The Secret of the Grain (Abdel Kechiche, 2007)

An old world is fast disappearing in the southern shores of France. Abdel Kechiche’s momentarily elegiac but ultimately celebratory The Secret of the Grain opens on this note of lamentation. Everywhere are signs of obsolescence and decay -- floating junk, rotten boats -- as the camera surveys the fast-changing harbor of Sete. We are listening to an unsentimental annotation of a tour guide about the transformation of this maritime corner on the Mediterranean. Gone is the fish crier, he says, the man who announces the day’s catch. He has been replaced by the mechanical proclamations of computers. Here to one side of the harbor are the mountains of detritus and scrap-iron of old factories. “There used to be ovens in France,” comments the guide, referring to the closure of heavy industries. As if to locate the displaced humans in this equation, he proceeds to describe the torturous, 3-month excursions of old tuna fishers to far-away oceans.

Surely this casual commentary is insufficiently convincing, so the camera cuts to the graying figure of Slimane, a faithful shipyard worker, to give these sad realities a human face. We see him just at the instant when he is summarily eased out of his 35-year job. Slimane is a throwback to the old concierge in Murnau’s The Last Laugh, made obsolete after years of faithful service. In stunned silence, Slimane accepts his fate, silently incredulous that an old, artisanal job such as his can find a quick and equally qualified replacement. The truth is, latter-day economics are striking roots and have made manual labor expendable and his services dispensable. We learn the other manifestations of this new but ruthless and cut-throat world order: the preference for new and illegal immigrants as the workforce where they are needed as they present fewer complications and more profit to employers. As commented on elsewhere in the film, the new capitalists are shifting to more lucrative and less-labor-intensive, post-industrial ventures.

This talk can be all densely suffocating for a 151-minute film and Kechiche shifts to less mechanic, more domestic gears, as he follows Slimane around. Taking his cue from Robert Guediguian’s sociological studies of the working class strata of Marseilles, writer-director Kechiche proceeds to documenting the daily lives of immigrant Arabs in this seaside town in southern France. But lest one forgets, some of the quasi-documentary feel must also derive from Kechiche’s previous film, L’Esquive. It’s a familiarity with this mode of filmmaking that allows him to trace the reticulations of the Arab immigration and assimilation with relative ease.

Whether observing the gatherings of Slimane’s former wife Souad and their four children, and the protective care the graying man receives from his new woman, Latifa, and her feisty daughter Rym, Kechiche never fails to introduce an underlying commentary on the broader picture. His prime narrative strategy is linguistic metaphor. Gathering to partake of a meal of couscous, their dialogue is very pointed and empathic in expounding, for instance, the subject of disposable diapers – a thinly-veiled allusion to the disposability of Slimane in the new economy. Another: Couscous, they remark meaningfully, is the product of love, a labor of love, meant to reference the human touch invested by old artisans.

As the film wears on, the accent soon falls on the family and its crucial role in many aspects of life, at least in Slimane's life. What starts out with the solitary, dour figure of this man soon gives way to a lively ensemble of his extended families and the Arab section of Sete. They may find it irresistible to talk behind Slimane’s back, but there is genuine solidarity originating in these tight-knit circles in his hour of need. The consequences of documentary closeness, however, are such that we are made to witness, for instance, the extra-marital indiscretions of his son Majid and the scene-stealing disaffection of his Russian wife, Julia. We don’t fail to listen to Rym, almost like Slimane’s surrogate daughter, as she defends the old man from his unfeeling sons and often acts as his mouthpiece.

Much of the film’s engaging and endearing payload, however, comes in the last section of the film, when Slimane undertakes a plan to turn an old, dilapidated ship into a couscous restaurant. There is gripping suspense in anticipating whether his efforts will come to fruition on his restaurant’s opening night. But The Secret of the Grain does not fixate on single-handed heroism. To be blunt about it, Slimane comes across as an almost pathetic, ineffectual persona, and there’s a literally breath-taking allusion to De Sica’s Bicycle Thief towards the film’s end that highlights this, as he tries to run after and retrieve a stolen motorcycle.

An allegory about solidarity and the communal values of an older world, The Secret of the Grain sees a sincere volunteerism and a closing of ranks at the film's crucial juncture. Perhaps meant as stabs at the patriarchal nature of Arab societies, many of the well-meaning acts are the gestures of women. Don’t fail to watch through to the end; multivalent and polyphonic, this film makes simultaneous points that are brought home at the conclusion. Full of carousing, music and belly-dancing, the suspenseful – have I used the word yet? -- ending rounds out a tale well-told. In a world fast metamorphosing and phasing out the need for human touch, there is hope in homespun goodness yet.

