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philipbn
Reviews
Ressources humaines (1999)
Excellent film about family relations and neoliberal labor exploitation
This film won a lot of awards in 1999-2000 for best new director and best actor, etc., and it's not hard to see why. Cantet has made a taut, thrilling drama out of very unlikely materials, and has something intelligent to say about the world we live in.
Jalil Lespert gives an amazing performance in the lead role, playing a working-class young man who is socially mobile via business school. He returns to his industrial home town to become a management intern at the same factory where his father has been employed in a repetitious, soul-killing piece-work job for his entire career, and then ruins his chances at advancement when he reveals that the factory plans to increase profits by laying off a group of career-long workers that includes his father. He attempts to jump-start a strike, but the father refuses to participate and hates him for showing the spine that he (the father) never did. Yet we can also see the drama from the father's perspective: the tension between the son's disappointment and resentment, and the father's self-loathing, impatience with a son he has sacrificed for, and pathetic desire for the whole painful drama to simply go away, becomes excruciating.
The tension between father and son (and the way their conflict triangles the mother) is almost unbearable, and it condenses the larger social violence summed up in the management-worker relations. The nominal point of disagreement is the 35-hour work week, but of course the general logic of the horrendous management-labor violence is the same as it was in Zola's "Germinal," and the landscape here summarizes the industrial-worker world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Everything about the film is remarkable. The writing and directing by Cantet is wonderful. The editing is extremely taut, and there is NO musical soundtrack, which is all the more surprising given the amount of suspense and tension the film produces.
This is both a first-rate drama, an exercise in contemporary sociology, a great performance by one of the up-and-coming leading men in French cinema (Jalil Lespert), and a very insightful commentary before the fact on the Sarkozy era of neoliberal economic violence against workers in France. Ultimately, this a smart and artistically-sophisticated (but never "artsy") film about the human price of contemporary economic transformations in the (over)developed nations.
Le petit lieutenant (2005)
Very solid police drama featuring strong middle-aged woman lead
Often French films use Anglo-American genres to interesting effect. This was as true of "A bout de soufflé" / "Breathless" and the cop movies of that period as it is here. I don't know Beauvois' (the director's) work very well, but here, as several comments have pointed out, he is using the conventions of the contemporary Anglo-Am "procedural" crime dramas (especially the various Helen Mirren ones). To me, the film succeeds and is quite enjoyable, largely thanks to very strong and striking performances by Jalil Lespert as the "young lieutenant" Antoine Derouere of the title, and Nathalie Baye in the role of his commanding officer, Commandant Vaudieu.
Both these actors are terrific. Lespert was great in the taut labor drama "Human Resources" (1999) and Baye is of course a major figure. With a fine supporting cast, they develop very strong characters and a moving drama that doesn't heroize or fetishize the police apparatus (as Anglo-American procedural films almost invariably do), but rather humanizes it and emphasizes the suffering and loss that it involves. Rather than magically resolving and banishing fears and social responsibility by projecting responsibility for crime onto irrational others, as Anglo-American police dramas do, this film recognizes the irreducible problems that police workers face, and dramatizes the lives of realistically-developed characters, not the fantasy figures that populate most dramas of this kind.
So yes, the film does refer to Anglo-Am procedural dramas and the Helen-Mirren type of character, but it develops these in very interesting ways that go beyond the Anglo-Am subgenre. Lespert and Baye deliver very strong performances, and the film is a good illustration of how some French directors and writers can take popular genres and give them twists that would be difficult to find in the English-language versions. No fantasy explosions or violence- or cadaver- porn, but a moving drama about human experience in a sadly violent social order.
Also, a great strong role for a middle-aged woman, which one doesn't see every day. This seemed to me one of Baye's stronger recent films.
2 Days in Paris (2007)
The indiscrete charmlessness of the bourgeoisie
I've enjoyed Delpy and Goldberg in other films, and certainly Goldberg works very hard here to make an obnoxious part work. Ultimately, though, this film was not enjoyable for me on several levels. As I read it, it does not deliver on its promises, it never develops the topics it seems to introduce, and generally I didn't find the efforts at humor very funny. The film piles cultural cliché and stereotype upon cultural cliché and stereotype, then presents this to the viewer as a "comic" slice of life.
It seems to me that none of the topics the film addresses--the relationship between the woman and the man, the cultural contrasts and relations between France and the U.S., or the questions about how women are treated in relationships (developed via the mother and the emphasis on stupid male jealousy, for ex.)--are ever developed in interesting or thoughtful ways.
Ultimately, is the film simply being marketed as a comedy for lack of a better generic niche, or did Delpy actually think she was making a comedy? I confess I'm not sure about this.... My perception, at least, is that the film is less a comedy than a portrait of anxiety, ignorance, and ugliness in self-absorbed yuppie types. It dramatizes socially-privileged people with very limited horizons, adrift in a world they understand nothing about, who are seemingly headed toward nothing but more of the same ignorance and small-mindedness. Everything is narcissistic, petty, unfulfilling, repulsive, etc. People who have any kind of ideas about a world outside of immediate self-concern are complete crazies (the anti-fast food "fairy," the idiotic "soixant-huitard" pseudo-radical father), and relationships are experienced on a basically adolescent level, they're about little more than petty jealousy and guilty indulgences with no purpose beyond self-gratification. The only commentary beyond self-indulgence the film seems not to ironize is the Delpy character's anger at the (stereotypically) racist and sexist taxi-drivers, but here again this basically affirms the righteous yuppie over against the nasty cabdrivers, and ultimately our heroine seems more concerned about her body image than about any of that....
