Two Pianos

In an old interview with David Ehrlich, filmmaker and critic Kent Jones recalls a conversation with Arnaud Desplechin in which the great French director told him “a script is a very small thing. The movie is the thing.” It’s a wonderfully succinct summation of Desplechin’s interests as an artist; there’s always a story, a plot, and characters in his movies — he is in some ways a fairly traditional dramaturgist. But what brings his best films fully to life are the small moments of idiosyncratic behaviors he captures, formal flourishes that cause a rupture in the proceedings. It’s in these ruptures, these fissures, that Desplechin’s art truly resides. 

It will surprise no one that Desplechin’s latest film, Two Pianos, is a story of star-crossed lovers separated by time and circumstance. Mathias (François Civil) is a piano prodigy who has returned home to Lyon after an eight-year sojourn in Japan. He has been summoned by his mentor, the renowned pianist Elena (Charlotte Rampling), who wants him to accompany her on a series on concerts that will act as her farewell to public performances (and, it is intimated, return Mathias to a level of fame that he has squandered in the intervening years). Desplechin and co-writer Kamen Velkovsky also introduce Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), her husband Pierre (Jeremy Lewin), and their son Simon (Valentin Picard), as well as Claude’s best friend Judith (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) and Mathias’ agent Max (Hippolyte Girardot). It’s a sprawling number of characters, and much of the first half of the film is spent establishing Mathias’ connection to each. Claude is Mathias’ old lover and Pierre his former best friend, while Max acts as a sort of guardian angel who protects Mathias from his worst instincts. Which feels necessary, because the former prodigy is a mess, running from his past and his talent, still in awe of Elena but hesitant to play for her. He drinks, gets tossed in jail, and upon laying eyes on Claude for the first time in eight years, immediately faints. 

The patented Desplechin rupture comes in two parts, their connection eventually revealed as Mathias and Claude’s shared past comes into full view. First, Pierre dies suddenly, with no warning, in a stunningly abrupt sequence. Next, Mathias spots a young boy at a playground and is stunned to see that he looks exactly like himself at age 8. Mathias tumbles into an existential funk, convinced he has found some sort of doppelgänger that haunts him like a ghost. It’s a metaphysical conceit that will ultimately have a more quotidian explanation, but not until Pierre’s funeral leads to a sort of reunion (but not a reconciliation) between Mathias and Claude. 

What’s so enthralling about Two Pianos is Desplechin’s odd rhythms, his own kind of musicality in form. The narrative stretches and compresses in fascinating ways, revealing major plot points in just a few lines of dialogue while allowing moments of doubt or fear or lust linger and undulate. Characters enter the narrative only to just as abruptly leave, the scenario gradually paring itself down to focus entirely on Mathias and Claude. Long musical interludes consisting of Debussy, Chopin, and Bartok lend the proceedings an almost operatic grandeur, even as the emotions on display are familiar, even granular. Ever the playful formalist, Desplechin employs frequent jump cuts, disrupts shot-counter-shot conversations with mismatching lines of sight, and often distorts the widescreen image via wide-angle lenses.. The image bulges and compresses in fascinating ways, everything left just slightly off-balance. Which is to say, Two Pianos is a film endowed with the energy and unconventionality of life itself. Early on in the narrative, Elena tells Mathias that she’s a “monster” because she has no home. She chose performing all over the world in lieu of marriage and children. Two Pianos becomes, then, a story of a man who must choose if he too is willing to become a monster. It’s a portrait of the artist in the act of becoming. If there is no room in modern cinephilia for Desplechin, then we have truly lost something. — DANIEL GORMAN

Case 137

At first glance, Dominik Moll’s Case 137 looks a lot like his last film, the César-winning The Night of the 12th. That film was a police procedural organized around an unsolved murder that used its inherent lack of resolution as means to both explore a broader social issue, a prevailing cultural misogyny, and drill into the personal psychology of its police protagonists. If its structural aspirations brought to mind Zodiac or Memories of Murder, its form was decidedly more pedestrian and its impact hampered by clumsy thematic underlining in dialogue. But while Case 137 arrives with the style and the rhythms of its predecessor intact, they are employed to greater effect in this context and bolstered by a great central performance from Léa Drucker.

