes in cars. And just as all of those sequences managed to convey a deep humanity and convincing emotional response out of a fabricated context, so too do the looks on the women's faces communicate a clear progression of shared yet isolated emotional reaction.

Understanding the strange dichotomy of viewing art, Kiarostami emphasizes the discrepancy of seeing a movie within an audience yet ultimately processing it alone. Filmmakers face that challenge all the time, either making their film broad to have the maximum impact or more personal to appeal to the individual internalization of a film's emotional projection. In the world that Kiarostami creates out of the darkness of his false theater, the unseen film manages to unite the two, with tears beginning to roll down the cheeks of the audience past the 30-minute mark, slight smiles tugging at the lips at the moments of quiet humor and the soft creak of shifting weight as the moviegoers lean forward in suspense. Each of the actresses gives a terrific performance of silent cinema, and David Bordwell is right (as ever) to note that their reactions to Shirin's martyrdom on the screen are so pure and empathetic that the best comparison is not with Godard's Vivre sa vie but the film that Anna Karina's prostitute watched in the theater, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.

The ties that bind all of these films are, of course, the female characters, and Shirin embodies the same martyrdom as the other two in much subtler ways. Through dialogue and narration, we pick up that Shirin, an Armenian princess, falls in love with the Persian king Khosrow, only for his bloodlust in battle to repulse Shirin and political opportunity to give his hand to a Roman princess in marriage. Dejected, Shirin manages to find love in the poet and carver Farhad, who displays more devotion and innocence toward the princess than the entitled Khosrow ever could.

As tears stream down faces, we realize that where the inference between Falconetti's Joan and Karina's Nana is open, the connection that links Joan of Arc and the women watching here is more obvious even as it is more nuanced. These women aren't doomed like Joan or Nana, but they are trapped in a patriarchal system that in the best of cases restricts freedom and, in the worst, harms and even kills women. As Khosrow interferes in Shirin's happiness to his own ends, the reactions of the women convey an emotion that runs deeper than mere involvement with the film. They see their own plight in Shirin's pain. Dreyer almost never showed Joan in a shot with a man, using shot/reverse shot structures to maximize the impact by isolating Joan in the frame and magnifying the effect of men looking down upon her. Kiarostami never even shows us the tormentor, as if the actions of Khosrow and, by extension, the patriarchy are so immense that they cannot be adequately squeezed into the frame. Here, Binoche's cameo fulfills a broader purpose: without makeup and scarved in a hijab, it's almost impossible to discern her from the Iranian women, and Kiarostami deftly uses her to globalize the issue into something that affects women the world over and not merely in openly oppressive regimes.

Never before has Kiarostami's feminism been more plain. He has had difficulty displaying it in the past, what with the Iranian theocracy's restrictive policies concerning women -- so many Iranian films are made out in the open and never in a house, in fact, because it's illegal to show a woman without her hijab -- but here he communicates volumes with only the slightest voiceover narration. The women reflect Shirin's disgust as they turn away from the sound of battles, a sharp contrast to the men in the audience, who look bored every time except when an action sequence is clearly playing on the screen. "Damn this man's game that we call love," comes an exasperated voice from the screen, and considering how Shirin finds herself in the middle of a struggle despite her clear preference for one man, it's not hard to see romance as a leftover of primitive territoriality among unevolved males while women are forced to wait for men to reach their level of sophistication and emotional maturity.

In broader terms, Shirin simply marks a master's return to true cinema, even if he takes the long way 'round. If it really does have a connection to The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent film, Shirin inverts the structure of that film by presenting blind cinema. We pick up the story from the soundtrack which is more nuanced and evocative than any of the boisterous blockbusters that take home sound editing Oscars year after year. Sounds you don't expect from a romantic melodrama appear in the mix, such as crows cawing, owls hooting, horses galloping, the battle sounds of clanging steel and the wet thump of blades carving into flesh. The orchestration can be teasing, bombastic, but also minimalistic, with a barely perceptible hum undercutting the sound at times. Most bizarre is the ambient noise of water dripping at several intervals, a noise that must be coming from the theater speakers but doesn't seem to have any reason to exist in the screened film. Maybe that dripping is simply the sound of tears pooling under the eyes before the audience finally sheds them.

