Monthly Archives: September 2007

  • Private Fears in Public Spaces (Coeurs) – Alain Resnais – Fr 2006 – Sabine Azema Andre Dussollier

    Adrin NeatrourGeneral

    Adrin Neatrour writes: With its soft wry humour and humanistic take on contemporary social mores, Private Fears in Public Spaces(Coeurs) feels like an old man’s film. The question is whether Resnais has anything further to commit to film: whether he still has real energy to add to his own oeuvre and to say something to us about our situation. Otherwise why bother. Otherwise he is simply going through a gestural process of demonstrating the vacuous art of film making.

    Private Fears in Public Spaces (Coeurs)
    – Alain Resnais – Fr 2006 – Sabine Azema Andre Dussollier

    Viewed Tyneside Cinema 18 Aug 07 Ticket
    Price £6-20

    With its soft wry humour and humanistic
    take on contemporary social mores, Private Fears in Public
    Spaces(Coeurs) feels like an old man’s film. The question is
    whether Resnais has anything further to commit to film: whether he
    still has real energy to add to his own oeuvre and to say something
    to us about our situation. Otherwise why bother. Otherwise he is
    simply going through a gestural process of demonstrating the vacuous
    art of film making.

    Coeurs is based on a theatrical text by
    Alan Ayckbourn whose play gives the film its English title. Alan
    Ayckbourn is the dramatist of middle England whose plays
    characterised by an admix of both vicious and gentle humour explore
    the social and consumerist pretensions of his characters. The plays
    of his that I have seen certainly explore the dark areas of the
    modern bourgeois psyche but do so in the manner which is contrived to
    allow his audience to be complicit in their own dramas and invites a
    sort of empathic collusion with the characters that is the basis of
    their success. The plays are all written for the proscenium arch and
    usually involve a small number of sets. The sets are central to
    Ayckbourn’s work as the axes about which the action revolves and
    they comprise interior settings familiar to a middle class audience.
    The theatrical devices utilised are contrived coincident, the doors
    in the scenery opening and closing to admit unexpected presences and
    brutal quasi slack-stick accidents. It is a theatre of farce:
    sometimes of a high order that artfully throws into high relief both
    the devilish mechanisms by which we live and at the same time tacitly
    understands and lends them a certain order and measure of ritual
    theatric expiation.

    This is the territory that Resnais has
    chosen to explore. Ayckbourn is a very English writer/director who
    writes for the audience of his Scarborough theatre. His characters
    are defined by physical and attitudinal reflexes that make them
    immediately familiar to the Yorkshire audience. The strength of
    Ayckbourn’s dramatic writing is in releasing in his characters
    forms of recognisable idiosyncrasies and ways of seeing things
    wrapped up in contemporary settings. Resnais has to transpose this
    filmically into the otherness of his chosen social milieu – Paris.
    A city that has its own iconic attitudes traditions, and social and
    consumerist mores.

    Coeurs introduces a central filmic
    idea with his opening shot – a track from high above a shimmering
    white Paris through the falling snow to an upper balcony of a beaux
    arts building, an apartment which Thierry the estate agent is showing
    to his client Nicole. Resnais’ concern is with interiors, empty
    shells which we fill with our desires. Coeurs opens up to a world
    that revolves about the estate agent and the idea of the search:
    search for right apartment, the search for the right partner, the
    search for passion in an world increasingly hemmed in by blandness.

    The film is an exploring of
    interiority. Exteriors for the bourgeois city dweller who travels
    from place to place in the car, are little more than simple visual
    effects, a sort of child’s transparent bubble world where a quick
    shake induces a gentle fall of snow. A pleasing visual simulacrum.
    There are no exterior shots in Coeurs except the opening track so the
    viewers are seeing the outside world from within the bubble lives of
    the characters and their interior worlds. Between each shot, the hand
    of Resnais shakes the bubble and in an inverse arrangement of the
    child’ toy, it is on the outside the bubble where the snow gently
    flutters down.

