Rent or Buy (From The Oxford Times)

Rent or Buy

8:06am Thursday 27th August 2009

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Despite having several films released in this country, Maurice Pialat is one of the least appreciated French masters of the last 40 years. Trained as an artist, he spent the nouvelle vague era making documentary shorts and so shocked audiences with his social-realist debut about abandoned children, L'Enfance nue (1968), that four years passed before he was able to raise the finance for a second feature. In a sop to commercial convention, Pialat cast stars Jeanne Yanne and Marlène Jobert in Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972), which he adapted from his own autobiographical novel. But few other concessions were made in this emotionally rigorous study of a couple bent on not growing old together.

Although the focus is only on the dying embers of their affair, Yanne and Jobert have been sneaking trysts in cars and hotels for six years because, even though his marriage is palpably over, the fortysomething film-maker won't leave wife Macha Méril. The lovers have furtively stolen weekends together and even contrived to turn business trips into romantic holidays. But it's clear from the resentment and recrimination of their on/off break-up that this has been a relationship that neither has enjoyed, yet neither has had the courage to live without. With its endless round of manipulations, betrayals, apologies and excuses, this is a distressingly raw insight into an interdependency that's increasingly based on a fear of absence rather than genuine acceptance and affection. The performances are excruciatingly courageous, with Yanne's shifts from lust to frustration to abuse and violence being as chilling as Jobert's enslavement by her masochistic insecurity. But Pialat obviously pushed his leads hard, as Yanne refused to accept in person his Best Actor prize at Cannes.

Pialat continued to explore our flawed ability to care for someone while hurting them in the second part of his loosely confessional trilogy, La Gueule ouverte (1974), which uncompromisingly contrasts youth and age, family and individuality, and sexuality and mortality through a series of intense long takes that forces the viewer to examine their own attitudes to life, love and death.

Monique Mélinand comes to Paris for medical tests that confirm she is dying of cancer. Despite their bickering, she is relaxedly close to son Philippe Léotard and accepts that he finds it harder to be around her as her condition deteriorates. Ironically, Hubert Deschamps becomes increasingly doting, as he realises he is going to lose his wife, even though he cheated on her the day after their wedding and still seeks solace from mistress Jeanne Dulac, when he's not flirting with the nubile girls he never misses an opportunity to undress and paw in the clothing and haberdashery store he runs beneath their Auvergne apartment.

Like his father, Léotard is incapable of fidelity, even though his own marriage to Nathalie Baye seems superficially happy. Yet Pialat never judges, whether Léotard is skulking into a hotel with his latest conquest or grappling with fleshly nurse Corinne Derel at the hospital where Mélinand is dying. Consequently, even though this lacerating analysis of physical and psychological pain laments Léotard and Deschamps's callous chauvinism, everyone's behaviour is presented as inveterately and fallibly human.

With Nestor Almendros's camera fixing upon their every gesture, the cast exceptionally conveys the suppressed emotions that simultaneously unite and divide the family. But what makes this so poignant is Pialat's remorseless focus on a genuine sense of attachment that can never be corrupted by careless actions. People are weak and selfish and rarely even think of their nearest and dearest while seizing opportunities to make their brutish, short existence seem more bearable. But while Pialat refuses to blame anyone for their lapses in judgement, he starkly avers that each (mis)deed has its lasting consequence.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, audiences didn't want to be confronted with such harsh truths and La Gueule ouverte proved a box-office disaster. As a result, Pialat and cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn had to adopt an even more austerely vérité style to shoot Passe ton bac d'abord (1979) on a shoestring in the northern town of Lens.

Resolutely shunning a linear narrative, Pialat alights upon a group of friends as they hang out at a café and wonder what to do with their lives once they've completed their Baccalaureate. Sabine Haudepin has a fractious relationship with parents Annick Alane and Michel Caron, but she finds herself growing closer to Philippe Marlaud, even though her mother regards him as marriage material. Thus, when she flirts with the wolfish Bernard Tronczak at Agnès Makowiak and Patrick Playez's wedding, sparks begin to fly that threaten to ignite a powderkeg of unspoken jealousies and frustrations.

