everwhere, i see chiendent...
i went to the cinema today and had quite the experience: i watched quite possibly the worst film i've ever sat entirely through at the cinemas, ensemble, c'est tout. (an adaptation from the book of the same title. and boy does it feel like it. the book was 573 pages long, which is pretty hefty. so you would imagine that the person responsible for the script was someone truly in love with the book. but claude berri clearly isn't at all.) the film have a totally pointless english title hunting and gathering. what does this have to do with the film? how could this possibly be seen to fit in with the domestic moeurs that are on display? the french title actually makes sense, because it literally is a film about togetherness, with everyone learning to just get on. as the english tag line goes 'love might be closer than you think'. it's probably the only thing in the film that does make sense...
but it is quite strange that i feel so compelled to sit through any film whatsoever at the cinema, even if i haven't paid for it. today's adventure was the result of a free ticket. and thank you sincerely very much to that person who gave it to me! i was fully prepared for to see a very average film, but berri out did himself. the film is actually so crap that its crappiness became a redeeming quality. in the end, the conversation that resulted from this film was probably even more interesting and funny then a solidly 'average' film, even one that borders on 'good'. as though we had just watched a comedy, we recounted to each other, laughing all the while, the many story lines and their mini-story lines that continued to bud (dans le rhizome il y a le meilleur et le pire: c'est le chiendent, nous avertit m. d.) and how none of them went anywhere. for example, we wonder why we're show the meetings between camille and her mother. there is no story line developed here. the scenes only serve to show us that mother and daughter don't get on. and to add a couple more quips about how camille should put on weight. but even this isn't meant as a running joke. you're a skeleton you need to put on weight kind of thing. it's a simple superfluous statement.
one of the funniest bits, for me, since i could see it happening and turned to my neighbour to whisper my prediction, was when a car appears in one scene out of nowhere, and i wonder 'wow franck has a car, even though he's a dirt poor cook living with an aristocrat in an huge dirty old inner city parisian apartment. he mustn't be too bad off after all'. but in the middle of a conversation with his grandmother franck cuts short the chit-chat and declares to the others, and us, that he's just going to duck out and take the rental car back. it was particularly funny because it was an extremely rare point of clarity in the film. the rest of it remains opaque and impervious, like a tangled mass of floating seaweed of a story line invading new virginal territories.
but it is here that lies the surprising interest to be found in the film. it is unintentionally very comical and its opacity renders it rather difficult to make real sense of according to any sort of traditional narrative framework. in this respect the film is quite reminiscent of a robbe-grillet film because it is both funny (robbe-grillet we might assume is purposefully humorous, if his personal character is anything to judge by), and also works with the bare bones of a story that appears to be in constant grasp of the viewer, but it is never attained. and if it ever is actually attained, the viewer quickly drops it as another incongruous element of the story is revealed which brings the rest into contradiction, or in this film's case, renders it irrelevant. moreover, like robbe-grillet, we note that there is a surplus of detail at work that adds another layer of difficulty to the story: surplus story lines, characters, character conversations, scenes and clarifications (ah, the wonderful rental car!). and this surplus might even be taken to be the result of major cuts in the story, because it actually appears to produce gapping holes. in other words, hunting and gathering, as with robbe-grillet, is attempting to work within an established tradition (here it appears to be a sort of light drama, or even a lite bourgeois french film: it is tagged on the flyer as 'romantic fable'...) and unwittingly, and quite perversely it must be said for a film which is sold as a safe, comfortable bourgeois film, undoes its ultimate goal of gentle emotional heart-tugging. all of this results in something of an odd experience where the film's characters talk to each other on a purely surface level without really interacting, so that the film verges on being an inadvertant abstract wonder.
p.s for the record, the only film i've actually walked out on is cut, that terrible horror movie with a pointless bit part by kylie minogue.
but it is quite strange that i feel so compelled to sit through any film whatsoever at the cinema, even if i haven't paid for it. today's adventure was the result of a free ticket. and thank you sincerely very much to that person who gave it to me! i was fully prepared for to see a very average film, but berri out did himself. the film is actually so crap that its crappiness became a redeeming quality. in the end, the conversation that resulted from this film was probably even more interesting and funny then a solidly 'average' film, even one that borders on 'good'. as though we had just watched a comedy, we recounted to each other, laughing all the while, the many story lines and their mini-story lines that continued to bud (dans le rhizome il y a le meilleur et le pire: c'est le chiendent, nous avertit m. d.) and how none of them went anywhere. for example, we wonder why we're show the meetings between camille and her mother. there is no story line developed here. the scenes only serve to show us that mother and daughter don't get on. and to add a couple more quips about how camille should put on weight. but even this isn't meant as a running joke. you're a skeleton you need to put on weight kind of thing. it's a simple superfluous statement.
one of the funniest bits, for me, since i could see it happening and turned to my neighbour to whisper my prediction, was when a car appears in one scene out of nowhere, and i wonder 'wow franck has a car, even though he's a dirt poor cook living with an aristocrat in an huge dirty old inner city parisian apartment. he mustn't be too bad off after all'. but in the middle of a conversation with his grandmother franck cuts short the chit-chat and declares to the others, and us, that he's just going to duck out and take the rental car back. it was particularly funny because it was an extremely rare point of clarity in the film. the rest of it remains opaque and impervious, like a tangled mass of floating seaweed of a story line invading new virginal territories.
