How does the authenticity of a story affect our reception of it? Consider that novelists in time gone by referred to their fictions as “histories”, even “true histories”. Meanwhile, today, fraudulent memoirs are held up for bitter condemnation and their authors made into pariahs. In Un Secret, we have a story based on fact — remarkable, brutal fact that has more in common with Greek tragedies than is healthy. In fact, authenticity is thankfully beside the point because the story itself is such a riveting tragedy that one need never excuse it.
Claude Miller’s adaptation relies heavily on flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks. The structure is deftly handled, insofar as it reveals the story with a teasing suspense, but it also adds a sentimentality that is misplaced. There is nothing here to get misty about; the effect should be hollowing for the audience. The performances are strong: Cecile de France is immaculately alluring, Patrick Bruel is aptly built like one of Notre Dame’s buttresses and the fraught eroticism of their relationship is handled with a bristling mix of desire and pain. Ludivine Sagnier touches lightly on the shadow of Medea and Julie Depardieu turns up just to make sure at least one of the family gets a trot. The score is by Zbigniew Preisner, who brings his trademark haunting flute along just in case anyone missed it in Three Colours Blue, and Jacqueline Bouchard’s costumes are beautifully spot on. In the end, the story is extraordinary, the elements quite fine, but the result somewhat prosaic.
Opens May 15 at selected cinemas, check your guides.
Jacques Demy’s classic film from 1964 launched Catherine Deneuve into that heady stratosphere of aesthetic canonisation that the French do so well. In many ways, Deneuve’s career and name have eclipsed Demy’s, but watching his films reminds you of how bright his penumbra can be.
The Nouvelle Vague pin-ups Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut made their mark with black and white immediacy — you could sense the urge towards youthful street smarts in the bustling cinematography and locations of A Bout de Souffle and Jules et Jim. Demy is similarly reconfiguring the language of cinema but pulls it in the opposite chromatic direction. If you left a four year old alone with a bunch of Crayolas, they’d get pretty darn close to the colour palette in this film. Initially, Demy makes the rainy Cherbourg look like the Fauvists took over Jodphur and added some cobblestones. As the film’s storyline progresses, the palette smooths itself into creams and whites - it is an Expressionistic stylisation that belies the social realism of the plot and yet matches it incomparably well.
Demy’s cinematographer, Jean Rabier, had earned his stripes on Les Quatre Cents Coups with Truffaut, Les Amants with Louis Malle and Cléo de 5 à 7 with Agnès Varda. This was to be Demy’s first colour film and Rabier clearly pulled all the stops out. The lighting is unusually high-key, which makes the surrounding surfaces as luminous as the actors, and by playing with the balance of daylight and tungsten sources, Rabier heightens the contrast of candy-like interiors and blue exteriors.
Working alongside the cinematography in heightening the stylisation of it all is the amazing music by Michel Legrand. The film is less a movie than it is an operetta — the entire script is sung. Indeed, the score and voices were pre-recorded and the filming took place with actors miming to playback. Demy is paying homage to the musicals of the Hollywood studios, the melodramas of the French theatre and the opera of all Europe in one fell swoop. The effect is magical, unsentimental and triumphantly enjoyable.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Available now throughAztec International
$29.95
Also available is Demy’s 1967 follow-up The Young Girls of Rochefort.
Alegranza is an album remarkable in its ability to simultaneously invite and dismiss comparison. El Guincho is Pablo Diaz-Reixa and he’s managed to sample half a planet worth of music without it coalescing into a lazy homogeneity. His beats oscillate with wild abandon and yet the album feels tightly sprung, like a jack-in-the-box that’s been teasingly wound up. Born in the Canary Islands and now based in Barcelona, El Guincho kicks off Alegranza with a track that slams doowop honey up against salt-water-summer vocals and backs it up with a track that plucks itself out of the dancehalls of Sub-Saharan Africa. Its effervescent, glorious, lollipop music.
El Guincho: Alegranza out now through Mistletone Records
Get yourself along to see El Guincho’s Australian tour this May. He’s playing along with Architecture in Helsinki as well as solo sideshows, check your guides.
The WOMAD festival shows off some very fine musicians from around the world who would otherwise slip well under the radar of commercial radio and media here in Australia. At the same time, it doesn’t forget that the Occident is part of that very same world and from The Cruel Sea to the Kronos Quartet, it’s played host to some great talents from the USA, the UK and the Antipodes. Indeed, the Friday night line-up this year was dominated by these acts. The John Butler Trio and The Black Arm Band owned the big crowds early in the evening, with gospel queen Mavis Staples rounding out the main stage performances with a downright authoritative performance of classic soul. Staples couldn’t quite pronounce Adelaide’s name, but she wrapped her mouth around some awesome gravely tones as she stirred up the crowd with memories of the civil rights struggles of yesteryear and the struggles that continue to this day. In a style reminiscent of Jimmy Cliff, she gave such committed renditions of old standards that their cliché and nostalgia was replaced by an urgent passion.