This is primarily a treatise on self-discovery and testing one's limits. Yet it's also very much about gender and class. Wannabe stud Tronczak's rivalry with Patrick Lepcynski reeks of testosterone and it's clear that his holiday conquest of chic Parisian Frédérique Cerbonnet is as much an assertion of his latent masculinity as a satiation of his teenage lusts. Yet while he is allowed to be as predatory as he wishes, his parents prevent sister Valérie Chassigneux from accepting a modelling contract. Even though this seems a dubious enterprise, Chassigneux is denied the freedom to make her own choices and Haudepin's feud with Alane is underpinned by the same bourgeois conservatism that insists a young woman's best chance of making something of herself is to find a suitable spouse.

The roots of the unhappy liaisons in the are readily evident in this damning indictment of hypocritical conformity. Only Claude Chabrol denounced French middle-class foibles with such consistent acuity. But there's nothing of Pialat's contempt in any of Chabrol's mischievous dissections. Indeed, there's even a wisp of despairing fondness in flms like The Girl Cut in Two.

Nobody does this sort of sophisticated satirical savagery better than Chabrol. Yet this reworking of the 1906 Stanford White scandal that inspired Richard Fleischer's The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) is not as pitilessly incisive as past assaults on the narcissistic bourgeoisie. There's a grim fascination in watching rakish novelist François Berléand and indolent pharmaceutical heir Benoît Magimel competing for the affections of ingenuous weathergirl, Ludivine Sagnier. But Sagnier is too docile to possess the requisite femme fatality of a noir anti-heroine, while Berléand's literary and marital reputations never really seem imperilled by his arrogant folly.

The storytelling is impeccable, however, and Chabrol's insights into the transience of trust, the marginalisation of books in an age of electronic media and the celebrity class's craving for the deference abnegated by society's traditional powerbrokers are typically trenchant. So while this may not be a masterwork, it's still clearly the work of a master.

Chabrol was one of the leading lights of the nouvelle vague that erupted in France half a century ago. Disappointingly few minor works from this thrilling period have been issued on disc to mark the anniversary, but one welcome release is Georges Franju's La Tête contre les murs (1959).

Adapted by star Jean-Pierre Mocky from a Hervé Bazin novel with the intention of creating a Gallic Rebel Without a Cause, this was singer Charles Aznavour's first acting assignment and he steals the show as the epileptic whom the well-heeled Mocky befriends after he is committed to an asylum by lawyer father Jean Galland for irrationally vandalising his desk. Frustrated at being treated as a guinea pig by competing psychiatrists, maverick Paul Meurisse and traditionalist Pierre Brasseur, Mocky talks Aznavour into escaping to Paris, where he hopes to find sanctuary with girlfriend, Anouk Aimée.

Mocky has originally intended to direct himself, but Franju (who was venturing into features on the back of several acclaimed shorts) contributes an oppressive sense of enclosure and ennui that is decidedly missing from the melodrama. He is much assisted by cinematographic veteran Eugene Schüfftan, whose use of brooding contrasts of light and shade to convey the complexities of the psyche is, in turn, complemented by Maurice Jarre's disconcerting mix of lyrical orchestration, chiming bells and abrupt percussion.

The influence of the New Wave was slow to spread to the transatlantic mainstream, as executives struggling to keep their studios solvent opted for grotesquely inflated blockbusters rather than more personal works of potentially iconoclastic artistic expression. Curiously, this was not the case in Czechoslovakia, where the so-called Film Miracle was sustained by the likes of Milos Forman. However, he was driven into American exile as the Communist authorities began to clamp down on cinematic subversion. But he left with a resounding parting shot - The Fireman's Ball (1967), which begins as a gently mocking comedy of small-town manners, but ends as a blazing allegorical satire on the incompetence, insularity and ideological idiocy of the country's rulers.

Veteran fire chief Jan Stöckl is about to retire. So, Jan Vostrcil heads up a committee to plan a farewell party. Endless debate is required to make the simplest decision, with everyone demanding to be heard and no one really saying anything. Typically, the event is a farce, with the prizes for the raffle being pilfered at regular intervals, the contestants for a beauty contest being as unco-operative as they're unattractive and the guest of honour being mortified by the mayhem occurring in his name, especially when he suggests that the lights are extinguished to allow the thieves to return their ill-gotten gains and his own wife is caught returning an item red-handed. To cap it all off, a fire breaks out across town. But the brigade is too late to douse the flames and the victim is left with the consoling suggestion that he should move his chair closer to the fire to beat the winter cold.

