The Decade List: Les chansons d'amour (2007)

Les chansons d’amour [Love Songs] – dir. Christophe Honoré

Approaching the films of Christophe Honoré is a lot like walking along a tightrope. The odds always seem to be against you making it to the finish line without a gust of wind (or, in Honoré’s case, of bullshit) blowing you off. Even the worst of his films have glimmers of effulgence, but in most cases, they’re buried so deep in self-indulgence and shallow affronts that those moments are quickly forgotten. In every one of his films, Honoré “borrows” from considerably better pieces of French cinema, namely Godard and Truffaut, but in Love Songs, he takes on Jacques Demy, and the results are the most fruitful and satisfying of his career, even if you do still have to scrape a little shit off the bottom of your shoe afterward.

Love Songs exists in a magical, musical world of pliable sexuality during the winter months in Paris. The cold does provide more fashionable attire for the cast of beautiful people, does it not? It’s also the sort of world in which love and despair are grossly exalted, a world in which people can actually die of a broken heart. The ever-charming Ismaël (Honoré’s favorite actor, Louis Garrel) and the ever-lovely Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) have what would seem to be a harmonious love affair together… and with Ismaël’s pretty coworker Alice (Clotilde Hesme), but something’s awry. Ismaël feels like the third wheel, even though he’s a hit with Julie’s family, and Julie appears unsatisfied with both of her partners, though she only shows it when pressed by her mother (Brigitte Roüan) or sister Jeanne (Chiara Mastroianni). Quickly, we begin to realize that this particular ménage à trois isn’t a progressive way of looking at romance, but a last resort to keep a once bright flame from extinguishing.

Honoré hasn’t fully allowed himself to step away from his lame visual quirks, from a title sequence where the entire cast and crew are identified by last name only to a stupid moment where the camera pans across the titles of the books the three love birds are reading in bed. His grasp of sequencing, cause-and-effect and timing is off, especially in the convenient, lazy ways he threads characters into the film. But dammit if Love Songs isn’t kinda wonderful in spite all that. The songs, composed by Alex Beaupain who makes a cameo in the film as a musician whose show the lovers attend, are almost uniformly superb, even if Roüan and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet’s singing voices are truly unremarkable (I still can't decide how I feel about Hesme's). It’s as if Honoré wanted to alert his audience to which of the characters hold the most weight in the film based on the quality of the actors’ serenades (it says a lot about the youngest of Julie's sisters, who only exists as an inconvenient plot contrivance).

Sagnier had already proven her vocal abilities in François Ozon’s 8 Women, and though according to the presse dossier Garrel hadn’t sang much before the film, his voice is pleasant. But it’s really all about Chiara Mastroianni, who plays Julie’s slightly uptight, certainly sheltered older sister. It would be giving Honoré too much credit to suggest that her presence is what links Love Songs to the film it aspires to, Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (which, of course, starred her mother). Not only does Mastroianni have the richest singing voice of the cast (she recorded the album Home in 2004 with then-husband Benjamin Biolay), but she delivers the moment that brings the film to its knees with the song “Au parc.” Her Jeanne is the sole character whose sorrow stretches deeper than just sulking and pouting, and it’s profoundly felt in the scene at the Parc de la Pépinière.

Andrew O’Hehir accurately points out that Honoré takes more from Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy [Jeanne et le garçon formidable] than it does Les parapluies de Cherbourg, even if he does find an excuse for placing Mastroianni beneath an umbrella as she walks Julie to the métro station. Compared to Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, a marvelous tragi-comédie musicale about a young woman (Virginie Ledoyen) who meets her dream man only to discover he has AIDS, Love Songs comes up short, but still it cast its own bittersweet spell on me. Even when it comes to Christophe Honoré, I can admit defeat.

With: Louis Garrel, Chiara Mastroianni, Ludivine Sagnier, Clotilde Hesme, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Brigitte Roüan, Jean-Marie Winling, Alice Butaud, Yannick Renier, Alex Beaupain
Screenplay: Christophe Honoré
Cinematography: Rémy Chevrin
Music: Alex Beaupain
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: IFC Films/Red Envelope Entertainment

Premiere: 18 May 2007 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 21 March 2008

Awards: Best Music (César Awards, France)

The Decade List: Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000)

Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes [Water Drops on Burning Rocks] - dir. François Ozon

Water Drops on Burning Rocks was the first of François Ozon's bountiful offerings in 2000, the year in which he presented the two best films of his career (I have yet to see Ricky, however). Adapting the film from an unpublished play written by a nineteen-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon mapped out his own career, in both his finer and weaker points. Unlike fellow second generation Douglas Sirk admirers like Todd Haynes or Pedro Almodóvar, Ozon's fascination with the melodrama could be attributed best to Fassbinder. While Haynes took a more direct approach, Ozon drew inspiration through the filtration of Sirk's legacy in Fassbinder, acknowledging his own (intended) similarities to the director with Water Drops on Burning Rocks and later Sous le sable, Le temps qui reste and Angel. The film, then, would showcase the talents of both artists before Ozon ventured on his own later in the year.

