Hitchcock/Truffaut transmits the desire of filmmaking for all to fall in love with — a film review
January 7, 2016
It can be a tricky proposition: making a film about films. Even trickier is the idea of making a film based on a book about films, in this case the 1967 book Hitchcock/Truffaut. But film critic/director Kent Jones turns the task into a buoyant, delightful ramble that will inspire viewers to revisit the film catalog of Alfred Hitchcock. Co-written with Serge Toubiana, the director of the famed Cinémathèque française, the documentary is an examination of cinema so in love with its subject, the viewer will find themselves seduced by it. It sucks you into the delights of some of the most brilliantly formed films, from editing to music to performances to tricks of mise-en-scène like a light hidden in a milk glass to subtly draw the viewer’s eye. It’s an absolutely captivating bit of filmmaking in and of itself.
The source material stems from the famous book by French film critic turned director François Truffaut written after a week-long conversation with Hitchcock, in 1962. Jones has assembled some of contemporary cinema’s most famous filmmakers to talk about the book’s essential quality and the lessons they have learned from it. Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese are among some of the talking heads whose voices mostly supplement images of Hitchcock’s films, interwoven with samples of Hitchcock and Truffaut’s original conversations. There are also storyboards, photos from the meeting of the two filmmakers in Los Angeles and perpetual string music by Jeremiah Bornfield, which could forgivably be confused for original music by Hitchcock regular Bernard Herrmann. The montage of it all is structured but still breezy.
The film begins with Anderson and David Fincher recalling early memories of the book as children and how it seemed to seep into their identity as aspiring filmmakers. There’s a bit of history of Hitchcock and Truffaut before their meeting, which is explained as a symbiotic event. Truffaut sought to free Hitchcock of a perception that his films were shallow, and Hitchcock freed Truffaut as an artist. Then the film goes into the minutiae of how Hitch played with the form of cinema. The layers of information can be overwhelming, but you will want to revisit the documentary to get familiar with it and enjoy it deeper, just like the value of the book to all these filmmakers. It’s a terrific lesson in filmmaking that benefits aspiring directors and fans of cinema alike.
Jones dedicates a big chunk of time to Vertigo and Psycho, but the insight is interesting, especially for Vertigo, a film that was seen as a bit of a popular failure when it saw release, though now it’s considered one of the greatest films in the history of cinema. It’s Fincher (whose work often endures similar perception) who points out Hitchcock’s embracing of his perverted interests, which Fincher also admits is key to his own work. Scorsese chimes in to note how Vertigo is more than a story but a life. The examination of the film becomes a look not only at plot but how it reflects the director and his beliefs. Bringing up the scene in the museum where James Stewart’s character spies Kim Novak from the back of her head, director James Gray brings it back to the power of the image in the cinema of Hitchcock and how amazed he is about Hitchcock’s vision. Gray assumes Hitch must have been so confident in the choice of his images that he probably skipped coverage from other angles.
Though some may argue, where’s the book in this? I posit this kind of passion is informed by Truffaut’s passionate respect for Hitchcock, the filmmaker. A sort of transcendent energy and affection comes from the meticulous examination of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. This excitement of the art by current directors becomes indelible with the book that dared to celebrate the form of an art with a genuine curiosity and affection for its subject. It’s no wonder Truffaut and Hitchcock fell in love with one another as fellow travelers in their craft. It’s a love that has outlived them and is beautifully transmitted by Jones and Toubiana.
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A retrospective of films by Hitchcock/Truffaut starts today, Jan. 7, and continues every Thursday for the month of January at the Miami Beach Cinematheque featuring local film critics (including us at Independent Ethos) and friends of ours. The schedule is as follows:
- Jan. 7: Marnie with intro by Miami International Film Festival Director Jaie Laplante
- Jan. 14: The Bride Wore Black with intro film critic Rubén Rosario
- Jan. 21: The Wrong Man with intro by film critic David N Meyer
- Jan. 28: Confidentially Yours with intro by film critics Hans Morgenstern and Ana Morgenstern (that’s us!)
For tickets to each of these events, visit the theater’s calendar and look for each of these dates: miamibeachfilmsociety.memberlodge.org/calendar.
