Movie Enthusiast Issue 51: French New Wave Diaries II; Cannes Update
My mission to close all the gaps in my knowledge of the major films and filmmakers of the French New Wave continues this week with three more films!
Lola (1961)
Directed by Jacques Demy
Jacques Demy dedicated this, his first film, to the memory of Max Ophüls, who had died in 1957 and two years before that had made Lola Montès, an extravagantly designed film that uses every dutch angle and deliriously long tracking shot in the book to demonstrate how making a spectacle of one’s suffering is the ultimate form of imprisonment. In that movie’s final shot, the most beautiful and seductive woman in all the land sits behind bars, extending both hands to be kissed by what a minute-long tracking shot reveals to be hundreds upon hundreds of faceless men. I was reminded of all those Instagram style influencers I used to hate-follow and broke out into a cold sweat.
Lola is a much different film than its namesake. It’s a light romp around the port city of Nantes, where a layabout intellectual, a smarmy American sailor, a frothy nightclub dancer—Anouk Aimée in one of those roles that made an icon of many a French actress this decade—and a precocious preteen girl do the tango of love together.
A couple more nouvelle-vague hallmarks are out on display here: the on-location filming, the low budget production, the black-and-white cinematography, the classical music cues, the boundless energy of the edits. Lola is, in conventional terms, a “badly edited movie.” The sight lines are all over the place, the rule of 180 gets broken like plates at a Greek wedding (with gusto); the edits are, overall, not very “clean.” I loved it so much.
For absolutely no good reason, I kept thinking of The Shape of Water while watching this movie. Del Toro’s Oscar winner is edited and directed like clockwork. Some people like that kind of precision. It apparently shows that a director has total command over his medium. Perhaps this kind of editing appeals more to a moviegoing public used to living algorithmically calibrated lifestyles. Uncertainty’s no fun in a movie any more because it’s such a source of anxiety when it appears in our actual lives. “Au cinéma, c’est toujours plus beau,” [it’s always more beautiful at the movies] a waitress tells the main character in Lola at one point. Right on, girl.
Belle de Jour (1967)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Neither this movie nor Buñuel are in any meaningful sense part of the French New Wave, but I thought it would be interesting to bring some peripheral films into these diaries to see the broader picture of what was going on in French cinema in the 60s. A 23-year-old Catherine Deneuve stars here in one of her racier earlier roles as a housewife who starts working afternoons at a bordello to kill some time and cope(?) with her unsatisfactory marriage to a medical student. (I mean, it’s kind of nobody’s fault but your own if you marry a med student expecting him to have all the time and energy in the world to devote to anything outside of school?)
This movie was financed in part by Yves Saint Laurent, who provided all of Ms. Deneuve’s costumes. I’m curious now to research the relationship between Parisian fashion outfits and cinema. To name a notable example of this recurring phenomenon, Chanel provided some financing for both of Olivier Assayas’s most recent films, Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper. The fashion lucre helped him pay to shoot these movies on 35mm film, rather than settle for a more cost-effective digital solution.
Despite the surrealist touches always present in his work, Buñuel, who was 67 when he directed this film, here exercises a controlled and deadpan style. It’s easy to compare this movie to Lola (or to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, also by Demy, also starring Deneuve; or The Young Girls of Rochefort, for which they reunited, the same year as Belle de Jour!) and see what sets the nouvelle vague apart. Belle de Jour is stately in a way that the more exuberant and youthful films by the Young Turks so obviously are not. You can feel the intentionality behind every cut and camera angle in Belle de Jour, even if that has the side effect of rendering the whole thing rather dry.
It’s also, all things considered, not as sensual a movie as either of the others in this week’s newsletter. Unlike in real life, where our desires tend not to exist apart from the moral, theological, or cultural environments we allow to shape our lives, in this movie desire is a thing that just kind of…happens. Buñuel films everything so matter-of-factly, without ever giving us any clear indication of where Deneuve’s kinky lusts originate. This is either incredibly disturbing, or reassuring.
Le bonheur (1965)
Directed by Agnès Varda
If we want to be technical about it, Varda beat Claude Chabrol to the punch in kicking off the nouvelle vague with her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1956. She was married to Demy, whom she tearfully reminisces about to this day. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, she’s the only director still left from this era, and at 89 she’s even making movies still. (Her next project will be a retrospective documentary of her filmography, Let’s Talk About Cinema.)
Happiness! What a title for a film! Look at all those beautiful sunflowers in the opening credits! Look at the way Varda fades to primary colors in between sections of the movie instead of fading to black (although there’s one of those, too)! Look at this happy family, mom and dad and petit fils and petite fille as they have a nice little father’s day picnic out in the grass! The bees are humming, the Mozart is pumping cheerily through the speakers, the father is so smolderingly handsome (think Antoni Porowski, but French and heterosexual) it’s a miracle the celluloid didn’t combust on contact with his face. Au cinéma, c’est toujours plus beau.
Only about five minutes after it became obvious what was going on I realized this guy was having an affair with a postal worker. (Look, all the women in this movie vaguely resemble one another.) The weird thing is, he has no moral hangups about what he’s doing. He tries to explain to his wife (!!) that it’s like he has three arms (??) and he can still love his wife fully with two of them while also loving this side chick with his third arm (?!). Wifey seems to be okay with this; three shots later her drowned corpse washes up on the riverbank. …happiness!
Varda’s a bit of an odd character in this way. She’s a gentle and curious filmmaker and she’s not averse to dabbling lightly in the macabre. Surely Cléo de 5 à 7 is the most melodious and beautiful movie ever made about the anxiety that precedes a cancer diagnosis. She’s also always been light on a certain kind of morality, which I guess is a major selling point if you’re a disgruntled American running around New York in the 1960s ducking into movie houses to escape your life and receive an education in the art of sexual liberation, as my cursory study of the period through the writing of James Baldwin and aggrieved 21st-century conservative intellectuals would indicate was the case. The guy goes off and remarries (the postal worker) by the film’s end, and that’s that.
Two issues ago I predicted which movies would be competing at Cannes for the Palme d’Or this year. I got six right! (Ash is Purest White, 3 Faces, Cold War, Under the Silver Lake, Burning, and Sorry Angel [Plaire, aimer et courir vite]) Joining them are Jean-Luc Godard and Asghar Farhadi’s newest movies, a debut film by Egyptian director A.B. Shawky, a whole lot more Asian directors than we ever usually see at Cannes, and Spike Lee’s obnoxiously titled BLACKkKLANSMAN. Out of competition, we’ll be getting the world premieres of Solo: A Star Wars Story and a Wim Wenders documentary about Pope Francis. Overall, the festival is light on both English-language movies and recognizable stars, which should make this a fun edition for the Western press to cover.
2–3 more films are expected to be added to the competition lineup this week. Strong contenders: Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built and Claire Denis’s High Life. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which is ineligible because of some draconian rule about Netflix-distributed films not being allowed at Cannes this year, evidently did screen for the selection committee and was so well-liked by all involved that festival director Thierry Frémaux is working overtime to try to break the no-Netflix rule…which he instituted just this year…to get Roma to premiere at his festival. Can’t have all the real masterpieces going to Venice now, can we!
For the full list of films in competition and others playing at Cannes sidebars, see here. The festival runs May 8–19.