On Sep 4, 2005, at 9:56 PM, MG4273@... wrote:

> And a second thing about the posts. Maybe I just was not paying
> attention,
> but I cannot recall anything in the posts that prepared me for the
> film I saw.
> Nor in critical comments in newspapers. The actual film seems
> wildly different
> from most of what has been written about it (in English).

I recall posting that I thought the film was mostly crap, although I
love Amalric and I love Devos. As such it had two more things going
for it than the terrible 'Léo or, Playing "In the Company of Men",'
which is beyond defense in its blithering pretentiousness and
hyperbolic (Desplechin-provoked) performances. Good god, the
pretentious idiocy of that rehearsal footage, and both the actors and
Desplechin believe that all the extraneous hokum-palaver will inform
new and necessary takes on the cinematographic nuances. Such
rubbish. Compare and contrast with 'Dokument 'Fanny och Alexander','
as one example. What a ridiculous, meaningless, arbitrary working-
method Desplechin whips everyone up into.

An artist has the right for his subject matter to be as cruel and
despicable as it needs to be for the sake of arranging some kind of
emotional epiphany within the close-viewer -- and not necessarily a
sense of uplift. However, the final Maurice Garrel-intoned letter in
'Kings and Queen' was such a pale, blanched, colorless, uninspired
(except by amphetamine or cocaine delusion during the scriptwriting),
and downright stupid take on Ingrid Thulin's quasi-non-diegetic to-
the-camera recitation of a pained letter in Bergman's
'Nattvardsgästerna' / 'The Communicants' / 'Winter Light,' that a
small part of me died while watching it play out. Bereft of dramatic
shock, let alone emotional epiphany, except for the premise that
we're watching a father up and reject his daughter and who knew. (Of
course that premise also ties it into Björnstrand's diary entries re:
Andersson in 'Såsom i en spegel' / 'As in a Mirror' / 'Through a
Glass Darkly'.) Throw in the quasi-mysticism of the letter
physically scorching the hip. (Desplechin throwing "everything into
the mix" is apparently one of his admired virtues -- hence the hip-
hop dancing scene being thrown in and cited by every critic as a high-
point -- cut to shreds in the editing room I should note; compare and
contrast with any dance scene in 'Haut bas fragile' to compare
amateurish enthusiasm with masterly mise-en-scènic communion. The
French love it when a film makes a -mention- of something, as thought
it were the same as an -insight- -- hence, this white Frenchman
having white Amalric suddenly show go loose and jive out the flow to
a hip-hop beat for twenty seconds becomes the raison d'être of a
forty-minute-overlong film.) The most succinctly I can express it
is, Bergman is a genius and understands the tenets of dramaturgy at
the apex degree, and Desplechin is a movie-buff, poetry-buff, could
just as well be an online-gaming buff.

Visual style often serves only as window-dressing; it's unessential
to the creation of good cinema. Desplechin's problem is he's all
manic-energy and no talent. (Unlike, say, Assayas and Scorsese, as
two contemporary examples, who are all manic-energy, but with
talent. And incidentally, "visual style." Although, really, fuck
"style" -- it's only as good as the heft of its sub-rosa purpose.)
Or maybe he had the talent in the earlier films I haven't seen, and
lost it along the way, I don't know.

On a side-note, I'm very surprised to have learned in the last few
months all the dirt about how Devos got the role. I had the
impression she and Arnaud D. were, like, best-friends-forever who
probably established a sexual bond somewhere along the line, and she
was always at the forefront of his mind for most lead female roles he
writes. As it turns out, things sound considerably more detached, if
not icier.

craig.