As I watched, I couldn't help but wonder if, on some level, Shirin wasn't Kiarostami's sarcastic reply to colleagues and supportive critics who wanted him to return to narrative filmmaking after his experiments. Oh, the director returned to the cinema, alright, but he does so in a way that makes his digital movies look straightforward. There's no way to know where the film is at any moment, nothing to signify which face is the most important and thus the last to be shown. One can imagine him sitting his excited friends in a screening room, declaring "I have returned" and taken his spot at the front of theater to watch Shirin have its effect on them. By the same token, the movie is so emotionally resonant that, even if it is a joke, it is built on a foundation of sincerity that turns a movie with only the sparest parts into riveting cinema. Furthermore, the nature of its construction speaks to the power of film to generate meaning from nothing, and how editing is what ultimately tugs the heart.

What would such a film be like if it showed an American film to an American audience? This is cynicism speaking, but I imagine we'd see an audience of people focused on everything but the film, with people whispering, texting, checking watches. Then when the movie ended, a few would lazily turn to friends and mutter, "That was awesome" or "That sucked" with all the conviction of a porn star delivering a line of dialogue. Here, Kiarostami creates a shared experience, not simply among the fictive audience but those watching Shirin. But he especially speaks to the women, and if there's a driving force behind the film, it's the hope that women will realize how the issues that affect each of them affect all of them and have done for centuries. Is it any wonder, then, that Kiarostami had to head to Europe to make his next film? If he'd continued on this path in native Iran, he'd be imprisoned by now.

Summer Hours

As much as the French might be ensconced at the forefront of cinema, likely for many years to come if until the collapse of the artform (or humanity; whichever comes first), they have their trends as readily identifiable as the "Sundance indie" or the "Oscar-bait message movie." Summer Hours has "French movie" written all over it: it's a drama concerning a family that falls prey to the shifting tides of social mores, gently but forcibly pulling apart by the seams until general gaps form in the fabric. That the film emerges as a unique, arresting portrait is but the latest proof of director Olivier Assayas' position at the top of contemporary French cinema, alongside Arnaud Desplechin, Catherine Breillat and a number of other auteurs who continue to take advantage of France's artist-friendly society to craft some of the most interesting films on the market.

Summer Hours opens on a palatial cottage in the French countryside, a well-worn home surrounded by lush vegetation; indeed, the place is such a part of the land that plants seem to have fused into the brick and mortar in a way that accentuates the beauty of the architecture. The house belongs to Hélène, a 75-year-old matriarch who welcomes her children and grandkids for her birthday. Hélène is still vibrant and witty, and she looks barely in her 60s (the actress playing her, Edith Scob, is 72). Sharp enough to know that her vitality may be fleeting, she discusses practical matters with her eldest son, Frédéric, about her wishes for the estate after her death. The house belonged to her uncle, a renowned painter, and she meticulously maintained its look after his death, the curator of his legacy.

Yet she understands that her children have lives of their own. Frédéric (Charles Berling) lives in France, but Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) works and lives in Hong Kong with his wife and three children, while Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) lives in the States with her American fiancé. She details which objects should be donated to the Musée d'Orsay (who produced the film and lent the actual furniture and paintings for the house) and tells Frédéric to sell the rest and divide it among himself and his siblings. After a lifetime spent preserving her uncle's legacy, she no longer cares if the house and its antiques are sold, as she'll be dead. The family leaves, and the bright green of the outdoor party turns to a muted blue, Hélène left in her now-spacious and hollow mansion, alone but for the housekeeper Eloise; in that moment, the spirited matriarch looks suddenly old and fading, as much an antique as the chair she sits in.

Less than a year later, Hélène is dead. The kids gather back in France to handle the funeral and to discuss their mother's effects. Frédéric wants to keep the house, but Jérémie and Adrienne move to sell; both are moving permanently to their new countries, and they need the money. Adrienne in particular has spent so much time traveling that she's outgrown not only the home but France itself. Adrienne doesn't care for Jérémie's line of work -- an executive at the Asian division of Puma -- though she also designs shoes and is as much a slave to the corporate world as he is. Frédéric, an economist, understands his siblings' financially motivated decision and resigns himself to losing his old home and all the childhood memories within it.

