Potiche

My second native French film Potiche is a 2010 French-Belgian comedy of that veteran of feminine unpredictability on celluloid, François Ozon, based on a play of the same name by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy. The word "potiche" literally means a decorative vase whose function is to serve as an item of display of its owner's taste and social status..It is a simple, comical,  irreverent spoof on gender equality in which the respective roles of husband and wife in the late 1970s France were through a series of accidents completely reversed. At the start of the film, we find the 67-year-old but still captivating Catherine Deneuve as the stereotypical perfect middle class housewife Suzanne Pujol (described by her daughter as the "trophy wife" which she announced she has absolutely no intention of becoming)  in a red track suit running through a trail in the wood, talking to and photographing a bird, squirrels, tending flowers and writing her thoughts for poems on a pocket paper pad she carries around. Her maid having taken the day off, Suzanne prepares the breakfast for her husband, Robert Pujol ( Fabrice Luchini), a bespectacled and balding middle aged man in a tweed jacket reading  the right wing Le Figaro and complaining about the workers' perpetual strikes, worried only about production and profits and expressing the desire that they should all go to hell. In the middle of the breakfast, he receives a call from his secretary Nadège (Karin Viard) telling him that the workers are on strike at their family umbrella factories. He hurried off but still walked with straight shoulder, head held high in impatience to deal with the crisis.  When he reaches the factory, he is greeted by Nadège whose bottom as she rose upon a short wooden step to retrieve certain files on the wall shelves he deftly pinches out of force of  habit and is as deftly hit and warded off by her practised defensive hand. At the end of the film, Robert is encircled by two grandchildren, one slumped in his lap and another on his right on the family sofa in the family room, watching some indifferent afternoon TV programme on home cuisine, with his daughter at the other side of the sofa, with an apparently domesticated expression on his face, as if the words "complete resignation" to the fate of being the perfect grandfather, were written in bold capitals !

In the meantime, he has suffered a heart attack, been advised by his doctor to take a vacation to relax. In the interval, his wife takes over, successfully managing to persuade Paul Pujol, her son, studying art in university, to join when earlier he flatly rejected his father's strong recommendation that he did so, assisted by her duaghter Joëlle (Judith Godréche) who had earlier asked for her father's permission to join but was rejected by him and with not a little help from  Maurice Babin ( Gerard Depardieu), her old flame and now Socialist mayor of the small town. At the very first meeting, she made use of her status as a woman and called for comraderie and understanding previously shown by the old Pujol, the now deceased founder and succeeded in getting the workers at all the Pujol factories to back to work and promised to improve the working environment and to adjust the pay and manages to establish a cordial working atmosphere and is accordingly is well liked by every staff member, inlcluding Nadège .  She managed to increase production and even lauched a highly successful new Kadinsky line of colorful and modern looking umbrellas. In this, she had enlisted advice of her old flame Babin,  whom she first met whilst she got a flat tyre on her car near to a lake, when the former was just a passsing lorry truck driver who stopped his lorry to help her change her tyre. He is now may or of the small town and a member of the French Parlement as "deputé" of the region.

There are many humorous scenes in the film. I like in particular one in which we are shown a how, once Babin was told that Laurent might not be Robert's true son, he immediately jumped to the conclusion that Paul must be his own son, and then when he next met Paul, abruptly showered some inordinately "fatherly" admiration and attention upon him . I also like nother equally abrupt change when Suzanne she told him later in his car whilst on a trip down memory lane that the son Maurice thought was his might not be his after all but might be that of the lawyer for whom she worked when she was young and when she told him when Maurice discovered that all through the years, she had kept a locket in which there was a photo of him on one side and her own on the other and begged her to continue their broken off romantic liaison and she refused on account of her changed circumstances. The moment he heard her refusal, he instantly ordered her off his car and drove away without turning the bat of an eye although it was some dozens of kilometers away from Suzanne's home. There is Charlie Chaplinesque mime-like feel to Ozon's slapstick which is so endearing and so credible when done with the veterain actor's perfect timing . It is a sheer delight to watch such perfect but quietly effective humor. At the end of the film, we see Suzanne winning the local election as the  new "deputée" of the region against Babin! A complete turning of the tables!

