The Flowers of St. Francis

As ascetic in style as in subject, The Flowers of St. Francis depicts monkish life with radical simplicity. This pastoral hymn, at once comical and reverent, pays tribute to the uncommon devotion of these divine dimwits, who caper about their ramshackle monastery with all the giddiness of children (small surprise the original Italian title translates as Francis, God’s Jester). Indeed, the film is so confoundingly free of guile viewers may suspect director Roberto Rossellini of mocking the men’s innocence. Ginepro, the holiest fool of them all, maims a pig and mistakes the tortured squeals of “Brother Pig” for heavenly praise; a later scene where the village poor fight over scraps of charity from the monks could easily have been taken from Bunuel. Only a religious iconoclast like Rossellini, so ill at ease with institutional authority, could craft a work of such spiritual impiety. (Rather tellingly, the fiercest tyrant in the film rules with an iron fist so heavy he can’t even lift it, while Francis grows in power the more he denies his own strength.) The film carries a whiff of the didactic about it, but these parables of virtue and faith are always firmly planted in the stuff of life: cooking food, gathering flowers, building a home. When Francis lays weeping in a dusky meadow after an encounter with a leper, the camera tilts skyward towards the unblemished heavens, but such transcendent gestures are hardly characteristic of the film. Rossellini, much like the monks, is happier down in the mud.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part Four

Walker 

The audacity of Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker lies in its simplicity. Lee Kang-Sheng, Tsai’s favourite actor, dons bright red monk robes and walks down the bustling streets of Hong Kong—but slowly, very slowly. Shots are held for minutes at a time, mirroring the glacial pace of our faux-monk friend, whose every step seems to occur in super slo-mo. At times, this short film resembles a kind of artful “Where’s Waldo?” as Tsai buries the monk deep inside the frame, forcing viewers to scan for that telltale splash of red. Other times he’s front and centre, standing in the middle of a busy street as onlookers gawk and snap photos (the crowd parts around the man, as if repelled by a force field). Either way, every shot is a living tableau, rich in detail and unexpected beauty in a cinematic experience of unparalleled purity.

No 

Style and substance do battle for the heart of modern politics in Pablo Larrain’s No, and the results are about as shocking as an Iranian election. But more than a mordant political satire, Larrain’s retelling of the referendum that brought down Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship is also a brisk, funny piece of high-powered filmmaking. Fortunately, even as he delivers his most mainstream work to date, the director remains his stubbornly eccentric self. The film’s washed-out video aesthetic is just as much a rejoinder to commercial slickness as it is a riff on the dated look of its 1980s setting. The decision to focus on the boldly irreverent advertising campaign against Pinochet yields much humour, while Gael Garcia Bernal’s conflicted adman provides the pathos. His haunted look at the end speaks to the powerful anxieties just beneath the surface of this otherwise jubilant tale. Once he sold freedom—now he sells soap operas.

Mother

First-time director Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul (or Billy, if you prefer) looks to his own life for inspiration and settles squarely on his mother. No wonder—the woman seems on the verge of self-destructing, with a broken leg and weak kidneys hobbling her body while depression and kleptomania cripple her mind. Billy blends documentary footage of his family with fictional tangents, but the technique is mostly one of expediency (he wasn’t there to film his mother stealing from a grocery store, so he re-creates it with actors instead). Sadly, the jumble of reality and fiction leaves each scene unmoored. A painful sequence where the director captures his mother sobbing helplessly as someone off-camera browbeats the anguished woman over her failings is so isolated from the rest of the film that the powerful emotions stirred up are only muffled. The last thing we see is Billy’s message, “This is what I can do”—an admission of the film’s loving sincerity, as much as its own shortcomings.

Mekong Hotel 

Most films from Apichatpong Weerasethakul feel like overgrown trees deep in the jungle, entangled in the surrounding world and teeming with life. Mekong Hotel, on the other hand, is more like a meagre sapling on a well-groomed lawn. That may be partly due to the film’s unusual origins: based on an old script, it forms the kernel of a larger project currently underway. Everything that you would expect of Apichatpong is here, from the familiar faces in the cast to the flattened mysticism of the story. Scenes of entrail-eating ghosts and thwarted love affairs mix with offhand moments from the film’s own creation, such as the soundtrack being recorded and the director advising his star to wear the tight pants. The director’s fascination with the hazy border between truth and fiction remains, but only in its most rudimentary form. At most, the film holds a passing interest as a sort of sketchbook, offering viewers little more than the unfinished doodles of a keen mind.