Just Anybody (Jacques Doillon, 2008)

Two figures plunge the viewer in medias res at the start of Jacques Doillon’s quirky, genre-bending, romantic comedy, Just Anybody. Barging out of a restaurant, Costa (a native of these country parts) and Camille (a Parisienne who tags along with him) are disputing a point of difference. They are threshing out a night gone wrong, their first together: Costa sees it as consensual sex; Camille sees it as rape. Yet Camille strangely sees a saving grace in him. For the moment, Costa wants to rusticate and visit his young daughter, and so just as soon, they part ways.

Following Costa to his hometown of Le Crotoy, Camille encounters Cyril, a cop who takes an instant romantic liking to her. They, too, get into a suddenly elaborate conversation. With practiced deduction, Cyril reads between the lines and concludes that Costa, a ‘nobody’ in these parts (a euphemism for sure), raped Camille. It’s a potential ménage-a-trois that is further complicated by Gwendoline, Costa’s long-suffering wife. Along the way, there is an equally quirky array of characters that add comic and cuckoo color to this film.

But Just Anybody is not so much about quick couplings as it is about men and women blundering their way into a proper niche, a sense of redemption. Wrong-headed and deviant, they lead ill-advised lives that seem to be headed nowhere. Seemingly patterned after Jim Jarmusch’s menagerie of misfits, Doillon’s characters are embroiled in a farce that features strange, uproarious, even recidivistic behaviour: a thug who is actuated by chivalry, a cop who stalks a woman and yet refuses to leverage his badge, an urban girl who aids and abets the thug.

Writer and director Doillon depicts a sense of anomie in such a surprisingly infectious and lighthearted manner. Costa commits one felony after another, mugging and robbing his defenseless victims, but his acts seem to be rationalized by some perverse notion of chivalry and responsibility. Camille, who exhibits a measure of urban sophistication, is not above overlooking and condoning Costa’s often shocking crimes. It is she who goads Costa to raise some money, however tainted, as a peace offering to his estranged wife and child for the many years of neglect. Meanwhile, Cyril thinks it’s not undeserved and perhaps normal -- the offshoot of the pursuit of love? -- to be blindsided by violence. The characters are whacked, touched by a crooked sense of moral ambiguity.

The dialogue, scripted by Doillon, is often casual, witty and punchy. But this director seems to be suffering from a paucity of ideas since his prize-winning Ponette (1996) on his way to wrapping up his latest film. Suffice it to say that after all the display of criminal deviancy and feckless behaviour, Just Anybody peters out into a conciliatory end, all too neatly. And perhaps that is the film's overriding but elusive point : however flawed the characters may be, there shines a common humanity -- forgiveness and magnanimity on one hand, contrition and reconciliation on the other. Still one can't shake the cut-and-dried, schematic ending. Doillon must be getting overtures from Hollywood and this must be his calling card.

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008)

Birdsong. Emerald green trees, lush verdant undergrowth. Dogs playfully bounding in the glistening grass. You can hear them breathlessly panting. Children hunt and search, heartily and boisterously, for hidden treasures among the boughs. These opening images in Olivier Assayas’s latest film Summer Hours set a lyrical tone for the luminosity that follows. We are in the middle of the Marly estate in the French countryside, as Helene, the matriarch, celebrates her 75 th birthday. Everyone who matters is present: Helene’s two sons, Frederic and Jeremie, and lone daughter, Adrienne, and their children, despite their hectic, cosmopolitan lives. Alone with her eldest son, Frederic, however, Helene is leaving instructions and the contents of her last will and testament.

These are no idle premonitions. True enough, Helene soon passes away before the end of summer. Her last will is most needed to sort out inheritances, a considerable one that includes her collection of antique furniture, paintings and books. Her former lover happened to be Paul Berthier, a painter of some renown. Helene had rightly foreseen what would happen, taking into account her children's different circumstances, the different lives they lead. While Frederic wishes to keep the summer house and its contents intact, Jeremie and Adrienne, both industrial executives based in different countries, see no need for it. Jeremie, in fact, is in dire need of money to buy a house in his adopted China; Adrienne may have to live much of the time in Japan.

Here is a scenario that would in lesser hands be fraught with melodramatic possibilities and histrionics. But Olivier Assayas’s film keeps emotionalism within acceptable levels, not only achieving a film of assured pathos but parlays his premise into a statement not just about the Marly family but about each one of us, each human being. And as it makes its humanistic statement, it offers a gentle reproach to the inexorable march of civilization. Summer Hours is not so much about family intramurals as it is about the recognition of each one's birthright to live according to a personal compass.

There is what we might call a sweet dynamic among the Marly siblings. To make his point, Assayas never overplays the angle of fraternal civility, leaving only little, automatic gestures as shorthand for respect and reverence. No words necessary, the gestures are reflexive and heartfelt. Much of the differences among them is elliptical.