The photography is subtle and natural, the humor subdued, the acting perfect. There are some old and new songs in the film which adds quite a bit charm to it including "Emmène-moi danser ce soir", Il était une fois with "Viens faire un tour sous la pluie" and Jean Ferrat's "C'est beau la vie". I'd give it a 2A!

A family photo of the Pujol family

 

Kaboom

I had a late night last night at the Cultural Centre watching a movie called by the comic-book like title "Kaboom". Watching the first half of the film feels literally like reading a comic book on a teenager's fantasy on what college sex might be like: you got almost continuous on-screen sex in all kinds of style: homosexual, lesbian and heterosexual or bisexual. There is even a Nordic who practises how to bend his body so that he can suck his own dick! But as we move into the the second half of the movie, we discover that there is a secret link to all the guys and gals met by the first year college student Smith (Thomas Dekker) and hero of the movie, behind what we originally thought are apparently unconnected or isolated episodes of his sexual adventures, something rather more sinister.

The movie starts with an undeclared gay Smith having certain repetitive dreams about going through a tunnel at the end of which is a door marked 19 in which he meets various people, including two girls and a guy whom he later actually meet and also some people wearing animal masks. As the movie develops, we see Smith meeting his roommate, Thor,( Chris Zyllka) an athletic type having a great body and an apparently insatiable drive for sex with both genders and even for the pinnacle of self-help: practising to suck his own dick by supporting his own back with both hands with his elbows resting on the mattress and his head bending over forward and downward towards that instrument of sexual pleasure. We see him getting mixed up with with all kinds of partners and taking an interest even in Smith.

Then Smith begins to get acquainted with Lorelei (Roxanne Mesquida), a lesbian partner of his best friend from Grade 9, Stella (Haley Bennett) now majoring in art, someone who appeared to have some kind of supernormal powers which Stella would somehow feel from time to time and hears about and sometimes sees the open display of their physical attraction and affection for one another. Whilst trying to clean up the puke on his shoes thrown up by Lorelei in a ladies toilet during a college party, he got to know and immediately thereafter have sex with an easy going blonde called London (Juno Temple) and begins to get mysterious email messages from strangers wanting to meet him and soon starts to have great sex with a guy on a nearby nude beach in California. In the meantime, he continues to have weird nightmares and hallucinations about various people he would meet, including a weird character predicting doomsday and people wearing animal masks pursuing him and also a figure dressed a bit like a washed down version of Roman emperor and a redhead who is murdered (Nicole LaLiberte) . 

As the movie goes forward, we learn that there is cult which has chosen him as the successor of a secret cult called the "New Order". The cult involves his father, the Roman emperor of his dream, who, according to his mother, had died a long time ago in a traffic accident, Lolorei, Thor and black man with whom he had sex at the nude beach. In fact his father is still living as the head of the cult and London is his half sister by one of his father's lovers and the reason why London tracks him down is that she wants to know the truth about her own father and she knows that Smith is the "chosen one" to succeed to his father's empire. The film ends literally in a kind of computerised virtual comic world's "Kaboom".

Despite all the inherent incredibility of the story, the film moves along at a racy pace, is full of surprises, gags, in jokes, moments of spooky tension, mock college jargons, which I am sure fresh college kids may find familiar and appealing. The visuals are good. The screen is contantly filled with rich colors and images. The plot of the film, written and directed by the veteran film maker exploring sexual themes, Gregg Araki, must have been carefully thought out. What Smith dreamt about at the start and a little into film makes it prima facie likely that he might be hallucinating about the various bizarre events that he later encountered at the college campus but when his high school best friend Stella also started to have strange experiences, it began to get rather more spooky. The film is good Hollywood entertainment. In Smith's initial dream, once the door was opened, all we find is a red box! That in a sense is exactly what the film is, a box of colorful images. I would give it a 2B. 

Special Treatment (Sans Queue ni Tête )

My first French film at the HKIFF this year is Special Treatment Sans Queue ni Tête ( literally With neither tail nor head) . Directed and written by Jeane LaBrune and starring Isabelle Huppert as Alice Bergerac, a high class prostitute and Bouli Lanner as Xavier Demestre, a psychoanalyst, the director seems to want to explore certain similarities between this oldest and new profession of the 20th century. 

