The Worst People in the World
No not those ones
Watching
France (2021)
Having fulfilled his patrimonial duty to make a two-part film about Joan of Arc, Bruno Dumont pivots from the medieval to the bracingly contemporary for his latest. France stars Léa Seydoux as France de Meurs, a globetrotting television reporter of Anderson Cooperian fame and Louis Vuitton-subsidized glamour. We meet France at the top of her game, putting on a show as she asks hard-hitting (if somewhat vacuous) questions of none other than French president Emmanuel Macron himself, in a press conference sequence that cleverly stitches archival footage together with Dumont’s own (evidently tapping monsieur le président for an on-set appearance exceeded the film’s budget). Confident, loopy, and gorgeous, and only somewhat happily married with a son to a Franzenesque novelist of a husband, France is not the type to draw viewer sympathy. But after she accidentally hits a gig economy courier with her car, a malaise grabs hold of France and sets her on a journey of self-discovery and spiritual awakening.
Reuniting with David Chambille, his cinematographer on Jeanne, Dumont shoots France as a maximally and transparently digital production: high contrast, high dynamic range, five trillion colors or whatever we’re up to now. Even Seydoux’s flyaway hairs look sharp enough to cut bread with. Dumont’s eye for a striking composition doesn’t let his cameras go to waste, but these images are more technically impressive than they ever are outright beautiful. I wouldn’t blink if I walked into an Apple store and saw this playing on their biggest Mac Pro displays, sans audio and subtitles.
The technical specs have meaning here that they typically don’t in any given modern TV show streaming on the platform of your choice. It isn’t so much that this story, which entails plenty of straightforward reflections by France herself on the nature of her own celebrity and the role she plays in giving a shining white face to conflict across the world, necessitates these aesthetics—Nightcrawler, a movie I don’t much care for but which makes for a useful counterexample, hits some similar beats about the news media but was shot on film. Rather, Dumont’s style takes what on paper sounds like a run-of-the-mill satire and makes it something much more disorienting, even disturbing. Reality and spectacle are one and the same in France; see, for instance, the truly absurd late-film car crash sequence that opens looking like any old Mazda commercial.
The world of France is one where everyone is lacking for points of reference to give coherence and direction to their moral dilemmas. While paying a surreptitious visit to the family of the worker she hit, France decides on the spot to write them a check; certainly there are worse ways of making amends to workers than by giving them money directly instead of, say, throwing a gala in their honor. But attend a gala is what France immediately does next. In between speeches by neoliberal dignitaries, one of her dinner companions gives an impromptu sermon to the table:
Who among you has ever wondered, What is capitalism? Capitalism is the gift of oneself to others. It means striving for virtues, both moral and spiritual. We approach the spheres of fulfillment, redemption and salvation for oneself and also for others…Believe me, we must give, we must give and keep giving. You won’t run out of money, we’re so rich. To die well, one must die poor. Once you’re dead, your kindness will remain.
He pauses to take a sip of wine, and chokes on it.
That somewhat confused definition of capitalism and the good life doesn’t leave much of an impression on France, who isn’t shown parting with any more money for the duration of the film, though the speech marks an inflection point after which France will spend approximately every other scene of the movie crying. She cries waiting for a limo, she cries in a park, she cries at home, she quits her show to check into an alpine resort for celebrities seeking emotional rehab and cries there too. She cries when she finds out the handsome lad she falls for in rehab is an undercover journalist reporting on her life outside of the public eye and she, finally, lets out a face-contortingly wonderful ugly cry onto the steering wheel of her car. Insofar as it can be called an action, it’s the only one she seems capable of.
The waterworks eventually slow down enough for France to take stock of all she’s learned in her failed attempt to heal her soul through the pursuit of anonymity. In the penultimate scene, she tells her undercover lover what amounts to her takeaway from her figurative and literal trips up the mountain—a contrasting message from the one she’s built her journalistic career on. “Forget a brighter future. Progress, ideals…that’s all dead. That’s what makes us suffer. You understand? Only the present remains. Here and now. Forget all expectations. Don’t postpone the present.” Yet she sounds less convinced than she does in the preceding scene, where France goes on location to the countryside to shoot a segment with a woman who was married to a mass murderer for 20 years. Surveying a field of mud on their way back to the van, France asks her camera crew, “It’s beautiful, no?” Not really, unless beauty is whatever can resist being reduced to a mere image up for sale.