While this may not be as subtle as A Blonde in Love (1965), this socialist realist parody is still a raucous treat that's so stuffed with insouciant comic detail that it's easy to forget that its real theme is the purges that characterised the brutal regime of Josef Stalin. The fun can easily be enjoyed without a profound knowledge of Czech politics. But, suffice to say, once Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring was over, this affectionately scathing swipe at incompetents in uniform was `banned forever'.

Tony Richardson and the other pioneers of Free Cinema had been a major influence on Forman. But the Yorkshireman's star was on the wane by the time he released Mademoiselle (1966) and, despite being scripted by Marguerite Duras from a story by Jean Genet, this much maligned film did little to arrest his decline.

Most critics applaud Jeanne Moreau's darkly obsessive performance as the French village schoolteacher who is prepared to jeopardise the lives of her unenlightened neighbours to pursue her passion for Italian woodcutter Ettore Manni. But few can find a good word for Richardson's symbol-heavy direction or his seemingly prurient filming of Manni's son, Keith Skinner. To many, the director of such kitchen sink classics as Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) had had his head turned by the Oscar success of Joseph Andrews (1963) and was desperate to find his way back into the social realist fold after the spectacular misfire of his Evelyn Waugh-inspired Hollywood lampoon, The Loved One (1965).

Yet, for all its faults, this is a hugely cinematic study of destructive obsession, emotional manipulation and provincial xenophobia that is strewn with references to Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946), Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), Marcel Pagnol's Manon des Sources (1953) and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959). Moreover, Richardson follows the lead of Michelangelo Antonioni in using David Watkin's glowering monochrome photography to contrast Moreau's psychological state with her environment. Were Michael Haneke to remake this with Isabelle Huppert, it would be commended for its audacious attitude to bestial lusts. So, even though the out-of-vogue Richardson is easy to dismiss, this disconcerting drama is long overdue reappraisal.

In the year Richardson was battling to retain his status, then-wife Vanessa Redgrave was boosting hers in Antonioni's Swinging London mystery, Blow-Up. However, this proved to be the Italian's last feature for four years and his reputation had also dipped by the time he suffered a massive stroke in 1985. Yet, with the help of Wim Wenders, he made a remarkable comeback with Beyond the Clouds (1995), which was pieced together from short story collection, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber.

John Malkovich holds the vignettes together, as a director who insists he only began to understand reality when he began photographing it. His first story is set in Antonioni's home town of Ferrara and centres on a moment of romantic regret when engineer Kim Rossi-Stuart loses teacher Inés Sastre because he fails to consummate their relationship. Two years later, they meet again - perhaps for real, perhaps in his imagination. But once again, he prefers to idealise her rather than expose his feelings.

Malkovich's Portofino encounter with boutique owner Sophie Marceau is more readily carnal. But, while he tries to find a way of incorporating her in one of his films, she tells him how, many years ago, she was acquitted for repeatedly stabbing her father. If this segment best showcases cinematographer Alfio Contini's eye for architecture and landscape, it pales dramatically beside a throwaway sketch reuniting La Notte stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, as she mocks him for reproducing a Cézanne masterpiece rather than trusting his own vision.

The Parisian episode is more substantial, with Peter Weller's ex-pat New Yorker conducting a three-year affair with Chiara Caselli behind the back of his elegant wife, Fanny Ardant. When she discovers the truth, Ardant challenges Weller to make a choice. But she despairs at his dithering duplicity and moves into a luxury apartment with Jean Reno, whose workaholism has recently cost him his own marriage. This off-kilter happy ending finds echo in the concluding Aix-en-Provence plotline, which sees lovesick Vincent Perez doggedly following in the footsteps of Irène Jacob, as she attends mass and concludes a lengthy discussion of their respective philosophies by telling him she is due to enter a convent the following day.