    In common with other of his films the
    settings in Coeurs are a key expressive component embedded at the
    core of the film. Resnais moves through a number of different types
    of bourgeois interior urban space. Firstly the empty and unfulfilled
    spaces of the uninhabited apartments through which Nicole wanders as
    an increasingly lost soul becoming ever more detached from the belief
    system that sustains her. The empty apartments are finally shot from
    overhead increasing the sense in which they are simply skeletal
    structures waiting to be fleshed out by our yearnings. Secondly the
    public spaces such as the space ship bar (presided over by the
    extraterrestrial Lionel) whose interior fantasies and multiplicities
    of plane and colour are designed to make us believe we exist in
    another dimension on another planet: not on earth. And finally the
    domestic home interiors which intensify either our sense of emptiness
    or dissatisfaction. Like the video of Charlotte’s room, full
    replete with dancing headless bodies. Interior architecture as
    gaseous neon mirrors holding up for our inspection our reflection as
    a parade of souls wandering through an increasingly detached
    inconsequential world. Resnais makes particular use of colour as a
    signifier of emptiness. Colour is primal. A biological indicator of
    states of which we should have awareness. Danger – safety –
    opaqueness – transparency – spirituality – carnality are all
    states or conditions that can be suggested by colour. But in modern
    interiors colours seems to exist for their own sake, for pure visual
    effect, to create illusion to hold reality at bay. The
    signification of colour has been transformed in contemporary settings
    a signifier if hazy gaseous vacuity.

    If Resnais chooses his settings for
    their expressive potential it is the characters and scripts which
    have enabled the settings to resonate and give form to the work. The
    man and the woman in Hiroshima, the two men and the woman in
    Marienbad the character in Providence all created a dynamic immanent
    relationship with space and place allowing the film to move out of
    the constraints of action and penetrate real adjacent but less
    tangible realms such as time and memory. Nothing like this happens
    in Coeurs. The more the film progresses the more it seems to fall
    apart. Resnais seems trapped in Ayckbourn’s little interrelated
    stories unable to free himself from the trite machinations of plot
    and character.

    The characters are deterritorialised
    personas who have drifted from the wings of Ackbourn’s Scarborough
    theatre and have been trapped in a script which fails to locate them
    as Parisians. The consequence is that they do not appear so much as
    lost souls but rather as unconvincing actors in unconvincing roles.
    The characters – with the possible exception of Charlotte – about
    whom there is a coy reticence – all seem to simply go through the
    motions of pretending to play their roles. Something in the film in
    the relation of the actors to their script and their settings simply
    breaks down as the plotting becomes less and less convincing and
    trapped in empty thespian gestures. At this point the film stops.
    The developed relationship between Dan and Nicole is particularly
    weak as it fails to resolve the tension between settings and
    emotionally contrived demands of the relationship. The film produces
    in the end a decontextualised nexus between setting script and
    characters. In short it goes nowhere.

    The strongest item in the film is the
    1930’s poster advertising Scarborough which Thierry and Gail have
    in their living room. I kept on looking at this displaced ‘art’
    and wondered why it was there – at this point I hadn’t seen the
    script was based n Ayckbourn’s play. I thought at first that it
    was of a piece with a film whose theme was displacement. But by the
    end, like the fluttering snow motif the poster had degenerated into a
    mechanical response of a director who was an old man with nothing to
    say, and with just a few jokes to leaven out his story.

    Adrin Neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • The Walker – Paul Schrader – USA /UK 2007 Woody Harrelson, Lauren Bacall Lily Tomlin, Kristin Thomas

    Adrin NeatrourFilm Review

    Adrin Neatrour writes: Paul Schrader’s film compromises its own intention and ambitions. Schrader’s intention as I read it was to conduct an expressive exploration of the form taken by American power during the Bush administration. This intention would be actualised not through a script that directly probed the central machinations of power, but through an examination of the peripheral zones – the hangers on, the petty criminals the courtiers, courtesans and lackies – such as Carter Page. Instead of allowing Page’s hollowness to pursue its own dance its own logic to find his own lines of flight, Schrader’s script follows a sentimental humanising line of development to suggest the possibility of redemption for his protagonist.

    The Walker Paul Schrader – USA /UK
    2007 Woody Harrelson, Lauren Bacall Lily Tomlin, Kristin Thomas

    Viewed: 6 Aug 07 Empire Cinema
    Newcastle upon Tyne: Gala screening free ticket

    Empty Centre

    Woody Harrelson as Carter Page, is the
    eponymous walker, the name given to a male consort who accompanies
    high placed ‘society’ ladies to events or situations which their
    husbands (if they have one) don’t want to attend. Page walks his
    ladies round and round the social whirl. Schrader’s camera
    (continually moving – tracking panning) registers an incessant
    agitation but that does find a point of stillness in the scene in
    Page’s bedroom, a sort of Egyptian tomb like space where he stores
    and displays the tools of his trade: his clothes jewellery and male
    sartorial appurtenances. This scene takes place early in the film.
    It not only reinforces the perception of Washington as a necropolis,
    but when Page divests himself of his wig, his manly mane is replaced
    by stark baldness, a nakedness that points directly to the charade he
    conducts. A hollowed out man in a dead hollowed out city. A man
    without a centre in a town without a centre.