Both a prostitute and a psychoanalyst deal with people's needs, desires and frustrations, sexual in one case and emotional in the other. In the film, for one reason and another both are unhappy doing what they are doing. Alice has to pretend to be whatever her clients wants her to be, a doll, a domestic servant, a school girl, a lesbian, a sexual task master, a mother or a pure whore. Xavier on the other hand, who is despised by his wife, has to listen to all kinds of his clients' complaints and pains and be their emotional trash can or spitoon. Whilst one hires her body out for use by her clients, the other hires out his ears, his professional sympathy and his time for the use of his clients. Sometimes, his client through talking about their own problems, will arrive at certain insight but often will not improve. Both of them love art and both would go to art auctions from time to time. Both have got their rules and charging rates. For Alice, there are different rates for straight sex, mere time without actual sex, extra services like dressing up, sex involving different parts of her and her client's bodies.

The film starts with various scenes in which we see how each serves their clients and how, feeling frustrated and lonely because of his failing marriage, Xavier wants to seek relief through sex with a whore but feels too inhibited to do so. However, he got Alice interested,  after a traumatic experience from a particularly demeaning sadistic client, in finding a solution for her own problem of not wanting to be a professional hooker any more. She hunts for different psychoanalysts, tries them out for a fitting and eventually found a psychiatrist who found out how strong psychologically she really was and  that what she needed was not to find a psychological help to ease her transition from ceasing to be a hooker but a job. He gave her a name card. It is the name of an art dealer, because she studied art at university.

The film is full of subtle ironies. I like the scene in which Alice enumerates the types of services she renders with truly brief and to the point "professional" description. complete with differential charging rates, mode of payment and even default payment terms to the hapless and hypocritical and inhibited Xavier about his intended 10 "sessions" with her, during  their first free exploratory appointment at a hotel lobby and also the dramatic irony when Alice was being taken care of by a mentally retarded patient when she visits the busy psychiatrist at the mental institution where he works. I also like another scene in which one of Xavier's own clients remarks how sad he looks and decides to make a fool of him by pretending to have forgotten to bring money and expecting Xavier to say that it does not matter and after Xavier has said what he expected him to say, albeit with fuming with a barely suppressed rage, then telling Xavier that that was his last session with the psychoanalyst and that he would never return again!

The dialogues are superbly written, full of wit and humor. As always Isabelle Huppert excels as the intelligent high class professional prostitute and portrays well the strictly professional and the almost mechanical alacrity in the way she changes her wig, her dress, her talk to suit the different kinds of roles her client wants her to play in the make-belief world of their sexual fantasy.  It is a truly amazing and devastating dig at the psychoanalytic profession! I would give it a 2A.

La Mosquitera (The Mosquito Net)

The Mosquito Net (2010)  is a Spanish style tragi-comedy of screen writer/director Agusti Vila starring Emma Suarez as Alicia, Eduard Fernandez as Miguel, Martina Garcia as Ana, Marcos Franz as Luis, Alex Bartlori as Sergi. 

As the film opens, we see a middle aged husband Miguel just home from work. Being a person who wants everything neat and tidy, finding another unknown dog in the house proves too much for him. He starts to argue with his wife Alicia, an aspiring writer and illustrator of children's book. But they have to argue in whispers because his wife wants him to be gentle at all times! But they already had 6 dogs and cats. Alicia wants another one.  Miguel says the maximum is 5. Eventually they settle at 6. The dogs and cats were picked up by their teenage son Luis from the streets.  To be "empathic" to their pets, Alicia and her son Luis even eat like them, lapping up their food from their plate with their tongue! 

As the story develops, Miguel and Alicia no longer speak or sleep with each other. This happens after a quarrel in which Luis brings home an injured pigeon hoping to cure it. But they discover to their surprise that it has died on the floor. One of their dog then comes near to smell it. Miguel hits the dog gently to drive it away so that it will stop sniffing it. Alicia accuses Miguel of cruelty when obviously that is not the case at all. That is the last straw. 