An aching sadness informs this courageous, if occasionally salacious work. Antonioni's genius for using environment to interpret character remains undiminished. However, as he was always more comfortable with mood than narrative, the brevity of the chapters exposes his weakness as a storyteller. Dismissed by many on its original release as pretentious, voyeuristic and self-indulgent, this is clearly an old man's film. But it's still ravishingly cinematic and infinitely superior to `The Dangerous Thread of Things', the then-92 year-old's disappointing swan song contribution to the portmanteau piece, Eros (2004).

Critics have often had as difficult a time appreciating the prolific Chilean Raul Ruiz as they have Antonioni. However, Time Regained (1999) proved to be one of his more accessible and, therefore, accepted outings.

One of the pillars of 20th-century French culture, Marcel Proust's multi-tomed Remembrance of Things Past had already confounded film-makers as gifted as Joseph Losey and Luchino Visconti before Volker Schlöndorff adapted the first volume as Swann in Love in 1984. But Ruiz produced a bravura version of the concluding instalment, which draws on all his visual inventiveness and technical ingenuity to capture the artistic synthesis of this epic masterpiece.

Perusing photographs on his deathbed, Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella), a writer subsumed by his calling, is revisited by memories from a life spent among the aristocracy. Awe-struck childhood impressions mingle with fond recollections of lost loves (Emmanuelle Béart and Chiara Mastroianni), gossiping socialites (Edith Scob and Marie-France Pisier), matriarchs and mistresses (Catherine Deneuve and Elsa Zylberstein), sexual dilettantes (John Malkovich and Vincent Perez) and reluctant heroes (Pascal Greggory), as time elapses from the hopefully vibrant 1880s to the post-trench melancholia of the early 1920s.

As the line between fact and fiction repeatedly blurs, events tumble in on one another, with each triggering a new line of thought. Making inspired use of superimpositions, prismatic lenses and a variety of transitional devices, Ruiz effortlessly marshals his multifarious storylines to keep the action fluent, elegant and sophisticated. Similarly, Ricardo Aronovich's majestic visuals perfectly complement the impeccable designs of Bruno Beauge, who not only recreates the passing periods, but also brings them tangibly to life.

It might be argued that Ruiz's baroque, often surrealist imagery, prevents us from peering too deeply into these ostensibly glittering lives, while the endless shifts of focus around this beguiling gallery of characters marginalises stars like Deneuve, Béart and Malkovich (who is self-consciously imperious as the gay masochist, De Charlus). Yet each performance is a small gem, precisely adding to the brilliance of this exquisite dance to the music of time.

Deneuve is on equally imposing form in Arnaud Desplechin's trenchant analysis of contemporary social mores, A Christmas Tale. This sprawling study of bourgeois dysfunction was surprisingly inspired by a treatise on transplants. However, the search for a suitable bone-marrow donor for Deneuve's free-spirited matriarch is merely a pretext for reuniting estranged family members in Roubaix for an excruciating round of revelation and recrimination.

Embittered daughter Anne Consigny is reluctant to allow troubled son Emile Berling to bail out the mother who ruined her own childhood, while black sheep Mathieu Amalric (who was ostracised after Consigny paid off his debts) is keener to help, but not before he has taunted everyone from supportive father Jean-Paul Roussillon and disapproving brother-in-law Hippolyte Girardot to younger sibling Melvil Poupaud and his steadfast wife, Chiara Mastroianni.

With Emmanuelle Devos excelling as Amalric's Jewish girlfriend enjoying the shenanigans more than the festivities, this is a compellingly literate Bergmanian exploration of kinship, belief, ritual, mortality and the muddle of misguided motives and lingering regrets that bind families together Daniel Auteuil and Jean-Pierre Darrousin provide another masterclass in screen acting in Jean Becker's Conversations With My Gardener, an adaptation of painter Henri Cueco's novel that not only captures the bucolic beauty of a French summer, but also the joy of renewing a lapsed friendship, the allure of learning new things about familiar places and the satisfaction of discovering the hidden truths about oneself.

