Crime Stories (En Français)

Maïwenn, NYC, 5/19/12

My mother liked murder.  The first thing she read in the Sunday papers was The Justice Story in The Daily News.  It was impossible to enjoy watching a mystery on TV with her–five minutes in and she had infallibly apprehended the perpertrator.

Last summer, bleary with insomnia, I discovered in syndication, endless late-night episodes of a long-running CBS show about serial killers and FBI profilers, “Criminal Minds.”  The members of the team, the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), are smart, workaholics, depressed, bound and devoted to each other (the atrocities that routinely fill their workdays make it hard for them to sustain outside relationships), and charismatic, good-looking (of course they are–this is American TV).

In one episode, “The Reckoning,” a character reveals grim numbers–there are 380,000 cases of child abuse annually in the United States; 1% goes to trial.

There are fewer cases in France–it’s a smaller country.  Maïwenn’s riveting policier (based on actual cases not a crime novel), “Polisse,” embeds with a team of detectives working in the Child Protection Unit in Paris.  The members of the unit are ferociously hard-working, in pain, funny, as close as family, and charismatic, good-looking (mais   oui–this is a French film).

With cinematography so unobtrusive and a naturalistic (but actually tightly-written) script, the film almost seems like cinéma-vérité, immersed in the life of the unit and an entwined love story that develops between one of the detectives, Fred (played by famous French rapper, Joeystarr), and a photographer (played by the director), on long-term assignment to document the CPU.

Maïwenn used the title “Polisse” not just because “Police” was taken (by Maurice Pialat’s 1985 powerhouse, scripted by Catherine Breillat and starring Gerard Depardieu) but to evoke a child’s spelling error.

Growing up Le Besco must have been something extraordinary–odds are against it being coincidence that Maïwnn and her younger sister both became actor/writer/directors. And although Maiwenn’s sister, Isild Le Besco, is famously fair, there’s a startling resemblance between the two beauties, particularly when they smile–smiles seemingly shy, yet totally magnetic.

“Polisse” will open on Friday, May 18 in New York and Los Angeles with a national roll-out to follow.  On Friday, May 25 it will be available nationwide on Sundance Selects’ video-on-demand.

Isild Le Besco

Good Vibrations

The cover of this week’s Back Stage (and two articles) feature portraits of British actor Hugh Dancy from my recent shoot.

In his newest film, “Hysteria,” opening tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles, Dancy stars as Mortimer Granville, an idealistic young Victorian doctor, who in the 1880s inadvertently invented the vibrator.

Designed to treat the “woman’s disease,” hysteria (then a catchall term for “maladies” such as unhappiness, “overactive uterus,” disobedience and suffragette leanings),  the machine (which he patented) was known as Granville’s Hammer.  Although the stellar cast (including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jonathan Pryce and Rupert Everett) is totally  entertaining,  ”Hysteria, ” is so broad that it seems as if it started life as a play and just added a montage or two.  The film was highlighted in a recent New York Times trend article, discussing that “female sexuality is still an unusual subject on screen” and citing signs of change.

Through June 17, Dancy is also starring in David Ives’ “Venus in Fur,” nominated for a 2012 Tony for best play.

Read Back Stage staff writer Dan Lehman’s interview with Hugh Dancy here:

http://www.backstage.com/bso/news-and-features-features/hugh-dancy-surrenders-to-sex-and-taboos-1007071752.story

http://www.backstage.com/bso/news-and-features-features/hugh-dancy-on-casting-for-chemistry-1007062552.story

2 or 3 Things I Know About Him

Bruce Goldstein

Bruce Goldstein is celebrating his 25th anniversary as programmer (extraordinaire) of Film Forum’s repertory screen and all of us, friends and filmgoers, are celebrating our continuing good fortune, remembering series devoted to stars and genres as diverse as Josephine Baker, film noir, westerns, Al Pacino, Billy Wilder, silents (with piano accompaniment), Russ Meyer, Robert Bresson.  And having premiered nearly 1,000 new prints and restorations and remaining committed to showing the best possible 35mm prints, this past March, Bruce took a look at the future, DCP (Digital Cinema Package), screening such classics as “The Red Shoes,” “Dr. Strangelove” and “Taxi Driver”