Then they have a new new maid Ana, an immigrant worker. Miguel falls for her, frequently offering her money which she refuses but she eventually accepts after his repeated insistence. After she takes a wad of money, she undresses herself but Miguel does not want her to behave as a whore. He pulls back her dress and then undresses her again by himself! It was obvious he wants to be in control. Even if he wants sex, he wants to maintain the image of a gentleman!

In the meantime, Alicia herself falls for Sergi, one of Luis's best friends, which she met on an occasion Luis was otherwise engaged and the relationship starts by her offering him a lift home on the eve of Luis's birthday. She has bought a ring for Luis which also happens to fit Sergi's finger. She offers it there and then to Sergi and says she will buy another one for Luis. But he says that the ring has Luis's name engraved on it. So she says in that case, she will buy another one with Sergi's name engraved. Sergi comes to Luis birthday party. They got drunk and she seduces him in her drunkenness but afterwards finds she cannot stop seeing him. But when he begins to treat her as a whore, she finds that it is no longer so acceptable. 

The film ends when one of Alicia's bizarre stories gets published, after the dysfunctional couples' respective romantic flings find after all that happened, that they should no longer be separated by their differences, their rigiditeis and be more tolerant of each other's weaknesses than before. 

The main lines of the plot is contrasted with a sub-line, relating to Alicia's sister, a single mother who fools herself that when she was "teaching" her 4 year old daughter the consequences of the latter's desires, she was doing it for her daughter's own good. We are shown scenes in which she forces her to eat three chocolate icecreams because her daughter asks for a third "big" one after she tells her not to have any more, burns her because she wanted to play with fire and then forces her to step on to three eggs which she places on the floor so that she can feel how messy a broken egg is,. All the while she was thus punishing her daughter who has not yet reached the age of reason, she keeps on denying that she was in fact acting under the influence of her own anger and rage for her daughter's definace of her will. 

In this film is Vili trying to say how we always manage to hurt those who are closest to us and those whom we are supposed to love because of the rigidity with which we hold on to our own  only partially justified values by masquerading them as moral correctness? Is he trying to tell us that it is not just what we are trying to do which matters but how we do what we think is right which is more important: whether we should do what we think is right with love, with sensitivity of how the others feel?  At times, the behavior of the characters in the film verges on the absurd.

The title of the film in fact refers to a story created by Alica about a girl who is so afraid of stepping on ants when she walks and so afraid of hurting the mosquitos that she will not use a mosquito net when she sleeps! 

The acting is excellent, the photography competent. There is a nice blend of pathos and irony in the way Vila shows how the acts of the characters suggest the contrary of what they think or say they are doing.  There are also some scenes about the parents of Miguel who are both of advanced years and look as if they are suffering from Alzhemer's disease and who keep on forgetting to turn off the gas. Is that not what Vali is quietly suggesting: that in the end we shall all become human vegetables. If so, what then is the point of arguing and insisting upon what must be strictly adhered to in our values?

Oki's Movie

Having seen so many films last week one after another, sometimes two or three movies a day,  I will probably have to checked through the ticket stubs to know exactly what number it is down my list of movies seen some of which I have not yet written about is Korean director Hong Sang-soo's Oki's Movie. Hong has won the Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 for his film Ha Ha Ha.  

In a way, this messing up of the boundaries between reality and real life may be exactly what I think Hong is trying to portray through this four part movie, told with different narrative perspectives: omnscient narrator and then the perspective of one of the central figures of the the love triangle Oki. (played by Jung Yumi)  

In the first episode "Day of Incantation", we are shown the male protagonist Jingu ( played by Lee Sung-Kun) down a street waiting for someone. Another woman then appears. She looks at a gate where Jingu was looking at and mentions a name. He complains why she should suddenly recall the name of one of her high school male friends. She says she does not know and that it just occurs to her. Then the two begin to look for the car which they parked in the vicinity in the course of which we hear her complaining that he never has time for her any more, being always occupied with his film production and is smoking and drinking too much. He asks for forgiveness and says that he is busy with course work and the upcoming film competition. But she is not appeased.