Set during the early days of France’s yellow vest protests in 2018, the film follows IGPN (that’s French for Internal Affairs) officer Stephanie Bertrand (Drucker), whose desk is inundated with complaints regarding police violence against protestors. Her work is fairly routine and the heavy workload — not to mention institutional indifference — leaves little time to properly investigate each case. But the case of a brutally injured young man shot in the head with a riot round becomes an object of obsession. The injury’s severity is part of her interest, but the man’s family’s origin in her hometown of St. Dizier draws her in further. Whether this is simply personal connection or latent working class solidarity on Bertrand’s part is left purposefully unclear.

Her investigation unfolds mostly as a series of interviews with the victim’s family and police suspects in the offices of the IGPN, with sequences of fieldwork being few and far between. These scenes are presented either in the kinds of snappy montages that create a mosaic reconstruction of events through multiple testimonies or as long interrogations of a single subject which use their extended duration to gesture at progress before routinely denying clean answers or erecting a new institutional roadblock. Though this is typical, generic form, Moll executes it skillfully and without attention-seeking fuss. Where The Night of the 12th was sometimes limited by its unadorned style, Case 137’s even greater stylistic restraint produces an oppressive atmosphere within the drab interiors. If his previous film announced its lack of resolution in an opening title card, Moll now suggests the limits of internal police investigation by building aesthetic walls that mirror a bureaucracy designed to frustrate Bertrand and protect the perpetrators of state violence.

Though Moll doesn’t abstain from the simple pleasures of a policier — an early crack in the case involving a string of security cameras and a roving gang of masked police is a thrilling bit of procedure — most of the film’s drama is mined from the gray area inhabited by IGPN police like Bertrand. She is set apart from the other cops, including her narcotics detective ex-husband and his new girlfriend, who treat her as an adversary as they repeatedly invoke the police union and accuse her of wanting to destroy the reputation of the police in an increasingly fraught time for the profession. Any suggestion of oversight is an affront to the immunity cops seem to take for granted. It is increasingly clear as the film goes on that the police see themselves as at war with not just the yellow vest protestors, but the public at large.

Bertrand, however, still views herself as a cop — she transferred to IGPN from narcotics when her son was born — and is rankled by ACAB sentiment. She operates in the field like a detective as well, and her interactions with witnesses verge on overreach. To the public, she is just another police officer, an uncaring figurehead who exists only to offer the illusion of accountability. When confronted by a witness, Bertrand concedes that no police officers have been successfully convicted or even fired as a result of these internal misconduct investigations. Bertrand’s lack of allies allows Case 137 to build empathy for her impossible situation, but the film does not let her off the hook as a member of the force. Good as her intentions may be, the shape of the film suggests that internal investigation is doomed to fail, that a system by which the police regulate themselves is ineffectual at best.

Moll’s narrow focus on policework short changes the yellow vests themselves, however. They are uncomplicated victims of systemic injustice, and while the film’s sympathies never leave them behind, their actual politics are only paid lip service, as if the setting of the film is just useful context for a police story Moll wants to tell more than an ideological struggle of its own. Zooming in to portray the IGPN’s part in the protests limits the film’s political dimensions, but if this gives it something of a ceiling, Case 137 remains an effective procedural with designs toward a structural social critique. — CHRIS MELLO

Hugo

Robert Zucchini — with a nom de plume that simultaneously signifies an Italian origin and mitigates any self-seriousness — loves Victor Hugo. He’s a writer, an actor, and a director, and inhabits all three roles in his successful one-man show where he simply reads a curated selection of the great Frenchman’s writings and comments on their significance. His attitude to Hugo during these shows is fawning, laudatory, hagiographic, but still a tad funny, as when he engages in call-and-response readings of Les Contemplations to point out its peculiar comedic timing. He also loves his daughter, though she’s nowhere near as present in his life as the long-dead Hugo.