Naturally, one's memories don't die when one loses trinkets, but Assayas uses Summer Hours to examine the way ordinary objects become something important, be it timeless art or an emotionally resonant part of someone's life. Adrienne and Jérémie blithely take stock of the artifacts to be sold, questioning their potential value and generally speeding the process along to return to their normal lives. They are modern people, connected to the business that employs them instead of outdated ideas of settlement.

It's a typically American point of view, and the characters of Summer Hours subtly reflect a mindset that has become as much American as French. Adrienne lives in New York with her American boyfriend, and the children of the brothers are, like all youngsters, we're told, infatuated with American fads. Jérémie represents the speed with which people can adapt now to new environments: set to move permanently to Peking after living in Hong Kong for years, mentions that his daughter will spend a term in San Fransisco, the city where Asian immigrants traditionally landed; his daughter not only wants to see the America she's fascinated with but she'll arrive more as a Chinese visitor instead of a French one, vaguely reminiscent of the pure-French Arielle referred to as "La Chinoise" in Kings and Queen.

Assayas suggests that the old family unit, or at least this one, is dying, but Summer Hours is not a dark film, nor a melodramatic one: everyone in the family loves each other, and their conversations are realistic and natural. When Adrienne tells her brothers and their wives that she's engaged, they all laugh about her disastrous first marriage without needlessly relating stories and facts they already know. Frédéric's disappointment with his siblings (and, later, his children) is visible but does not lead to anything more than a few gently heated debates.

Roger Ebert wrote in his review that the most recent American film that approaches Summer Hours' level of familial honesty is Rachel Getting Married, a comparison I agree with albeit with one caveat: Summer Hours, unlike Rachel, is not about the closeted skeletons of a family. While Demme's film ultimately emerged as a fair and humanistic portrait of a family that sets aside its tremendous issues for a moment of bliss, Summer Hours never digs up dirt on its characters. The siblings discuss their mother's fascination with her uncle and ponder the true nature of their relationship, but they do so with casual curiosity, and when a definitive answer is provided it is not a plot device but a touching insight into Hélène.

The matter-of-fact believability of Assayas' script is aided immeasurably by his direction, which finds that perfect balance his colleague Arnaud Desplechin has found, between blatantly cinematic camera movement and placement and spur-of-the-moment realism. The director seems to know the right way to frame every shot, from static long shots to hand-held movement into the family's inner circle; Assayas uses his docufictional camerawork -- like Desplechin and, in Rachel, Demme -- to make us a part of the story, his camera movements sometimes fast but never jarring or distracting us from this microcosmic family.

Two moments of the film particularly caught my eye. Adrienne tells her mother in the beginning that her tastes are too modern for the old art in the house, yet she fixates on a silver tea platter and justifies her attraction to it by stating that beauty is beauty. Later, as appraisers comb the house for knickknacks, she finds the tray and holds it to her elated, unwilling to part with this one trinket. It shows how even the most modern and flighty of individuals can assign psychic weight to an object just as readily as more sedentary people, and even if she ignores the rest of the beautiful art in the house she's acknowledged something of its grace. This moment finds a distant echo in the end, where Eloise visits the house one last time before Frédéric's daughter Sylvie hosts a party there to bid her grandma's home farewell. Seen heretofore as a disaffected, bored youngster, she confides in her boyfriend how much she'll miss the place and wonders if she's losing a part of her childhood with it. These moments prevent Summer Hours from becoming a tedious lament by just some cranky old man railing against technology and modernization; instead, it demonstrates that some part of us will always create sentimental touchstones for our identity, and the advent of modern technology simply allows us to do so wherever we want, and it is that distinction that makes Assayas one of the most perceptive and interesting directors of our time.

Caché

In some ways, Michael Haneke is the soapboxing, socially conscious heir to Alfred Hitchcock: concerned less with psychosexual hangups than the growing impact of video and the omnipresence of modern communication on our daily lives. "A feature film is 24 lies per second," he once said (a cynical response to Jean-Luc Godard's declaration of the truth of images), and one imagines him saying it while brandishing a cane and telling neighborhood children to stay off his lawn. But there's a certain charm -- for lack of a better word -- in his irascibility, as well as his firm hand on suspense.

