In his editorial
Le style et le geste, building on Céline
and Roland Barthes, and writing on Nagisa Oshima who then recently passed away, Delorme
properly defines the politique des
auteurs as
talking about the “morality of the mise en scène.” This engagement can otherwise be said by one word: its gesture… The idea of the gesture also has the advantage of bringing up the idea of an event, which connects the films, scenes, and shots. An auteur doesn’t only make one gesture. A film is the ensemble of them, and it is these gestures that we review when we critique a film.
Delorme brings
this level attention to his reviews, and that of the Restless one in specific, which creates a model that raises the level
of writing by his fellow critics. Of note in this review is its focus on youth, people, love, and death – all key
facets of cinema and life. This criteria of evaluation recalls how it was put into practice in Delorme’s review of
David Lynch’s last film to date Inland
Empire, Une femme mariée (n.620),
where after discussing its key features - how it's haunting, and creates fear and affects - he
concludes, “The temptation of adultery or not, dryness or not, there is for
sure the story of an amour fou in Inland Empire, but it takes place on
the other side of the screen, between the director and his actress, Laura
Dern.”
This Restless review from
the May 2011 Cannes issue (N.667) isn’t even the official Cahier Critique (that
would be by Dominique Païni’s in N.670, and it’s also worth checking out Marcos
Uzal’s Trafic N.81 review). I’ve
translated it below. It illustrate the heartfelt and lyrical
aspects of Delorme's writing, which is seamlessly incorporated into traditional film criticism (e.g. the discussion of a director and his films). It’s one of Delorme’s best and most personal recent contributions, alongside his
piece on L’enfant secret. Vant Sant, whose
Elephant made Cahiers' Top Ten of the
decade (whose directors have all slowly been getting événements), has been over time,
surprisingly, the source of some of Cahiers most generous and touching critiques (see in particular what some of their past writers have said, whether it is Serge Daney or Stéphane
Bouquet and Jean-Marc Lalanne). Some filmmakers have a way to bring out the best in people. Gus Van Sant is one of them. - D. D.
***
Gus Van Sant, calme and without rest
It was a few
years ago that he was at the top of his game with Elephant, Gus Van Sant didn’t try to outdo himself by getting
locked into the posture of an auteur
or of a superauteur which happened
to other past Cannes prize winners and that paralyzed them formally by this quick
ascension (Wenders, Moretti, Almodovar – as we anticipate for their new films).
Gus Van Sant seems not to be a victim of this pride and complex, public
recognition doesn’t seem to affect him: he has nothing to prove, he lands and
shows up again surprisingly, in the hippy streets of San Francisco (Milk), in a line waiting at a busy
Starbucks (an unrealized project with Tom Hanks), or in a pathetic melodrama à la Love Story (1979), because most
people would be able to compare Restless
to the Arthur Hiller film.
We like a
filmmaker for his gesture of picking what films to direct,
just as much for their style. When Coppola takes up projects in the Eighties, without even worrying
about how they are just jobs, he then produces some of his best films
while multiplying his filming style; he makes a Disney (Jack), and then stops and starts over again to make films at his
house. Or like with Lynch when he goes from Lost Highway to The Straight
Story. There are a lot of filmmakers that once they reach 50 years old (Gus
Van Sant is already 58) don’t bother about gestures, and start to advance while
looking behind them, contemplating the vestiges of what they’ve already done.
On the other hand, for some, the gesture seems to be guided by a personal
challenge, which is hard to necessarily convey, that prevents the oeuvre to
just lie down in its own bed. The renewing of the game isn’t that of the
director of the classical studio era who was tied to projects as he held his
singular identity (the standard model of the auteur, Hawks); it’s a choice, a
necessary capacity to accelerate and decelerate, to navigate, follow ones
course, through warm and cold currants, without ever stopping swimming through the
river.
Why Restless? But also why Good Will Hunting? Or Gerry? Or the aberrant remake of Psycho? There is, first off, the desire
and the challenge to realize an intimate film on a heterosexual amorous couple,
something the director has never done before, and to tell this 'love story' in a Hollywood fashion. We can just imagine the criticism this will get from
the fans of Last Days who will
denounce it for its lack of ambition. But Gus Van Sant rediscovers the form of the
walk-film, which follows the principals of the pre-mortem of his 'young death' trilogy
(Gerry, Elephant, Last Days): the
story is that of a man who, haunted by the death of his parents, falls in love
with a young women that has only a few more months to live. The director from
this then tells the story of their friendship during those few months.