The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Julie (Renate Reinsve), the protagonist of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, is, unlike France de Meurs, relatable, or so we’re meant to understand. On the cusp of thirty, Julie has cycled through a number of careers (doctor! psychotherapist! photographer! writer! part-time bookstore salesperson!), is unsure of whether or not she wants kids with her years-older partner and cult cartoonist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), is unsure of whether she even wants him. On a lark she crashes a wedding party and meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a sexy barista who becomes her big What If. In a word, she’s a millennial dealing with all the chaos and contradictions of a world we feel more like we’ve inherited than had much of a hand in building ourselves.
The three leads all give affecting performances, with Danielsen Lie ginning up some special late-film sympathy with a sudden cancer diagnosis and a teary hospital-courtyard monologue. Reinsve has a more difficult, sustained part to play, as she has to both live Julie’s life and also withstand whatever the audience projects onto her, and at both of these I’d say she succeeds. I’m more convinced by her performance than by Trier and co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt’s idea of a 21st century woman. You really want me to believe that Julie isn’t constantly texting her all-girls group chat to vent about the men her life?
This is Reinsve’s big break (she had all but sworn off screen acting right before Trier lured her out for this role), and for her starmaking occasion (she won Best Actress at Cannes) Trier and his cinematographer Kasper Tuxen have broken out the good film stock like it’s champagne. I’ve opted not to use any of the most recognizable images from the film in this newsletter, but if you’ve seen them you can instantly picture them in your mind’s eye as I describe them: a big-grinned Julie mid-stride as she runs across a frozen-in-time Oslo, Julie and Eivind exhaling smoke into each other’s mouths in an almost-kiss against a night sky dotted with blurred lights, Julie falling arms akimbo onto a crimson oriental rug at the start of a mushroom trip (my friends of psilocybin experience have been at pains to point out that the film has taken some shopworn creative liberties with its depiction of shrooms). The Worst Person feels like it was actually handcrafted, much like the authentic brands and experiences that for a time were all the rage in marketing talks about how to reach my generation.
Trier structures the film in 12 chapters with a prologue and epilogue—the French title of the film is literally Julie in 12 Chapters—which makes for a fun way to test out different scenarios to put Julie through (sometimes in as short as 5 minutes), but it also doesn’t sit quite so well with Julie’s supposed relatability. The discrete things that Julie feels and does may be drawn directly from millennial experience, and the world she struggles through is discernibly our own, but the shape of the story belies how we experience it. People we love (or once loved, as it were) get ill and die; they typically don’t do so at times that are narratively convenient for the stories we try to tell about ourselves.
Reading
An excellent, short history of how digital came to dominate the film industry by Will Tavlin in n+1:
In the new system, projectionists screened a film with a Digital Cinema Package (DCP). The DCP was a collection of files on an industrial-grade hard drive. Projectionists downloaded the DCP onto a proprietary server and entered a passcode — sent separately by the studio — that decrypted the files for the duration of the theater’s rental period. The system made piracy impossible. But it also made studios more involved in the projection process. Unlike 35mm film, which could be viewed directly by projecting light through a film print, the DCP required patented technology to interpret its files. On its own the DCP was a useless brick. The significance was what it portended. For studios, the DCP guaranteed that they’d have full control over the circulation of their films in perpetuity, while permanently yoking theaters to their technological whims. Theaters might not have realized it then, but this was the first step toward a new exhibition paradigm that would no longer include them.
[…]
The cost of converting a single screen to digital was between $50,000 and $100,000. The big three theater chains (AMC, Regal, and Cinemark) were able to secure financing to convert their screens because of their enormous capital reserves, access to Wall Street money, and economies of scale. For independent theaters, especially rural ones, the outlook was bleak. “All of the movie theaters in the Adirondacks were going to close,” Sally Wagshaw, owner of the State Theater in Tupper Lake, New York, told me. “No one was going to be able to take on a hundred-thousand-dollar loan and stay in business.” Wagshaw, along with several independent theater owners in the Adirondacks, launched a group fundraising effort. They succeeded. But the projectors they purchased are far more expensive to maintain. Thirty-five millimeter film projectors need only $1,000 to $2,000 per year in maintenance, use easily sourceable mechanical parts, and can last several decades with proper upkeep. Digital projectors require as much as $10,000 per year for maintenance, use proprietary digital parts that can take up to a week to install (during which they’re inoperable), and are estimated to last only ten years.
The Oscars!
I’m sorry, you want me to write up all THAT in 8 hours? They don’t pay me enough. Congratulations to Ryusuke Hamaguchi on the Oscar and to Janus Films on the prime time namedrop. Was Reinate Reinsve’s outfit good or not? The group texts were split—sound off in the comments!