Indeed, no other film of the decade so completely captures Hitch's capacity for filtering pop psychology through the sieve of a thriller than his magnum opus Caché, which took Cannes by storm back in 2005. Where Hitch derived his tension through his masterful direction and pacing -- perceptive audiences will note how bad the effects were in his films, and I say "perceptive" because he was so skilled at grabbing your attention that one must break away from its current to focus on the problem -- Haneke opens Caché with a static long take. In the frame is the exterior of a house in Paris: not a modest flat, nor an opulent house. It plays in silence until two characters in a voiceover begin to speak over it. At last, lines appear in the image, and the action reverses, revealing the image to be a videotape watched by those speaking over it.

The voices belong to Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), two bourgeois French intellectuals who first regard the tape with curiosity: is it a prank? How did Georges walk in front of the camera and look in its general direction -- as evidenced by the tape -- without seeing it? When more tapes arrive, however, accompanied by crude, childlike drawings of violent acts, their curiosity morphs into fear, which in turn becomes uncontrollable paranoia. In a nod to Hitchcock, Haneke has put his hand in Rear Window and turned it inside out.

That inversion of Hitch's plot is but a small piece of Haneke's larger stance as the perfect antimatter for the master of suspense and his style: Hitch used threadbare plots and basic acting to force his audience into cheap identification before turning their world upside-down to reduce them to primal states of fear and lust. It's a barbaric method of filmmaking, but it's also often entertaining as hell and I never did leap aboard the haters' wagon. Haneke too can be cruel: his camera -- even when following the characters outside of his subtly terrifying static voyeurism -- is objective and detached, preventing even a tenuous emotional identification between the audience and characters. But that objectivity serves him just as a 3rd person perspective benefits an author, allowing him to gauge his characters and the situations around them.

His emotional distance reveals many social issues evident in the couple's relationship, such as the gender gap. Georges works on a TV show, bloviating with other critics on the merits of works of art; their program likely strikes even the French as pretentious. Anne is no less intelligent, but Haneke undercuts the idea of equality in the modern, educated couple by making Georges the bread-winner and the final word on every subject. Neither devotes much time to their son Pierrot, as Georges subtly hints that it's "woman's work" and Anne is too busy protesting the inequality in her relationship with her husband to care for the child. When she protests her husband's exclusive attempts to find their tormentor and counters his pleas for her to simply "trust" him with a plea for him to reciprocate on that trust, Georges looks at his wife as if she's gone mad. Haneke is harsh, but sympathetic to her helplessness, viewing her inability to assert herself not as a personal or biological weakness but the result of a social structure that continues to oppress women, different from past times in that it name check equality to look superior. Contrasted with Hitchcock's brand of sexism, Haneke's is an actual commentary on that sexism.

As the unseen voyeur -- it might as well be Haneke himself -- he slowly guides these decreasingly sane individuals to epiphanies; Caché is less about the hidden camera than what has been hidden in these characters to shape them into the people we see. The Laurents receive footage of areas other than their own house, leading Georges to the apartment of Majid, a man from Georges' past. Majid, an Algerian immigrant who lived with Georges and his parents until Georges told lies to have him ejected, evokes themes of racism and social status -- Majid's son later tells Georges that his father could have gotten an education had he stayed with the Laurents and not been forced into an orphanage, that he too might have enjoyed a comfortable upper-middle class life instead of dwelling in a cramped apartment into late middle age. For a deceptively simple film, Haneke manages to uncover not only the lingering ignorance even among the intellectuals but the echoes of the racist past of the country itself (Majid's story is closely tied to the Algerian War and the Paris massacre of 1961).

Georges and Majid's confrontation also permits Haneke to study our ability to convince even ourselves of our lives. Georges has put his childhood menace out of mind, but he begins to suffer nightmares of that childhood (the images in his dreams coincide with the drawings accompanying the tapes) that show how, even subconsciously, he believes the story he told his parents to remove Majid from his home. Haneke pokes holes in his own maxim by showing the truth of video, not its capacity for manipulation and deceit. Home video devices store data, or memory, to be played back for buyers -- this is more literally true of digital media like DVDs or Blu-Ray than the analog videocassettes sent to the Laurents -- and Haneke refashions them into devices to store human memory as well; after all, what is a home movie but a memory permanently enshrined in a hard copy?