It would be a
shame, though, to reduce this subject to the theme of the countdown from the
films in the previous death trilogy. We would miss the originality of
the usage of the inevitable from that trilogy. We would also miss the originality of
Restless. What he’s trying to do is
more difficult than trying to accomplish a fourth opus with a Steadicam held by
Harris Savides on unhappy adolescents. This is because Gus Van Sant is
horrified of routines. The challenge is to bring out the melodrama from this
heavy subject, from an adolescent with cancer towards the sentimental comedy.
The challenge is to blend the tones. There must be a maximum balance that needs
to be achieved that can hold this fragile equilibrium, which takes into account
the fragility of the the physicality of the actors as well the extreme finesse
of the choices of the director. This airy equilibrium nourishes itself on the
trivial, bad taste and a perverse fascination that is brought out with this
closeness to death. Gus Van Sant then finds two aesthetic challenges in Restless: the pleasure of pure
constraint which he rarely ever stays to (here a love story); and the mixing of genres (melodrama and sentimental
comedy), a mixture that he had previously created a perfect model for, though
perhaps in a mode less fluid, with his dream-like My Own Private Idaho (1992).
But we can’t
stop there. Gus Van Sant (more and more?) is making a moralist oeuvre. He wants
to be useful: Milk was a film to make because there was a cause to
defend and we were surprised to find a variety of edifying sentiments (the gay
adolescent who is handicapped that calls at night time to find comfort). Restless proposes an edifying apprenticeship: the
apprenticeship of life after death, in a follow up that isn’t as poisoned as
his previous trilogy. It’s almost the antidote. Like with Larry Clark, this
fascination for adolescents doubles because it comes from an ethical stance of
good will and protection (as if the directors were saying: “beware”). The film wants to be happy, it
offers the hero a reconciliation after the sudden death of his parents. He fell
into a coma during the accident that was the cause of their death, he suffers
from a double culpability, which is that of surviving and that of not assisting
their burial. All of the film lies on this traumatism, and on this healing. He
hadn’t had the time? Now he has all of the time (three months) to say goodbye
to this young girl that he meets just in time to see her off and to accompany
her. It is she that dies but it is he who will rest in peace.
To do this, the
filmmaker choses to go into an unexpected terrain, even though if it has
already been there deep down in certain of his films, that of wonder. This
sense of wonder culminates with a great scene in the forest during Halloween,
where the boy is disguised as a Japanese aviator and her as a geisha, and they
reenact a scene from a Japanese ghost film. The decision to cast Mia Wasikowska
is judicious, because it seems like she is still wearing the fairy-like costume
from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland:
a young actress of a rare intelligence, she brings a conviction that interrupts
the potential pathos of the subject. A haircut like that of Jean Seberg, a head
like a sparrow, boy’s clothes, she has a androgynous figure, which was already
apparent under Alice’s amour with the false impression of a Johnny Depp.
The male hero (Henry Hopper) resembles a king without a crown, who lives with
his aunt in a large house that seems like it’s right out of Last Days. There is a third character,
who is really bizarre, which accentuates this Japanese imagination: Hiroshi,
the ghost of a kamikaze, who accompanies the hero since the death of his
parents. This companion enchants the reality of the young man, but he also weighs
the idea of death upon the story. In the extraordinary opening of Elephant, a son interrogates his father
about his activity at the Chuuk Lagoon during the Pacific War, before answering
him, this adolescent: “I went there” – but how could he? This enigmatic remark
resonates with the omnipresence of war, and the uncalled for intrusion of
archive images of the atomic explosion at Nagasaki.
The enchantment
of Restless relies also on the mise
en scene which is unique to this filmmaker: the autumnal colors that pass
through the trees to the generous night-robe that Mia Wasikowska wears, the
framing that are like friendly gazes posed upon the characters just like a friend’s
hand on one’s shoulder; out-of-focus images that find themselves as the scene
unfolds, like when the couple find themselves in front of the parent's
tombstone, beside a naïve sculpture of two sheep that are side by side. There
are also conventions, notably the music, but they are compensated by genius
ideas: like the first medical attack of the young girl, who in the middle of a
sentence, without even screaming, falls down backwards in a gesture of an
infinite violence; or when, before dying, in a scene that counteracts all of
the hospital scenes in every Hollywood film, she just simply asks him, “Ok?”, in the vein of “can I go now, will you be fine?”
But the
strangest thing, in this luminous film, is the presence of Henry Hopper. With
each expression, his face threatens to take on the traits of his father,
Dennis. All it takes is for him to squint his eyes a little, and we are back in
1955, the era of Rebel Without a Cause. When
the end credits of the film finish and there appears its dedication to Dennis
Hopper, a deeper emotion engulfs the whole film, as if this story is the
backdrop for this character. The resemblance between the father and son
contributes to its power.
Stéphane Delorme
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