The key headline act this year, Cesaria Evora, was forced to withdraw due to illness after the festival had already begun. And so, the big crowd-pleasing finale on Sunday night was left in the incontrovertibly safe hands of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. The band provided a three song lead-in for Jones, with a sound as taut as their bass drum insignia and dapper suits to match. With appetites whetted and anticipation building, Jones charged on stage with rambunctious determination and proceeded to belt out an audaciously cool funk. She shimmied, she hollered and she grooved. Out in the crowd, thousands upon thousands of people swivelled and bopped as the dust rose and the sweat poured. And then it was all over — 2 days, 3 nights.
Film and theatre are tempestuous bedfellows. For every spirited success (take Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street) there are five flaccid failures. In Benedict Andrews’ production of Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla the semiotics of cinema step firmly on to the boards.
This is a remarkable work of theatre. The direction is fluid and graceful and the performances often brilliant. The set, rather than taking the traditional Sarsaparilla form of three houses side by side, compacts the action into a single building, mounted on a revolve. There is no risk of confusion: Andrews is a deft choreographer and conducts our attention with precise and seamless shifts. Added to this is the presence in the house of cameras and two screens at either side of the stage that relay their perspectives to us. The result is that the cutting up of the space is left to invisible lines: vectors of movement and angles of light.
The shared space of the set fundamentally changes the thematic dynamics of the play. Gone are the class-based material differences of the houses; gone is the false sense of security that discreteness can imbue. In their place comes a more private and disturbing landscape. The essential dislocation and failing connection between characters is heightened by the dark irony of their proximity. There are very few moments of spatial isolation on stage, yet the loneliness and disparity of the Mildred St inhabitants is often acute. The space is public but the isolation is private.
This dialectic of private and public space parallels the tension between the theatrical and cinematic elements of this production. The camera is a monocular viewer and the sole witness to the light it captures. On the other hand, theatre is stereoscopic and pluralistic in its witnessing. An actor on the stage cannot look out at an audience and make eye contact with everyone at once but an actor on the screen can. To see the eyes of the actor peering out at you, even if it is through the processed reflection of camera, projector and screen, is a window on the private world of a character. However illusory the experience may be, the sense is that this is a private audience with the character — an intimate moment of self-revelation. Thus, the public arena of the theatre is entwined with the private diegesis of the cinema. And where the theatre of Sarsaparilla is inherently allegorical or, at least, metaphorical, the cinema of Sarsaparilla is psychological and personal.
The screens have another important part to play with respect to the composition of the space. Theatre is rarely “widescreen” - its historical connection with everything from the gods to the lighting rig is vertical. Cinema is all about horizontals - from railroads to deserts - and the addition of the two screens, at either side of the set, widen the “aspect ratio” of the Playhouse stage. Perhaps this seems a trivial point, but the thematic ramifications are enticing. None of the characters, except Roy Child (Eden Falk), ever bother to look up, to peer heavenwards in hope of inspiration or, at the very least, some “razzle dazzle”. Roy seems to be the authorial voice of Patrick White incarnate, though he is never made more sympathetic than anyone else, and there is something hapless and futile in his vertical ambitions. The rest of the cast, staid in their horizontal urban sprawl, are usually framed by windows that cut off the completeness of their lives like a scene from Rear Window. The only thing they have to look out at is the audience, an enigmatic view that the audience is clearly denied and that, therefore, may as well not exist. The result is a cyclical ennui, an implacable desperation muffled by a suburban complacency that refuses to look up or down for a different way.
The cinematic shift of space in Sarsaparilla is paralleled by its shift in time. The cameras capture moving images but if there is nothing moving within their frame, there is simply photography. Time stands still, as it were. The directorial eye of Benedict Andrews can linger over apparently minor details - an empty beer glass or perhaps an out-of-place hat. The wandering eyes of the theatre audience necessarily take note of the static screens and the cinematic language of montage is thereby born. A woman enters, we see a stranger’s hat, there is a moment’s pause and the full impact of the hat is known to us. From Antonioni to Marker, the stillness of an image and its extension through time can be as redolent with meaning as a sweep of action because it is its juxtaposition, its context that imbues it with significance.
What Andrews has created in this production of The Season at Sarsaparilla is not just a wonderful piece of theatre but a worthy piece of cinematic craftsmanship. No doubt, this theatre is no film, nor should it be, but in working with cinematic language so fluently, Andrews has managed to integrate the two with rare success.
