Friday, March 31, 2006

PFA Presents The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy

Jacques Demy has taken a lot of hits over the years. He was a man who attempted to make movies for everyone, yet he was never what people wanted him to be. He wasn’t political enough, wasn’t edgy enough, wasn’t rebellious enough.


But his critics were often missing the point. Demy did not aspire to be political, edgy or rebellious. He did not attempt to portray characters burdened with the world’s problems. He didn’t look for timely themes, didn’t try to capture a moment in history. Demy was more concerned with the timeless themes of love, happiness and heartache; he merely wanted to show people swept up in the joy and agony of love.


Pacific Film Archive is seeking to rectify these misconceptions with “The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy,” a series of five of his films, as well as Jacquot, a documentary about the director made by his wife, filmmaker Agnes Varda. The series began Thursday and runs through Sunday.


Demy’s first film, Lola, was greeted with praise by his contemporaries. Lola embodied so much of what the French New Wave embraced: young French people in modern, realistic locales, facing real-life dilemmas, sprinkled with references to American movies and culture.


The New Wave was about aesthetics and attitude; its characters shared a certain disaffection with or alienation from their surroundings. Demy’s work shares the referential nature of the New Wave; his films are steeped in Hollywood lore and mannerisms, but he doesn’t share the New Wave’s alienation and rebelliousness. For while Demy’s characters may become restless and disenchanted with their surroundings, all it takes is a little affection from the opposite sex to rekindle their excitement with the world—much too bourgeois for the New Wave.


Lola’s male lead, Roland (Marc Michel), is lost and wandering through life, as are his counterparts in such New Wave classics as Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Band of Outsiders. But there is no grand meaning or sociological statement behind Roland’s predicament—he’s just lazy. And lonely. He wanders from job to job and cafe to cafe, but he’s not looking for a religion, a political cause, or for fulfillment through work. Nor is he searching for identity, really. He is simply looking for love. And yes, it is through companionship that he hopes to find meaning and fulfillment, but this is almost an afterthought; Roland more or less just wants to be happy.


Though Lola has all the trappings of the New Wave, it is at odds with the movement in that its story is at its root a simple one. Demy is not trying to make a grand statement, he is only trying to make a movie about love lost, found and lost again.


Demy was also at odds with the political motivations of the Left Bank school of thought, of which Varda's work was a cornerstone. Once again, somewhat by chance, he had become associated with a school of filmmaking to whose tenets he did not adhere, and this misunderstanding of his work and his aspirations again led to criticism. His films are not about politics; they are about love, romance, dreams and failure, all wrapped up in a layer of escapism.


And this informs one of the central premises behind Demy’s work: that pain and loss go down better with a layer of frosting. His films are light, fluffy confections of infectious music, swirling emotions and bright, lovely faces surrounded by bright, lovely colors.


The actors in Demy’s films are young, beautiful and full of dreams and longing, and it is difficult not to fall for them. The women—from Anouk Aimée’s Lola to Catherine Deneuve’s Genevieve to Ellen Farner’s Madeleine and even Annie Dupéroux’s precocious 14-year-old Cécile—are without fail lovely and engaging and easily draw empathy from the audience.


Unlike Godard’s heroines, who often have a certain detached aura, Demy’s women have more in common with the flushed-faced excitable young belles of Hollywood’s heyday. Demy’s actresses evince the fresh, bubbly wholesomeness of the Hollywood starlets of the ‘40s and ‘50s while managing to convey much of the moodiness, sultriness and complexity of America’s leading ladies of the ‘20s and ‘30s.


The men likewise are compelling, though Roland at times seems a bit too bland to be fully engaging. Guy on the other hand, in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with his gentle, soulful eyes and all-around good-guy qualities, is a sympathetic character from the start.


In 1967 Demy pursued Gene Kelly as star and choreographer for The Young Girls of Rochefort. Kelly, already in his mid 50s, was well past his song-and-dance prime and was working primarily as a director. Bringing him back in front of the camera in a French musical may have seemed like an odd decision at the time, but it was a perfectly logical extension of Demy’s work. Demy was a great admirer of Hollywood’s golden age of musicals, and Kelly especially embodied much of the creative spirit Demy sought for his films.


Check out Kelly’s musicals of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s and you can see the influence they had on Demy. Kelly was fascinated with dreams and fantasy, placing in each of his great films extended show-stopping dream sequences full of color, dance and romance. On The Town features a balletic demonstration of love and longing; An American in Paris shows the whirlwind of emotions of a couple in love amid the joy and glamor of Gay Paree; and Singin’ in the Rain features an episodic sequence filled with bright, splashy colors as his Don Lockwood character goes from rags to riches to lovelorn in 10 minutes of highly stylized fantasy.


