Bad News, Bad Love

I suppose we should have known better, but Catherine Breillat's planned remake of her own Parfait amour! in English with Naomi Campbell has been scrapped. According to several news sources, Bad Love's cancellation has everything to do with Breillat's choice to cast infamous con artist Christophe Rocancourt in the male lead. As they say, once a thief... Rocancourt reportedly scammed Breillat out of around 650.000€, and the project is now dead. Though this source reports that Breillat will release a (likely scathing and exquisitely written) book entitled Rocancourt et moi about her wretched experience with him (Wikipedia claims the book will be called Abus de faiblesse).

Thankfully, Breillat has lined up her next project, funded by French television, with a modern adaptation of Sleeping Beauty, continuing to stray from using her own writings as source material, after The Last Mistress [Une vieille maîtresse] from Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly and Bluebeard [Barbe Bleue] from Charles Perrault, the man also responsible for Sleeping Beauty. The Sleeping Beauty project appears to be part of a series of films updating classic contes de fées. According to Toutlecine.com, filmmakers Jacques Doillon (Ponette, Le premier venu) and Marina de Van (Dans ma peau, Ne te retourne pas) are rumored to also be contributing to the series. Sounds compelling, but can I hope then that Breillat casts Campbell as belle au bois dormant? We'll see...

All of the links, except for Breillat's Wikipedia page, are in French, but you can read Rocancourt's Wikipedia page for details in English.

The Decade List: Dans ma peau (2002)

Dans ma peau [In My Skin] - dir. Marina de Van

After five years of collaborating with François Ozon as both co-writer and actress, Marina de Van unveiled her directorial debut in 2002 with her metaphysical horror film In My Skin. With an ode to David Cronenberg, de Van examines the final frontier of horror films, the body and its dangerous levels of elasticity. After suffering a fall at a party, Esther (de Van) discovers a fascination with her body and its threshold for not simply pain, but sustainability. What follows is expectedly grotesque and ghastly.

The parables to Esther's fascination are abundant, some surprising and others effective despite the foreseeable correlations to the subject matter. The initial flesh wound doesn't introduce itself as a physical manifestation of Esther's lifestyle as a moderately successful businesswoman in a nominally happy relationship with Vincent (Laurent Lucas), but it becomes her obsession, something that seems initially impulsive but also weirdly natural. Esther's self-mutilation evolves into a search for feeling, something of a substitute for the falseness of the people around her and even herself.

While de Van is pointedly critical of the business world Esther places herself in, its treatment of women and even the carnivorous eating habits of these people, In My Skin isn't simply leftist propaganda masking as psychodrama. Both de Van and Esther approach this fascination with that oh-so-Cronenberg clinical eye. While she never avoids the shock aspects of In My Skin, particularly in the film's nauseatingly effective sound design, the suggestions and ramifications of Esther's "disorder" cut deeper than any of her literal knives.

With: Marina de Van, Laurent Lucas, Léa Drucker, Thibault de Montalembert
Screenplay: Marina de Van
Cinematography: Pierre Barougier
Music: Esbjorn Svensson
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: Wellspring

Premiere: 27 September 2002 (San Sebastián Film Festival)
US Premiere: 7 November 2003 (New York City)

Cannes 2009 Line-Up: Updates

Via Variety, the full jury, headed by Isabelle Huppert, has also been announced: Asia Argento, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Lee Chang-dong, James Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Shu Qi and Robin Wright Penn. In addition to that, a number of other screenings have been announced out of the festival's main competition. Marina de Van's Ne te retourne pas, her second feature after Dans ma peau [In My Skin], will screen along with Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell in the Midnight Program. The film stars Sophie Marceau, Monica Bellucci and Andrea Di Stefano. Michel Gondry's L'épine dans le coeur, Souleymane Cissé's (Yeelen) Min ye and Keren Yedaya's (Or My Treasure) Jaffa will receive special screenings. In the Un Certain Regard category: Denis Dercourt's (The Page Turner) Demain des l'aube; Alain Cavalier's (La chamade) Irène; Bahman Ghobadi's (A Time for Drunken Horses) Nobody Knows About the Persian Cats; Bong Joon-ho's (The Host) Mother; João Pedro Rodrigues' (O Fantasma) To Die Like a Man; Tales from the Golden Age from Romanian directors Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu and Ioana Uricaru; Pavel Lounguine's (Taxi Blues) Tzar; Pen-ek Ratanaruang's (Last Life in the Universe) Nymph; and Lee Daniels' (Shadowboxer) Precious, formerly known as Push. Check the Variety link above for more information.

