THE CYNEPHILE

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

“It was about time that Fuck the police! replaced Yes sir, officer! In this sense, the open hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the desire for salvational destruction by which the country is consumed.” -The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

Un Prophète has the rare distinction of having been in the right place at the right time. When droves of cinephiles line up to see it when it opens this Friday, they will unfortunately be rather late to the party, for its impact was felt in France last year (and indeed, all the important European film societies showered it with awards quite some ago). If it wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, that will only add a shiny American feather to its amply decorated hat, and maybe Audiard will make a film in the U.S. as a result.

Newcomer Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebana

But what makes this film a cause célèbre in France has nothing to do with the quality of the film itself, although the film will undoubtedly become a classic — it has French Goodfellas written all over it. Un Prophète is important the same way Entre Les Murs [The Class, 2008] was important, because it touches on the changing racial and class dynamics that have been the subject of heated controversy lately, particularly since the appointment of conservative Éric Besson as Minister of Immigration, and his accompanying xenophobic agenda: he is anti-Burka, pro-immigration quotas and re-patriations and thinks that immigrants should have to pass a French language test. (Oh, and schoolchildren should sing La Marseillaise at least once a year.) His policies have led him to be deemed “the most hated man in France” (more hated than Sarko?) and things have only gotten worse since Besson was discovered, in true repressed-politician fashion, to have a secret Muslim girlfriend.

Malik and Corsican mob leader César Luciani [Niels Arestrup]

So what does this have to do with Un Prophète? The film is the coming-of-age story of a young Arab delinquent Malik, who learns to survive in prison by successfully wheeling and dealing with members of the Corsican and Arab gangs that are engaged in a brutal turf war. The socio-political commentary is indirect but it’s pretty damn clear: if the prison is a microcosm of society, the open hostility between the two clans mirrors “in a slightly less muffled way” the conflict between ethnic groups and their struggle for domination. The Corsican gang in particular is threatened by the influx of Arab prisoners; the sheer number makes it hard for them to maintain control. Malik is an interesting figure to put at the center of all of this: ethnically ambiguous, he is forced to kill a fellow Arab at the bidding of a Corsican mafia boss [played wonderfully by Niels Arestrup]. That man comes back to haunt him and suffuses the film with a vaguely preternatural / quasi-religious aura (as do the biblically-inflected chapters and the title of the film itself). Un Prophète has started a national conversation about prison reform, and that’s momentous and necessary, especially when Sarkozy himself refers to the institution as “the nation’s shame.” But what Un Prophète really dramatizes, through its parable of an Arab outsider becoming the ultimate insider, is the ascendency of a new polyglot, multi-racial national identity.

The ghost of Reyeb [Hichem Yacoubi]. This strangely reminded me of the ghost who haunts Gena Rowland’s character in Opening Night.

Titles with Biblical references are interspersed throughout the film.

U.S. viewers are likely to only get a sense of the political overtones, as Un Prophète is also a genre piece that also calls to mind recent gangster films such as Gomorrah, Canet’s Ne Le Dis à Personne, and the two-part Mesrine. But Un Prophète also deserves to be included in that slippery category of “zeitgeist” films, because it takes on a flammable topic, however obliquely, and acutely presages circumstances to come.

“If we go beyond a few rudimentary signs (eccentricity, classicism, dandyism, sport, ceremony) can clothing signify without recourse to the speech that describes it, comments upon it, and provides it with signifiers and signifieds abundant enough to constitute a system of meaning?” -Roland Barthes, The Fashion System

Some fashion designers create clothing and some create universes. Alexander McQueen did the latter, and he often drew directly from cinema for inspiration. Citing influences such as Hitchcock and Kubrick, his fashion shows were elaborately produced spectacles that often evoked scenes from classic movies. Fantasy, horror, noir, Merchant-Ivory costume drama — all were fodder for his innate brand of showmanship. It was also impossible to reduce a McQueen collection to the usual trendspotty rhetoric, i.e. “brown is the new black” or “pencil skirts are back,” or “another season of dominatrix heels.” His clothing wasn’t about innovations in materials, new silhouettes, or outright sex appeal, although those factors couldn’t help but figure in. McQueen was for the girl who wakes up feeling equal parts Siouxsie Sioux and Anne Bancroft, who wears David Bowie eyepaint with an Audrey Hepburn shift dress to a party*, who cultivates the queasily erotic aura of a Manson girl, who chips her own nail polish and rips her own fishnets because she doesn’t want to look too “done” but puts her hair up into a chignon just because. A lot of designers mine movies for their source material, but few were as inventive and eclectic as McQueen.