There is a satisfying thread that runs through the PFA series. Umbrellas, strong on its own merits, is all the more engaging when you have seen Lola, which gives you the full import of the character of Roland—his wandering spirit, his lost love, and all the pain and shiftlessness that leads him to Genevieve and to the profession of diamond-selling. And Model Shop likewise gives the audience a chance to follow up on Lola’s title character, catching up with her after she has left France and made her way to Los Angeles.


To see these films together makes clear what so many of Demy’s critics missed: that he was in fact a filmmaker of great originality and integrity. He may not have been the director some wanted him to be, but he stayed true to his vision, making simple, emotional movies about simple, emotional people, regardless of the politics, trends and preferences of his era.



The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy.

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Cut From Different Cloth: Women in Afghanistan

Berkeley husband-and-wife filmmaking team Cliff Orloff and Olga Shalygin have taken several trips to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, and their most recent visit has resulted in a poignant film about the lives of Afghan women. Cut From Different Cloth: Burqas and Beliefs, a one-hour documentary, will air on PBS at 5 p.m. Sunday and again at 8 p.m. Thursday. 


The filmmakers focus their attention on Hasina, a 27-year-old woman who is, as the film states early on, Afghanistan’s equivalent of a radical feminist. 


The film features interviews with Afghan men and women and government officials, but it is at its best when it centers on Hasina. She is a remarkable woman, walking a delicate line between defiance and devotion. She is intelligent, sensitive, articulate, charming and strong. There is no ill will in her stance toward her culture’s restrictive mores; there is only the desire to be true to herself, to be true to womanhood and women’s rights, to do right by her family even when they think it’s wrong. Hasina is too humble to speak of herself as setting an example, as blazing a path, but that is essentially her role; she and other Afghan women like her are sacrificing a great deal to chip away at the barriers that their culture places before them. 


The filmmakers employ an interesting device: Orloff and Shalygin took their 27-year-old daughter Serena with them, to see the country and its women through her eyes as she lived with Hasina for two months. The approach has its rewards—a genuine friendship seems to take shape, and Serena’s presence does provide a vantage point the average American viewer can probably relate to—but it is hardly necessary. There is no need to set up an east-west conflict, for there is more than enough conflict in Hasina’s heart to carry this film. In a series of painful and poignant moments, Hasina’s brothers and sisters discuss their relationship with her and the ramifications of her lifestyle, revealing the unresolved conflicts between family and society. 


The film portrays much of modern-day Afghanistan’s repressive climate as the result of 25 years of warfare, combined with a backlash against the permissiveness of the country’s mid-century Communist era. In a society of great internal strife, women have essentially become the battleground. It’s as if the country’s men have for so long felt so beset upon by outsiders that they have compensated by exerting control over their women. 


The situation poses a difficult and potentially dangerous dilemma: Women must consent to oppression out of compassion for the oppressors. They do not necessarily walk in fear of outsiders or of the Taliban; they walk in fear of the shame they bring to their fathers and brothers should they step out of line. They obey out of love for the men who control them. Defiance is not a stick in the eye of Islam or the Taliban—it is a swipe at the very family that clothes, houses and feeds them. It takes a strong woman to walk that line, to retain the love of and for her family while setting her own path. And though governments may set more enlightened policies and police may enforce them, it is these acts of defiance and devotion that gradually win hearts and minds. 


What is especially maddening is watching a country in such need of strong, talented people as it ignores, stifles and condemns such a wide swath of its population—among them many of the country’s most potentially valuable leaders. It is painful to see Hasina, a woman of such depth, of such charm, of such intelligence, competence and ambition, go unappreciated by her family, by her culture, by her country. What a waste of potential, what a crime to condemn a person of such talent and grace. 


Cut From Different Cloth paints a picture of an Afghanistan that is regressing, that has been torn asunder and is slipping backward in a retreat from modernity. This a hardly a blueprint for rebuilding the country or healing its wounds, and it leaves the viewer with the impression that it is a nation that has little chance of making itself whole again if it cannot bear to embrace its better half. 



Cut From Different Cloth. Produced and directed by Olga Shalygin and Cliff Orloff. 

Airs on PBS at 5 p.m. March 26 and at 8 p.m. March 30.