Haneke's direction is never showy, but he and his editors, Michael Hudecek and Nadine Muse, have the skill of maintaining the atmosphere of a thriller even as the question of who's recording these tapes and tormenting this family fades into an exploration of those characters. The simple act of transitioning from those drab, immobile shots of building exteriors to tracking and panning shots of the characters is jolting, often leaping from the dully lit static shots to bright and colorful action, such as young Pierrot in swim meets. Some may even get hung up with the lack of action in the film, as it's so concise and well-paced that even those who admire its exploration of themes can't be faulted for constantly expecting more action than Haneke gives us.

Indeed, Haneke shows only two scenes of violence, one odd and somewhat imagined, the other a stark, horrific moment that's all too real. This last act brings a terrible finality to Majid and Georges' decades-long conflict and a sobering look at how France's post-'68 intellectual socialism still hasn't eradicated the racism and disparity between classes that drive some people to desperation (La Haine was an excellent glimpse into this social problem as well). But, for all Haneke's supposed misanthropy and cynicism -- here is a man so pissed off by the lasting relevance of his 1997 work Funny Games that he remade it shot-for-shot a decade later with English-speaking actors so he could get ignorant Americans to watch it without bitching about suffering the indignity of having to "read" a film -- he has the optimism to insert the film's epilogue, an unheard conversation between the sons of Majid and Georges. Perhaps Haneke does not allow us to hear what they have to say because it is not worth hearing, a rehash of their parents' conflict that starts the cycle anew. But maybe, just maybe, their brief meeting contains the spark of reconciliation, and the hope that, through talking out issues and understanding the problems that plagued past generations, the current youth can one day move beyond a legacy of hate and fear. Didn't know ya had it in you, you cranky Austrian bastard.

Three Colors Trilogy

Krzysztof Kieslowksi's Three Colors trilogy is one of the deepest, most rewarding film series I've ever seen. Very loosely related, they nevertheless form one giant film on the basis of their themes. Kieslowski's The Decalogue was based on each of the Ten Commandments, and this trilogy picks, of all things, the French flag as its nucleus, with each film titled after one of its three colors.

Blue starts things off magnificently with a hauntingly metaphysical dissection of grief. Juliette Binoche plays Julie, the wife of a famous composer, who must cope with the sudden deaths of her husband and their daughter in a car accident at the film's start. Her grief is overwhelming yet contained; she does not spend the first half of the film (or even a scene) in hysterics. Instead, she retreats into agony.

Julie does everything she can to rid herself of the pain. She burns her husband's unfinished symphony (a piece celebrating the unity of Europe), sells the house and moves to Paris, hoping the bustle of the city will envelop her. She takes nothing with her save an object of her daughter's made of blue beads, and distances herself completely from her past life. Yet soon she realizes that a rejection of the physical cannot dull her psychological trauma and, despite her attempts to cut herself off from the old Julie, Paris throws several items from her past back into her life.

On the one hand, she reunites with Olivier, her husband Patrice's best friend and a fellow composer. Julie knows Olivier loves her and rejects him at first, then turns to him to feel something. The other major character Julie must contend with is her husband's mistress, who is pregnant with his child. The scenes between the two do not play out as they likely would have in an American film; there are no screams nor catfights, only two women so broken that they recognize each other as kindred spirits in grief.

The tone of the film is certainly blue; these characters struggle through indescribable sorrow. Yet that is not what the title really means. On the French flag, blue stands for liberty, and ultimately Julie's tragedy becomes a means to start anew, free of the baggage of a husband whom she loved but nevertheless had to support. As she becomes more involved with Olivier we learn who really wrote Patrice's music, and the answer might not be who you think. The film ends with a completed version of his planned symphony, booming a message of hope into the story and signifying a new chapter in Julie's life, one in which she can move forward without forcing herself to forget the past.

White, a comparatively straightforward black comedy, seems about as distant in tone as you could get to the ponderous Blue. Karol, a Polish immigrant who speaks halting French, stands in a courtroom for divorce hearings, where (in a painful and painfully funny moment) his wife tells the poor sod she doesn't love him, and he must have it translated for him by a third party.

