I am lucky to live in Montreal directly upstairs from one
of the best repertory cinemas in the city, the Cinema du Parc, which plays a
role in most of the many film festivals held in Montreal. Recently it was part
of the large festival of Black Films,
and currently it is one of half a dozen
venues for the 250 movies being screened by the Festival du Nouveau Cinema, now
in its 42nd year. The Cinema manages to
keep up its own programmes, in which it offers many of the best current films,
as well as producing retrospectives of classic films, such as the screening earlier
in the year of all 44 of Woody Allen’s films, and the current revival of the
best of Jacques Tati.
Yesterday I took in one of the Festival offerings, as well
as the three-hour sensation, winner of the Palme d’or at the Cannes film
festival this year, La vie d’Adele,
alternatively called, in English, Blue is
the Warmest Colour.
It is difficult not to feel obliged to write something
about this latter film, not only because it features perhaps the most explicit sequences of lesbian love-making ever seen in a major motion picture, but
because it is a movie, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, which succeeds in
getting right under the skin of its heroine, a 17-year-old high school girl, played with rivetting
intensity byAdele Exarchopoulos, a 19-year-old actress on the way up in French
cinema.
The movie opens with a group of schoolgirls hanging around
gossiping about boys, and the things
that can happen between boys and girls. And --- though I have to confess a
limited knowledge of this world --- these scenes seem so authentic as to be
delightful to watch and listen to. Adele seems a normal girl, rather more shy
than most of her friends, who find it difficult to convince her that a young
Arabic-speaking man who is part of the student
group is hot for her. The camera
follows her through her first sexual experience with this young man, a budding
actor, and through the breakup of their friendship, leaving her with the first
tears rolling down her cheeks.
Pretty soon at a party she catches the eye of a woman with
blue-tinted hair, a slightly older woman who turns out to be in her fourth year
studying Fine Arts at the university. She is extraordinarily attractive, this
woman, and when they get into a conversation one immediately begins to feel how
strongly Adele is drawn to her. When the
woman turns up at her school on a later day, they get into conversation, and
her obvious admiration for Adele quickly
turns into physical embraces, and eventually love-making. The actress playing
this fascinating character is Lea Seydoux, a 28-year-old daughter of a family
that, in real life, appears to own about half the French movie business, but
the fact is, whatever influence she may have used to get this role, she carries
it out with a panache that is quite astounding. From the first she exudes the
sense that she is a predator, and yet not a dangerous one, a predator
interested in her own pleasures, but willing to treat gently the younger woman
who has fallen into her ambiance.
This is a remarkable performance by Lea Seydoux, a
performacne so powerful that there is little doubt the movie gets its strength
and truthfulness from her constant presence.
When, at about the midway point, she becomes less present, the movie
seems also to dip into a more somnolent air.
Adele, noticing her lover’s attraction to another woman, a
heavily pregant one, permits herself a brief fling with a young man. She
returns one day to Emma’s apartment to be confronted by a furious lover,
accusing her of lying, of being a slut, a whore, telling her to get out, she
never wants to see her again. Suddenly the lover has become a termagant, and
this is one of the most ferociously effective rants I can remember seeing on
the sreen in many years. The tears and entreaties of the abandoned girl do not
move her. She slams the door on Adele’s face, shuts her out completely from her
life, and the rest of the movie becomes almost anti-climactic as it follows
Adele into the early days of a career as a teacher of young chidren.
The tedium of Adele’s life is relieved only once when Emma
agrees to meet her for coffee: once again, Adele cannot disguise her continuing
love, and is once again distressed to learn that, while maintaining a warm
regard her, Emma says she no longer loves her --- she is with someone else now.
This is a remarkable tale drawn from a graphic novel ---
which is the fancy name for a comic book these days --- and in its French name
it seems to promise that the story will be continued in later films, this one
having embraced only Chapters 1 and 2.
It may be doubted whether these continuations will ever be
achieved, because not long after the award of the Cannes prize, which went to
Kechiche and his two main actresses, technicians who had worked on the film accused
the director of harassment, unpaid work, and violations of labour laws. And thereafter the two actresses
also complained about the director’s behaviour during the shooting, describing
the experience as “horrible”, and vowing never to work with him again.
As for the festival contribution to my day’s viewing,
perhaps the less said the better. It was called CowJews and Indians, was made by an Americn Jew called Marc
Halberstadt, whose idea was that he should demand restitution of the property
seized from his family during the Nazi times in Germany. Then he had the
thought that he himself was living on land that had been stolen from the
Indians. So eventually he stitched together the idea that the Indians should
try to get the Germans to pay them rent, thus cutting out the middle-man,
namely, himself. This was a loopy idea, which resulted in his being thrown out
of the premises he was claiming in Germany.
But then he had a further idea, that just as Europeans had
violated Indians by sending them to the residential schools, to be made into
copies of white men, so the Christians had made over the historical Jewish
figure of Jesus into a white European image. He tried to get various German
pastors to hang in their church a slightly comic Jewish-oriented portrait, and
the end of it was that the Indians from Akwasasne and Lakota territory whom he
had recruited in his campaign were sitting around discussing how they had been
used by him for purposes which he had never really made clear to them.
A crazy project from the start, and hardly one that
deserved inclusion in any festival.
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