*this is my current sartorial fantasy

McQueen Fall 2005. Inspired by Hitchcock brunettes-turned-blonde. (Now I want canary yellow shoes.)

McQueen Spring 2007. Inspired by Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

McQueen Spring / Summer 2004. A re-enactment of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? This is truly breathtaking.

Steve McQueen’s Hunger comes out on DVD today from Criterion, and I can’t think of an art-house title from the past year that is more deserving of the “Criterion” treatment (including what must surely be a harrowing Blu-ray release). A video artist turned feature filmmaker, McQueen refuses to talk about his work in convenient, journalist-friendly soundbytes, or define what it’s about for the viewer. In an interview, he cites a conversation between Pauline Kael and Jean-Luc Godard as a source of inspiration for Hunger:

“I found this interview that Godard did with Pauline Kael two days after Bobby Sands died, where Godard essentially said, “The reason why Bobby Sands is important is because he’s childish.” I got this image in my head of this child sitting at the table with some food, and the parents saying, ‘You’re not leaving this table until you finish eating it.’ The kid says no, wrongly or rightly. What time a child goes to bed, or the clothes a child wears, those things are dictated to by experience, and it’s a common situation that the only power a kid has is to refrain from eating. It’s a situation all of us know.”

I love how that one word “childish” spurs an image that allows McQueen to take a specific historical moment — the hunger strike of Bobby Sands — and translate it into a common experience. Here’s what Godard said in the actual interview (Pauline Kael is asking him about film being used a a political weapon):

JLG: …I think a good example is La Chinoise…It was made in 1967 before the 1968 events in France, before the Weatherman here, before the Baader-Meinof in Germany, or the Red Brigade in Italy. At the time it was hated by the left, who said, “These people are ridiculous.” And today, after seeing it fifteen years later, we discover that all of those people, even Bobby Sands a few days ago, are childish, and it’s because they are childish that they are important people.

“Childish” here isn’t used as pejorative — Godard seems to be using it as an adjective to encapsulate a strength of conviction, an uncompromising will, and a sense of stubborn refusal. In La Chinoise, there is a pivotal scene in which the university student Veronique has a conversation with Francis Jeanson, a leftist professor. He repeatedly questions her morals, her anger, and what he considers to be her childish revolutionary actions.

It is evident that the second part of Hunger, in which Bobby Sands confronts a priest who tries to dissuade him from becoming a martyr, is directly inspired by this train conversation. Like La Chinoise, they argue in a very long take, almost in silhouette, forcing the viewer to focus on the dialogue.

Other McQueen news: I recently dropped by his show at Marian Goodman, and despite having missed Yoko Ono by mere moments, I was a bit underwhelmed by Giardini (his film from the Venice Biennale). There is a lovely piece called Static in which McQueen circles the the Statue of Liberty from a helicopter, that transforms the tourist trap back into an object of awe and wonder. It’s a must-see for video art enthusiasts and McQueen completists.

His next project? A biopic about the Nigerian singer Fela Kuti, which will hopefully sidestep the clichés of the genre and will undoubtedly be visually and sonically arresting.