Plus, the bargain-basement stereotypes of what is "American" and, even more surprisingly, of what is "French," for me at least, were exasperating and tiresome. Is this life in Bushworld and Sarkoland?
Les Lip - L'imagination au pouvoir (2007)
Long-overdue Documentary: Ton patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui.
I saw the film at Espace St Michel on 22.3.07 with a discussion with Christian Rouaud afterwards. He mentioned that there are fictional film treatments in the works; it will be interesting to see how those handle the story.
Using new interviews and old news and other footage, this documentary tells the story of the epochal Lip watch factory strike and worker takeover of 1973-75, in Besancon. This is an important episode in recent French labor history and looms large in discussions of post-1968 labor developments, even though few studies or films have appeared thus far. The strike and worker takeover drew support from all over France and Europe, but was eventually broken by armed Government intervention and the imposition of a new management. Seen from today's historical perspective, the incident marks the end of the firm-centered and production-centered factory economy of the modern era and the beginning of the finance-capital era of downsizing and neoliberalism that we live in today. It also contains interesting new information about the role of Jacques Chirac in the final CGT-Government deal to resolve the strike and disempower the workers' councils. Apparently Chirac has already denied that he played the role this information suggests.
Obviously the film will retell the story for a new generation and serve as a primer for non-Francophone viewers who eventually will see it with subtitles (I hope). It takes the viewer through the stages of the strike and takeover, and provides many insights into the price the leaders eventually paid for their devotion to their fellow workers. It does not heroize the strikers naively, but develops the complexity of the strike process and the multiple forces that were at work. An appreciation of this complexity makes both the great achievement of the workers and their final defeat all the more tragic. Rouaud's narrative does a good job of clarifying tensions between the strikers and the CGT (the primary union involved) on the one hand, and the Gaullist government on the other. That's already a lot for the documentary to do, so the extra attention paid to gender issues, and the "personal" responses of the leaders are all added features. The amazing anecdotes about how the strikers hid the factory's money and materiels are very entertaining.
The footage consists primarily of very moving interviews with strike leaders and organizers (Piaget, Raguenes, Vittot, Jeanningros and other men; Demougeot, Pierre-Emile, Darteville for the women), the Gaullist minister Charbonnel, and Neuschwander, the manager brought in by the government to follow the overt violence of the police with a more subtle managerial violence designed to divide and break the workers.
Overall, this is an important film for anyone interested in labor issues and post-1968 radical culture. Although the film's organization is very well-done, elegant even, I still wish Rouaud had taken the narrative all the way to the final denouement of the worker takeover.
Please bring this out on a DVD with subtitles in other languages.
As the leaders keep insisting, things can be different!
Forrest Gump (1994)
"Being an idiot is no box of chocolates" (the original line from the novel)
A movie with this many comments obviously has great resonance. On the one hand, the movie is technically skillful, well-acted, and used then-advanced special effects to great advantage. As demonstrated by the comments here, it has charmed many viewers. On the other, the movie's values and message are clearly right wing: as many other reviewers point out, the plot rewards ignorance, unquestioning obedience, and laissez-faire corporatization (the marks of a good heart, apparently!), while it trivializes retardation to charm viewers with a saccharine vision of idiocy as goodness. It provides a right-wing allegory of recent US history by punishing the free-thinking Jenny and rewarding the mindless Forrest, named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Charming!
I share the view of those who not entertained by the movie's right-wing allegory of Reagan-Bush era know-nothingism and historical blindness. As another commenter put it, "this is a movie for people who voted for Reagan" or for the Bushes. Overall, it's a remarkable document of Reagan-Bush era dominant thinking.
So the basic situation with this movie is not too difficult to grasp: the movie is skillfully made and acted, and the wide success of its right-wing plot and message demonstrates that the American movie-going public largely shares these right-wing views.
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Stick to what you know....
My response to this film falls with all those who are observing what a fundamentally weak piece of work it is. Obviously some enjoy it for their various reasons, but I have to agree with many others that this film is poorly done in many ways and on many levels: pacing and narrative are incredibly weak, the music and visuals are annoying (to me), and the historical angle is woefully bad. Poor Kirsten Dunst, to have soldiered through her role in such a disaster! It seems to be me that the film demonstrates that filmmakers only really make films about what they know (not an original conclusion, but this film seems a good demonstration of the general principle). After succeeding with Lost in Translation, clearly Ms. Coppola has a good grasp on subject matter involving rich yuppies living in privileged circumstances in the Reagan-Bush era. Here, I think, she has tried to project this kind of subject matter back onto the late eighteenth century, but, alas, she knows nothing about the late eighteenth century, or the French Revolution, etc. She should have picked subject matter she could get a better grasp on.
I hope she's able to recover from this one and follow it with something successful.