The divorce leaves Karol penniless and unable to return home to Poland, and eventually he plays songs in the metro station for change. Finally he meets Mikołaj, a fellow Pole who offers Karol a job: a man wants to die but cannot bring himself to commit suicide, so he'll pay Karol to do the deed.

From there the plot balloons; Mikołaj smuggles Karol back to Poland in a suitcase, where he attends to his task, with a number of twists. Eventually he regains his wealth by buying up valuable land on loans and selling them to companies for massive profits. This wealth allows him to pursue the theme of the film (and, of course, the meaning of this section of the flag): equality.

But just as liberty for Julie was not political, equality for Karol is not social. He means to "get even" with his wife Dominique, and plans to use his money to fake his death and implicate her. In these passages Kieslowski uses Karol for a metaphor for his native Poland. Poland has long been at the mercy of various European invaders, but with the fall of the Iron Curtain it at last regained its independence. Yet it was unceremoniously dumped back into the real world with nothing, and it quickly hosted the same sort of ruthless capitalism that hit postwar Japan. Karol personifies this journey: he's cast into the streets after a separation, then accumulates wealth to get his revenge.

The ending is hopeful, though perhaps not entirely earned, and that, combined with its more plot-driven narrative, makes it inferior to its predecessor, and the final chapter. Red, the best of the three (though distinguishing between them is a bit silly), takes the pathos of White's black comedy and meshes it with the spiritual musings of Blue, then adds in character insight that is wholly its own. The theme this time is fraternity, and Kieslowski crafts a film that shows the intertwining nature of man in a way that would make Robert Altman proud.

Red centers on Valentine (Iréne Jacob), a model who states in the beginning that she feels lonely. She has a brother, but he's distant yet possessive of his sister and Valentine finds no comfort in him. Every day she walks past Auguste, a law student studying to become a judge, who lives in her apartment building with his girlfriend Karin, the unofficial weatherperson of the neighborhood.

One night she accidentally runs over a dog and takes it to the address on her collar. She enters the house to find Kern, a retired judge who sits hunched over in his living room, isolated from the world. He says he doesn't care about the dog, so Valentine takes the poor thing to the vet herself. Eventually she and Kern strike up a friendship and, after a fashion, Valentine learns that his hobby is eavesdropping on people.

Kieslowski ever, ever so slowly connects the various threads of the story; establishing relationships between some characters and breaking apart others. It lacks the improvised feel of one of Altman's or Renoir's pieces, but it nevertheless seems to paint a portrait of life. Red bookends the trilogy with another tragedy, though this one offers more immediate hope. In the ending scenes, we see the major pairings of each film standing together, total strangers linked in ways beyond their knowing.

Apart from tackling the themes of the French flag, Kieslowski constantly employs each of the three colors in his shots. In Red, Valentine prepares for her shower by opening her blue blouse to reveal a white bra as she stands by a red shower curtain. In Blue, children in white bathing suits don red floaters and jump into a blue swimming pool. The director also links the films in minor ways: apart from the final moments of Red, Julie's story crosses into Karol and Dominique's when she stumbles into their divorce hearing looking for her husband's mistress. His camera movements, particularly in Red rarely call attention to themselves, and only do so when they're so incredible that I can't stop wondering how he did he could move the camera so fast without losing focus.

All in all, Kieslowski offers up one of the great trilogies in film, one linked not by narrative or franchised characters but by ideas. To steal from Ebert, these films are "metaphysical through example, not theory." Where a Hollywood version of this would have introduced a smarmy friend who'd make wisecracks until the last ten minutes before saying "Julie, life ain't about yo' past, it's about you," at which point I'd punch my own TV screen, Kieslowski lets the characters figure it out for themselves. It never spoon-feeds us the answers and for that we should be exceedingly grateful, although the fact that treating an audience like an adult is seemingly so rare it deserves gratitude is a bit of a sad realization. I have not seen anything else of Kieslowski's work, and I don't like to make bold platitudes, but the strength of these films alone ensure I will seek out his entire filmography, because I've never seen a director like him.