Dennis Lim’s review of Hunger in The New York Times

A nice breakdown of important moments in McQueen’s career from New York Magazine

In Pedro Almodóvar’s latest mise-en-abîme of a film, the protagonist is a director who makes a movie called Chicas y Maletas (Girls and Suitcases). This film is a tongue-in-cheek remake of the movie that put Almodóvar on the map, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988]. The plot of the latter anything but simple, but the film revolves around Pepa (played by Carmen Maura) who frantically looks for her former lover Ivan in order to give him a suitcase full of his things and to tell him some very important news. The suitcase is a textbook MacGuffin –and it’s worth noting that in Hitchcock’s original explanation, the MacGuffin is literally a piece of baggage — while also symbolizing the emotional baggage of a past relationship, which Pepa must eventually ditch in order to free herself from him. (She ends up throwing the suitcase in a dumpster.)

Carmen Maura as Pepa: on the verge of a nervous breakdown. (Don’t mind the French subtitles.)

In Broken Embraces, Penelope Cruz takes on the Pepa role in the film-within-a-film, with one crucial difference: she’s on crutches. The crutches are not a prop: In the principal plot of Broken Embraces, her husband pushes her down the stairs when she tries to leave him for the director. She is both emotionally and physically crippled by him, but goes on to finish the film despite her disability. The interesting thing about this is that the Spanish word for “crutches” is muletas, which is almost identical to maletas (suitcases). The meaning of the play on words is clear: Her former lover is a crutch that she too must cast aside in order to move on.

Penelope Cruz as Lena, wearing red and leaving with a suitcase of her own.

Carmen Machi as Chon, visiting Lena. [What a fat big toe!"] Lena’s crutches are in the background. (P.S. I  love her dress.)

Another layer: the director of the film (Mateo Blanco, who changes his name to Harry Caine) is also impaired: he becomes blind in the car accident in which he loses his lover (Cruz as Lena). Fourteen years later, he re-edits Chicas y Maletas in order to repair himself and move on. Almodóvar, when speaking about this character, mentioned that he recently had been afflicted with crushing migraines and wondered what it would be like to make a film as a blind man. The underlying message of this film, in which life and cinema are fully intertwined? We must live and love despite all handicaps (emotional, physical and everything in between). The last line: “Films must be finished, even in the dark.” This is a fitting metaphor for the creative process as well.

Lluís Homar as the blind Harry Caine: His lack of vision is momentarily overcome by touch as he caresses the screen.

In the absence of more substantive content, here’s a quick link for the Asian-American filmmakers among us:

http://asiancinevision.org/

Don’t delay! Entries must be postmarked by February 24th, 2010.

In the future, I would love for this blog to become a place to find out about eclectic happenings all around the city, a sort of cinematic bulletin board for the events that won’t necessarily make their way into Time Out New York. So this is also a request of you, my dear readers (all three of you): what do you know about that’s off the beaten path, that’s cool (but not too cool) and most importantly, that no one else has on their radar? Send it my way, s’il vous plaît, and I’ll probably post it here.

Miroslav Tichý’s photos are a mess, and I mean that as a compliment. They look like they have been stepped on, scratched, crumpled up, and left out in the rain. Old and neglected, many of them have partially oxidized, obscuring the ghostly image that lies beneath a layer of corrosion. They are covered with fingerprints, grit, and in one case, the image of stray fly that made its way on to the enlarger. They are small and oddly-shaped, with nary a straight-edge in sight. Seemingly artless, they look like mistakes that another photographer would consign to the dustbin. But for Tichý, the imperfections are where the beauty resides: “The flaws are part of it,” he insists. “That’s the poetry.”

(Click on individual photos to enlarge)

Tichý himself is an odd character: a toothless Czech vagabond, he was briefly jailed by the Communists for being deemed “subversive.” While he did wander around snapping photos of the unsuspecting in his native Kyjov, most of the village saw him for what he was: a harmless eccentric. Using cameras that he constructed from found materials (clothespins, spools, cardboard tubes, string), Tichý shot about two rolls of film per day, mostly of females caught unaware in the midst of their day-to-day leisure activities (sunbathing, reading, riding bikes, sitting on park benches.) While there is undeniably an element of voyeurism to his work, his photos remind of Chris Marker’s atmospheric portraits of women or Gerhard Richter’s blurry photo-paintings — hazy, feverish, sensuous images suffused with an undercurrent of death, decay and dissolution.

