Movie Enthusiast Issue 52: French New Wave Diaries III; On evil films
Paris Belongs to Us (1961)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette served as the editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1963–1965. He assumed this position after Éric Rohmer’s tenure came to an end over a political spat. The Rohmer biography that I have been reading piecemeal for the last 8 months paints quite a picture of Rivette at this time:
Whereas Rohmer was measured, polite, restrained, tolerant, and open to contradictions, Rivette was more peremptory. He was a leader in discussions, he had fixed ideas, his self-assurance impressed people, and he did not hesitate to excommunicate adversaries or mediocrities. Perpetually dissatisfied, he lived in permanent doubt, and his reversals were sensational, but he had a definite ascendancy over some of the authors at Cahiers and over some cinephiles. His adversaries did not like him, even if they respected him, describing him as brusque, arrogant, and dogmatic. At Cahiers, that was how he was seen by Jean Douchet—“Rivette was furious to see that he was no longer running things surreptitiously. He has become a conspirator, he’s a ‘Father Joseph’’’— […] Philippe d’Hughes angrily noted: “Rivette had a Saint-Just side, he was an intransigent Jacobin who considered you a moron if you didn’t agree with him. He determined what was moral and right, like a hall monitor.” His allies, on the contrary, emphasized his daring, his intellectual brio, and his artistic curiosity; they liked his somewhat abrupt intransigence.
That full array of descriptors feels right in regard to Paris Belongs to Us, which was Rivette’s first film. It’s a sprawling movie with barely a point of entry for the viewer. It’s about actors and acting in a highly reflexive and allusive way. It’s about paranoia and conspiracy theories and general malaise among the young artistic-intellectual class. It’s very assured in its liberal use of the styles of Hollywood noir and surrealism. It’s a movie, ultimately, about life becoming cinema. It doesn’t care if you get it or not. It’s a chore to sit through on a Thursday night. I lost interest halfway through but persisted, distractedly, through to the end for Cinema’s sake if not my own.
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An aside on Le Bonheur, which we talked about in the last newsletter. This movie came up in conversation online last week and my favorite cinephile weighed in with what he thinks Agnès Varda is trying to do (and why the movie ultimately fails:
I kindly detest Le Bonheur…I think in trying to make irony about human beings she failed to present any behaviour that felt remotely human. Both the women AND the men in this film are ridiculous constructions trying to prove points, not anything resembling human beings. … I do think it's ironic, but towards the man, the one that's feeling “happy” (however superficially and validly) despite making someone else deeply unhappy, so I do think the portrayal of women isn't very acceptable, but the portrayal of the man is even worse.
So there you have it! Never need to think about that one again either.
Some of you might find details in the following part of the newsletter gross and upsetting for a Monday morning, so proceed with caution.
A pit always forms in my stomach whenever I get news of some new film that’s allegedly so grotesquely violent or shocking that it causes viewers to require immediate medical attention. In the past two weeks I’ve heard anecdotes of two such movies in the pipeline.
Attendees at CinemaCon last month were treated to a clip from Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s giallo classic Suspiria. The original is notable for its preposterous violence and its equally preposterous beauty. Though I’ve not seen it myself (and not for lack of trying; it keeps having theatrical engagements in D.C.), the reputation of its gorgeous cinematography and exhilarating sound design precedes it.
Guadagnino has stated that his remake is going to be something else entirely. He’s promised that all the color and beauty will be stripped away. Dakota Johnson, who’s starring in it, has said she had to seek therapy after filming wrapped. Armie Hammer, who’s evidently seen the full cut, has described it as full-on evil. And those who saw the first clip of the film at CinemaCon took to Twitter to describe how the display of skin-ripping, bone-cracking, bodily-fluid-projectiling torture they were treated to made just about everyone sick to their stomachs. (It certainly helped no one that they were shown the clip immediately after lunch.) It’s as easy to believe that people are just trying to feed the marketing machine as it is to believe that Guadagnino’s Suspiria really will be as nauseating as I Am Love was beautiful.
I can stomach most anything in a movie, but my tolerance for spectacular violence has precipitously declined in the last three years. I don’t know where exactly I draw the line. Some of the skull-crushing that happens in Twin Peaks: The Return is up there, but it’s a part of a larger whole that I was on board for. (And Lynch has always seemed to be much more interested in using cinematic violence as a textural element to his art, rather than as an element that’s there just to be provocative.) Even the baby death in mother!, though revolting in its entirety and responsible for the grossest sound effect I’ve ever heard in a theater, was a the maraschino cherry on top of what I considered to be such a juvenile story that I rolled my eyes as it happened.
I know my limits well enough to know that I won’t be seeing the new Suspiria, though I’m sure my curiosity will lead me to read everything I can about it to learn just how revoltingly violent it ends up being. It will certainly have some competition from Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built for the most upsetting film of the year. In a backstage conversation about the film, French film industry insider Cédric Succivalli reported that the Cannes Film Festival is prepared to have medical crisis units on standby for the film’s premiere because some viewers will find it unbearable to watch. It’s a 155-minute-long movie about a serial killer who kills women, told from his point of view. Knowing Von Trier’s track record of onscreen misogyny, nihilism, and provocation, it doesn’t surprise me in the least to hear that The House That Jack Built—which will mark his return to Cannes after his infamous Nazi sympathizing comments from 2011—is shaping up to be his most extreme film yet.
Von Trier is one of maybe three directors whose work I never plan to watch, no matter how essential anyone tells me Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark is. (The first ten minutes of Melancholia are on YouTube anyway so what more do you need than that.) Von Trier’s art is deeply informed by his lifelong depression, but it’s also informed by a nasty view of the world that lends itself to finding evil everywhere, in everything. (“Life is only on earth, and not for long,” the depressed bride in Melancholia famously declares.) I can empathize with needing to use art therapeutically. What I can’t get on board with is signing up for therapy, so to speak, predetermined not to get better. In an interview with The Guardian, Von Trier described his new movie as a celebration of “the idea that life is evil and soulless.” Couple that attitude with offscreen abuse—Björk has raised allegations that he sexually harassed her on the set of Dancer in the Dark—and you have not made a strong case for yourself or your art.
In thinking these anecdotes over—about a filmmaker whose previous films are works of such sumptuous beauty making a U-turn and producing something seemingly devoid of it, and a filmmaker whose life’s work has been characterized by juxtaposing beautiful surfaces with galaxy-sized despair—I was put in mind of a passage from John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. The unwise, uncareful artist, says Gardner, “who loves beauty and cannot find it in the world around him may give up the attempt to reaffirm, to raise nobility from the dead, and may satisfy himself with mere expression of his own disappointment, pain, and anger.”
This seems to me to apply to Von Trier; I’ll need to wait and see what Guadagnino’s story is. Until these films are released upon the world, I’ll sit here and ponder a while longer what it means to infuse art with evil—indeed, whether a work of art can itself be evil. My gut tells me there’s a time and place for it—the murder of the priest in Rome: Open City comes to mind as a compelling example. But in the 70 years since that movie, filmmaking technology has evolved to let artists indulge their most depraved fancies with much more gusto and verisimilitude than ever before. Which leads to me ask: why do we need this? Who, exactly, benefits from representations of evil that exist to provoke rather than inform? If film employs evil cathartically, does that make it okay to keep around? Am I overthinking this? Am I just too squeamish? Should I actually watch a LVT film before making blanket statements about his work? (Don’t answer that, it’s not gonna happen.)