The Decade List: Sous le sable (2000)

Sous le sable [Under the Sand] - dir. François Ozon

The term "growing up" always comes with a hint of condescension. I try to gravitate toward the word "maturing," but isn't that just an euphemism? So for lack of better terminology, Under the Sand was the once-labeled garçon terrible of French cinema's coming-of-age. His fourth feature after a plethora of shorts (and Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes earlier that year), Under the Sand was a step forward for the director, who, with Sitcom and Les amants criminels, seemed unable to resist the fleeting charm of shock and disturbance. Pairing with actress Charlotte Rampling, whose career resurgence could be attributed single-handedly to Ozon, Under the Sand was the director's own L'avventura (though it also bares resemblance to Anthony Minghella's Truly Madly Deeply with a rigid tonal difference). Within the first twenty minutes of the film, Jean (Bruno Cremer), the husband of English literature professor Marie Drillon (Rampling), vanishes without a trace on a beach during the couple's vacation. Stricken with grief (or is it denial?), Marie returns to Paris as if nothing had happened.

Under the Sand's strength comes not only in Rampling's riveting performance but in Ozon's reluctance to diagnose Marie's condition. At a dinner party hosted by colleague and friend Amanda (Alexandra Stewart), Marie casually suggests that Amanda's husband Gérard (Pierre Vernier) should join her gym as it would convince Jean to start exercising as well. The rest of the party looks on, uncomfortably, as the subject is quickly averted. As she returns home, after being escorted by publisher Vincent (Jacques Nolot) whom Amanda is trying to set up with Marie, Jean appears in the shadows of the apartment. Was he still alive? Or was this just a figment of Marie's imagination, a way of coping? When it becomes clearer that Jean wasn't found that day at the beach, Marie's mental and emotional state becomes more disoriented. She speaks of Jean in the present tense, even correcting Vincent at a pivotal moment, but it seems that the more the audience discovers, the less Marie appears to know about what's going on in her world.

Our understanding of Marie's condition reaches a turning point after a doctor's visit, in which she's asked to settle her husband's bill as well as her own. With reservation (or is it confusion?), she asks the receptionist when his last visit was. At this point, we realize Marie isn't in a conscious state of denial, though it might have felt that way earlier when she adamantly denies recognizing one of her students who happened to be one of the lifeguards searching for her husband that summer. Things take a further turn when Marie visits her mother-in-law (Andrée Tainsy), who naively (?) suggests that Jean didn't drown and had disappeared purposefully to get away from Marie. It's the feistiest scene in the film, and it's to Ozon's credit that, like the rest of the film, the explosion comes calmly, resisting the urge to show a pair of proper ladies duking it out; he would give in fully to that urge with 8 femmes. Like Lea Massari's Anna in L'avventura, Jean is riddled with ennui, something that isn't apparent to his lover. Marie and Jean's relationship, seen in the film's early scenes, had been reduced to silence and impersonal small-talk. Marie never senses his distance, but after seeing the way she handles his disappearance, this might be a result of living in a constant state of denial.

By remaining implicit about Marie's coping, Ozon permits Rampling to brilliantly shape her character. In bouts of girlish exuberance, Rampling takes Marie through not just the stages of grief but of self-discovery. Mercifully, this isn't a film about reinventing and discovering yourself late in life, so there's a greater level of intrigue when Marie blushes at Vincent's courting and giggles uncontrollably when they start to have sex for the first time. The moments, in which Rampling returns Marie to the seemingly forgotten days of youthfulness, revive her, if only momentarily, as the dread sinks in when things become more familiar the night Jean decides to stay the night. The complex relationship between the knowledge of the viewer and of Marie wouldn't have worked without Rampling, whose beauty seems eternally preserved. Her performance keeps Under the Sand mysterious, an effort that would prove less successfully when she re-teamed with Ozon in 2003 with Swimming Pool.