Warriors of Art: A Guide to Contemporary Japanese Artists
by Yumi Yamaguch
published by Kodansha International, distributed by Bookwise International
RRP $49.95
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this elegantly presented survey is that much of the artwork seems startlingly familiar. Certainly part of this familiarity might come about through the Yankeephile integration of Western tropes into Japanese life but it is notable, nevertheless, how pervasive an impact contemporary Japanese aesthetics have had on our popular culture. From Astro Boy to the Mario Brothers, from Hello Kitty to yamato-e, the markers of Japanese style have become globalised and commodified — and thus, sadly, sometimes made quotidian to the point of dullness.
This book, if nothing else, can inspire new reflections on just this dilemma. How can Japanese artists continue to work in styles that have been so objectionably hijacked and exploited by consumerism? Of course, some dodge the quandary by taking their own idiosyncratic path but, as this book attests, most choose to tackle the matter head on.
Takashi Murakami is probably the most famed of the artists on display. His delightful fancies look like Walt Disney had a big weekend with some Japanese dadaists. More accurately, his meticulously detailed and highly complex works take manga and anime and churn them into high art. He also designed the multi-coloured patterning on Louis Vuitton bags, which is either the most inspired cross-promotion since Warhol’s soup cans or a grievous error of judgment for both parties. Murakami writes with fervour of the superflat culture of Japan — the facile and hollow imagery of materialism — and his artwork, it seems, works to further flatten, with ironic glee, the icons of manga that so pervade.
Taking a stab at the pornographic arm of manga, known as hentai in the West, are artists Makato Aida and Mahomi Kunikata, who draw on two of the extremes of the genre: sadomasochism and pedophilia, respectively. Kunikata’s deliberately naive pictures of self-abusing school girls is both an indictment of lurid eroticism and a disarmingly affecting work of empathy for the clearly confused subjects. Kunikata also added her faux-porn to pieces of sushi, creating small pieces of indigestible sexploitation out of raw fish.
There are forty artists represented in Warriors of Art. Each one allowed several examples of their work and provided with a concise blurb by the author. Though hardly an exhaustive tome, it offers a tantalising glimpse at the best new artists to come out of Japan in the last few years. Whet your appetite.
Gillian Armstrong’s latest directorial outing, Death Defying Acts, is a glossy cage of cinematic feints signifying nothing. The story is a pretty typical contrivance — a rich man offers a reward and a pair of likely aspirants try to con their way into a fortune. The twist is that the rich man is Harry Houdini and that one of the money-hungry aspirants is Catherine Zeta-Jones - although apparently she’s playing a character.
Guy Pearce, who plays Houdini, is at his best (as in L.A. Confidential) when playing men with a dangerously fractured masculinity. His jaw line’s mix of delicate effeminacy and bristling physical tension gives him a vulnerability and impotence that is always a fidget away from shocking rage and untempered violence. As Houdini, Pearce has returned to the physical form and masochistic drive of the bodybuilder he once was. The role should be a good fit, but instead we are given a self-conscious blankness that makes Houdini a hollow showman.
Zeta-Jones is similarly superficial and dislikeable as a hardened single-mother-cum-sexy-psychic. Her precocious daughter (Saoirse Ronan) is, well, precocious. Timothy Spall pops in and lends his doughy jowls to proceedings but can’t lift the film out of its pointlessness.
If everyone is an illusionist, if every action and emotion is just a sleight of hand, then the unreality has to be unapologetically spectacular or there’s nothing to care about. Death Defying Acts is a cheap stunt parading as something more, but I think we can spot a naked emperor when we see one.
Take several established directors.
Add a handful of legendary actors (with a sprinkle of fashionable ones).
Fold in some cobble stones and avenues.
Add it to a well-greased pan, splash it with Pernod and put it into a fan-forced oven.
Remove it before it’s fully baked and serve with 4kg of icing sugar.
If you like the sound of that, you’ll like Paris, Je T’Aime. If the idea of a frivolous confection for the whole family doesn’t get you salivating, steer clear.
It’s not all saccharine nonsense though, some of the short-films in this compendium work hard to redeem the rest. Daniela Thomas and Walter Salles provide a profoundly simple vignette of a young mother from the banlieue and Alexander Payne’s 14ème Arrondissement, which closes the film, is all the more remarkable in its monotone melancholia when set in relief against the heartless fancies before it.
Stylistically, the film is much of a muchness. France’s cinematic aesthetes like Jeunet, Besson and Ozon are notably missing. So, it’s left to Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle to add some surreal panache and, unfortunately, it’s just a silly muddle.
At least on DVD, you can skip to the good stuff.