Hitchcock/Truffaut runs 80 minutes and is rated PG-13. It opens Friday, Jan. 8, in our Miami area at the following theaters: The Miami Beach Cinematheque and in Broward, at the Cinema Paradiso Fort Lauderdale, which will host a Skype Q&A with the film’s director, Kent Jones, on Saturday, Jan. 9, at the 7 p.m. screening of the film. The film expands to The Bill Cosford Cinema on Jan. 22. It opened in other parts of the U.S. already and continues to roll out. For dates in other cities, visit this page. Cohen Media provided all images in this post and a preview screener for the purpose of this review.
Clouds of Sils Maria examines the layers of celebrity identity with powerful performances — a film review
April 22, 2015
Not since Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, has a movie unpacked identities in flux as profoundly as Clouds of Sils Maria. Whereas Bergman concerned himself with transference on a psychological level between two women, writer/director Olivier Assayas examines transference on a more labyrinthine level by bringing in the industry of Hollywood, celebrity and the spectrum of roles the people of this milieu play both on-screen and off. At the heart of the movie lies an amazing relationship between a star actress and her assistant, but the film also looks beyond, examining the role of director and actress, generational differences and the perceptions of those on the outside of the industry. It’s a challenging film, but it also could be one of the best movies you will see this year.
An important chunk of the film unfolds at a luxurious home in the village of Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps. French movie star Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) has her younger right-hand Val (Kristen Stewart) read lines with her for a play loaded with the ghosts of Maria’s past. The home belongs to the widow of the director that made Maria a star. The play Maria is preparing for is the theatrical presentation of the film that made her career: Maloja Snake. In the film version, Maria played the 18-year-old Sigrid, an intern who has an affair with her middle-aged boss, Helena, only to dump the older woman, as the business crumbles around her. In the stage play, Maria is now to take the role of Helena.
Maria needs a bit of convincing to play Helena. A young, but highly respected director, Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), is determined to have her play the role that was formerly played by an actress who died not long after the film’s release, lending one of several ominous layers to the role. Also, Maria is reluctant to taint that part of her life with what may seem like a trivial gimmick in stunt casting. “I played Sigrid in Maloja Snake when I was 18,” she tells Klaus. “For me it was more than a role, and somewhere I am still Sigrid.” She then adds, “and it has nothing to do with being a lesbian. I’ve always been straight.” Again, identity and the blurring of the role with identity is meant to prepare the audience to consider the difference between what is stated and what is implied. Klaus speaks of the characters as having the same wounds, which also has echoes of the relationship of life and fiction: “Helena and Sigrid are one in the same person.”
The dramatic implications are enhanced by barely-there hints of intimacy between Maria and Val. Key scenes are stitched together with conspicuous fades at select moments in the narrative that are loaded with both the passage of time and moments obscured and unknowable. This is established subtly, when Assayas uses the technique to explain the death of Maloja Snake‘s author, Wilhelm Melchior. After news of his death, the film fades to the snowy Alps, showing rescuers collecting his body at a distance, and then the film fades again. Not long after this scene, his widow, Rosa (Angela Winkler) shares a secret with Maria: Wilhelm never died of a heart attack while on a walk but took his own life after receiving news of a fatal diagnosis. This establishes the fades as a narrative tool that obscures secrets.
Later in the film, during a hike in their gorgeous backyard of the Alps, Maria and Val jump into a chilly lake. Maria strips naked and Val down to her underwear. They laugh and splash around, as the film slowly fades to black. In another, Val heads out to meet a guy for a date, and Maria runs to a window to watch her drive off, and there is another fade. The following morning, Maria rises to peek into Val sleeping, with her backside to the door. Val’s only wearing a g-string and T-shirt, Assayas cuts to Maria’s gaze before fading to black again. These are hints that imply more than a professional relationship between these two women.
None of this would work without the actresses giving the camera silent performances loaded with unexplained feelings. Binoche plays Maria Enders with a veneer of confidence and experience that barely shrouds a sense of insecurity that comes with aging in her business while constantly being reminded of the youth of her assistant. You can sense Maria’s reluctance to tap into it during her often frustrated line readings with Val, yet it is key to a performance that 
unnerves Val toward the end of the movie. Though Binoche is terrific in the film, Stewart will stand out to many as the movie’s strongest element. Recently, Stewart was the first American actress to win the Cesar award for best actress — France’s equivalent to the Oscar, and the proof is in the pudding, as they say. She excels at delivering nervous awkwardness with a disarming hangdog distance behind large-framed glasses. It always feels as though something is brewing below the surface. Her performance harnesses the natural quality of her acting, and it also carries the weight of her own celebrity on a meta-level, as the film also alludes to paparazzi and an interest in an actress’ life outside of her work, something Stewart is all too familiar with.