Summer Hours, more aptly, ranges over generational contrasts, between Helene and her children, and in the last act of the film, between Frederic and his teenage daughter, Sylvie. Too preoccupied with the matters of the family estate, Frederic is jolted when he finds out Sylvie’s adolescent crimes. Shoplifting. Smoking pot. Sexual initiation. The father may be furious but to borrow a phrase from Godard, this is her life to live. Yet surprisingly Frederic subsequently consents to what might be seen as a desecration: Sylvie throwing a party for her friends in the auctioned summer house. Perhaps it's just as well. After all, these, too, are her summer hours.

The history of civilization has been notable for its production and preservation of cultural artifacts. Assayas’ film, a film that features the auction of art treasures and family heirlooms and the interiors of museums, may never refute that, but it postulates each person’s inalienable heritage: Nothing takes more privilege than the individual, the human welfare. Let each one explore the height and latitude of summer -- those too-few, too-brief summers.

God's Offices (Claire Simon, 2008)

It’s OK. No one knows us here, a teenaged girl reassures another in the opening sequences of Claire Simon’s felicitously titled God’s Offices. They stand restlessly on a balcony of an abortion clinic cum family planning center in the heart of an unnamed French city, moments away from taking their turn with a social worker. As the film unfolds along the fine lines between documentary and fiction, this troubled teen will pass through a revolving door of women, women of all ages and walks of life, as they receive all manner of help, from simple advice and assistance to life-altering succor about matters of sex and the repercussions of sex. Whether referring to this halfway house for women or the conceiving womb, God’s Offices depicts a humane though often painful portrait of women.

Drawing on research material she and her team gathered between 2000 and 2007, Claire Simon crafts a story -- nay, a series of stories -- that hews close to sessions recorded at a host of family planning centers across France, sessions unified by an inherently confessional tone and themes that would otherwise have been kept in the dark. As befits the material, the film is captured in cinema-verite fashion (not too overly shaky and intrusive, however), and a supplemental authenticity is added by a cast of first-time actresses playing the beleaguered women. It’s an inspired stroke of casting that the social workers are played by well-known veteran actresses of French cinema, including Beatrice Dalle and Nathalia Baye. They provide the compassionate presence and the voice of reason through an often tense and disconsolate film, a presence more subtly empathic and empathetic than what non-professional actors might be able to portray.

God’s Offices, if nothing else, puts forward a whole spectrum of sad and tragic human stories from the vantage point of women. Through highly detailed and informative accounts, one gets the sure sense that women take the brunt of sexual relationships. Anxiety from delayed periods. The pill. Abortifacients. Pregnancy. Abortion. The wrath of families and the whole social stigma of unwanted pregnancy and motherhood. The few men who figure in this film are angry, demanding and impatient figures, and the men who figure in the women's narrations are no more scrupled. This series of episodes channels one exhausting psychic outpouring. But in a film that features only one half of the gender divide, we are merely getting one side of the story, however honest and genuine the accounts are made to be.

The thrust of the film is, unswervingly, the story of women. With an almost unvarying emotional pitch, it plays out a dozen or so slices of women's life in a 2-hour duration. There is the young teenage girl at the film’s opening asking simply about contraception behind her parents’ back. A more distraught and tearful episode features the confession of an impregnated woman caught between a husband and a lover who turns to blackmail in order to bed her down repeatedly. Another confession reveals a woman, who for years has suspected her own sterility, suddenly getting on the way. How? Everything comes full circle at the end, when a middle-aged Bulgarian prostitute is asked why she keeps getting pregnant with the same man. There is but one answer wafting through the corridors of God’s offices: Love. A picture that foregrounds abortion and its convenient rationale, God's Offices intimates, at film's end, that most noble of human emotions and motivations. Nothing should be unwanted and tainted, not the wages of love.

The Girl on The Train (Andre Techine, 2009)

She's not all there. There's a faraway and wistful look in the eyes of young Parisienne Jeanne Fabre, and it scarcely seems to be one of aspiration. When the camera follows her around the city in Andre Techine’s The Girl on the Train, she seems to be a study of youth misspent. There is little to indicate what yearnings, or perhaps sorrows, inhabit her mind, and even when she rollerblades across the city, there is on her face, the perpetual gaze of abstraction. Taking her time to look for jobs, she mysteriously eschews the ones that answer her resume. It’s not as though she lacks her mother’s wisdom and supportive presence. Au contraire. Even when she finds love, it hardly seems enough a catalyst to awaken her from a perpetual reverie. “Learn to open your eyes,” someone soon advises her.