Under the Sand is just one example of a common sentiment among French filmmakers in relation to the beach and les vacances. Alongside films like Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, Sébastien Lifshitz's Presque rien, Julie Lopes-Curval's Bord de mer, Anne-Sophie Birot's Les filles ne savent pas nager and Ozon's later Le temps qui reste, the expected relation between summer and relaxation or frivolity appears to have been replaced by layers of coldness and despair (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Crustacés et coquillages would provide the counter to these films). I plan to address this in later posts about a few of the aforementioned films.

With: Charlotte Rampling, Bruno Cremer, Jacques Nolot, Alexandra Stewart, Andrée Tainsy, Pierre Vernier
Screenplay: Emmanuèle Bernheim, Marina de Van, François Ozon, Marcia Romano
Cinematography: Antoine Héberlé, Jeanne Lapoirie
Music: Philippe Rombi
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: Wellspring

Premiere: 11 September 2000 (Toronto International Film Festival)
US Premiere: 4 May 2001 (New York City)

Awards: Audience Award: Best Actress - Charlotte Rampling (European Film Awards)

Coming (or Not Coming) in 2009: Part 1

This is the first part of a series of posts which will look at what films we can expect to see make their premiere during 2009. You can check some of my earlier posts about the Berlinale for news about films from Lukas Moodysson, Catherine Breillat, François Ozon, Rebecca Miller, Stephen Frears, Costa-Gavras, Andrzej Wajda, Hans-Christian Schmid (Requiem), Lucía Puenzo (XXY), Andrew Bujalski, Sally Potter, Chen Kaige and Theo Angelopoulos. This post will focus on French directors and productions. The run-down is admittedly auteur-driven, as no one can really predict when a film like Cristian Mungui's 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days will sneak up and floor us. As you can imagine, many of these films won't hit the US until next year, later (or never).

UPDATED: I forgot to include Jean-Pierre Jeunet's new film when I pasted this from my word processor, so scroll down for that. I've also included some more links (nearly all of which are in French).

I've mentioned my enthusiasm for Claire Denis' latest film, White Material, several times on the blog as I was told (via Facebook) that Denis was hoping to have the film edited in time for the Berlinale. It isn't playing there, so the next likely place would have to be Cannes in May, though I'd suspect it'd play out of competition as star Isabelle Huppert is the head of this year's jury. Set in Cameroon, Christopher Lambert co-stars as Huppert's husband, along with Nicolas Duvauchelle and Isaach de Bankolé, both of which have worked with Denis in the past. The film is produced by Why Not Productions in France. Denis' 35 rhums [35 Shots of Rum], which played at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, opens in France on 18 February.

Four years after Gabrielle, Patrice Chéreau (Queen Magot, L'homme blessé) returns behind the camera for Pérsecution, which he co-wrote with Anne-Louise Trividic who also co-write Gabrielle, Son frère and Intimacy with Chéreau. The film stars Romain Duris, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jean-Hughes Anglade, is being produced by Arte France Cinéma and should be released by mk2 before the end of the year.

Isabelle Huppert will once again team with director Benoît Jacquot (L'école de la chair [The School of Flesh]) for Villa Amalia, which opens in France on 11 March through EuropaCorp. Jean-Hughes Anglade, Xavier Beauvois and Maya Sansa (Buongiorno, notte [Good Morning Night]) also star.

I haven't been able to find any new information about Catherine Breillat's Bad Love, a remake of her own Parfait amour! starring Naomi Campbell and Christophe Rocancourt. Naturally, I will post more information as I come across it. Her latest, a fantasy La barbe bleu, premieres at the Berlinale. La barbe bleu was produced by Arte France and look for the possibility of a re-release of Tapage nocturne [Nocturnal Uproar] as it will screen at Berlin as well.

In their sixth collaboration, Catherine Deneuve will once again grace the screen for director André Téchiné in La fille du RER, which opens in France on 18 March from UGC Distribution. The film also stars Michel Blanc (who was in Téchiné's last film Les témoins [The Witnesses]), Mathieu Demy (Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda's son), Ronit Elkabetz (Late Marriage, The Band's Visit), Émilie Dequenne (Rosetta) and Nicholas Duvauchelle.

Alain Resnais' new film Les herbes folles stars Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos and Anne Consigny, all three of which were last seen in Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël, as well as André Dussollier and longtime collaborator Sabine Azéma. The film is based on the novel L'incident by Christian Gailly and should be released through Studio Canal on 21 October in France. Les herbes folles was shot by Eric Gautier, who has previously worked with Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat, Patrice Chéreau and Desplechin.