Stoned: The Life and Death of Brian Jones

Brian Jones seems all but forgotten these days, at least outside his native England. He founded the Rolling Stones, but they passed him by, leaving him to gather moss, or at least ingest a great deal of grass. 


Jones essentially created white-boy blues, using his band to bring the sounds of American blues to a British audience at a time when American blues artists were obscure, even in their own country. Stoned, opening today at Shattuck Cinemas, depicts Jones’ rise and fall, from his childhood in upper-class Cheltenham to the dizzying heights of rock ‘n’ roll success to his ignominious death at the bottom of his swimming pool. 


The opening credits show the Stones performing at a small club, and the staging of the scene is indicative of Jones’ role in the band: The rest of the Stones are in dark clothes and standing in the shadows while Jones wears a white shirt and is illuminated by the spotlight. This is an exaggerated depiction for the sake of dramatization, but check out virtually any of the band’s Jones-era record covers and you’ll see precisely this sort of composition. Jones is almost always dressed differently and standing apart from or in front of the other band members. He was their leader, their founder, the heart and soul of the group. But not for long. 


Jones was basically a blues purist; if it had been up to him, the Stones might never have done anything other than cover blues and rock ‘n’ roll classics. His decline as leader of the band began once their producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, convinced the band that they must start writing original material if they wanted to have a future. 


The problem for Jones was that he couldn’t write. He was a remarkable musician; he could seemingly pick up any instrument and learn to play it within an hour or two. Anything out of the ordinary on those early Stones albums is more than likely Brian’s doing: marimba, sitar, dulcimer. His talent lay in transforming the raw materials of his bandmates’ work into something quite unique. He was not a songwriter, but an interpreter. 


Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took on the songwriting duties and excelled, turning out a string of blues-based rock and pop classics and catapulting the band to the top of the charts, positioning them as the Beatles’ primary rivals. Stoned hints at this but doesn’t overtly express it, and this is perhaps the film’s most significant flaw: It speaks to the initiated, to those who already know the tale. Those who don’t may find the film’s plot points and timeline confusing and the characters’ motivations a bit vague. 


Along with the creative responsibilities, Jagger and Richards began assuming leadership roles within the band, further alienating Jones. The band was maturing, developing its talents and range, while Jones himself was essentially stagnating, content to wallow in success and excess. His powerful ego, combined with his fragility and insecurity and growing dependence on drugs, quickly made him a liability as his total immersion in the benefits of fame led to increasingly erratic behavior. And it certainly didn’t help matters when Jones’ longtime girlfriend Anita Pallenberg left him for Keith Richards. 


The movie is flawed from the start in that it takes one possible scenario for Jones’ death and plays it through, the scenario being that Jones was murdered. An apparently unsubstantiated 1993 deathbed confession by Jones’ building contractor provides the rough outline of the musician’s demise. A more interesting film could have been made without taking a position on Jones’ death, instead depicting the mystery and intrigue that surrounded the tragedy, and the circumstances that launched a troubled rock star into martyrdom. Biopics often make this mistake, replacing the messiness and ambiguity of life with simple plot resolutions and facile explanations of character and motivation. 


First-time director Woolley makes a few unfortunate rookie mistakes. For whatever reason, there are no Stones songs on the soundtrack, nothing to denote Jones’ actual contribution to the music of the era. Instead we hear plenty of his influences—Robert Jones, Muddy Waters, etc.— and that’s appropriate. But we also hear several current artists performing very modern versions of blues classics, and the juxtaposition can be jarring. It is likely meant to demonstrate Jones’ influence on the blues-based artists who followed him, but it doesn’t quite work. 


There is also a completely moronic sequence, shot like a music video, in which Gregory lip-synchs his way through “Not Fade Away” during a montage sequence of significant moments in the life of Brian. The scene threatens to sink the film with camp and cheek and should have been left on the cutting room floor. 


But for what it is, the movie is quite good. The direction is for the most part effective and the performances are solid. Luke de Woolfson as Jagger, though it’s only a small part, nails the singer’s mannerisms, off stage and on. And Leo Gregory brings out the fierceness and fragility of Jones, a man who acquired all the fame and fortune he could have wanted, yet immersed himself in it to the point of drowning. 



Stoned (2006). Starring Leo Gregory, Paddy Considine, David Morrissey, Tuva Novotny, Amelia Warner, Ben Whishaw, Monet Mazur, Luke De Woolfson, James D. White. Directed by Stephen Woolley.