In Another Country 

A typical Hong Sang-Soo interrogation of feckless masculinity gets a shot in the arm from a game Isabelle Huppert, providing a welcome dash of culture-clash comedy to In Another Country. That may sound unlikely at first—cultural differences are more often sources of lazy humour—but Hong’s eternal preoccupations ensure the film strays from the ordinary rather quickly. Huppert plays three different French women in South Korea alternately fending off or inviting the advances of the locals in an unending quest for some kind of happiness. The casual tone and goofy bonhomie belies Hong’s meticulous construction, which lays bare the unseen patterns that shape his character’s lives, for good and ill. With its intricate layers of interlaced fictions and dreams, all blurred together with constant repetition, the film could easily be mistaken for a surrealist comedy of manners akin to Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Belle de Jour

Let’s begin with the box. Not because it’s important—though it is, sort of, kind of, in the proper light and when the mood strikes—but because it remains one of the most beguiling moments in one of Luis Bunuel’s most beguiling films, Belle de Jour. It appears only briefly, when bourgeois-housewife-turned-prostitute Severine (Catherine Deneuve) is shown a buzzing, glowing box by one of her clients. We see only the woman’s reaction, not the contents. Rather than horrified or confused, she responds with simple wonder, approaching it quietly, wide-eyed and serious, like a child encountering a strange, new toy.

Viewers drawn to literal explanations are easily flustered by the presence of such an inscrutable detail, which can best be described as a surrealist MacGuffin. It structures the scene and drives the plot forward by providing something to entice Severine on her sexual journey, but beyond that the meaning is irrelevant. The little mystery of the box allows the larger mysteries of the film—those of Severine’s curious, conflicting desires—to exist. One almost begins to believe that the film could be explained away if only that one little mystery could be explained: everything unknown and unknowable, safely locked away in a little box held by a man who, to our relief, speaks a language none of us understand. 

If only it were that simple. Belle de Jour remains one of Bunuel’s most engaging yet confounding works, effortlessly pleasurable and still somehow unsettling (Bunuel attributed the film’s enormous success not to his own talents, but rather “his marvelous whores”). At times, the film evinces nothing more than a fly-stained pulp erotic novel, scraped off the back shelf of some used bookstore. The very premise—sexually repressed housewife becomes a prostitute during the day while her husband is at work—has very likely been replicated a dozen times over in a less tasteful manner than what we see here. Even the first few clients met by Severine (a candy maker and, no kidding, a gynecologist) sound suspiciously like the beginning of a pornographic joke.

Ever the blasphemer and ever the Catholic, Bunuel’s version of titillation is modestly restrained, relying heavily on fetishistic detail (Deneuve’s calves should get second billing). Severine’s numerous visions of debasement are filmed from a cool distance, which only heightens the erotic charge. Contra to all the good clean kinky fun, the film also flirts with adding a psychological gloss to Severine’s masochistic tendencies by offering two brief glimpses of her childhood: a scene where an older man fondles her, and another where she denies herself the sacrament in church. Already there is a pattern of desire and shame at work here, self-denial and self-flagellation rooted deep in her being. But like most psychological origin stories, it’s far too simplistic to be believed, and the film rushes past it, eyes down, as if almost embarrassed. 

However, everything is elevated—you might even say levitated—by the inimitable Bunuel touch, which erases all boundaries between fantasy and reality. So many of his other films freely break into dreams and surreal interludes with little warning, but few spend so much time focused on the dreams of one individual. Bunuel’s surrealism comes and goes like weather—forever changing, always present. Typically rooted in the director’s own imagination, here it is personalized as an emanation of Severine’s own stormy psyche. We likely spend close to a third of the film in her dream life, and if we’re not in her head we’re in her bed at the brothel, where she spends her afternoons luxuriating in the desires of others or merely lounging in the arms of her gangster lover, Marcel—he of the golden scowl, perpetual slouch and scar from the knife in his back.