but it is here that lies the surprising interest to be found in the film. it is unintentionally very comical and its opacity renders it rather difficult to make real sense of according to any sort of traditional narrative framework. in this respect the film is quite reminiscent of a robbe-grillet film because it is both funny (robbe-grillet we might assume is purposefully humorous, if his personal character is anything to judge by), and also works with the bare bones of a story that appears to be in constant grasp of the viewer, but it is never attained. and if it ever is actually attained, the viewer quickly drops it as another incongruous element of the story is revealed which brings the rest into contradiction, or in this film's case, renders it irrelevant. moreover, like robbe-grillet, we note that there is a surplus of detail at work that adds another layer of difficulty to the story: surplus story lines, characters, character conversations, scenes and clarifications (ah, the wonderful rental car!). and this surplus might even be taken to be the result of major cuts in the story, because it actually appears to produce gapping holes. in other words, hunting and gathering, as with robbe-grillet, is attempting to work within an established tradition (here it appears to be a sort of light drama, or even a lite bourgeois french film: it is tagged on the flyer as 'romantic fable'...) and unwittingly, and quite perversely it must be said for a film which is sold as a safe, comfortable bourgeois film, undoes its ultimate goal of gentle emotional heart-tugging. all of this results in something of an odd experience where the film's characters talk to each other on a purely surface level without really interacting, so that the film verges on being an inadvertant abstract wonder.
p.s for the record, the only film i've actually walked out on is cut, that terrible horror movie with a pointless bit part by kylie minogue.
posted by goguenard at
6:09 AM
2 Comments:
oh god, i had a laughing fit reading your rental car observations . . .
but isn't that, as you say, pretty indicative about this film. i mean, it's SO expository i almost thought sometimes it was being experimental. a fine line. it's sort of like one of those feel-good films which is so feel-good it starts to seem like it's operating under some new martian criteria of cinematic production.
also, imagine if characters did stop more often to explain anomalies and details in their lives. "I can't get on the plane with you now Sarah, I have to meet the insurance people about my fall at work." or if at some point the main character just had to sell his apartment, not because he loses his job or his life changes through a justifiable emotional paradigm, but because he'd wrongly calculated the necessary interest repayments. jarmusch is really interested in this sort of thing i think: Broken Flowers does it par excellence, and i think it's one of the reasons people either love or hate that film (i LOVE it, and i can't remember what you thought of it. but BF is quite RG)
but aww i don't know, i thought this film was also kind of sweet par moments . . . i think feel-good is a better term than comedy. are there even any attempts at jokes? i can't really remember any. i certainly never laughed, personally, but i saw it in france and the french people in the cinema actually laughed themselves silly over the aristocrat dude. they apparently thought he was hilarious: "un peu TROP!!!" eh beh oui, mais quand meme. this should be taken with a grain of salt though as in my experience the french often laugh way too much during films.
also, tatou is entirely unsexy in this film, which after hors de prix i didn't think possible, but i found their love scenes so utterly uninspiring, almost like watching strangers together, and i didn't like the guy either, really typically boring cliche of teddy-bear hidden beneath surly simmeringness which in real-life actually just equals arsehole.
now excuse me, jimmy stewart, i have to return the rental-car . . .
i remember not particularly liking BF. more indifferent perhaps. i think at the time too i was in a really anti bill murray mood, because i'd just seen some other films of his, and his and in BF he just did BM. and i suppose i have a thing against actors who just do this one thing. and everyone raves on about how good murray is at doing murray. and that shits me. so i suppose it was not so much the film as the actor. but other jarmusch that i've seen, like coffee and cigarettes and down by law, i really liked.
but re: ensemble, c'est tout, i didn't say it was a comemdy. it said it was as though we had watched a comemdy when we talked about it, because it made us laugh that none of it made sense. the film didn't want to be a comemdy, so there were no outward attempts at comemdy, except for the aristocrat character and his stuttering. so i think i was probably laughing at the film more than i should have. the kind of laugh where at the same time you hit your head. but then after i'd done that several times, i kind of thought, wow there's something else going on here.
but see you right on the money with the love scene. there's no connection. and none of the characters has a connection with any other, and so they just talk right past each other. it's like the modulated talking in godard, only here they talk normally as though they really do connect. another example of part of the film that doesn't make any sense: her art fascination: camille is always drawing, just like that for no reason. she draws so much that you except someone to tell her she's really good and should quit being a cleaner and try her hand at being an artist. but she ends up being franck's talented artist 'wife' (with her drawings all of the cafe's walls. and we don't even know if it's his wife. do they get married?? we know the aristocrat gets married and out of nowhere, on stage he declares his love without her having actually said one word in the film. did we know for sure they had talked at all?) who helps run some overnight success story of a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. and what's with camille drawing the dead grandma? for me, there was not enough of a relationship between the two to warrant such an intimate scene. far more intimate than a love scene. and plus she's just a cleaner with a hobby for drawing. and then there's the story of camille and her mum. what's going on there? why do we see them meeting? she never meets anyone else in the film. it's a completely separate off shoot that doesn't and will never meet with any other part of the 'main' story. there is, in short, a whole bunch of little story line buds that are only actually connected because they're in the film, the same frame. they've been forced together and we have to make sense of it, and establish some sort of meaningful relationship. the film is after all sold as a romantic fable. a pretty simple genre.
so i kind of think that it's better that the fild was trying to be experimental, and just leaves itself open to such a crazy assertion.
yeah, wow, was this film popular in frace? only because of the pulling power of a big name like tautou? or berri, he's rather popular right? because as an outsider you could be tempted to think this film is made purely for the foreign market, with all of its french steorotypes to make us laugh and revel all of its frenchiness.
(and yeah i laughed at m. le begayeur. especially when he said his full name. ha! how hilarious! how french!)
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