Film Freak Central

Telluride '14: Two Days, One Night

Deux jours, une nuit
****/****
starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne, Simon Caudry
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the middle of the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), trying to convince her sixteen co-workers to vote to allow her to keep her job at the expense of a bonus of one-thousand euros, accuses her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) of turning off the radio because the song is too sad and he fears she's too fragile for it. She turns it back on. It's Petula Clark's French-language cover of Jackie DeShannon's "Needles and Pins," "La Nuit N'en Finit Plus." Shot in the Dardennes style, close and over the shoulder, Sandra looks at Manu slyly for a second, pumps up the volume, and laughs. Cotillard is disarming, as always, and she's so natural in this moment--in all of the film, but in this moment in particular. It's stunning. Her Sandra is absolutely compelling throughout. Her victories are ecstatic; her defeats are deflating. About an hour in, I realized that Two Days, One Night is a fable--a literal one, with a heroine undergoing a series of trials, forced to say the same things like a Belgian Bartleby to a sequence of different people in different situations. Even her exit line at the end of every encounter ("Thank you, goodbye") is identical each time. It's through this repetition that the film finds a rhythm, sure, but also room for Sandra to learn and for Two Days, One Night to paint as complete and sympathetic a picture of depression as there's ever been.

Rosetta (1999) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux
written and directed by Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer If there were any doubt that the Dardennes discovered what would be their lasting aesthetic with La promesse, it was dispelled in the opening moments of Rosetta. The earlier film spent a lot of time following characters around, hovering behind them as they made their way through their world. As Rosetta begins, we're again in close to a character, but this time we have a velocity: The girl, Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), is storming from room to room in some kind of industrial facility, and the Dardennes' camera is following her at speed. This isn't a virtuoso tracking shot out of Scorsese or P.T. Anderson, though; Rosetta isn't accommodating the camera. When she exits a room, she slams the door behind her and the camera is caught up short, forcing an edit. When she erupts onto a factory floor, she ducks underneath the machinery, making her own passageways where the camera cannot go, and again forcing a cut. We are not welcome to follow.

La promesse (1996) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo, Rasmane Ouedraogo
written and directed by Luc Dardenne & Jean-Pierre Dardenne

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Since the mid-1990s, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been the standard-bearers for French-language Belgian cinema. Born in Engis and raised in nearby Seraing (both located in the industrial Belgian province of Liège), the Dardennes started making documentaries in the 1970s, followed by a pair of narrative films they immediately disavowed. 1996's La promesse was a completely fresh start. The Dardennes' non-fiction work demonstrated a social consciousness that remained in effect once they found their narrative voice, and it's amazing how fully realized this effort is, exhibiting many of the formal strategies and much of the narrative sensibility that would serve them well over the next decade and a half.

TIFF '08: Lorna's Silence

Le silence de Lorna
***½/****
starring Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban Ukaj
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Bill Chambers That figures: I'm finally ready to get on board the Dardenne Brothers bandwagon and everyone's bailing. What I like--maybe love--about their latest, Lorna's Silence (Le Silence de Lorna), is that it zigs when you expect it to zag, which may peg me as superficial (some reviews of the film have admonished it for having a plot) but which nevertheless strikes me as a refreshing change of pace from the neorealist wallowing of their earlier work. (To my mind, the Dardennes crossed the threshold of self-parody with the psychotically-overrated L'Enfant and needed to acknowledge that they'd become predictable.) The picture opens on Lorna (Arta Dobroshi, bearing a striking if irrelevant resemblance to the Ellen Page of Hard Candy, right down to the costume), an Albanian immigrant residing in Belgium's economically depressed Liège (a.k.a. Dardennes Central) who's evidently reached the end of her tether with junkie husband Claudy (L'Enfant's Jérémie Renier, in a lovely performance). (We don't have to live with him, of course, but he generates a tremendous amount of pity when she slams the door in his face after he sweetly asks her to play cards.) Slowly, as though the narrative itself were irising out, Claudy is revealed to be the pawn in a green-card scheme, the necessary evil before Lorna can enter into an equally sham marriage with a Russian mobster. But if The Apartment taught us anything, nothing brings ersatz couples together like convalescence: During Claudy's latest detox, he and Lorna start acting more like a real husband and wife. And then comes the most jarring bifurcation this side of Full Metal Jacket; Lorna's Silence is two different movies, really, and it's the picture's second, less conventionally satisfying half which has courted the most hostility from critics, despite the fact that it arguably justifies more than any of their previous films all the ink spilled over the years comparing the Dardennes to Robert Bresson. (Maybe it's a challenge to those who insist on making the link.) Tempting to trot out that hoary description "fairytale for grownups," but let's just say that Lorna's Silence is on top of everything else a clever and affecting pro-choice fable. Minor Dardennes is my kind of Dardennes, I guess. PROGRAMME: Masters

L'Enfant (2005) + The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)|L'Enfant (2005) - DVD

The Child
**½/****
starring Jérémie Renier, Déborah François, Jérémie Segard, Fabrizio Rongione
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
**/****
directed by Jeff Feuerzeig

by Walter Chaw I believe the title is meant to indicate the arrested protagonist more than it is the baby he tries to sell on the black market, thus The Child (L'Enfant)--another of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's mild, allegorical subversions of Robert Bresson and incrementally more violent subversions of the French New Wave--takes on Pickpocket via Breathless. In so doing, it conjures up this odd chimera of a stylistically backward-looking, formalist deconstruction, the first film of the Brothers (after La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son) to feel this much like a knowing satire, to come so perilously close to being smug and post-modern that its style begins to become confused with its message. It could be a product of overfamiliarity with a fine and distinct sensibility (the last thing this kind of innovation can afford is to be outrun and second-guessed), or it could be that the Brothers are getting either bored of their shtick or fond of their reputation.

Man on the Train (2002); Chaos (2001); And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen... (2002); The Son (2002)

L'Homme du train
***/****
starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-François Stévenin, Charlie Nelson
screenplay by Claude Klotz
directed by Patrice Leconte

CHAOS
*/****
starring Catherine Frot, Vincent Lindon, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud
written and directed by Coline Serreau

AND NOW... LADIES AND GENTLEMEN...
***½/****
starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Kaas, Thierry Lhermitte, Alessandra Martines
screenplay by Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux & Pierre Uytterhoeven
directed by Claude Lelouch

Le fils
****/****
starring Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw After a brief period where French cinema seemed exclusively interested in the ugliness and violence festering in its anti-Semitic margins, what with pictures as variegated as Baise-moi, Trouble Every Day, My Wife is an Actress, and indeed, Gasper Noé's sensationalistic Irréversible (which demonstrates a continuing fascination with a tumultuous French cinema in extremis), the old guard begins to reassert itself with its own tales of the underbelly of life displacing the façade of the comfortable upper class. Patrice Leconte's new film Man on the Train (L'Homme du train) is reserved and slight while Chaos by Coline Serreau (who was born the same year as Leconte, as it happens) tries to soften the cruelty of much of modern French cinema by overlaying it with a patina of feminist uplift and misplaced social satire. Films like Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke and Godard's In Praise of Love attempt to draw a line between the nouvelle and the digital age (and Chaos is shot in ugly DV), and pictures like Rivette's wonderful Va Savoir and now Claude Lelouch's And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen... act as surveys and auto-critique of the medium itself. With these three pictures, the meta-critical instinct--something of a hallmark of French culture in general and cinema in particular--finds a new voice in, ironically, its older generation of directors. Somewhat apart from all of that is the Dardenne Brothers' The Son (Le Fils), which is on its own stylistically but looks thematically for common ground in its own tale of obsession and reconciliation.