At times, Severine bears an uncanny resemblance to Conchita, the literally two-faced (well, two-bodied, really) heroine of Bunuel’s final work, That Obscure Object of Desire. In that film, Conchita is played by two different actresses in order to showcase her capricious moods, alternating between warm tenderness and fiery passion. Severine is similarly divided, living her passions out by day before going home to a fond, but frigid marriage at night. Yet this division should not be taken for mere inconstancy. Much like the later film, it is a sign of feminine individuality, unbowed before the demands of the men who wish to control her. The two halves of Severine define the woman, her repression meaningless without her liberation and vice versa.

This tension comes to a head in a final scene that brings her daytime adventures into conflict with her nocturnal domesticity. Her husband, wheelchair bound and practically a vegetable, cries after being told of his wife’s affairs. But then bells ring from the street—the sound of the carriage that carries Severine through her fantasy world—and her husband springs to his feet. We’re back in the dream world of Severine, but this time it is not her humiliation she envisions, but rather a modest matrimonial clinch (or is that her final humiliation?). They watch the carriage ride away from the window.

There are a number of ways of looking at this. One is to say that her fantasies and reality have a last merged, making her whole and satisfied for the first time. But another possibility exists. She only imagines her unrealistic desires—abject humiliation, violent and painful sex—because what is the point of a realistic fantasy? You dream of what you want, not what you already possess. This final fantasy may be her most perverse, unachievable longing—a simple, loving marriage. When all the barriers have been broken, normality becomes the one taboo remains out of her grasp.

Are the filmmakers punishing Severine for her desire or setting her free? Doubtless, Bunuel has little interest in answering the question, much as he cares not to explain away the contents of the box. Later in life, he remarked upon how often people came to him asking about that buzzing mystery. Undoubtedly, it irritated the old surrealist, all these ridiculous prosaic types who saw the film as some riddle to be solved. Does the picture in a jigsaw puzzle become incomprehensible when you remove one piece? (It’s a bigger question than you think: why do people see what they lack instead of what they have?) When people asked Bunuel what was in the box, he would simply wave them away with a simple answer, “Whatever you want to be there.” No surprise that the answer leaves so many unsatisfied. How many of us truly know what we desire?

The Devil is a Woman

“To reality one should prefer the illusion of reality.” So said Josef von Sternberg, whose films bear the proof of this philosophy in their carefully sculpted worlds, typically crafted entirely in studio settings where Sternberg was free to indulge the exacting whims of his tyrannical imagination. The Devil is a Woman, his final collaboration with Marlene Dietrich, is no different. Set in turn-of-the-century Spain during carnival, the film is fittingly raucous, but with melancholy and violence behind its revelries. Free-spirited mobs dancing through air thick with balloons and streamers, giving way to empty streets where the streamers now reveal themselves as cobwebs, swamping our protagonist Antonio in desire and memory. All the settings, the lights, the costumes, are designed to drive us straight to the face of Dietrich, her mature eyes and childish mouth, those meticulously drawn features. At times, she seems the only real thing in this fantastic world. In Luis Bunuel’s no-less-masterful That Obscure Object of Desire (based on the same Pierre Louys novel), Dietrich’s character Concha is played by two actresses, emphasizing the fundamental capriciousness of the woman, and her unobtainable and indefinite essence. But here, all that is needed is Dietrich. Her smile shakes the world.

Considering the title, the film might at first appear like some musty old-world misogyny, but the sympathy of the story is clearly with Dietrich and not the pompous, frail male egos that frame her (“You’ve always mistaken your vanity for love,” she tells one, demolishing her entire suite of suitors/tormentors in a single blow). She draws them near and pushes them away, but it’s clear she’s just a woman looking to survive while adding interest to her assets. Her last line—“I used to work in a cigarette factory”—says it all. “I began with nothing, but now look at me.” And while she needs the men to climb out of her humble beginnings, it’s also clear that giving herself entirely to one would destroy everything she has worked for. None of the men are satisfied with this state—preferring, perhaps, a reality to the illusion she offers—and so she dispatches each in turn. But how startling to see the final shot set not in one of Sternberg’s studio sets, but the real world, where a carriage drives Concha not deeper into the tyrant’s dreams but out of them. A final bittersweet parting between director and star—she is banished from the dreamland, but at last free, free to go where you see not through a veil of rain and streamers, leaves and lace, but clearly, in harsh, unyielding light.