The surrogate for this side of the celebrity aspect of the actress, is the young ingenue who will play Sigrid in this theatrical staging of Maloja Snake, Jo-Ann Ellis, played brilliantly by Chloë Grace Moretz. Jo-Ann is another shifting character in Clouds of Sils Maria. She is steeped in scandal, caught by paparazzi in compromising acts, including wielding a gun at an ex. Behind closed doors, Maria looks her up on the 
Internet and finds a press conference and TV interview where Jo-Ann may be high or drunk. In these on-line video clips, including one with a laugh track inserted, Jo-Ann reveals an ignorance for the material and the play’s director that Maria guffaws about in a sense of schadenfreude that speaks to the morbid interest that draws people to celebrity gossip. Jo-Ann calls the director “Klaus Klaus, the Klaus,” unable to recall his last name. However, when the meeting between the two actresses finally occurs, Jo-Ann is presentable and well-mannered. While Maria orders cognac, Jo-Ann orders chamomile tea. It becomes clear Jo-Ann is playing one role for entertainment news and quite another in “real life.”
But Jo-Ann the actress — who is also well-known as having starred in a sci-fi/action hit — is nothing compared to the intricate relationship between Val and Maria. Their relationship is always fascinating. After watching Jo-Ann as a psychotic, righteous “mutant” in the hit 3D movie, Maria and Val have a great conversation that speaks to their view on what is artistic. Above all, their scenes at the house are an intoxicating blur of the script and their earthy, candid relationship. Often, the director cuts to them in the middle of reading lines that resonate with their private lives, creating a disorienting sense of perspective. In one of the best of these scenes, Maria yells at Val, “I gave you whatever you want, you know that!” Val reads stage directions, “She composes herself,” as if it were some sort of safe word before she reads the Sigrid part: “Like a job at a dead-end company that’s about to go down the drain?” It’s a role, but it also speaks to the fading relevance of her boss in an industry more interested in youth.
One could go on and on about the performances in Clouds of Sils Maria and the profundity of the characters and their varied personas. None of it would matter were it not in such capable hands, and Assayas is quickly becoming a personal favorite of this critic. There is never a sameness to his films. He is constantly playing with the medium and his manner of telling stories. Be it adventure through music in his last film in capturing an era (Film Review: ‘Something in the Air’ presents vibrant picture of youth in tumult) or the way he played with filmmaking and holding a mirror to the industry much earlier in his career with the witty Irma Vep (1996).
The title of the play around which the film revolves, Maloja Snake, has its own significance. Before she hands over the keys to the house to Maria and after revealing the secret of Wilhelm’s passing, Rosa plays a video for Maria of the 1924 short film “Das Wolkenphänomen in Maloja.” It’s a film by Arnold Fanck, a famous German director who basically invented the German Mountain Film subgenre. The short focuses on a cloud phenomena called the “Maloja Snake” unique to the Alps where clouds snake through the valley and portend dangerous weather conditions. As she shows the film to Maria, Rosa says, “Wilhelm used to say the snake reveals the true nature of the landscape.” The “snake,” a naturally occurring yet mysteriously sublime phenomena, also has resonant effects as a symbol capturing the incongruities of human nature. The film’s title not only references the phenomena but also the nebulous personae of the film’s three women. At film’s end, along with the appearance of the clouds to Maria and Val will come another level of incongruity that will surprise and test the viewer. How the film handles it in a lengthy epilogue reveals yet another glimpse of the complexities of the career of the actress not worth spoiling here, but if you have gone along with it so far, you will find you may just be witnessing one of this year’s greatest films.
The Clouds of Sils Maria runs 123 minutes, is mostly in English but there are parts in French and German with English subtitles. It’s also rated R (expect some flashes of nudity and coarse language). It opens in our Miami area this Friday, April 24, at several indie cinemas including the Bill Cosford Cinema at the University of Miami Coral Gables campus, Miami Dade College’s Tower Theater in Miami, O Cinema Miami Beach Cinema Paradiso – Hollywood. It comes a little later to South Beach via the Miami Beach Cinematheque on May 29. If you live outside of our area, follow this link for a list of cities showing the film. If it’s not already playing near you, it may show up soon. It continues to roll out through May.
