Isabelle Huppert x 2, Canada x 2
Four more strong 2016 releases.
Things to Come + Elle The latest from Mia Hansen-Løve and Paul Verhoeven have so much in common--lead performances by Isabelle Huppert, prominent roles for dark-coloured cats, Huppert's character having a strained yet still somewhat affectionate relationship with her ex-husband, Huppert's character having a close yet bitter relationship with her eccentric, hypochondriac mother, Huppert's character becoming a grandmother--yet, beyond these fairly striking similarities, they are very different films, with very different, if equally superlative, performances by Huppert. The key point at which these two films, both about smart, self-possessed, professional French women working through personal crises, starkly diverge can, in fact, best be identified through another ostensible echo: scenes where Huppert's character (philosophy professor Nathalie in
Things to Come, video-game company executive Michèle in
Elle) is sexually harassed or assaulted. In Hansen-Løve's film, this is just a single scene, disturbing as it escalates but ultimately limited to unwelcome advances and the
threat of violent force. Nathalie herself shuts it down, and while it's surely something that will stick with her, it feels, in the context of the larger story, like one relatively minor episode, not a major turning point in the narrative. By contrast, the (first) instance of sexual assault in
Elle comes in the opening scene, and it is the main catalyst for all the shocking, perverse, darkly amusing things that follow. This is vintage Verhoeven, to be sure, and it's certainly the more provocative of these two films. If visceral, unflinching, sly provocation are what you're principally after in cinema, it's the better film, too. But
Things to Come is the wiser, deeper, more lived-in portrait. (To say that it's also more humane seems like a no-brainer, though Huppert injects more humanity into
Elle than is normally present in Verhoeven's work, just as she did years ago for Haneke's
The Piano Teacher.) Hansen-Løve's film is one of the most convincing and thoughtful character studies of an intellectual trying to reconcile her everyday, exterior life with her philosophical positions. Totally absent here are the 'Aha!' big-idea moments that normally plague films about serious intellectuals. Instead, Nathalie, as played so exquisitely by Huppert, is learning and adapting on the go, using the skills, ideas, and materials available to her to respond to difficult, but not finally insurmountable, circumstances. As doors close, other open, and unknown pleasures lie in wait. It's a vital lesson, shown not told.
Never Eat Alone + Werewolf If Sofia Bohdanowicz and Ashley McKenzie's features represent something like the vanguard of English-Canadian independent cinema, as practiced by the younger generation - and
strong arguments have indeed been put forward to that effect - then what's increasingly clear is that Atom Egoyan - not Guy Maddin, certainly not Cronenberg - is the real spiritual progenitor of that cinema. This is not to say that Egoyan is seemingly the
most direct influence for either Bohdanowicz's
Never Eat Alone or McKenzie's
Werewolf. The former is clearly angling toward Chantal Akerman territory, which it mostly succeeds in hitting, while the latter reminded me above all of the raggedly ethereal quality of David Gordon Green's first two films. But Egoyan's early-career experiments (esp.
Next of Kin,
Family Viewing, and
Calendar) seem, if only indirectly, to be part of
Never Eat Alone's filmic DNA; and more discernibly, directly related still is
Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley, a "daughter" of sorts to Egoyan's art. As in Polley's film (and, for that matter, Sophy Romvari's excellent short
Nine Behind), family is a matter of some mystery, its seemingly known past transformed into
terra incognita by the dynamic functions of memory and questioning. In Bohdanowicz's documentary-fiction hybrid, an elderly woman tasks her granddaughter with tracking down an old CBC live-to-air musical melodrama, and, perhaps more importantly, the whereabouts of the man with whom she starred in that program. Underscoring the film's potent admixture of reality and artifice, Bohdanowicz inserts footage from the CBC program, filmed at Toronto's Casa Loma and delivered in romantic, mock-medieval style, into her film. In these scenes, we see a much younger, quite luminous incarnation of Bohdanowicz's grandmother, Joan Benac (who actually plays herself, or a version of herself, though an actress, Deragh Campbell, serves as a stand-in for Bohdanowicz), singing and swooning alongside a dashing baritone, her one-time would-be paramour. Bohdanowicz provides one answer to the question that I often find myself asking when watching old, obscure movies and TV programs: what happened to these people, not the major stars about whom biographies have been written and Wikipedia entries are updated daily, but the vast majority of semi-anonymous ghostly faces haunting our splendid pop-cultural past? In this case anyway, she went on to live a long, interesting life, maybe not extraordinary but not unmysterious either. The filmmaker expresses this by means of a remarkable attentiveness, her camera patiently observing the mundane daily habits of her grandmother, singing with her choir group, cooking and eating a dinner for one, lying on a couch reading a book. However quotidian all this may seem, there's something new and revelatory about it, insofar as we so rarely see older people just going about their days. This type of sensitive attention to oft-ignored individuals is a virtue shared by McKenzie's film, which centres on two young homeless people, a male and a female, both dependent upon daily doses of methadone. The film opens with a certain tragic event. Initially, it seems as though the story, stepping back and then moving forward again in time, will build inevitably toward that predisclosed conclusion. After supplying her audience with this foreknowledge, McKenzie circles around the trauma, in decidedly Egoyanesque fashion and not unlike
Manchester by the Sea, although Lonergan's film is more dramatically pronounced. In
Werewolf, quiet, fleeting moments, or scenes of incidental conflict, all take on a heightened, eerie quality in light of what's to come. But then - gradually, not all at once - McKenzie's film gracefully side-steps doom by switching tracks, that is, by transferring its attention and emphasis. It's a poignant feminist statement of, at once, the most obvious and the subtlest sort.
