Are Unexamined Lives Worth Watching? (From The Oxford Times)

Are Unexamined Lives Worth Watching?

7:55am Thursday 19th November 2009

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Despite the admirable titles showing in the French Film Festival - which is currently touring the UK, but (surprise, surprise) won't be coming to Oxford - this hasn't been a vintage year for Gallic cinema. However, 2009 is ending with a couple of its better offerings going on general release. We'll soon be treated to Martin Provost's sublime biopic, Séraphine, while this week we have Rémi Bezançon's intuitive insight into domestic travails, The First Day of the Rest of Your Life.

Alongside Jean-François Richet's crime duology, Mesrine, this was the major beneficiary at last spring's Césars (winning three from nine nominations). Structured around five days that shaped the destiny of a suburban family between 1988-2000, this potent dramedy owes much to Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), right down to borrowing Marc-André Grondin to play the middle child of Parisian cabby Jacques Gamblin and his onetime hippy wife, Zabou Breitman. However, this is much less self-consciously kooky than the cult Quebecois hit.

Having failed to make wine snob father Roger Dumas proud, Gamblin has devoted himself to his kids. But oldest son Pio Marmaï is about to start medical school and his departure from the nest forces Gamblin and Breitman to consider what to do with the remainder of their lives, even though Grondin's genial slacker and his tomboy sister Déborah François appear to be immovable objects. As time passes, Marmaï settles down with conservative classmate Cécile Cassel, while Grondin meets and loses the girl of his dreams at an air guitar competition and François is humiliated in the process of losing her virginity on her 16th birthday. Even Breitman is tempted to stray after she takes up photography. But while they're often strained, the family ties hold fast until one day in the new millennium.

Claire Lacaze's costumes and Jimena Esteve's set decoration are key to the success of this slickly staged picture, along with Sophie Reine's crisp editing and Antoine Monod's dextrous cinematography, which adopts a different visual style for each of the five vignettes. However, it's the performances that make the bittersweet shifts so lifelike. Grondin and François thoroughly deserve their newcomer awards, but there's also genuine poignancy in Breitman's struggle to reconcile her maternal instincts with her free spirit and Gamblin's mid-life realisation that sanguine decency is an admirable quality at a time of such traumatic socio-political change.

By comparison, Rithy Panh's adaptation of Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall, is markedly less inspired. But this is still a meticulously made melodrama that bears comparison with Régis Wargnier's Oscar winner, Indochine (1992).

Although much of the plot revolves around her short-fused son (Gaspard Ulliel) and quietly precocious daughter (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), Isabelle Huppert dominates proceedings, as a civil servant's widow in 1930s Indo-China attempting to keep her lands out of the clutches of corrupt French bureaucrats and scheming Asian tycoons. Aided by loyal foreman Vanthon Duong, Huppert seeks to rebuild the Pacific defences after her rice crop is destroyed by salt water. But, with the bank refusing to extend further credit, she has to resort to fleecing playboy Randal Douc by exploiting his passion for the 16 year-old Berges-Frisbey. However, Douc has his own agenda and his revenge upon the family and their tenants is as cynical as it's cruel.

Better at capturing a sense of place than period, this is always more the work of a documentarist than a dramatist. However, Panh and cinematographer Pierre Milon make atmospheric use of the Prey Nup locations to convey the rising tensions between both Huppert and her children and the indigenous population and their imperial masters. He also generates considerable sexual charge between the conflicted Douc and the virginal Berges-Frisbey and between the hulking Ulliel and Ingrid Mareski, the elegant daughter of a visiting businessman who lures him away from the insular backwater where he was born and into the wider world.

Yet it's Huppert's deceptively taciturn matriarch who most fascinates, as she alienates the bookish Berges-Frisbey by favouring her recklessly dynamic brother and throws herself on the mercy of the colonial authorities while also encouraging the displaced peasantry to rebel. However, it's her misjudgement of Douc that sharpens the film's political edge, as her naive sense of superiority finds a match in his contemptuous chauvinism. Ultimately, however, it's her self-serving benevolence that prevails, as a paddy in modern-day Cambodia is still called the White Woman's Field.

A very different world is depicted in another fact-based tale, Machan, an exploration of the lighter side of migration that recalls the disappearance in September 2004 of the 23-man Sri Lankan handball team while competing in a tournament in Bavaria.

Bartender Gihan De Chickera and fruit salesman Dharmapriya Dias are sick of trying to make ends meet off the tourist track in Colombo. Furthermore, Dias has to endure the wrath of brother Dharshan Dharmaraj, who helped pay his debt to a local shyster and now faces the prospect of his wife going to work as a maid in the Gulf to keep up the payments. So, having had yet another visa application rejected, Dias hits upon the idea of forming a handball team, entering an event in Germany and then vanishing into the lucrative underground economy.