Sometimes the use of a song makes a movie or provides the perfect capper that resonates throughout the work. For Something In the Air it’s the aptly titled slow burn by Kevin Ayers: “Decadence” (Listen to it here). In fact, the entire soundtrack for this film is sheer brilliance, culled together by the director himself, Olivier Assayas. This was his soundtrack; it’s the alternative rock of his generation coming of age in a tumultuous France, and it goes deep beyond the usual culprits you would expect on a soundtrack for a film set in the early 1970s. OK, there’s Syd Barrett and Nick Drake, but for each of those selections there’s Dr. Strangely Strange and Soft Machine, Ayers’ band with Robert Wyatt. It’s not just about suiting the era so that the majority can relate. It’s about intimacy. Most of all, and especially in the case of “Decadence,” it’s about echoing the tragic themes of idealistic dreams turned hollow in the face of decadence.
With Something in the Air, Assayas has pulled together a film that floats on an indulgent air of nostalgia but also has the hindsight of decades worth of growth. As he has matured as a more subtle filmmaker, he has also matured as a man. He tackles a mighty subject that exists beyond the idealistic youth of his former self presented as Gilles 
(a brooding Clément Métayer). The film’s French title Après mai (changed to Something in the Air for English-language consumption) means “After May.” It’s a pity to lose the original title in translation, as it alludes to the May 1968 Marxist-inspired riots in Paris that nearly dismantled the economy and government. Set up with the title card “1971, not far from Paris,” the film shimmers with a relevance to the universal age between high school and adulthood while offering an impactful testament to a generation searching for purpose.
Assayas’ talent for amping up the scenes of conflict in his masterful miniseries Carlos is on full-display during an early demonstration where protestors show up in helmets and armed with bats. They hardly state a single phrase when police rush them, firing tear gas canisters and swinging batons from the backs of motorcycles. After the violent dispersal of the protest, the first resonantly powerful moment key to appreciating Something in the Air arrives during a reading of Gregory Corso’s “I am 25.” Below the incandescent leaves of trees on a brilliant afternoon in a forest, the protagonist’s fair-weather girlfriend Laure (an ethereal Carole Combes, making her feature debut) gives Gilles a copy of Gasoline. Gilles reads from one of several pages she has bookmarked for him (I remove the author’s original emphasis on the first line here, as he does not read it as it’s written):
“I hate old poetmen.
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:—I did those then
but that was then
that was then—”
This may well be foreshadowing of by the director, looking back at the vessel of his youth gone by: Gilles, who is about to live these tumultuous events as both frustrated cog in an unstable France but also a young man seeking his path. At first, his drive seems to fall in line with the progressive, if privileged, youth embracing Marxism to fight for workers’ rights and denounce capitalism. He passes the slow minutes in a high school class carving the anarchist A into his desk while the professor pontificates on Pascal. After dismissal he runs outside the school’s front gate to sell subversive newspapers to classmates. Occasionally, the film offers passing, wry moments that reveal angry disagreements between Maoists and Trotskyites.
Lest you think this is some stale nostalgia piece stuck in the past, the film does offer a resonance beyond time. This about a universal state of growing up that could apply to anyone entering adulthood with a conscience. A meeting of these young revolutionaries recalls fissures between the young idealists who recently fronted the anti-Capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. With nary a manifesto, the movement soon imploded on itself, as business for stock brokers, big banks and corporations ultimately and mockingly boomed during the so-called recovery of the Great Recession of 2008. Unemployment still remains high and workers’ rights continue to be whittled away.
By the time this film picks up, the May 1968 riots are three years in the past. When do idealist good intentions turn to flagrant, empty violence? Something In the Air soon makes it clear, as a tense scene of mob vandalism at the school ends up having very real consequences for Gilles and his accomplices, and they find themselves on the run. 
If the troubling times and their relevance have not begun to echo with irrelevance, enter the ladies in Gilles’ life and his indulgence in painting. His real struggles lie with two desirable women, Laure and the earthy, doe-eyed Christine (Lola Créton), and his aspirations of making it as an artist. Conflicting with his activism, his personal bourgeois troubles soon start to overshadow any political consciousness.
The film is suffused with vibrant scenes steeped in both melancholy and urgency. It doesn’t waste a minute of runtime, as it not only considers Gilles, but the fates of those he loves. There’s a disconnection with his father that feels bitter-sweet. When Laure makes her dramatic exit from the movie it echoes with an unresolved air of life pitching forward, as the weight of the world waits for its inevitable turn to mash us all to dust. Nothing is easily tied up in life, and Something In the Air makes no pretense to try to do so. 
