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Regarde la Mer

     Discerning viewers are advised to steer well clear of Francois Ozon’s new feature, the grating and scatological Sitcom, and search out instead his previous featurette also screened at the SIFF, Regarde la Mer, a calm, quiet thriller centering around three female characters. One is staying at a coastal cabin while her husband is away on business. Another is a reserved, somewhat feral drifter who pitches tent on the property. The third is a six-month-old infant.

     But where there’s dread there should also be a corresponding culmination, and the climax here, though certainly disturbing, is so deliberately inevitable, so logical, so clinically perfect, that it will surprise precisely no one. A more ambiguous or unexpected approach would have been tonally consistent with the preceding uneasy buildup. Ozon obviously has brains and talent to spare, so one would have hoped for a less tidy conclusion. They say getting there is half the fun; in this case, it’s the other half as well.

     Gaspar Noe’s debut, Seul Contre Tous (creatively translated, "I Stand Alone"), is subtitled "The sad story of a butcher suffering in the bowels of his own country." But this character, an inarticulate brute whose moral sense is shaped less by mind than passion, is not exactly an innocent sufferer. In the film’s preamble we learn he has been jailed for assaulting a young man he believes has raped his mentally impaired daughter (in truth, she was merely experiencing her first menstrual cycle). Now he’s back on the streets of Paris and seemingly less in control of his emotions and/or faculties than before. Noe relies on the device of interior monologue, a relentless, misanthropic soundtrack rant only slightly more profane than it is monotonous, which has the effect of plunking the viewer down directly in the butcher’s brain for two hours or so. Our hero apparently has aspirations of becoming an iconoclastic independent filmmaker, for his brain is teeming with jarring, arbitrary jump-cuts, Godardian title-cards, narratively lazy fantasy sequences, and assorted stylistic punctuations wildly incongruous with the character’s coarse, animalistic nature.

     To his credit, Phillipe Nahon, as the butcher, does a good job articulating the rage, desperation, and fear that any human being experiences at certain low points. But director Noe is clearly more interested in cutting a vulgar entrance for Middle Finger Cinema than in constructing a consistent psychological study. His flailing attempts to shock or provoke (he provides us with, among other "sordid" things, penetration footage from pornographic films) are neither particularly shocking nor provocative, unless simple ugliness has now been elevated to that stature by a pop-culture dominated by hip, "knowing" irony. The film makes a few obligatory nods to sociopolitical commentary, but these seem vague, insincere, and employed mainly to deflect charges of superficiality.

     In his most self-promoting affront, near the picture’s climax, Noe throws onscreen a title card with a backward-counting timer advising sensible viewers that they have "30, 29, 28… seconds to leave the theatre." That what eventually transpires actually lives up to such hyperbole is a kind of victory of sorts, if an ultimately hollow one. But most will wish Noe had had the temerity to place his disclaimer somewhere earlier in the film, preferably before the opening credits.

     If there was a single screening that made all the SIFF’s slumming and spectacle worthwhile, it was After Life, Hirokazu Koreeba’s highly anticipated followup (excluding intervening documentary work) to his assured and haunting debut feature, Maborosi. Unexpectedly moving, without a shred of forced or phony sentimentality, it takes a leisurely head-to-heart stroll, tastefully bypassing the usual detour through the gut. The central conceit of the picture, a secular sort of purgatory wherin recently departed souls must choose a single memory to relive in a perpetual loop, seems, initially, too precious and clever. But it’s handled with an immense sense of compassion and sensitivity. Koreeba uses his documentarian’s skills here, filming real-life subjects in static headshots as they explain their individual answers to the filmmaker’s proposition. Koreeba is not interested in visceral catharsis; most of his subjects’ choice memories are of such simple moments as catching a breeze or flying through clouds.

     Where Maborosi was all quiet dignity focused on a single subject, After Life has a brisk, forward momentum encompassing several storylines. Maborosi was drenched with light and color; After Life is dominated by stark monochromes: this afterlife looks more like a high school than the gleaming white beauracracies and Maxfield Parrish miasmas that commonly turn up in motion picture purgatories and paradises. The allegorical trappings do occasionally give rise to minor missteps (windows and doors, for instance, are all backlit, unnecessarily overstating the portal/passage metaphor), but these are easily forgiven in light of the ease with which the director could have made a crass, manipulative What Dreams May Come piece of schmaltz out of the material. One can only imagine the depths of bad taste an American remake would plumb while merely scratching at the surface of the internal consistency and commitment of vision displayed here.

     In the film’s culmination, the benevolent inhabitants of its post-mortal way-station get to work reconstructing the participants’ chosen memories on ad-hoc soundstage facilities. What began as a meditation on mortality and the human condition ultimately becomes a sly and knowing commentary on the power of the recorded image, and how it affects our very identities—exactly the kind of commentary that seems especially pointed under the goofy, glitzy "festival" rubric.

     The sort of mature, intelligent approach to fimmaking that ought to have been more in evidence at the SIFF is Brakhage, first-timer Jim Shedden’s recently released documentary about experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. It’s a shame this solid, unassuming piece wasn’t included in the Festival lineup. A chronicle of a life’s work, it fittingly contains both a birth and an autopsy (extracted from Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving and The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, respectively), and touches on such difficult subjects as obsession, imagination, and the destructive potential of the creative impulse.

     Accomplished with a breezy lightness of tone more stimulating than contemplative, more affirming than immediately informative, Shedden’s offering does falter somewhat in attempting to stylistically emulate his subject; this common error tends to accentuate Brakhage’s vast superiority. But, in total, the picture is expertly paced and filled with intriguing, if occasionally fawning commentary. (One film professor’s assertion that, when all is said and done the acknowledged titans of film history will be Dreyer, Tarkovsky, and Brakhage, is admirable, but seems rather like wishful thinking.) James Tenney’s score is adroit and appropriate to the material, and Shedden provides generous clips from Brakhage’s films from the early 1950s to the present. Unfortunately, nothing is included from his brand new ellipses series. In fact, there’s little new here for Brakhage enthusiasts, aside from getting to watch the ailing sexagenarian bellow his way through "Old Man River." For the uninitiated, however, Brakhage may spark a cinematic epiphany or two—at the very least, it’s a warm ember of relief against the long, dark shadow of Jar Jar Binks.