Still working at 81, Jacques Rivette's new film (perhaps his last?) 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup stars Jane Birkin, who also co-starred in Rivette's L'amour par terre and La belle noiseuse, Jacques Bonnaffé (Prénom Carmen, Jeanne et le garçon formidable) and Sergio Castellitto (The Wedding Director, My Mother's Smile). Les Films du Losange are releasing the film on 16 September.

Claude Chabrol, who turns 80 next year, will unveil his latest Bellamy on 25 February through TFM Distribution after it premieres in Berlin on the 8th. Gérard Depardieu, Clovis Cornillac (Faubourg 36) and Jacques Gamblin star.

In the second Coco Chanel biopic in two years (the other was made-for-television and starred Shirley Maclaine), Anne Fontaine (Nathalie...) will direct Audrey Tautou as the fashion designer. Coco avant Chanel [Coco Before Chanel], which also stars Alessandro Nivola, Emmanuelle Devos and Benoît Poelvoorde, will be out in France through Warner Brothers on 22 April. Warner will also distribute the film in the US sometime at the end of the year or 2010.

Seven years after her disturbing feature-length debut as a director Dans ma peau [In My Skin] Marina de Van's second film Ne te retourne pas stars Monica Bellucci, Sophie Marceau and Andrea Di Stefano (Before Night Falls). The film sounds a BIT like The Eyes of Laura Mars, but that's okay in my book. The film should be out sometime in May in France from Wild Bunch.

The filmmaking duo Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (Jeanne et le garçon formidable, Drôle de Félix [The Adventures of Felix], Ma vraie vie à Rouen [My Life on Ice], Crustacés et coquillages [Côte d'Azur]) should have their latest, L'arbre et la forêt, out sometime this year, though I wasn't able to find any dates or distributors for the film. L'arbre et la forêt stars Guy Marchand, Françoise Fabian, Sabrina Seyvecou (Paris), Yannick Renier and Pierre-Loup Rajot (Felix, À nos amours). Their last film Nés en 68 [Born in '68], which also stars Seyvecou, Renier, as well as Laetitia Casta and Yann Trégouët, will be released in the US later this year through Strand Releasing.

Julie Delpy's second foray as a director will make its international debut at the Berlinale on 9 February. The Countess, which Delpy also wrote and stars in, also features William Hurt, Anamaria Marinca, Daniel Brühl and Sebastian Blomberg. The poster above incorrectly lists Vincent Gallo, Ethan Hawke and Radha Mitchell as stars though all three dropped out of the film. No word yet on a French or US release.

Jacques Audiard's (Sur mes lèvres [Read My Lips], De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté [The Beat My Heart Skipped]) Un prophète will be released through UGC Distribution on 26 August in France. The film stars Niels Arestrup (Je, tu, il, elle, Stavisky....).

Bruno Dumont's fifth film Hadewijch will be distributed by Tadrat Films sometime in 2009, after making a likely showing at this year's Cannes Film Festival. All of his films except for Twentynine Palms have debuted at the fest, and his last film Flandres won the Grand Prix. The cast will, like Flandres, be comprised of unknowns.

After contributing to two omnibus films (Destricted and 8), Gaspar Noé's third feature film Enter the Void will be released in France from Wild Bunch over the summer, possibly after a showing at Cannes. Enter the Void, which was filmed in Montréal and Tokyo, will be Noé's first English-language film.

After disastrous results working in the US (he called Babylon A.D. "like a bad episode of 24"), Mathieu Kassovitz returns home to direct, star and co-write L'ordre et la morale. Not much is known about the project, but it seems unlikely to make it out by the end of the year.

And finally, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's latest film Micmacs à tire-larigot stars Dany Boon (of the regional box office sensation Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, currently being remade in the US), Dominique Pinon, André Dussollier and Yolande Moreau (the latter three were all in Amèlie). Warner will release the film in France on 28 October and in the US sometime in 2010.

More coming soon...

Once said at the fires...

I can officially cross two of my 40 MIA DVDs for 2007 off the list, as Anchor Bay has announced an Alejandro Jodorowsky boxset, which will include El topo and The Holy Mountain, as well as a new disc of Fando y Lis. Granted this is a title that seems posed for numerous postponements, like the Kenneth Anger box-set, though I just ordered my copy today.

