Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas, 2013)

Something in the Air is the weakest of the last three films Olivier Assayas has made, but underneath its ostensible nostalgia and self-pity is a wry critique of revolutionary youths who quit the struggle because they did not realize what an impact they truly had. May '68 failed in its stated goals, but the youths who come of age in its wake face a radically altered set of possibilities, many of them scarier in their uncertainty than the status quo broken up by their predecessors (albeit not in the way they wanted to break it up). It's yet another fine entry from one of the world's best working filmmakers, and a slyly subversive work that belies its lack of "revolutionary syntax."

My full review is up at Movie Mezzanine.

Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)

[This is my May post for Blind Spots.]

Irma Vep is the third Olivier Assayas film I've seen, the other two being Summer Hours and Carlos. This 1996 feature contains the roots of both, the former's elegant respect for French art history and the latter's deconstructive, post-New Wave wit. A film about a film production starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Irma Vep instantly recalls Day for Night, but as Assayas voices and visualizes a sense of dissatisfaction with French cinema, the film becomes something else. Eric Gautier's gritty, 16mm cinematography and sophisticated camera movements combine New Wave spontaneity (the film was shot in three weeks) with formal know-how to be both behind-the-scenes docudrama and rich cinematic fantasy.

That the  production in question is an adaptation of Louis Feuillade's 1915 serial Les Vampires only complicates Assayas' thematic intent. The characters working on this French film set all talk of American films, some disapprovingly, others with an eagerness to see their own national cinema reflect Hollywood's crowd-pleasing scale. Assayas "remakes" Feuillade's film to remind everyone that France invented the action epic, and that they didn't need insane budgets and special effects to do so. Yet the fact that someone would remake it speaks to a lack of original ideas for contemporary French directors, and that's leaving out how little of France seems to make its way into this production.

Carlos

A moment near the beginning of Olivier Assayas' 5-1/2 hour epic Carlos recalled the opening shot of another 2010 masterpiece: The Social Network. Both films place the protagonist at a table with his lover. Carlos the Jackal, like Mark Zuckerberg, is unformed here, all ambition but no substance. And like Erica Albright, Carlos' female companion sees right through his bullshit: where Zuckerberg's girlfriend pegs him an "asshole," Carlos' woman recognizes the "bourgeois arrogance" behind his revolutionary zeal. Like Zuckerberg, Carlos would gain notoriety for linking people across the world. Only where the Harvard freshman gave collegiate youth a forum to broadcast drunken musings on the web, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez represented the dawn of the modern terrorist, capable of slipping in and out of cells anywhere on Earth.

Carlos the Jackal, like Zuckerberg, would become a defining icon of his generation even as both remained relative unknowns to those who vilified (and worshiped) them. Carlos, Assayas' finest film since...his last one, uses its excessive length to tear down the mythos surrounding the Jackal, the man who popularized, possibly even invented, the notion of airplane hijacking by terrorists. For years, a single photograph of Carlos, showing a pudgy, smirking man, became the symbol of terrorism, a vision of arrogant cool that today looks absurd. Just as Steven Soderbergh attempted to undermine the iconic photograph of Che Guevara, so too does Assayas dig into his own subject's portrait to demystify the Jackal.

His early actions portray an idealist whose incompetence overshadows his zeal. His first assignment for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to execute a Zionist businessman, ends in failure when his gun jams. Later, he and another take a missile launcher to an airstrip, only to to twice miss the plane they are aiming at on the tarmac. Eventually, he starts to work with the Japanese Red Army on some raids in The Hague and Paris, always staying a safe distance away from any action. Even his first significant success, killing French police who track him down via an informant, comes only because he stops paying attention and practically invites the detectives over. But a paper prints the headline "Carlos: 3-0" afterward, assuring the terrorist of his victory. Yet onward he moves, and Assayas communicates Sánchez's restlessness with a graceful but frenetic camera, not resorting to shakycam but never pausing. Assayas uses this direction to quickly paint a portrait of a man able to outpace his own failure, somehow taking every minor thing he does right along with him and leaving the detritus behind.

Carlos himself detests immobility. He views terrorism through the same romantic lens that so many view freedom fighters, and uses the image of a dangerous man to fashion himself into something of a rock star. The locations of the film change seemingly with every cut of the camera, globetrotting on fast-forward to show Carlos and co. stirring up trouble wherever they can. As if watching a James Bond movie, we see a parade of women undressing for Sánchez as his clothes become increasingly fashionable. In one memorable scene, he seduces a woman by rubbing a live grenade over her body, demonstrating in a flash his entire perception of his actions. When he must lie low, sent to the Middle Eastern desert to train a PFLP camp, the sudden decrease in movement affects Carlos so much that even his body suddenly looks amorphous and without structure. By the end of the first part, I wondered if Sánchez agreed to train as a "proper" terrorist only so he could feel justified wearing the beret he adds to his wardrobe.