For Fassbinder, the play wonderfully embodies the sinister humor of his notable early works, like Katzelmacher and Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, but it's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant where the most similarities can be found. With all the action confined within the walls of a single apartment, the single set piece transforms into the carefully adorned fighting ring for the four characters. It could be suggested that the claustrophobic restriction of the set would be the catalyst for the uncoiling misery in Franz's (Malik Zidi) life in the same way Catherine Deneuve's apartment in Repulsion would trigger her own demons. However, the apartment better represents the incubation chamber of Franz's despair, being left alone for weeks while his older lover Léopold (Bernard Giraudeau) travels on business. The key to Franz's unhappiness, like Petra von Kant's, lies within him as he becomes unable to extinguish the fact that he's fallen in love with someone who (likely) doesn't love him; the walls just amplify the anguish. Also like Petra (Margit Carstensen), he finds the outlet for its release in other people, spitting malice in the face of his former fiancée Anna (Ludivine Sagnier) just as Petra would to her secretary Marelene (Irm Hermann). Anna, though, is hardly the innocent witness to Franz's transformation. Between the two films (Petra von Kant was released nine years after Fassbinder would have written Water Drops), the most noticeable difference can be seen in the reversal of roles between the two central pairs of lovers, pegging the older Léopold as the predator in contrast to the younger Karin (Hanna Schygulla), whose involvement with Petra suggests self-advancing manipulation.

For Ozon, traces of Water Drops on Burning Rocks can be found in almost all of his subsequent works. Divided into four acts, the film moves from the playfully sexy to the dreadfully bleak, though the path isn't as straightforward as one might assume. Water Drops on Burning Rocks doesn't descend into the austere with each passing act; in fact, it retains its borderline misanthropic humor even after things get hopeless for Franz and Véra (Anna Thomson), Léopold's former lover who had a sex change in order to rekindle the spark in their dying relationship. The moment where Léopold phones Franz's mother at the end of the film painfully recalls the final moments of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?; this coldness is shared by both of Franz's lovers, with Anna's line "Who's going to father my children now?" placing her on the same careless plane as Léopold.

In terms of characterization, Véra becomes the film's most tragic figure. Officially entering the film in the fourth act after showing up earlier at Léopold's door twice, she is subjected to Léopold's cruelty within her first steps into the apartment. Despite these initial signs of hostility from Léopold (he purposefully refers to Véra as an old "copaine" in order to correct himself with the masculine form of the word to insult her), she plays along with his game of sexual manipulation until it becomes clear that she's only being used to hurt Franz and to seduce Anna. For Franz, Véra's return gives him a glimpse of his own doomed future; however, he succumbs to the hopelessness before Véra even reveals her own inability to stop loving Léopold. Véra emerges as the tragic figure when the film lets her humanity surface. Unlike Franz, she didn't succumb to the unbearable mimicry that occurs in Franz during the third act. She retains the sad hope Franz holds in the second act, when his awareness of Léopold's nature is still balanced by attempts to reconcile his lover's terminal dissatisfaction. Thomson, who enjoyed a wave of popularity in France after the starring in Amos Kollek's Sue and Fiona, gives Véra the perfect amount of compassion and sorrow, which makes the film's final shot, in which the audience learns all they need to know about her future, ever so desolate.

Looking back at Water Drops on Burning Rocks, you can almost see Ozon's entire career up to now inside of it. Between the amazing fourth-act dance number to Tony Holiday's "Tanze Samba mit Mir" (8 femmes), the crippling aspects of a relationship gone sour (5x2), the knowing touches of melodrama (Le temps qui reste), the pop music cues of Françoise Hardy's version of "Träume" (Une robe d'été) and a character's inability to accept the end of a relationship (Sous le sable), all of his films appear to have stemmed from this one film. Although his body of work may vary as much in quality as it does thematically, the same can't be said for Water Drops on Burning Rocks.

With: Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi, Ludivine Sagnier, Anna Thomson
Screenplay: François Ozon, based on play Tropfen auf heiße Steine by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: Zeitgeist Films

Premiere: 13 February 2000 (Berlin International Film Festival)
US Premiere: June 2000 (New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival)

Awards: Teddy Award: Feature Film (Berlin); Best Feature Film (New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival)

Bad News, Tennis Shoes!

Well, not really, but a friend of mine told me that his favorite video store clerk once referred to the lovely Ludivine Sagnier as "bad news in tennis shoes." While I hardly agree, the phrase has stuck. I digress, it looks as if Sagnier has become a mother once again, delivering a baby girl with director Kim Chapiron (Sheitan, below), which I suppose means that she's no longer with actor Nicolas Duvauchelle (Inside, Trouble Every Day, Le petit voleur), the father of her other daughter. Congratulations.