Other than that annoucement, I figured I'd just post a pull-quote from John Waters in This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick's wildly uneven assault against the MPAA.

John Waters (about felching): "No one has actually done it. I know a lot of perverts, and even they haven't."

And, as you know, I don't really get around to seeing every film that comes out, so here's a list of quotes my friends and non-friends have made in the past week or so, regarding the realm of cinema.

Chris B. (on In My Skin): "Vegetarian propaganda!"

David H. (on Freeway): "There's no such thing as a video store having too many copies of this film."

Katie P. (on her favorite quote from Six Feet Under): " 'I don't want him cruising me in the afterlife;' needless to say, I'm obsessed."

Random guy at bar (on Belle de jour): "Shit, it has everything -- sex, flogging, Catherine Deneuve, blasphemy, and horses."

Tom S. (on Hounddog): "Dakota Fanning getting raped is the best thing to hit cinemas this year!"

Tom B. (on Letters from Iwo Jima): "I think he's really pulled the wool over the critics' eyes, cloaking what really amounts to a lack of imagination with the label ''classicism.'"
Tom B. (on The Departed): "Jack Nicholson + strap-on dildo = summit of human cultural achievement."
Tom B.: "I recently had a dream where Godard, after delivering some obnoxious lecture, returns to his dressing room, hits the stereo and rocks out to 'Back in Black'. I awoke with a hard-on."
Tom B. (on Shortbus): "Damn Hedwig and his porno actors and their sublime sorrow!"

Josh W. (on Time to Leave): "Hot French guys should never have to die."

Nathan H. (on my blasting of his five-star rating for Life Is Beautiful): "Your antisemitism is cute."
Nathan H. (on Hedwig and the Angry Inch): "So fucking beautiful & hilarious it makes me wanna stomp a lightbulb."

Mike H. (on Show Me Love): "Shit, this made Foreigner sound touching!"

Cindy L. (on Prairie Home Companion): Blah-blah-blah boring."

Mike M. (on The Covenant): It's like The Craft, only for thirteen-year-old gay boys."

Me (in response to Mike M.): "Isn't The Craft like The Craft for thirteen-year-old gay boys?"

A douche bag who works at a video store (on The Guardian): "On an Ashton Kutcher scale, it's somewhere between The Butterfly Effect and Just Married."

Chris M. (not in response to him): "The Butterfly Effect is Donnie Darko for morons."

Me: "Fuck Donnie Darko."

Funny Games

Sitcom - dir. François Ozon - 1998 - France

Only upon rewatching Pasolini's Teorema, certainly his masterpiece, did I realize how frequent the themes present there have shown up in other films. I mentioned the comparison in my review of the dreadful Angelina Jolie thud, Foxfire, but I think the comparison works best here, with Ozon's first feature, Sitcom. Instead of Terrence Stamp, Ozon gives us a rat, who comes into a bourgeouis family only to disrupt their lives. The daughter (Marina de Van, director of Dans ma peau [In My Skin]) becomes a paraplegic dominatrix, the son (Adrien de Van) turns gay and begins hosting orgies in his room, the mother (Évelyne Dandry) lustfully tries to cure her son's homosexuality by fucking him, and the father (François Marthouret) shoots himself (in the opening scene). And all because of one cute little rat!

No doubt when Ozon was first dubbed the garçon terrible of French cinema, Pasolini, another rebellious cinematic homosexual, came to many people's minds -- though a French John Waters seems more fitting for Sitcom. In Teorema, the destruction of the upper-middle class family came in the form of a beautiful "visitor" (Stamp), but here, our God figure is literally a rat. There's a perverse, disquieting nature to Sitcom, but somehow it's missing the ability to haunt and provoke that Teorema had. Sitcom is played for dirty laughs, and this is where Teorema works better. One of the most crippling elements of Teorema is that it's hard to really allow yourself to laugh at what's going on. Pasolini doesn't play it tongue-in-cheek, but then again, he never really does. I suppose there's a seriousness about Pasolini in either his dark subject matters or his murder that doesn't allow for most people to see his films as comedies, even his more outrageous ones like Salò or Porcile. Teorema is subtly hysterical, and you can't help but feel that Ozon updated it with Sitcom, a Pasolini film as written by John Waters and directed by Claude Chabrol. Enough name-dropping for one evening.