Seeking to prove his credentials, Carlos will do anything he is asked, and the PFLP humorously seems to care more about the moderates within their own cause than the imperial powers they believe keep them down. Even Yasser Arafat is mocked and denounced for daring to even meet with Israeli representatives. Carlos and the other soldiers are convinced that they must purify their own side to better attack the enemy with a unified front, but we can read between the lines and guess that the ones actually in charge of the terrorist organizations realize that an attack on one of those imperialist powers will bring the military might of those nations to bear on nations utterly ill-equipped to handle a squadron of bombers suddenly entering Syrian or Libyan airspace. The cleansing of their own house allows them to look busy and fearsome while not getting much of substance done.

Assayas makes that underlying motivation clear by shooting Carlos' defining moment, the raid and subsequent hostage-taking at the headquarters of OPEC in Vienna on December 21, 1975, from a perspective that destroys any notion that the defining moment in Carlos' life was anything but an absurd waste. Sent to kill the representatives for Iran and Saudi Arabia for breaking the OPEC embargo, Carlos and his team successfully break into the building, quell resistance and separate the representatives by how friendly they are to "the cause." For all of Ronald Reagan's mistakes and all the things about his administration I find at best neglectful and at worst abhorrent, he was absolutely correct to lay down the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" policy, and, indeed, the Swiss authorities look like clowns as they acquiesce to every demand made by Carlos. Swiss TV stations play a prepared, pro-Palestinian statement every two hours, Sánchez's demanded DC-9 plane is obtained and Swiss authorities even take one of the terrorists in their custody, a wounded German named Hans‑Joachim Klein, and release him in his hospital bed to board the plane.


Of course, not everything goes according to plan. During the raid, Carlos locks one man in his office and leaves, failing to consider that a working telephone is also in that office. Nada, a ferocious vision of mid-'70s punk incarnate, kills a cop, then sends his body down in an elevator to alert those on other floors of what's going on. And when they reach the airport, Carlos is stymied to learn that, while he got the DC-9 he requested, he did not check the aircraft's range, learning from the assigned pilot that it cannot reach Baghdad and must go to Algiers. As with everything that came before, Carlos manages to succeed only through luck and the shared incompetence of others.

The raid and escape sequence, dominating the entire first half of the second part, delineates Carlos from his hero, Che. Assayas, who, on the basis of this fantastic interview with Glenn Kenny, saw and understood what Soderbergh was trying to do with his own epic -- to bypass biography to focus on strategy, separates Che's ability to rigorously plan and execute a revolution according to plan from the Jackal's more impulsive behavior. Before he kills the Saudi Arabian oil minister, he has a heart-to-heart with the man about his reluctance to assassinate the representative of a nation whom he usually considers an ally. The minister is so confused by this chat that he pushes his luck by asking why the terrorist is even speaking to him. Later, Carlos decides to trade both the Saudi minister and the Iranian finance minister with the rest of the hostages for a massive sum of money (which he claims for the cause, of course). We also get to see the brash, naïve views of his team. As Carlos takes a step toward more political thinking, or at least self-serving greed, his comrades rage at the idea of failing their prime objective for cash. Amusingly, their fiery rants make Carlos' plan sound mature. After watching Red Army members shoot at a portrait of former French president Georges Pompidou at the French embassy in The Hague (despite Pompidou having already died in '74) and the actions of people like Nada in the OPEC scenario, we almost sympathize with Carlos, until we realize he has become the moderate he hates, regardless of how much he continues to speak against moderation over the resulting decades.

From the second half of the middle part through the end, Carlos moves to detail the banality of the Jackal's life of crime, which seems more mercenary than extremist. He continues to do the bidding of others, others who are becomingly increasingly weary of Carlos' fame and his love of it. The PFLP throws him out for failing to kill the two intended targets of the OPEC raid, and the East German Stasi is too preoccupied with its inner turmoil over potential antisemitism vs. anti-Zionism to offer much to Carlos when he relocates to East Berlin. The split between hating Israel and hating Jews comes to a head with the 1976 hijacking of the Air France flight to Entebbe, foiled by IDF agents. Klein, the terrorist wounded in the OPEC raid, notes with horror that before the Israelis stopped the hijacking, the PFLP members involved separated the Jews on-board from the rest of the passengers, preparing them for the kill. By 1977, Klein has left Carlos' independent terrorist cell and confessed his crimes to the German paper Der Spiegel, placing the other terrorists in jeopardy.