Tichý’s work is currently on display at ICP, and it is something you should truly see in person. Incidentally, there is also an exhibit of Surrealist photography from Paris and a small presentation of vintage prints by Eugène Atget (which Walter Benjamin described as resembling “the scene of the crime”). Do you need any more beautiful reasons to go? Allez-y à ICP!

Barry Jenkin’s Medicine for Melancholy is many wonderful things.

1. It is not a mumblecore film.

2. It is an understated homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle [Breathless, 1960]. The film’s cinematography emulates Breathless in its look and feel, and there are several direct (but not derivative) references to iconic scenes:

The most obvious allusion is to Michel making faces at Patricia in the bathroom.

Wyatt Cenac as Micah, mimicking Belmondo’s trio of expressions in his bathroom mirror.

And then there’s the t-shirt that Patricia wears as she hawks newspapers up and down the Champs-Élysées.

Tracey Heggins as Jo, with her short, short hair, and yellow Loden t-shirt  (as in Barbara Loden, director of Wanda).

And finally, a scene in which Michel and Patricia lounge around endlessly in bed, having an intimate and often meaningless conversation — as only lovers can.

It is a something of a cliché in film school to cite Godard as one of your favorite filmmakers. But Barry Jenkins has managed to evoke his love of Godard — and these quintessential, beloved moments from a film that cinephiles hold so dear — and make them his own. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Read an interview with Barry Jenkins from efilmcritc.com.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.” –Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye

Here’s a little gem from this week’s New Yorker, from a tribute by Lillian Ross:

Salinger loved the movies, and he was more fun than anyone to discuss them with. He enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them. (He loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that he had seen “Grand Illusion” ten times.) Brigitte Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and he said that it was uplifting news. “I mean it,” he told me. “She’s a cute, talented lost enfante, and I’m tempted to accomodate her, pour le sport.”

Oh, J.D. Many men were tempted to accommodate her, and then some.

“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.” — A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Neytiri (from Avatar) vs. Anthony Mackie (from The Hurt Locker). Who would you rather spend two hours with?

As an occasional mainstream moviegoer, I find the Oscars increasingly irrelevant in shaping my multiplex digressions. The field is predictable; the ceremony is excruciating. Nevertheless, I do think it’s compelling that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and James Cameron’s Avatar both lead with nine nominations, because the movies come from opposite ends of the filmmaking spectrum. While the gossipmongers are twittering over the fact that the pair used to be married, I think these two films going head to head could be one indicator of the types of films the big studios will consider worthy investments in the future. Let’s compare the two:

AVATAR

• Biggest budget in film history (undisclosed amount; estimated at $200 to $500 million. That’s one hell of a range, J.C.)
• Highest Grossing B.O. ever (but not ticket sales! I find this extremely heartening)
• CGI spectacle with different tiers of engagement: 2D, 3D, IMAX, etc.
• Utopian, apolitical sci-fi storyline set in the future
• Made for merchandising (Teenage boys who read my blog, take note of this and this)

THE HURT LOCKER

• $15 million dollar budget, independently financed and produced
• Respectable B.O. (about $16 million worldwide to date)
• Character-driven, highly calibrated drama
• Politically relevant, contemporary storyline about the Iraq War (a subject that has not fared well in movie theaters)
• Little to no merchandising potential (although I would totally buy an Anthony Mackie action figure)

There’s no question as to which of these films will make more money. But hopefully Hurt Locker’s coup will convince the studios that low-budget films (in the $10 to $20 million dollar range) are worth greenlighting again, and can distinguish themselves in an overcrowded marketplace. Thanks to the sheer number of nominations, The Hurt Locker stands to do well in the aftermarket, and DVD / VOD sales will be strong. Not every film can be Avatar; the studios simply can’t afford to outlay prodigious amounts of capital for each individual production. If anything, the success of The Hurt Locker proves once again that sure-fire blockbusters with commensurately-escalating budgets aren’t the only game in town.