This is the setup of the late Sophie Fillières’ last screenplay, Victor comme tout le monde (bizarrely translated as Hugo for American audiences, as if that title won’t be immediately cannibalized by a certain Scorsese picture on any Google result), and one can guess where it goes from here. But, like all of Fillières’ works, familiarity is no damper on quality, and this picture, directed by Fillières’ partner Pascal Bonitzer, plays the right notes during its riffs on family, obsession, French literary history, and the rotating obligations of thespian life.

Longtime Éric Rohmer favorite Fabrice Luchini (another French-Italian) plays the lively Zucchini with his typical warm yet distanced approach. He does it well, as he’s been doing it for some time in his very own Fabrice Luchini Reads Victor Hugo series for the stage. But, offstage, he plays another kind of obsessive — one who constantly looks at his phone in case his estranged daughter Lisbeth (Marie Narbonne) finally forgives him for not attending his ex-wife’s (and her mother’s) funeral. Once she reestablishes contact by attending one of his performances, Zucchini intends to repair what he’s broken, though he constantly tries to do so through the ever-narrowing lens of Hugo’s life and works. Yet, this is not a film that relies on high-stakes drama or big displays of emotion. Only one scene even pretends to feel tense, and most disagreements and little fights are nearly instantly resolved. Fillières, like Rohmer, finds value in the moments in-between those most dramatic, and this light-hearted tale of reunion — of the missteps and tiny acts of forgiveness on the path to reconciliation — is a valiant effort in portraying the complications of life and art.

Most of the story’s little pleasures come from Zucchini’s inability to take even playful criticism of his beloved idol without, albeit cautious and friendly, launching into another miniature lecture about Hugo’s life and circumstances. When he finds out that Lisbeth is involved with a smaller theater putting on a reading series from the perspective of Hugo’s “femmes” — obvious counter-programming to his performance — he simultaneously launches into bouts of praise for the women while trying to excuse Hugo’s infidelity and fatherly shortcomings. Of course, Lisbeth’s friends don’t care to “take down” Hugo and find the grand actor’s constant “but”s and “because”s to be nothing but amusing, but Zucchini can’t stop himself from defending Hugo against a possible #MeToo claim that never materializes. A lesser film may have made this the focus: an out-of-touch old man railing against Gen-Z women critical of Hugo and therefore the entire French literary tradition. But this film makes the whole thing a humorous misunderstanding, one that can still play with those themes without reducing anyone to a cartoon.

But at the heart of the film is a rhyme between Hugo’s daughter’s own death (”the key to everything” regarding Hugo’s personal life and later works according to Zucchini) and the distance between Zucchini and his own daughter. A trip to Hugo’s home in Guernsey begets a conversation of Zucchini and his late wife’s trip there, one that resulted in their first kiss. Lisbeth, thinking this story quite meaningful, leaves in the morning with her boyfriend to go out to the very same sea her parents’ relationship first took to the current. When Zucchini can’t find them, he panics as he recounts, who else, Hugo and his drowned daughter Léopoldine. It’s in moments like this that the obvious parallel between Zucchini and Hugo announces itself too much and borders on the saccharine and the weepy in an otherwise low-stakes venture.

Hugo’s cinematography and music never seek to impress, but why would they? This is a film about little moments, and the camera and sound fully service each of those moments such that faces can be seen wincing at the right time and Luchini’s flustered personality never comes across as dismissive. It’s a subtle, charming work with humble aspirations, and it takes a certain kind of talent to make such a picture buoyant and lively, like a small boat riding the currents off the Guernsey coast. — ZACH LEWIS

The Stranger

“Listen Mr. Mersault, You’re not the first nor last to kill an Arab. You won’t be faulted for that. Trust me, I know the French justice system.” This attempt as reassurance arrives in the middle of François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It is one of a very few lines and moments invented for Ozon’s two-hour film, adapted from Camus’ slim 1942 novella, and it stands out as a sledgehammer blast for that reason. The Stranger has beguiled readers, academics, and philosophers for over 80 years because the simply-told and meticulously constructed story is layered with implication, but kept entirely ambiguous, open to diametrically opposed interpretations of what both the story means and Camus himself believed or was attempting to convey with any given monosyllabic response from its detached narrator/killer. With a few minor tweaks, Ozon has sapped The Stranger of this ambiguity, and in doing so, robbed much of what has made the text worthy of the rich debate that has stretched over nearly a century.