Ergo, the final part in the three-episode miniseries depicts Carlos as a man slowly, quietly coming undone from paranoia and the mounting realization that he's a has-been. As a journalist seeking an interview rightly notes, without the papers, there would be no Carlos. Thus, when his activity begins to slow in the '80s, he's left to continue evading capture, no longer acting on the offense but the defense. We are treated to mad sights like Carlos and his German comrade, Johannes Weinrich, hiding guns in the mansion Carlos buys as a "home base" (which sounds by this point to be the hip, geopolitical update to calling a man's house his "castle") before taking Carlos' wife to the hospital to give birth. We watch many of Sánchez's late dealings with terrorist-friendly governments on surveillance video, seeing beyond the discussions to note that even those ostensibly sympathetic to Carlos' convictions had begun recording him in case they needed to burn the man. Finally, Carlos, fat, tired and dealing with testicular pain, is betrayed by his own comrades who view him as nothing more than a liability and a waste of resources. When he's captured, he regrets that he won't be able to get that liposuction he was planning. A fine end for a committed Marxist.

The chief complaint I've heard registered against the film is that this last third is too slow, too concerned with staking out the banality of Carlos' life when that had already been made clear. But I found the final part the most revealing, especially because Édgar Ramírez's performance reaches its peak at the end. I've not yet commented on what is easily the finest acting work of the year, reluctant to approach the subject too soon for fear of never getting back on track with the rest of the film's greatness. Resembling a Hispanic Mark Ruffalo, Ramírez exudes animal magnetism: you have to keep reminding yourself that Carlos is, ultimately, just a foot soldier doing the work of superiors because he has a way of convincing all those around him he's a leader. He even seduces his second wife, the German revolutionary Magdalena Kopp, from being a radical feminist to a classical housewife -- in one of the film's most bizarre and darkly funny moments, Magdalena sobs over her husband's affairs while randomly screaming her desire to rejoin the cause.


Yet Assayas never commits the sin of making this man truly appealing to the audience. By balancing the farce with which he plays out Carlos' actions with the irresistible performance given by Ramírez, Assayas creates a well-rounded portrait of the man, starkly capturing the hypocrisy in the Jackal's actions but not discounting some hint of idealism that must have motivated him somewhat. To further ensure the audience doesn't get too caught up in action revelry, a great deal of violence is left off-screen. While guns fire throughout the first two parts, the shootouts are anticlimactic, and late-stage violence, such as Carlos' paranoid murder of a comrade in the next room over from his sleeping baby daughter, are announced in retrospect. Assayas also uses stock news footage after a number of terrorist actions, not only to make up for some of the detail the fast-paced camerawork managed to blitzkrieg past but to offer looks at the aftermath without the allure of big-budget explosions. When Carlos bombs two TGV trains, we see the real result, twisted, collapsed metal, instead of watching the train skid off the rails over loud music.

Speaking of music, the use of post-punk songs from bands like Wire is a brilliant method the director uses for getting inside the heads not only of Carlos but some of the people around him. This is what they hear in their heads every morning when they wake up, the soundtrack to their own movie, their own Battle of Algiers. By using post-punk instead of classic punk bands like The Clash or Crass, Assayas makes an important distinction: post-punk took the attitude of punk and, with exceptions, replaced politics with the personal, even making more socially aware tracks more intimate. Likewise, these people tend to view terrorism only through their own lens, seeing themselves as heroic for intervening on the behalf of others. If a post-punk just wanted to make music, these guys just want to make trouble. Only Nada gets an actual punk song, the Dead Boys' seminal "Sonic Reducer," and that's because she's the only one crazy and committed enough to warrant one. ("She's like the MC 5 of terrorism," Assayas hilariously but astutely notes in the aforementioned interview.)

If anyone else had been in charge of the last two hours, Carlos might have screeched to a halt and entered stereotypically "biopic" territory. But Assayas and Ramírez are not interested in the various events that befall our protagonist but why he lets himself fall apart. Carlos, for its epic length, might make a number of rewarding double-bills. The first comparison is of course Che, where one could compare Guevara's downfall in part two with Carlos' much more protracted slide into oblivion (plus, if you thought Che lost his way by sporting a Rolex, consider that Carlos buys a damn mansion). One could also pair the movie with Munich, Steven Spielberg's even-handed look at the failures Israel's Mossad made when seeking revenge for the 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics. Those revenge attacks provoked Carlos' own actions, and the combined sight of unforgivable mistakes made on both sides of Isreali-Palestinian situation would prevent easy alignment with either cause. I'm so used to "Based on a true story" banners at the start of films that I was amazed that Assayas, who thoroughly researched his film with greater journalistic integrity than dots most biopics, would go to painstaking lengths in an opening disclaimer to note that this is a work of fiction. Ironically, by admitting that he must lie, Assayas is more truthful to us than most, and that same contradictory honesty makes Carlos one of the greatest films of the new millennium and a document of terrorism that can intrigue and enlighten people on both sides of the political spectrum. It also speaks to the truth hidden in plain sight in that old photograph of Carlos: look beyond that vague aura of smug cool and you'll see nothing more than a fat, smirking fool with bad taste.

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.