We are next shown Jingu talking to a fellow student actor as the director of his own film, saying how she doesn't say the lines of the dialogue with any conviction. She tries again but he is not satisfied. He scolds her. The lady says she cannot do it because she hasn't got it in her to fulfil his strict requirements. We see LJingu  very frustrated. He then walks down a university path by a lake, meets another lecturer, who tells him that he is disgusted that there will be a new professor Song (played by Moon Sung-keun) who pays off someone to get that tenured position and that money is killing film as an art form. He doesn't know that. He continues walking to cool his head, falls asleep. When he opens his eyes, he sees a lady photographer. He tells her she shouldn't take his photo without his consent. They got talking. She says she is a housewife and has just bought a camera which she is trying out. He ends up teaching her how to do so. 

The film then cuts into Lee and a group of teachers and students drinking in a restaurant in which we see Jingu  telling Song that there is a rumor and that it is important that Song clears his name but Song can't be bothered. Then later, we see Song discussing Jingu's project with him and encourages him to go ahead. We next see girls talking about how Song was impressed with the preliminary screening of Jingu's proto-copy and everyone tipping that Jingu would win the competition and how all the girls in the campus seems to have a crush upon him.

In the second episode "King of Kisses" we see Jingu looking at a girl, is impressed by her. They got talking. He follows her around and says how beautiful she is and forces a kiss upon her by a garden bench which she initially resists but then begins enjoying it saying how good a kisser he is.

In the third episode "After the Snowstorm" , we find Jingu waiting for Oki outside her room all night in the cold. The following morning, Oki discovers him, feels sorry for him and changes her mind about him. Jingu appears as obsessed with Oki as with his film making. Then on another cold morning, Jingu and Oki were the only students who turn up for Song's class, so they decided not to have any formal lecture and merely chit chat. Oki asks the professor many questions about life, love, meaning etc to which the professor gives some non-committal answer, saying that each one should find his own meaning.

After the formal screening of Jingu's film, there is a "meet the director" session. One female student asks a lot of personal question totally unrelated to the film about how Jingu had destroyed the life of her best friend who was about to be engaged because that girl fell in love with Jingu. Jingu replied that he did not recall anything about that and refuses to answer any further question on that issue. Not knowing that Oki also like the professor, he continues to go out with Oki. When the results are out, Jingu is not the winner. We find Song talking to Oki in a restaurant, drinking. He says that Oki should not go out with Jingu any more because otherwise he feels that he could not judge Lee's work with the kind of fairness that he deserves. 

Then in the final part, which Song uses as the title of the film, Oki's own story begins. She compares, using her own voice as the narrator, her two lovers both walking down the same garden path up Mount Acha in a park,separated by two years, reaching the same tree, going to the same pavilion and the same toilet in a documentary and student essay type of comparison of how their conduct, their talk, their attitude and her own feeling towards the two men both constantly loops back on each other in her memory and her consciousness.

The film ends by Professor Song walking to the tree on lst January of the new year to wait for Oki but finding that Oki is now with Jingu and walking away. He has previously told Oki that should they for any reason no longer be seeing each other or be separate, he would go there every lst day of January to wait for her to refresh the memory of the love they once had. He announces to the film school faculty member to their surprise of the rumor mongering lecturer that he will be leaving the university to follow another film project at the start of the next academic year.  

It is a semi-documentary, semi-feature film about the confusing world of filming making, film teaching, human relationship, jealousy, academic politics, envy, love, rumor, truth and the ambiguities and complexity of human lives, with moments of pathos, humor and sadness done in the inimitable and extremely idiosyncratic cubist style of of Hong. There are many levels of meaning: the so-called reality itself, the portrayal of that reality in film and the "fictive reality"of that "fictive reality" through the story being told by Oki. Is it a film about Oki's (who herself is but a fictitious character in Song's movie") "movie" about her two lovers? Is it a film about the complexities of relationship between Oki, Jingu and Song? Is Jingu and/or Song alter ego(s) for Hong?  What is the meaning of Oki's own film making? Is she using the production of a film as an ooccasion or by means of which she seeks to understand herself? Is the Oki's movie her personal exploration and a reflection of her own relationship with the opposite sex and her own life? Each episode is announced by Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, to make the film important or is its use ironic?