For the many readers of this film nerd outlet who have not yet embarked on the tenth grade’s required reading, The Stranger follows Meursault, a young white French clerk in colonial Algiers who has a muted response to the sudden death of his elderly mother, almost immediately begins a relationship with a young woman that becomes an engagement, becomes enmeshed in the tawdry drama of a shady neighbor, murders an unnamed Arab connected to that drama, spends a year in jail, stands trial, and is convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to be beheaded by guillotine. Meursault floats through the novel as a dispassionate, passive narrator, with much of the action, good and bad, occurring to him unwittingly, including, arguably, the murder. 

It is widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s best books because within that plot — stretched to 120 pages in this writer’s Vintage International copy, including very generous margins — the novel is a Magic Eye whose meaning changes depending on what perspective you bring to its action and what decade you’re picking it up in. It’s absurdist, or is it racist, or is it both, or is it neither? And what of its author? One read of the story is that the young clerk is a colonizer who relishes the simple lifestyle of this coastal north African city far from Paris, oriented around the beach, the salt carrying on the air, the quaint bistros, the browned bodies in the sun, but also never quite comfortable in that climate and the, at times, unbearable midday heat and the glaring intensity of that sun that Meursault will claim drove him to murder. 

The Arab Meursault kills, the brother of his neighbor’s mistress, is an abstraction in the book. Is this because the murder itself — like the Arabs in the town he occupies — is an abstraction to Meursault? Is the book meant to be a purely rhetorical, philosophical allegory using murder and condemnation as a symbolic device to make a point about alienation in a society dictated by an inauthentic morality itself dictated by Christianity? What is Meursault’s true sin? Failing to performatively grieve his mother? Is it being honest about his vague motives for killing the Arab rather than playing the game and embracing a narrative that would’ve allowed a racist system to acquit him of his crime? What does it say that Meursault would rather kill than lie?

This is a review of a film, not an essay about a novel, but the point is you will walk out of Ozon’s film relieved of most of these quandaries and lines of questioning. Aside from a few conveniences of adaptation, taking a few internal monologues and placing them in the mouths of characters, Ozon’s main addition is injecting the indigenous Algerian perspective into the narrative. The film opens with a period-specific advertisement that might’ve been made by the French tourism bureau encouraging nationals to come visit their property by birthright, undercut by revolutionary graffiti. Meursault’s neighbor’s mistress (Hajar Bouzaouit) and her grief is brought to the fore. Evening prayer carries on the air as the action of the film happens around willfully ignorant Meursault. As he is carted off to jail, we see women in hijabs and boys playing football in the street that he is at last able to truly see. 

Because this is Ozon, Meursault is played by Benjamin Voisin, the hot and ripped vision of blonde French masculinity, and the murder is depicted as having overt, tortured, homoerotic undertones between oppressor and oppressed. The Stranger ends with the same famous line from the novella, but with an added beat, as the mistress, here named Dijemila, mourns over the grave of her murdered brother overlooking Meursault’s beloved ocean, lingering on that headstone that, like Kamel Daoud’s hit 2014 reinterpretation The Meursault Investigation, gives the Arab a proper name, while removing all subtlety from the story. Ozon’s film becomes a morality play, of the white man who unjustly, callously killed an Algerian and received a punishment commensurate with his crime. Some might argue this is what the story always has been, and those people probably didn’t care for The Stranger.

