Some word on two Cannes Premieres by Emmanuel Mouret and Serge Bozon, and Claire Denis's STARS AT NOON.
Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.
Dear Leo and Danny,
Danny, I’m glad you brought up Three Thousand Years of Longing, a film whose conceptual explorations of myth and storytelling sustained my interest for quite some time. The fundamental question it raises—and which is studied by narratologists and students of comparative religion the world over—is whether there is a finite number of narrative patterns and character archetypes, whether there is a theoretically enumerable list of story structures which we simply repeat again and again. In Three Thousand Years, the basic idea, voiced by Tilda Swinton's academic, is whether it is possible to tell a story about wish-granting that is not a cautionary tale? In its exploration of this, the film played, for a time, a bit like Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room (2015), only with a commitment to hyper-plastic computer generated imagery instead of the look of decaying two-strip Technicolor. But the comparison, while useful, only goes so far. Unlike Maddin’s film, which never stops anatomizing its own mise-en-abyme storytelling, culminating with a literal “Book of Climaxes,” Three Thousand Years eventually shifts into the territory of romance, transforming into love story between Swinton’s narratologist and Idris Elba’s djinn. The success of this conceptual move likely depends on one’s emotional response, and while I appreciated the look of the film's uncanny digital skies, my interest in it was, by the end, largely academic.
Still, Three Thousand Years offers a useful starting point for thinking about our relationship to the art of the past. How does the task of filmmaking change with one’s knowledge of, say, classical Hollywood films or European post-war cinema? How does one go about making films in an era when the cinema has, as it were, become conscious to itself?
Emmanuel Mouret’s Diary of a Fleeting Affair, which includes posters of Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949) and Bresson’s Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), and whose main characters at one point watch Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973), belongs to a tradition of French cinema that explicitly engages with such questions. The film, playing in the Cannes Premiere section, opens with a bar meeting between Charlotte (Sandrine Kiberlain) and Simon (Vincent Macaigne), virtual strangers who are meeting for only the second time. It is soon clear that they are going to sleep with each other. It is also evident that they each have very different levels of experience in such matters. She is an experienced single woman who, by her own admission, does not like “passion”; he is a married man nervous about embarking on his first affair, and who, by his own admission, tries his best to keep from imposing himself on others. Preceding each of their meetings by title cards that tell us the date, Diary chronicles their entire affair and nothing more, comprising only scenes featuring the two characters. Not unlike the way Three Thousand Years foregrounds its central premise, Diary explicitly asks whether it is possible to tell a story about an extra-marital affair without having it take either a tragic or comic turn.
Apart from the easy chemistry between Macaigne and Kiberlain (both superb), much of the appeal throughout is Mouret’s lively staging: Most every scene has some sort of foregrounded visual concept or reference point. The initial meeting between Charlotte and Simon—a scene whose non-stop conversational rhythm approaches that of His Girl Friday (1940)—unfolds in a fluid but unshowy sequence shot, laying out the physical space of the bar while the pair probes the boundaries of their relationship. One meeting plays out over a close-up of their hands, another in a wide shot, composed such that the two are but silhouettes against a museum display. Like so many great Hollywood comedies and romances, Diary includes significant jaunts away from the city—a pastoral vision to contrast the bustle of urban life—at one point incorporating a hushed visit to a rural church, recalling similar scenes in John M. Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939) and Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939). A significant plot development later in the film, involving another woman (Giorgia Scalliet) whose marriage to her architect husband is on the rocks, even suggests the possibility of a modern, gender-flipped update of Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933).
The cumulative effect of all this reflexive stylistic construction is to keep the central couple’s ardor largely submerged, complementing their own attempts to deny their desires and longings—that is, until Mouret finally allows the story’s potent emotional undertow to burst forth toward the end. Diary’s final shot suggests that Mouret is ultimately something of an ironist; nonetheless, the film conveys the distinct pleasures of romance.
On the basis of Diary, Mouret is clearly a filmmaker unwilling to give up the pleasures and risks of narrative fiction. And in a contemporary environment dominated by an interest autofiction, documentary “hybridity,” and an immersion into the real, Mouret’s is arguably a minority position. It is a position shared, though, by fellow French filmmaker Serge Bozon, here with Don Juan, also in the Cannes Premieres section. The film's script, co-written by regular collaborator Axelle Ropert, is constructed around an explicit reversal of the Don Juan archetype: What would happen if, instead of him leaving the women he seduces, he is the one who is abandoned? The film thus begins with Laurent (Tahar Rahim), a theater actor rehearsing for the role of Don Juan in a stage production, being left at the altar on his wedding day by Julie (Virginie Efira).
Continue reading here.