Each spring at Film Forum’s annual members’ brunch the cognoscenti jam Bruce’s room for a gorgeous print of a film by a great silent comedy star (Keaton, Lloyd, Chaplin) and some very special extras: “De Düve: The Dove,” a hilarious 1968 send up of Bergman with Madeline Kahn (Bruce’s exhaustive Igmar Bergman retrospective began the following week); a paragraph-long play (cast as the photographer, I had one line–Bruce said it was a part I was born to play; Kath Gates got to be the movie star–I don’t think it was only because she had an appropriate dress); the cardboard glasses with red lens and green plastic lenses were handed out and a selection of Harold Lloyd’s 3D photographs were projected onto the movie screen.

In addition (as I’ve written before) to being IMDb with legs, Bruce knows everyone who shares his obsession (and has befriended scores).  And he’s brought many of  them to my studio or sent me, with equipment, to them.  (I have to remind him to ask his friend, the legendary dancer and choreographer Marge Champion, if she’ll let me photograph her.  Ms. Champion, earning $10 a day, was filmed for the reference of Disney animators for Snow White and I’ve been determined to do the shoot since Bruce introduced us at a party and she was wearing a t-shirt proclaiming–but in diminutive letters–”I Was Snow White But Then I Strayed.”)

Bravo, Bruce–here’s to 25 more.

Russ Meyer

Nicholas Roeg

Harold Nicholas

Céline and Julie: Proto Virtual Reality Gamers?

Jacques Rivette

One of those really famous films that that virtually no one has seen, Jacques Rivette’s “Céline and Julie Go Boating,” opens in a park, with a few words on the screen: “Usually it began like this.”  And then magician Céline (Juliet Berto) races through, dropping her personal effects and fascinating librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier), who spiritedly follows (picking up after her), much the way Alice followed the white rabbit down the hole.

And in no time, the two young women have become BFFs, finding themselves interchangeable in their “real” lives (substituting at a  romantic rendezvous and an audition) and as the nanny/nurse for an invalid child, who lives in rambling house in which two women (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier) vie for the affections of the girl’s widowed father (Barbet Schroeder).

Each time Céline or Julie visits, she’s eventually ejected from the house, dazed and amnesiac.  But back at Julie’s flat, sucking on a hard candy (and later dribking a magic recipe clover drink) magically starts the playback of the adventure.

Anticipating virtual reality gaming and “That Obscure Object of Desire” (Buñuel’s 1977 film in which two actors, Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet, switch in and out of the same role without any of the other cast members seeming to notice), “Céline and Julie” ends as it began (twinned, but fraternally), suggesting the possibility that the entire proceedings have been a game and now the two young heroines are back to level one.

Speaking of Rivette and two young heroines–I shot the great auteur with Jeanne Balibar and Hélène de Fougerolles, stars of “Va Savoir” two weeks after 9/11.  My Tribeca neighborhood was dotted with check-points, a troop of cops stationed three blocks north of my loft, on Greenwich Street at Canal.  Only residents’ cars were permitted to pass and pedestrians were carefully screened.  Not knowing how spry Rivette, then 73, would be, I asked the sergeant to allow the town car to drive to my studio and was assured it would be ok.  Rivette, totally spry, and his actors, arrived on foot.

Later I asked the sergeant what had happened to our agreement.  He asked me, rhetorically, “Did you see those women?  Gorgeous.  All of us wanted to see them better and watch them walk.”  Ah, New York’s finest.

“Céline and Julie Go Boating” opens today at Film Forum for a one-week run. (Motor, don’t sail, over to Film Forum and just go with the film–suck the lifesaver, drink the magic potion.)

Jeanne Balibar, Jacques Rivette and Hélène de Fougerolles

“Jazz and Junk”

Shirley Clarke, Chelsea Hotel, NYC, 8/22/85

Bearing a striking resemblance to the Steve Buscemi of the future (the “Boardwalk Empire” actor wasn’t yet  four when Shirley Clarke‘s first feature, “The Connection” premiered in Cannes in 1961), Leach (Warren Finnerty) invites us into his Greenwich Village “pad,” where he and friends, junkies and jazz musicians, are uneasily waiting for Cowboy, their dealer.

Based on Jack Gelber’s 1959 play (within a play), produced by the Living Theater, Clarke (with a script by Gelber) similarly structured her film, sending Jim Dunn (William Bedfield), a (fictional) young, preppy and uptight aspiring documentarian, to a pre-arranged (and paid for) shoot with the group, to search for “the truth.”

To describe “The Connection” in shorthand, it could be called the first mocumentary, but the term only fits it loosely because of the seriousness of the dialog, the experimental, constantly moving camera, responding to the music by a quartet including jazz greats saxophonist Jackie McLean and pianist Freddie Redd.  Sam’s (James Anderson) rhythmic monologue, alternating between delusion and anger, backed by the musicians, is a forerunner of poetry slams.  And anticipating one of Dogma’s chastity vows, all of the music in the film arises organically–in addition to the musicians, Harry (Henry Proach) arrives with a portable record player and an album.

Despite the dated hipster language the film retains its immediacy, even as it views a now   lost New York real estate world–the film’s one set, Leach’s ratty, nearly raw, cheap, top-floor, sky-lit loft.  (In his kitchen, separated from the main space with a curtain, is a 40s Kelvinator, twin to the refrigerator in my parents’ basement.)

Although Clarke is widely cited by filmmakers as a major influence, her films haven’t received significant release nor is she appropriatley recognized in contemporary film history.  A press release from Milestone Films notes that “although there are more than 100 monographs, books and DVDs devoted to the works of (her) contemporaries like John Cassavetes, Stan Brackage and Andy Warhol; there is not one entirely dedicated to the life or works of Shirley Clarke.”  Through its four-year Project Shirley, Milestone has acquired the rights to four of Clarke’s features and dozens of her shorts and will be releasing luminous restored prints of Clarke’s work.

“The Connection” will open on Friday, May 4 in New York at the IFC Center, 50 years after it opened and closed in New York on October 3, 1962, after two matinees, a victim of censorship for its language.

Shirley Clarke, Chelsea Hotel, NYC, 8/22/85

Kelvinator, Yonkers, NY, 2/28/12

May Day, mayday: We Are the Rescue We’ve Been Waiting For

March, May Day 2012, NYC

May Day originated in Chicago in 1886 with mass strikes as part of the battle to secure the eight-hour workday.  On May Day 2012 the fight is for a better world for the 99%–including workers, students, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless. women, people of all races and the LGBT community.

March, May Day 2012, NYC

Patrick Robbins, Climate Apocalypse teach-in, May Day 2012, Bryant Park, NYC

March, May Day 2012, NYC

Guitarmy (OWS Music working group): Workshop and Rehearsal, May Day 2012, Bryant Park, NYC;
Gertrude Stein, seated, center

March, May Day 2012, NYC

You Say Goodbye, I Say…

Mia Hansen-Love, NYC, 10/14/11

Actor turned director, Mia Hansen-Love, 31, follows up her last feature, “The Father of My Children,” a story of professional obsession, with “Goodbye First Love,” which leans in close to observe a romantic obsession.

Camille (Lola Créton) is mad for her older boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urendowsky),  19, who reciprocates her feelings but side-steps the monomania that grips her.  She says, “I spend my life waiting for you”–she’s 15.  Frantically longing for phone calls and their next rendezvous, Camille descends into a suicidal depression after Sullivan leaves school to travel in South America.

Fast forward–with one cut–several years, and Camille is studying architecture, imposing structure on the world to balance her less than orderly psyche.  Emotional progress is recorded in a entry in her journal, “Solitude isn’t weighing me down for once.”  As more time passes she enters into both a romantic and professional partnership with a former professor.  And then Sullivan surfaces.

Hansen-Love’s cliche-busting, unsentimental look at young love prevents Camille’s continuing emotional chaos from being maddening, watching until the young woman finds a kind of balance and herself.  During a mid-film visit to a club, a bit of a lyric, “from happiness to loneliness,” is heard.  The soundtrack at the end of the film features Johnny Flynn’s “The River”:

The water sustains me without even trying                                                                              The water can’t drown me, I’m done                                                                                           With my dying

“Goodbye First Love” will open on Friday, April 20 in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and the IFC Center.