Noise is hardly an underrated film. It earned its makers a host of major nominations and some very handy wins. Yet, somehow, the rumble of critical acclaim wasn’t enough to launch the film with quite the stratospheric trajectory it seemed to deserve. Nevertheless, for those of us who simply missed out during its time in the cinema, there is now a 2-disc Madman release to let us in on what everyone else was so impressed by.
Director Matthew Saville grew up in Adelaide, attending the same high school as Scott Hicks, before joining the typical eastward migration to Melbourne, eventually studying film at VCA at the ripe old age of 29. After a steady career in the screen industry in various guises, Noise is his feature film debut. And a more accomplished debut is hard to imagine.
After the opening credits, which are set against a blurred and fidgeting nightscape, the first scene drops us into a familiar Melbourne world: the Flinders Street Station subway at night, a dank corridor to a distant platform, a young woman with big headphones wrapping her in a private world of sound. What follows is far from familiar – a film that is extraordinary in its chilling audacity and in its deep tension.
Saville wrote and directed the film but he is a wise collaborator as much as an auteur. His partner and composer, Bryony Marks, provides a brilliant score that is at times as scabrously atonal as Penderecki. His Hungarian-born cinematographer, László Baranyai, fills the crisp film stock with a short depth of field that keeps the action confrontingly immediate and dislocated. Sound designer Emma Bortignon’s brief, to convey the internal struggle of a tinnitus-sufferer, is unnervingly well-executed.
The onscreen talent is equally as important. Saville worked with several of the actors on earlier projects and you sense a common understanding of what the film is trying to achieve. Maude Davey, former Artistic Director of Vitalstatistix and a first-rate animateur, is blissfully believable in a minor role as a rollerblading policewoman, while Luke Elliot is an endearingly gelatinous hulk of grieving husband.
Brendan Cowell is, for want of a better term, the anti-hero of the story. A naturally intelligent presence, his character’s reserve and egotism suggest a mind unwilling to reveal its complexity to the simple world around it. Yet his character, a plodding policeman, is far from a bright spark. Cowell extends his vowel sounds into a drawl of apathetic, self-satisfied Australianness that grates itself against naïfs and sociopaths alike.
Though I’ve chosen not to expound it, the film’s plot is not so much a detective story as a thriller. Cowell is a protagonist in the way slow-moving astral bodies can be – he draws the cosmos to him with only a small desire to do anything about it. Yet, despite his faults, despite his sloth, he is redeemed both in his own eyes and the eyes of those around him.
The Meat Market is one of Melbourne’s most beautiful venues. The cast iron meat hooks are still on the beams, the names of the butchers are still painted in copperplate and the arches of the central arcade give a classical lift to proceedings. Nestled in North Melbourne, the hall has been given a facelift for the Beck’s Bar tag, with a swish bar that screams German efficiency and a line-up of musicians aimed to please the stovepipe generation.
Brazil’s mystique never seems to waver. From baile funk to waxing, the West loves to aspire to its sweaty-wet sultriness and lime-infused cool. With roots firmly placed in her home country’s inimitable tradition of gentle guitar and vocals, Badi Assad sets herself her apart from the bossa nova crowd with acrobatic guitar and vocal idiosyncrasies that make you wonder whether Ani Difranco and Bobby McFerrin didn’t have a lovechild after all. She has a disarming lightness of being and sings of hummingbird kisses but she also has a bold knack for covers that matches the vaunted Bowie-turns of her compatriot Seu Jorge. With gleeful abandon she clicks, ululates and birdcalls her way through U2, Björk and Tori Amos numbers, while plucking and strumming the guitar with the finesse of a classical purist.
Striking a very different musical impression are the Mexican electro-poppers Kinky. With enough masculine energy to topple a junta, the quintet take to the stage with a brand of danceable rock that is one part Corona, two parts Tequila and three sheets to the wind. Unfortunately, the crowd was under capacity, so the full force of messy gyration was a little underwhelming but Kinky were unfazed. The diminutive front man, Gilberto Cerezo, who looked like Lord Byron had met a toreador and nicked his clothes, blasted out some trumpet along with some lyrics, but that was where the Mariachi influence started and thankfully finished. At their best, the group slide from metal guitar solos into screaming techno sirens with nary a pause to dodge the genre police. At their worst, they hammer out banal English words and fuzzy rock. Nevertheless, their musical highs and fancy lightshow suggested a capacity for engaging mayhem along the lines of CSS sans the feminine irony.
And, as for the Beck’s Bar, it should be positively pumping on Saturday night for the closing night party. Judging by last year’s balltearer of a shindig, Kristy Edmunds should be in a very good mood and keen for hugs at 3am, so get yourselves to some more shows and scope out which artist you want to take home next weekend - there’s $10 in it if anyone can get Merce Cunningham’s number.