Having inherited the family home from his late mother, Auteuil's self-obsessed painter hires estranged school pal Darroussin to tend the grounds. Their lives have followed very different paths since, but while Darrousin has remained true to Algerian spouse Hiam Abbass and tolerated the idiocies of his son-in-laws, Auteuil has cheated on wife Fanny Cottençon with models like Alexia Barlier, who are no older than his estranged daughter, Élodie Navarre.

As they settle into easy companionability and the unkempt wasteland is tamed into a flourishing vegetable patch, Darrousin spouts folksy wisdom gleaned from his peasant-stock neighbours and Auteuil comes to realise the error of so many of his ways. However, mortality intrudes upon their idyll and they just have time for a fishing expedition and one last lesson in art before they’re parted.

Beautifully photographed by Jean-Marie Dreujou, this two-hander revels in the musicality of the spoken word and the pleasure of conviviality. Effortlessly avoiding sentimentality, yet insufficiently chauvinist to eschew poignancy, it benefits greatrly from pitch-perfect performances, with the bourgeoisly pompous Auteuil giving ground with a genial grumpiness that complements Darrousin’s homespun bluntness and makes their rather contrived relationship feel so utterly authentic.

Norwegian train driver Bård Owe similarly views the prospect of retirement with displeasure in Bent Hamer's O'Horten. Living beside the railroad to be lulled by the sound of passing engines, Owe misses his last run from Oslo to Bergen and sits through his farewell dinner with a reticence that suggests he is going to be lost without the discipline and direction that the timetables and tracks had imposed upon his existence. A visit to his ailing mother serves to further disorient Owe, as does the death of his favourite tobacconist, the loss of his shoes at the gym and a chance encounter with pensioner Espen Skjønberg, whom he finds lying on the snowy pavement. However, a few drinks and anecdotes later, Owe is prepared to let Skjønberg be his guide on a late-life, coming-of-age adventure that's strewn with quirky incidents and eccentric strangers.

With John Christian Rosenlund's imagery conveying the world of wonder that Owe had scarcely noticed as he chugged along in his locomotive, this is an episodic charmer that owes much to Jacques Tati, Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson. Whether breaking and entering, ski jumping, skinny dipping or being driven blindfold around the city by night, Owe is supremely deadpan, as the full significance of his new prospects dawn on him. Hamer doesn't have anything particularly new to say about growing old disgracefully, but the casual surrealism of the melancholic humour is irresistible.

The spirit of Tati also clearly descended on Otar Iosseliani during the making of Gardens in Autumn, a leisurely satire on transient power and the vacuity of modern life.

Dismissed during a public scandal, government minister Séverin Blanchet seems relieved to be emancipated from his sinecure and its dubious privileges. In fact, unemployment and a return to his impoverished roots suit the indolent to a tee, as it allows him to catch up with acquaintances discarded during his ascent of the greasy pole.

Filming in long, often silent takes, Iosseliani makes exquisite use of his contrasting locations and allows the almost whimsical gags plenty of time to evolve. Consequently, this is always a film of sly observations and wry smiles, although Michel Piccoli contributes a deliciously hammy drag turn as Blanchet’s ageing mother.

An odd bird of a very different kind shapes Cecilia Suárez's destiny in Ernesto Contreras's melancholic romance, Blue Eyelids. Ever since a feathered friend told her to set up a sewing business, Ana Ofelia Murguía has relied on a caged bird to peck a name from a hat so she can send a lucky employee on the trip of a lifetime. However, selection provokes a crisis for Suárez, as the seaside prize entitles her to take a companion and she doesn't have one. Dispensing with the idea of asking her sister after an unfortunate encounter, Suárez bumps into the equally lonely Enrique Arreola in a coffee shop and they chat hesitantly, even though she doesn't recognise him as an old classmate.

Delighting in small details, Contreras creates an inarticulate, mid-life variation on the Rohmerian comedy of manners. The couple's dates are excruciatingly authentic, with a picnic lapsing into awkward silence, a trip to the movies confronting them with a self-reflexive item entitled Blue Eyelids and a dance hall excursion nearly ending in humiliation when their table is given to some better looking customers. Yet love somehow finds a way and it says much for the charming performances, Carlos Contreras's nuanced screenplay and the discreet direction that this gentlest of romcoms manages to avoid both whimsy and mawkishness.

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