Ozon nails all the details, down to the nurse with a bandage where her nose should be, the fondling of a breast, an escape artist distracting an old neighbor (Denis Lavant!) while a mangy dog runs away. When the film was first shown in the fall of last year at Venice, it garnered comparisons to Bresson, but in its gorgeous black-and-white photography and its literalist, near verbatim treatment of its high school English source material, the film rather evokes Ripley, Steve Zaillan’s stately, eight-episode series that was arguably detrimentally faithful to Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel. Both of these productions are sumptuous, and studied, but in their slavish attention to detail, they lose the essence and magic of their texts. 

This has less to do with Ozon than Camus and his novella, which has never had a successful adaptation in spite of several tries. It resists filmic language because of its construction, with a first half that is written in an “American” fashion, as Camus framed it at the time, with short, blunt, visceral, and descriptive Hemingwayesque sentences, before Meursault goes to jail in the second half and the narrative becomes interior and crushing in its doomed elaborate lyricism. This comes after the murder, where the point and true inquisition of the novel lives. It is also, uncoincidentally, the exact moment the film loses sight of its purpose, and falls apart. — ABE BEAME

Affection Affection

A suspicious disappearance of a teenage girl in a small town on the Côte d’Azur sends a young woman searching and spiraling in the Cartesian truth drama Affection Affection. It’s the winter season, and the picturesque little town is troubled by minor mysteries, from a missing white puppy to a disturbing mine explosion on the beach. But Géraldine (Agathe Bonitzer) seems to be the only one truly concerned. She works at the office of town mayor Jérôme (Christophe Paou), soon revealed as her romantic partner and father of the 17-year-old Kenza (Clémentine Kaul-Surdez). Things become more alarming when her stepdaughter disappears on her birthday, just as Géraldine’s absentee mother Rita (Nathalie Richard) returns to town after nearly two decades of living in Thailand. Géraldine told teenagers run away at least once, but she isn’t convinced. What sort of secrets does this village keep under wraps? Why did her mother decide to come back? Is she lonely or terminally ill?

Conflicting narratives and morbid conspiracy theories follow as Géraldine plays detective and pursues some leads on Kenza’s whereabouts, exacerbated by Jérôme’s subsequent disappearance, with little help from an indifferent cop who keeps asking her to bring a letter to someone he courts. The more the protagonist rolls with every development, the more Affection Affection becomes beguilingly strange and slippery, operating within the same register as many an Alain Guiraudie movie. Naturally, there are detours and unexpected encounters, including a visit to a long-unseen friend that later involves a foursome.

Following their previous collaboration in 2018’s Blonde Animals, Affection Affection is the second feature by the filmmaking duo of Maxime Matray and Alexia Walther. Their film is a character study, albeit loosely. Never the people-pleaser, Géraldine learns more about herself and the relationships she sustains than the case she’s trying to solve, though eventually it snaps into focus. “I think she exists in you,” a stranger, claiming to sense a person’s aura, tells her. “You are the 17-year-old teenager.”

The sparse story works itself out through double meanings, symbolism, and repetitions. No matter how misleading the clues are, they seem to overlap, gesturing toward the same, still-shrouded thing that gives this otherwise ordinary village its sinister sheen. The signs are there, if one looks just a little bit closer and deeper. “This is the way the world ends,” declares the graffiti on the wall of Jérôme’s neighbors, which he keeps fretting over. There is a scarecrow in a full suit mistaken for somebody’s other self. There is tarot talk about The Hanged Man, just as the head of a statue is found hurled into a pool. In this way, Affection Affection often feels fascinatingly metaphysical and somehow out of time, mirrored by a Micha Vanony score that is enigmatically elemental. The film’s aesthetic, meanwhile, is exceptional in its muted appeal, taking full advantage of the French Riviera’s sun-drenched beauty, from beautiful villas overlooking the open sea to seemingly enchanted terrains that echo the film’s ambiguous power, though some images admittedly contribute little more than the general sense of mysticism.