    I think Paul Schrader’s film
    compromises its own intention and ambitions.

    Schrader’s intention as I read it was
    to conduct an expressive exploration of the form taken by American
    power during the Bush administration. This intention would be
    actualised not through a script that directly probed the central
    machinations of power, but through an examination of the peripheral
    zones – the hangers on, the petty criminals the courtiers,
    courtesans and lackies – such as Carter Page. Instead of allowing
    Page’s hollowness to pursue its own dance its own logic to find his
    own lines of flight, Schrader’s script follows a sentimental
    humanising line of development to suggest the possibility of
    redemption for his protagonist. This chosen line of development
    involves a homosexual relationship which becomes increasingly
    meaningful and central to the plotting in as much as it offers a
    solution to Page’s problem of personal vacuity. A relationship in
    which he can ‘find’ himself and confront his Oedipal demons. Of
    course this is bullshit – redemption of a kind may have worked in
    Taxi driver, but in The Walker it is unconvincing on its own dramatic
    terms. At the point that Schrader picks him up, Carter Page is too
    deeply excavated by the cancer of vanity empty desire and outward
    presentation for the pat mechanism of a relationship to offer any
    hope of a new start. Page is a citizen of a bloodless corrupted and
    debilitated culture. To permit Page the easy relational route
    through the script compromises the vision and undermines the force of
    the film’s logic with no dramatic or filmic gain.

    Basing the film on the periphery of
    power was premised on the perception that from the point of view of
    power the US at this moment is an empty centre. The empty centre of
    the world. Power has abandoned Washington DC, leaving the town with
    all the outward signs and indicators of power such as its
    architecture the self importance of the minor players(courtiers) and
    an enforcement system. But there is no substance. It is a city of
    tombs memories and monuments where the living are long gone. It is a
    city of the dead that is true to a Kafkaesque image of a power that
    recedes eternally and becomes ever more remote except when suddenly
    its close up and personal. Like the big corporation that suddenly
    threatens you with a bill or the consequences of their pollution.
    Remote and close. Washington has become like Japan under the
    Shoganate where real power belonged to a war lord who concealed
    himself behind a series of puppet institutions. Real power lay
    concealed away from the vacuum of the empty centre.

    The Walker works as an assemblage of
    expressive settings and players Strips of action taken from the
    social cultural business and criminal events that comprise life in
    Washington DC. The mood of the film is caught in the opening shot:
    a wallpaper shot. An endless circular pan across the wallpaper and
    fittings of the card room in a grand classically apportioned house.
    As the camera revolves we hear the chatter of the card players who
    are eventually revealed as Carter and his ladies. The circular
    nature of the shot evokes the idea of an eternal recurrence with the
    wallpaper exerting a mesmerising effect (more interesting than the
    dialogue which is held back) with its richly pattered geometric
    surface suggesting entrapment and introducing the idea of prison or
    tomb. Motifs that work its way through the Walker: entrapment; life
    of the tomb, Rome in precipitous decline, the Egyptian worship of
    the dead. Moods reinforced by Harrelson’s speech, remarkable not
    for what he says, “I’m not a very interesting person, ” but
    more for manner of his enunciation, the monotonal bass quality of his
    deep Southern accent. Enunciation of death.

    The shot also called up for me memory
    of the opening shot of Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad. Except
    Resnais’ shot tracks relentlessly forwards in its repetitions,
    whereas Schraders shot rotates. And the two shots perhaps share
    something of the same intention to establish a mood and lay out the
    parameters of the films loci of concern. Among Resnais’ concerns
    are the problem of memory with its invocation of differential
    perception the perception of time in the otherness of the other.
    Resnais has both his own discipline, and that of his scenarist Robbe
    Grillet to ensure that he never allows plot line to sabotage the form
    and content of his film. Clarity of intention and commitment to his
    thesis of the nature of time and film never waver. Schrader allows
    his film to be muddied by meaningless clutter of oedipal character
    concerns and a weak plot line which weaken and attenuate the real
    forces that the film initially sets in motion.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk