Here's a conundrum. Why is my short story collection in the Tacoma Public Library? Do I know anyone in Tacoma?
In other news, I did not show my class Arnaud Desplechin's Rois et reine (Kings and Queen) last night, because after fifteen minutes, no one except![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hans_the_bold and the professor had turned up. So I pocketed the film and went back to HGS and watched it myself. Their loss. There will be questions about the semester's movies on the final. There's for the people who think sections aren't really mandatory . . . On a less vindictive note, I really did like Kings and Queen; I'm sure I wouldn't have been the only one.
Structurally, Kings and Queen is nearly two films, a familial high tragedy and a farcial black comedy spliced one into the other: one strand for each main character, and presently they cross.
Nora Cotterelle is a beautiful Parisian art dealer, at thirty-five the mother of a ten-year-old son and, as she informs us in her opening monologue, about to marry for the third time. She has the cream-fleshed face and heavy reddish hair of a Pre-Raphaelite siren; she tells the audience all about herself with a total assurance of her own story. Her son Elias, a solitary, self-contained, uncannily mature child who has lived most of his life with Nora's elderly, scholarly father, is the product of her first, tragic marriage. Since her second husband was impossible to live with, that romance quickly went down in flames. Finally, she's been courted by and finally consented to a wealthy businessman who loves her passionately. None of these details is exactly or entirely false. But it's no spoiler to say that especially when it comes to her own life, Nora is not the world's most reliable narrator.
Ismaël Vuillard, meanwhile, is a concert violist whom we first meet through the insulting message he has left for the IRS on his answering machine: wildly black-haired, slouching around in untucked shirts and a perpetual five o'clock shadow, he philosophically contemplates the apparatus of suicide and has been known to wear a Musketeer cape for his occasional night out on the town. He has no social skills, the jittery energy of someone whose own brain chemistry produces all the amphetamines he'll ever need, and he's so hopelessly touchy that he makes Rufus T. Firefly look like the Dalai Lama. He owes 700,000 francs in back taxes and has just been involuntarily committed to the local psychiatric ward. And, as we discover almost in ellipsis, he's Nora's second husband and the only father that Elias remembers.
You can probably guess who gets the tragedy and who gets the farce. The curiosity is in watching how their stories dovetail and, after a fashion, change place: as Nora's carefully constructed and tightly maintained life starts to unpick itself and Ismaël slowly recovers—or discovers—his equilibrium. The tone jags back and forth between hilariously weird set-pieces (Ismaël's unassuming shopkeeper father singlehandedly takes out three teenage thugs; Ismaël puts on a hip-hop CD during a group session and breakdances for his flabbergasted fellow patients) and burningly painful moments (Nora reads a manuscript her father may or may not have left for her to find; we learn in flashback what precisely happened to the father of her child) in between which the characters more or less get on with their lives, because that is what people do. We finished Joyce's Ulysses in class last week, and I can see why Kings and Queen is a fitting coda: it has all the believable sprawling instability of real life and the echo-tuning of myth.
Older stories thread so naturally through the plot that no one needs to say Elektra, Leda, Pygmalion, because the resonances are all there. Nothing ever resolves cinematically. You keep looking for the familiar dramatic solution and it is simply not there: which is as it should be. And the character work is incredible. Nora operates in onionskin layers, so that the audience's attitudes toward her are constantly directed to shift throughout the film as more and more information reveals itself, some sympathetic, some terrible, some not so easily classified. Ismaël can be as charismatic and compassionate as he can be selfish and incomprehensible. Some of the minor characters are also brilliant, particularly Ismaël's mile-a-minute lawyer, whose entrances are accompanied by manic klezmer music and who hasn't yet met the drug he won't shoot, swallow, or snort; the student of Chinese literature whom Ismaël befriends in the hospital, who makes perfunctory suicide attempts and conscientiously fails all her classes in order to thwart her bourgeois parents' high expectations for her; and Ismaël's in-hospital therapist, who is played by Catherine Deneuve and with whom he gets along like water for metallic sodium. I should also like to make particular mention of Joachim Salinger, of whom I had never heard before—as Pierre Cotterelle, the father of Nora's child, he has the spiky dark hair, pale and always if not always reassuringly smiling face, and immense, unblinking eyes of something sketched by either Arthur Rackham or Mervyn Peake. He's a small role, seen only in flashbacks and dreams, but memorable: he's an effective ghost and an unsettling lover.
If I have a reservation about the film, it's that I'm not convinced it required its entire two-and-a-half-hour runtime. On the other hand, since I can't think what should have been cut, that pretty much disqualifies me from complaint.
Thus ends the movie review for today. What have you seen recently that you liked?
In other news, I did not show my class Arnaud Desplechin's Rois et reine (Kings and Queen) last night, because after fifteen minutes, no one except
hans_the_bold and the professor had turned up. So I pocketed the film and went back to HGS and watched it myself. Their loss. There will be questions about the semester's movies on the final. There's for the people who think sections aren't really mandatory . . . On a less vindictive note, I really did like Kings and Queen; I'm sure I wouldn't have been the only one.Structurally, Kings and Queen is nearly two films, a familial high tragedy and a farcial black comedy spliced one into the other: one strand for each main character, and presently they cross.
Nora Cotterelle is a beautiful Parisian art dealer, at thirty-five the mother of a ten-year-old son and, as she informs us in her opening monologue, about to marry for the third time. She has the cream-fleshed face and heavy reddish hair of a Pre-Raphaelite siren; she tells the audience all about herself with a total assurance of her own story. Her son Elias, a solitary, self-contained, uncannily mature child who has lived most of his life with Nora's elderly, scholarly father, is the product of her first, tragic marriage. Since her second husband was impossible to live with, that romance quickly went down in flames. Finally, she's been courted by and finally consented to a wealthy businessman who loves her passionately. None of these details is exactly or entirely false. But it's no spoiler to say that especially when it comes to her own life, Nora is not the world's most reliable narrator.
Ismaël Vuillard, meanwhile, is a concert violist whom we first meet through the insulting message he has left for the IRS on his answering machine: wildly black-haired, slouching around in untucked shirts and a perpetual five o'clock shadow, he philosophically contemplates the apparatus of suicide and has been known to wear a Musketeer cape for his occasional night out on the town. He has no social skills, the jittery energy of someone whose own brain chemistry produces all the amphetamines he'll ever need, and he's so hopelessly touchy that he makes Rufus T. Firefly look like the Dalai Lama. He owes 700,000 francs in back taxes and has just been involuntarily committed to the local psychiatric ward. And, as we discover almost in ellipsis, he's Nora's second husband and the only father that Elias remembers.
You can probably guess who gets the tragedy and who gets the farce. The curiosity is in watching how their stories dovetail and, after a fashion, change place: as Nora's carefully constructed and tightly maintained life starts to unpick itself and Ismaël slowly recovers—or discovers—his equilibrium. The tone jags back and forth between hilariously weird set-pieces (Ismaël's unassuming shopkeeper father singlehandedly takes out three teenage thugs; Ismaël puts on a hip-hop CD during a group session and breakdances for his flabbergasted fellow patients) and burningly painful moments (Nora reads a manuscript her father may or may not have left for her to find; we learn in flashback what precisely happened to the father of her child) in between which the characters more or less get on with their lives, because that is what people do. We finished Joyce's Ulysses in class last week, and I can see why Kings and Queen is a fitting coda: it has all the believable sprawling instability of real life and the echo-tuning of myth.
Older stories thread so naturally through the plot that no one needs to say Elektra, Leda, Pygmalion, because the resonances are all there. Nothing ever resolves cinematically. You keep looking for the familiar dramatic solution and it is simply not there: which is as it should be. And the character work is incredible. Nora operates in onionskin layers, so that the audience's attitudes toward her are constantly directed to shift throughout the film as more and more information reveals itself, some sympathetic, some terrible, some not so easily classified. Ismaël can be as charismatic and compassionate as he can be selfish and incomprehensible. Some of the minor characters are also brilliant, particularly Ismaël's mile-a-minute lawyer, whose entrances are accompanied by manic klezmer music and who hasn't yet met the drug he won't shoot, swallow, or snort; the student of Chinese literature whom Ismaël befriends in the hospital, who makes perfunctory suicide attempts and conscientiously fails all her classes in order to thwart her bourgeois parents' high expectations for her; and Ismaël's in-hospital therapist, who is played by Catherine Deneuve and with whom he gets along like water for metallic sodium. I should also like to make particular mention of Joachim Salinger, of whom I had never heard before—as Pierre Cotterelle, the father of Nora's child, he has the spiky dark hair, pale and always if not always reassuringly smiling face, and immense, unblinking eyes of something sketched by either Arthur Rackham or Mervyn Peake. He's a small role, seen only in flashbacks and dreams, but memorable: he's an effective ghost and an unsettling lover.
If I have a reservation about the film, it's that I'm not convinced it required its entire two-and-a-half-hour runtime. On the other hand, since I can't think what should have been cut, that pretty much disqualifies me from complaint.
Thus ends the movie review for today. What have you seen recently that you liked?
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