Best of 2015: Full Contact (David Verbeek)

Full Contact. David Verbeek. Netherlands/Croatia.

Working from an air force base somewhere in the Nevada desert halfway across the world from the targets he's surveying, Ivan, a stoic drone operator played by Claire Denis’ muse Grégoire Colin, finds his life spiraling out of control following the accidental bombing of a Muslim school that he mistook for a terrorist camp. Distracting himself with the company of a Las Vegas stripper (Lizzie Brocheré), Ivan finds himself unable to maintain an emotional distance from his work and from his involvement in that attack, just as the film takes a bold, surreal turn.

Arguably the most visually astounding movie of 2015 (kudos to Dutch cinematographer Frank van den Eeden, whose work was equally as impressive in Nicolas Provost’s The Invader (L’envahisseur) a few years back), David Verbeek’s Full Contact, his strongest film to date, is a mystifying experience that defies easy characterization or classification. Without going too much into detail, it best resembles David Lynch’s Lost Highway in terms of narrative devices, not to mention the bewildering feeling it ultimately leaves you with. It’s divisive, for certain, and sometimes that alone is enough for my admiration.

However, like another polarizing film from 2015, Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby, Full Contact suffers from starting stronger than it finishes. But the narrative shifts in Full Contact function less like a clinical experiment on the audience’s emotional investment as they do in Nasty Baby than an audacious mode for probing the intertwining themes of guilt and rebirth. Additionally, a lot of Full Contact’s success relies on a pair of impressive, bilingual turns from both Brocheré, who somehow manages to mask her French accent flawlessly when speaking English, and Colin, whose detached presence is truly haunting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any distribution information regarding Full Contact outside of the Netherlands.

With: Grégoire Colin, Lizzie Brocheré, Slimane Dazi, Alain Blazevic, Robert Jozinovic

Best of 2013: #4. Bastards (Claire Denis)

#4. Bastards (Les salauds). d. Claire Denis. France/Germany.

While there are a number of trends and themes running through this list, the thing that truly unifies at least the top 7 was their ability to haunt and resonate with me long after the credits. Claire Denis’ latest benefits the most from this sensation. Like many of her films, Bastards doesn’t offer much immediate satisfaction. The way Denis delivers information to the audience can tend to be rather obtuse or, in some cases, puzzling or, in most cases, disconcerting. For me, the word “puzzling” comes to mind with Denis’ work more than any other filmmaker because an unfinished puzzle offers the best visual analogy for many of her films. With carefully chosen pieces, she allows for us as the audience to imagine what lies in the empty spaces, and that isn’t a task that I imagine a lot of people enjoy having asked of them at the cinema.

With Bastards, the puzzle takes the form of a film noir, offering us glimpses of familiar traits of the genre. A wounded man (Vincent Lindon) reluctantly returns to Paris after his brother-in-law commits suicide in order to help his sister (Julie Bataille) settle the sizable debts and shady affairs that have brought the family and its company to ruin. Something’s fucked up with his niece (Lola Créton) who was hospitalized after being found walking the streets naked the night of her father’s death. And things get shaken up when he starts to get involved with a woman (Chiara Mastroianni) in the building where he’s living. There’s an unsettling air to nearly every scene, made all the eerier by the amazing synth-y score from Denis’ longtime musical collaborator, Stuart Staples of Tindersticks ("Put Your Love in Me"). And like two of her best films, Beau travail and The Intruder, Bastards has a wallop of an ending that’s nearly impossible to shake.

Bastards is available to rent on Amazon in the U.S. via Sundance Selects, and is currently on DVD in France via Wild Side Vidéo.

With: Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Michel Subor, Julie Bataille, Lola Créton, Grégoire Colin, Christophe Miossec, Alex Descas, Florence Loiret Caille, Hélène Fillières, Eric Dupond-Moretti, Sharunas Bartas, Nicole Dogué, Élise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson, Laurent Grévill

The Decade List: L'intrus (2004)

L’intrus [The Intruder] – dir. Claire Denis

In what Claire Denis described as her own mood piece inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s book of the same name, The Intruder is the most ecstatically puzzling of her career, a haunting exploration of a man dying of heart failure (Michel Subor). Denis subtly takes you into the mind of Louis, blending his fantasies into the already challenging narrative. What we do know is that he has a son (Grégoire Colin) he barely sees, a failing heart and is visited by a young Russian woman (Katia Golubeva), to whom he owes a large sum of money and might be a manifestation of his imagination (or “the Angel of Death,” as some have speculated).

I don’t think I’m alone in claiming The Intruder to be Denis’ most difficult in deciphering (nor in my total fascination with it). And still, it’s somehow everything I want out of one of her films: frustration, bewilderment and atmosphere. Similar to Beau travail, my other favorite film of hers, The Intruder only seems to strengthen through memory, even if returning to it still proves to be an extremely complex endeavor.

With: Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Katia Golubeva, Bambou, Florence Loiret-Caille, Alex Descas, Béatrice Dalle, Lolita Chammah, Kin Dong-ho, Henri Tetainanuarii, Jean-Marc Teriipaia, Anna Tetuaveroa
Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, based on the book by Jean-Luc Nancy
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Music: Stuart Staples
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: Wellspring

Premiere: 9 September 2004 (Venice Film Festival)
US Premiere: 18 March 2005 (Rendezvous with French Cinema)

The Decade List: Sex Is Comedy (2002)

Sex Is Comedy – dir. Catherine Breillat

Though obviously inspired by her experience working on Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat does more than simply “defend” some of the more provocative elements of her work with Sex Is Comedy, her underappreciated ninth feature. To call Sex Is Comedy a “defense” for Fat Girl doesn’t work for two reasons. Firstly, Breillat would never feel the need to justify herself in such pedestrian terms. She’s too smart for that; check out any interview with her or read any of her books, and you’ll understand. Secondly, Sex Is Comedy doesn’t even address what I would argue to be the more controversial aspect of Fat Girl (the final act, namely). Instead, it centers on the “scènes intimes” a director named Jeanne, played by Anne Parillaud, tries to authentically depict in her own film despite the frustration of working with two actors who seem to hate one another.