However, the plan also appeals to several of his neighbours, including a people trafficker and a couple of corrupt cops, and Dias has to produce kit and credentials for all of them to keep his dream alive. But the preparations leave no time for practice and the team is so severely hammered in its first two matches that the immigration authorities become suspicious. However, the Sri Lankans have become overnight celebrities and national pride dictates that they postpone fleeing to their chosen destinations until after their final game.

Marking the directorial debut of Uberto Pasolini, this has much in feel-good common with The Full Monty, which he produced back in 1997. Despite Stefano Falivene's camera capturing the desperate poverty in which Dias lives with his sister and eccentric aunts, the emphasis falls more on chancer charm than socio-economic actuality. Yet this still manages to get its message across while also being hugely entertaining.

Another British neophyte, David Holroyd, takes a few more dramatic and stylistic risks with his low-budget political thriller, WMD. Exploiting the conspiracy theories surrounding the `dodgy dossier' that enabled Tony Blair to convince parliament to sanction the war against Saddam Hussein, this is vastly more intelligent than the embarrassingly awful 31 North 62 East and less knowingly cognisant than In the Loop. It requires one to accept that surveillance cameras also have the ability to record crystal clear sound - but this is a small contrivance to brook for such a novel conceit.

With the government striving to convince the country of the 45-minute threat being posed by Iraq, SIS desk operative Simeon Lenagan is tipped off by Rome-based journalist Montserrat Roig De Puig that the data about Niger providing Saddam with uranium is unreliable to the point of fabrication. Despite the risk to himself, as well as his wife (Jo-Anne Knowles) and young daughter, Lenagan liaises with CIA agent Glenn Conroy, atomic scientist Peter Barnes and satellite image expert Somi De Souza to undermine Downing Street's case. But before he can make his findings public, Lenagan's car is stopped on a dark country road...

Flashing back from this sinister denouement and shuttling between London, Rome, Berlin and Washington, the action has been adroitly photographed and edited by Steve Buckland and Celia Haining. It's not always coherent (although that's partly the point) and the performances are not as naturalistic as TV veteran Holroyd obviously intended. But there's sufficient filmic ingenuity and docudramatic verisimilitude to ease this disconcertingly credible spook saga through its less convincing moments.

Finally, this week, there's Astra Taylor's latest bid to popularise philosophy among the movie masses, Examined Life. Her gambit this time is to allow a smugness of intellectuals to riff on the interdependency of society. However, some of her sages prove more interesting and less pretentious than others, although none is more camera savvy than the ubiquitous Slavoj Žižek, who dons an orange reflective tabard to root around a London rubbish tip while positing that ecology is the new opium for the masses and questioning whether we are right to try to prevent nature from continuing the cycle of catastrophes that has facilitated each new phase of evolution.

Riding across New York in Taylor's car, Cornel West clearly struck the profoundest chord, as he is accorded three spots in which to expound on death and desire, domination and democracy, and Romanticism and the Blues. His enthusiasm is infectious and his accessibility contrasts with the risibly jargonistic diatribe on ulteriority delivered by Avital Ronell, as she strolls through the park oblivious of the baffled expressions on the faces of the ordinary people she so patronisingly wishes to empower. But she is not alone in failing to communicate coherently or cogently, as Michael Hardt literally runs his rowing boat aground on a Central Park lake while insisting upon the need for a new concept of revolution, and Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor rather lose their way on the streets of San Francisco while drawing on their experience of societal prejudice against homosexuality and physical impairment to arrive at the hardly revelatory conclusion that mutuality is vital to common existence.

While walking beside Lake Erie, Martha Nussbaum makes equally obvious points (albeit with considerably greater clarity) about the need to base social contracts on love. But the most effective contributions come from Peter Singer and Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose locations (along with Žižek's) also prove the most germane to their arguments. Striding past Fifth Avenue's most prestigious stores, Singer eloquently considers applied ethics and whether the politics of spending money should amount to actively doing something to help others rather than passively not harming them, while Appiah mooches around La Guardia airport to ruminate on cosmopolitanism and the need to embrace a wider humanity as well as the members of one's own inner circle.

Essentially, this is a documentary soapbox that asks viewers whether they would prefer inertly to accept an imperfect world, strive to preserve a non-existent idealised version of it or rouse themselves to do something tangible to change it. Taylor certainly succeeds in her bid to show that thinking makes a person more alive than merely being. But, for all this occasionally self-conscious picture's flashes of brilliance, it's to be doubted whether many will rise to Socrates's challenge and reassess both their own lives and their place within society.

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