At its most potent, Affection Affection offers a compelling talking picture, where characters often eavesdrop and chime in without warning or as they please, where explicit references to T.S. Eliot casually make their way into a conversation, where humor is dryly appealing, and where one thing might mean something else entirely. “I don’t trust figurative meanings,” says Géraldine at one point. There is, of course, an attempt at the philosophical here, but Matray and Walther never allow the work to be weighed down by it — just enough so to give their project a little more texture. The French duo fashions a film that evokes a withdrawn but nevertheless gripping sensibility about the absurdities of truth, memory, and human connections. If you’re not entirely sure you understand everything, well, as the film articulates, you don’t exactly need to. — LÉ BALTAR

At Work

Valerie Donzelli’s At Work has proven divisive since its festival premiere last year; a film about an artist’s existential ennui while searching for his authentic self that also incorporates a critique of the modern gig economy, it’s simultaneously of the moment and decidedly old-fashioned. Some critics have dismissed Paul (Bastien Bouillon) as a poseur, a dilettante who’s playing at poverty as opposed to a person who has genuine reasons for their lack of means. It’s a fair point, but it misses what Donzelli’s film is actually about, as well as the long history (mostly literary) of artists’ struggles against “the world.” 

As the film begins, Paul is presenting his newest novel to his editor, Alice( Virginie Ledoyen). She informs him that his last book has not been successful, especially given the promotional push the publishing house dedicated to it. She also doesn’t like the draft of his new work, a sad-sack tome about the dissolution of his marriage. People don’t want to read stuff like this anymore, according to Alice. So, Paul returns home, where his ex-wife (a cameo by director Donzelli herself) and teenage children are packing in preparation for a big move. They’re leaving France, and Paul has neither the desire nor means to try to stop it. He’s leaving their nicely appointed apartment, too, moving into a small studio space that belongs to a family friend. We learn via occasional bursts of voiceover narration that Paul was once a successful commercial photographer, but gave it up to become a writer. And while he’s had several novels published (no small feat this day and age), they garner very little income. To make matters worse, he’s already spent the advance for his newest, unfinished work. 

But Paul is fiercely determined and unrelentingly stubborn, and instead of looking for stable work, he turns to a gig work app. He likes the idea of only taking jobs he wants, leaving him ample time for writing. The app itself is functional, but entirely plausible: not so different from TaskRabbit, potential clients post various odd jobs and users have to be the lowest bidder to get hired. Much of the film, then, consists of simply observing Paul at work, embarking on all manner of low-paid manual labor in exchange for less than minimum wage. He struggles to take apart a huge metal futon frame for a young woman and her hobbled boyfriend, interrupts a house party to build a dresser, and winds up using shears to cut the grass in someone’s backyard instead of a mower (which he doesn’t have and the client assumed he would provide himself). It’s all mildly amusing, watching Paul perform tasks that he’s clearly not cut out for, but the mental, physical, and financial tolls mount. 

Adapted for the screen by Donzelli and Gilles Marchand from Franck Courtès’ semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, At Work occasionally resembles Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in its look at the gruelling work of being poor. Paul argues with himself about the nature of poverty, admitting that he’s not genuinely impoverished even as he pinches pennies and skips meals. He notices his own weight loss, does laundry in a sink and hangs it from the ceiling to dry, and at one point even brings home a roadkill deer to harvest the meat. Paul documents his struggles and begins filling notebooks with observations about his various jobs and daily encounters, but never quite tips over into self-loathing or complaining. Despite the protests of his friends and family, Paul sticks with his choice to live beneath his means, valuing a certain kind of freedom while being clear-eyed about the degradation of gig work. 

If At Work falters, it’s in a too-tidy ending, where Paul finally publishes something popular and wins the respect of his son. But even here, in an ostensibly happy ending, the hard reality of modern publishing persists (Paul is still booking gig work during a book signing). As appreciation for the arts and the work of artists in all mediums is constantly degraded in our tech-driven world, At Work offers a hard look at the reality of producing something of value in a culture that prefers quick, easy, and disposable. — DANIEL GORMAN