It’s a beautiful patchwork of cinema, from lighting to costumes to music and set pieces that are far from aimless, as its thesis of life struggling to define itself resonates during each scene and the connections between them.
Assayas offers this film not only as a chronicle of his memories growing up in a key era but as a cautionary tale that transcends any specific generation. Though Gilles ultimately comes to terms with his art in a brilliant closing scene that ends with the swelling synth and the calmly plucked electric guitar draped in decadent reverb by Ayers, we all know how our hero turned out. Ayers sings it best as a wall of dreamy guitars swell and shimmer alongside his morose baritone: “To live I have to die.”
Something in the Air is in French with English subtitles, runs 122 minutes and is unrated. It opens this Friday, May 31, at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, where I was invited to a preview screening for the purpose of this review. The film also opens in South Florida at the Cosford Cinema, in the University of Miami Coral Gables campus, and in Fort Lauderdale at the Cinema Paradiso. The film is also playing nationwide and on demand.
When I got the assignment to interview Édgar Ramírez for his small but key role in Zero Dark Thirty, I jumped at the chance. I respected this actor immensely for what he brought to the title character of Carlos the Jackal in the miniseries Carlos (2011). I caught that film as a marathon cinematic five-and-a-half-hour experience at the Bill Cosford Cinema on the University of Miami Coral Gables campus. I came for the filmmaking of Olivier Assayas but was blown away by the performance by Ramírez.
Though an hour late to start, the low-key but charming Ramírez made the resulting round table interview with a group of five other local journalists a pleasure. The resulting piece was published early yesterday morning for the “Miami New Times” Arts and Entertainment blog “Cultist.” I think the story I wrote up captures the subtle intelligence and charm of this talented man. Read it by jumping though the blog’s logo here:
Of course, plenty more information was covered, so allow this blog post to stand as a supplement to the above piece. I was interested in the working relationship between director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal, as much has been about the writer’s constant presence on the set (here’s a great “Hollywood Reporter” article about it).
“He was always around,” Ramírez confirmed of Boal. “He’s very involved. It was a huge privilege to have the writer there, in case we needed to change something, in case a line was not working. Then, you could always discuss it with the writer, so it’s always very helpful, and you don’t get that privilege very often to have the writer on set. For me, it was very helpful also because it was a very fast-changing situation, and also because of the location we were at, the tension that was there because of the stakes, then we had to change and re-shape things as we were shooting, so it was great to have that.”
Ramírez also noted Boal’s producer credit, a rare thing for a writer to achieve in a Hollywood picture. However, Ramírez said, Bigelow had a firm hand on the visual elements and working with actors. 
“She’s directing. She’s directing the movie. She’s directing the actors, and Mark is there to support as a producer and to support as a writer when we needed him for something … There are certain things that look great on paper, then, for some reason, they don’t get to fully work on a scene, so it is great to have someone who understands, who has an overview of the whole script, who can tell you, ‘Well, this is what you should say because everything was related to something in other places of the script.’ Sometimes you can improvise things on movies, you get stuck, then you improvise, but in a movie like this, so accurate and based on firsthand accounts, you could not take the liberty of just changing one term for another.”
Another good question worth noting, which circled back to his role of playing Carlos the Jackal, is how the film handles history. He offered a very astute observation that too many take for granted while watching what is ultimately entertainment. In my review of the film (‘Zero Dark Thirty’ brings obsession with elusive truth to vivid light) I link to an interview with Karen Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and editor of “The Torture Papers.” 
She argues that history remains unclear on how fruitful torture was for crucial information in the tracking of Osama bin Laden. Yet one of the reasons the film has received so much heat for the torture scenes is that they result in the first utterance of the name Abu Ahmed, bin Laden’s courier, who ultimately leads CIA operatives, including the character Ramírez plays, to bin Laden’s hideout.
Though, again, more information can be found in the “Cultist” piece on how he felt about the torture scenes of Zero Dark Thirty, Ramírez put the narrative into perspective: “We were recreating reality. It’s impossible to reconstruct reality. It happened once. What you do is re-interpret, you recreate, and that’s what you try to do. Even if you have the person who lived it, the person who did it next to you, that happens just once, and I know this. I’m familiar with this because of Carlos. We also had first account information, very accurate research and navigation of facts, and however, it was a work of fiction. There’s no way to imitate reality because it’s not about imitation, it’s about realization.”
So, ultimately, remember, it’s just a movie.
Independent Ethos 