Sex Is Comedy, above all else, is a film about the illusions of cinema, and a transformative one at that. The film within the film supplies a bevy of illusions, most of them intangible (like the way in which a freezing, overcast shoot on a Portuguese beach can mask as a romantic summer interlude through camera trickery), some of them corporeal (the director has a prosthetic cock molded to prevent the likely case of the actor being unable to achieve an erection, among other reasons). The fallacy of Jeanne’s highest concern is that of passion. She suspects the actors of undermining her and the film itself, a concern she vocalizes to Léo (Ashley Wanninger), her assistant director. Whether the actors’ mutual dislike of one another is in fact a manifestation of their anxiety about filming the sex scene or an actual clash of personality, Jeanne makes it her primary goal to elicit the illusion of intimacy from the two, played by Grégoire Colin and Roxane Mesquida, essentially playing herself acting out the scenes she portrayed in Fat Girl.

In keeping things especially meta, Sex Is Comedy employs its own set of illusions. For starters, the film Jeanne and company are making only resembles Fat Girl though both the use of Mesquida and certain script specifics (like Mesquida’s character’s virginity and the use of a prosthetic penis). In the film, Colin’s character takes Mesquida back to his place, while, in Fat Girl, she invites her lover (played there by Libero De Rienzo) to her parents’ vacation home while sharing a room with her sister. Parillaud’s character, while bearing quite a few similarities to the director, isn’t named Catherine. Like Anaïs Reboux’s character in Fat Girl, Parillaud actually looks quite a bit like Breillat but, instead of a rounder, pre-teen version of the director, resembles a “movie star” projection (have you noticed that all of the women in Breillat’s films tend to be brunettes?). Jeanne’s slight immobility, as a result of slamming her foot too hard against the ground (“a metaphor for the film,” she adds), is simply coincidental, as Breillat didn’t suffer the stroke that left her physically impaired until two years after Sex Is Comedy was made.

The setting of a film shoot also vaguely masks the fact that the way Jeanne speaks of her art is precisely the way not only Breillat does but all of her characters seem to in relation to their sexuality, among other things. It is, given Jeanne’s closeness to the director, a believable one, but the more interesting fallacies of Sex Is Comedy are ones Breillat directly alludes to within the film. In one scene, Colin’s character crudely plays around with his fake cock amongst the crew in a veiled act of charming them, while Jeanne and Mesquida’s character both recognize it as a way of precluding his own nervousness about the scene he’s about to film. But the film’s most telling moment occurs when the cinematographer (Bart Binnema) points out that Jeanne’s frustration with Colin directly mirrors the way she’s felt about all of her male actors in the past. In calling the director out in failing to recognize the sexual prejudices she seems to notice in everyone else, Breillat dispels the same myths about herself as she does the act of imitating passion for the greater good of art.

With: Anne Parillaud, Grégoire Colin, Roxane Mesquida, Ashley Wanninger, Dominique Colladant, Bart Binnema, Diane Scapa, Júlia Fragata
Screenplay: Catherine Breillat
Cinematography: Laurent Machuel
Country of Origin: France/Portugal
US Distributor: IFC Films

Premiere: May 2002 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 14 October 2004 (Austin Film Festival)

The Devil(s), Probably!

Holy fucking shit. Ken Russell's The Devils, uncut, on DVD, Region 1, May 20th. Best news of the year. I love you all. Warner's treatment of The Devils has been a serious cause of blue balls for me. They've been threatening to release it for over five years and now they've "delayed" it again. Shoot me.

In other DVD news, it looks like Criterion has their hands on Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain, starring Rade Serbedzija, Grégoire Colin, Phyllida Law and the late Katrin Cartlidge. Expect it later this year.

Asshole 400

If you're feeling superficial: You're in good company! This is my 400th fucking post and instead of making a boring list of films or bitching about the Oscars, I'm just going to post 20 photos of filmic individuals who I'd give the business to (for a variety of reasons...). Yeah, I'm shallow. And no, I'm not sexually confused, but would you really turn down Asia Argento or Grace Jones? Not this faggot.

In no particular order:
Rosanna Arquette (pictured with Thom Yorke, to whom the business would not be given)
Monica Vitti (I like the variety in hair color I get with L'avventura or La notte)
PJ Harvey (Um, she was in Hal Hartley's The Book of Life, so it counts)
Paul Schneider (In George Washington)
The Renier brothers, Jérémie et Yannick (Together... in Private Property)
Romain Duris (Yikes, I'll take him in anything, especially The Beat That My Heart Skipped)
Grégoire Colin (Again, in anything, take your pick, but how about Beau travail?)
Harry Baer (in Gods of the Plague, definitely)
Jane Fonda (pre-exercise tapes, maybe even in Vietnam)
Jean-Marc Barr (Post-The Big Blue)
Lior Ashkenazi (Late Marriage, Walk on Water)
Daniel Hendler (Family Law, though really anything)
Emmanuelle Seigner (particularly in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and with Roman Polanski watching)
Gina Gershon (hell, and Jennifer Tilly too)
Grace Jones (!!!!)
Aiden Gillen (Either with crazy hair or as Mayor Carcetti on The Wire)
Alain Delon (Purple Noon or L'Eclisse)
Asia Argento (with blood, lots of it, and her dad filming)
Béatrice Dalle (Betty Blue 4-ever)
Bibi Andersson (Persona)