jürgen fauth’s muckworld

In 1985, Charlotte Gainsbourg (Lemming, The Science of Sleep) was just thirteen and cute as a button. L’Effrontée is only her third movie, and she owns it. The French vacation coming-of-age tale is a venerable subgenre (we’re fans of Girls Can’t Swim and Pauline at the Beach but not Fat Girl)–and this is a very fine addition. Charlotte plays the motherless daughter of a handyman who can’t afford to go out of town. Stranded, she enters the world of a perfect piano prodigy (Clothilde Baudon) while a creepy sailor twice her age (Jean-Philippe Écoffey) tries to buy her beer and her sickly friend Lulu (Julie Glenn) gets sicker. Like in many French films (Safe Conduct always comes to mind), drama is implied without having to be carried to some over-the-top climax. L’Effrontee is a lovely evocation of how much it can stink to be a teenager.

L’effrontée. Claude Miller, 1985. ****

After the jump, Europop madness, Serge Gainsbourg vs. Whitney Houston, and Jane Birkin singing Di Doo Dah.

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Luc Besson returns to Paris with a little movie that begins as playful comedy about a crook who meets a beautiful woman — and ends as dreadfully dumbed-down remake of Wings of Desire. André (Jamel Debbouze) is a scam artist who’s run out of luck, ready to hurl himself into the Seine when Angela (Rie Rasmussen) does the same. He saves her life, and they make a pact…. The first twenty minutes are lithe and fun, and in the slick black-and-white cinematography, Paris looks almost as good as the freakishly leggy Danish model.

Then comes the fatal misstep: Angela — mon dieu! – is an honest-to-god angel, sent to teach André the value of love, honesty, and self-respect. She does this by whoring herself out to every man in some sort of day-time nightclub and giving cloying speeches that Rasmussen is not actress enough to pull off (I doubt anybody is.) Even at 88 minutes, Angel-A feels padded and overlong, and the ending is an embarrassment of unearned sentiment.

Speaking of bridges: after the screening, we partied with Ghostface Killah and Spike Lee under the Queensboro, but that’s a story for another day. Angel-A opens May 25.

Angel-A. Luc Besson, 2005. **

• Angel-A Photo Gallery

Philip Gröning lived in a monk’s cell in the French Alps for six months to make this — you guessed it — very quiet documentary about the hermits’ lives. According to the press notes, the Carthusians are among the world’s most ascetic orders. (They also make the sticky herb liqueur Chartreuse). But you wouldn’t know this from the movie, which barely contains a spoken word at all. There is chanting, there is praying, there are the monks’ daily chores, the chopping of wood, the mending of shoes, the preparation of food. The seasons pass: snow falls, ice melts, spring comes, and the fog lifts off the monastery that lies nestled between stunning peaks. The patient observation lasts for nearly three hours; Gröning’s aim is not to explain and analyze the monks, but to approximate their heightened awareness through contemplative filmmaking.

I’m of two minds about this. Into Great Silence is an exquisitely boring, poetic film that uses the carefully observed day-to-day textures of the monk’s austere existence to lull its audience into a meditative state. But there is something of the imitative fallacy to Gröning’s approach. The outward signs of the monk’s lives are just that — they don’t just wander the hallways and kneel: they read, write, think, and pray. Even if they never open their mouths, their heads are filled with words, words we are not privy to. No matter how long he holds his shots, Gröning can only ever show us the surface, never the insides, of what the monks are living for. The film aims to find some sort of vague “spirituality” in moments of mindfulness, but the Carthusian’s very specific religiosity eludes it.

More soon in a full-length review for About.com. Into Great Silence opens next week at Film Forum. Here’s the trailer and the official site.

Die Große Stille. Philip Gröning, 2005. ***

A new disc from the Criterion Collection can feel a little bit like trying a new vegetarian dish. Sometimes it’s juicy and delicious, sometimes you feel like you ought to like it just because it’s oh-so-healthy (and then you’re glad you did), and sometimes it’s broccoli rabe.

Robert Bresson’s final black-and-white film, an adaptation of a tragic novel by Georges Bernanos, delivers a striking portrait of abject poverty. The early scenes, when young Mouchette shuffles on oversize clogs between school and flop house home (drunken father, wasting mother, screaming baby) are quite affecting. Bresson is up to his usual exposition-less tricks, and the stark naturalism is bracing. Mouchette is unloved at home and abused at school, so who’s to blame her when she throws some mud at the pretty classmates in their fancy dresses? But then, she turns out to be a character with no options, and storylines involving a) poachers and b) epileptics and c) rapists are always a problem for me. When there are poaching rapists with foaming epileptic seizures, I’m in deep trouble. Au Hasard Blathazar struck me as sublime evocation of suffering, but here, after only 81 minutes, I was just glad that the suffering–Mouchette’s and mine–was finally over. The DVD comes out tomorrow.

Mouchette. Robert Bresson, 1967. **

[tags]2 stars, film, french, robert bresson, criterion collection, tragedy, suffering, poachers, epileptics, rape, poverty, alcoholism, suicide[/tags]

The amazing Isild Le Besco plays the smitten fan of a pop diva (Emmanuelle Seigner) who stalks the star after a misbegotten reality TV encounter and ends up as her maniac mascot in the hotel room where Seigner is gobbling pills and hiding from the cruel, cruel world. Hothouse passions & overripe desire make this slightly silly but very watchable. Le Besco and Seigner are both fascinating. Currently playing at Film Forum. Trailer. RT.

Backstage. Emmanuelle Bercot, 2005. ***

[tags]french, film, 3 stars, emmanuelle bercot, emmanuelle seigner, isild le besco, stalkers, obsession, celebrity[/tags]

Yvan Attal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Terence Stamp in a romantic comedy from France: Yvan’s jealous of his successful actress wife Charlotte, who’s making a movie in London. It’s all very pleasant, Gainsbourg is beautiful, and favorite Ludivine Sagnier has a minor part. But in the end it gets way too goofy, and there’s a dreadful subplot hinging on the circumcision of a Jewish baby. Written and directed by Attal, who really is married to Gainsbourg. It’s suprising Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn haven’t remade this yet.

My Wife is an Actress. Yvan Attal, 2001. **

Curious high-contrast b&w 3-D animation can’t save derivative and cliché-laden cyberpunk script. Thanks, but we’ve already seen Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Sin City and A Scanner Darkly. Opens in a couple of weeks.

Renaissance, Christian Volckman. 2006. *

Bald people and people with tatoos talk tough, run, jump, shoot, and drive cars through locked gates. Parisian Escape from New York setting, Eastern acrobatics, and Euro techno soundtrack. Written by Luc Besson. There’s a bomb and a kidnapped sister and a villian who does too much cocaine for his own good.

Banlieue 13, Pierre Morel, 2004. **

[tags]french, film, 2 stars, action, fighting, luc besson[/tags]