Based on events that made news headlines in France in July 2004, Techine’s latest film draws on the hoax perpetrated by a 23-year-old woman named Marie-Léonie Leblanc who, in an apparent effort to gain attention, claimed to have been attacked by black and Arab youths on a Parisian train. It was a hoax that touched a nerve across a country reeling from a string of anti-Semitic attacks. In The Girl on the Train, we vaguely sense the public outrage, but what is writ larger are a young woman’s ill-advised choices and her galvanization from a mysterious trance.

The Girl on the Train is structured as a diptych, two halves carrying utilitarian titles, the first half being the “Circumstances” and the second “Consequences.” Far from assuming a documentary approach, Techine lenses his material with the same poetic sensibility and delicacy that grace his previous mature work (The Thieves, The Wild Reeds, My Favorite Season). “Circumstances” traces the fictionalized moments of Jeanne’s life that might help explain why she committed the hoax. What essentially unravels her is the repudiation by her boyfriend, a promising Olympian wrestler who is faced with a lengthy prison sentence because of her. “Consequences” encapsulates the moments after the hoax, the gathering together of Jeanne’s suddenly extended family, her mother and mother’s friends – mainly a Jewish lawyer and his family whom Jeanne involves in her hoax – to let her see the error of her ways. It is the adolescent Nathan, the young grandson of Bleistein, who sees through her, a kindred spirit.

The young Belgian actress, Émilie Dequenne, who played the down-and-out working class girl in the Dardenne Brothers’ Rosetta, essays enigmatic yearnings to perfection as the eponymous character. Catherine Deneuve, as Jeanne’s mother, is a strong but unobtrusive presence, ready to enlist everyone’s help and swallow her pride to see her child through. Michel Blanc, as the Jewish lawyer Bleistein, is a strong ballast who shrewdly knows the bigger picture borne out of the consequences.

Throughout Techine’s film runs a recurrent motif that reveals one of its inspirations: the musical theme to Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie. Both films, true enough, are unconventional character studies of young, embattled women. While Nana in Godard’s film meets with a fatalistic and perhaps cynical end, a prostitute’s cold-blooded death, however, Jeanne is not beyond redemption. The Girl on the Train professes, as in many previous Techine pictures, the power of familial bonds. Love redeems, and it cuts across all barriers.

Not as evidently strong and coherent as Techine’s masterpieces (The Wild Reeds, My Favorite Season), The Girl on the Train is a work that makes more sense with retroactive appreciation. It’s a film that hints and suggests as much as tells its story. If nothing else, it yet again confirms the filmmaker’s fascination with women, a long-standing one borne out in more than three decades of filmmaking. The Bad Girl, Strayed, The Thieves, and The Bronte Sisters are pictures that foreground the subjectivity of women, a subjectivity that paradoxically avoids eliciting facile judgments. Here lies the strange redemptive power of Andre Techine’s brand of cinema.

A Good Marriage (Eric Rohmer, 1982)

Cinema has never been kind to the figure of woman. Patriarchy interpellates and objectifies her, to paraphrase the words of a young Godard. Within the diegetic universe, if not the corporate ambit, of film production, she is asked to inhabit the margins to foreground the primacy of man. She is asked to assume a lower, inferior rank, tucked away in domestic and domesticated roles as mother, non-career woman, housewife. She must never threaten the male protagonist, and if she isn’t going to be his complement, neither can she assume the persona of an equally strong villain. This, more or less, defines the screen presence allotted to women in this most macho of arts.

Released in 1982 as part of his cycle of films called Comedies and Proverbs, Eric Rohmer’s A Good Marriage is a picture that can divide opinion as to its place within feminist canon in an era of growing identity awareness. It is bound to be applauded outright or perhaps elicit a few cringe-worthy moments in its depiction of women. Its main protagonist, Sabine, the movie’s premise quickly makes plain, is a young woman on a quest to find a husband. She declares one fateful night, after doing away with her married boyfriend, that she will pursue marriage as an ideal in life and revert to a figure of olden times when women were respected and desired for their virtue.

Enter Edmond, a lawyer bachelor who meets all of Sabine’s coveted attributes in a man. Handsome, rich, successful. Most of all, single. Here is Sabine’s cue to assume the womanly ideal that she espouses, but she gets bad advice from her best friend Clarisse, who goads her to take the initiative and pursue him. Much of the rest of A Good Marriage is a lot of self-absorbed second-guessing on the part of Sabine (and her friend Clarisse) on how to go about ensnaring her intended man and the resulting abortive efforts. They proceed, predictably, with teary-eyed repercussions.

As a woman exercising her subjectivity, the figure of Sabine may elicit groans from an audience that thinks her crude and less than cunning in her methods of entrapment. Good for her, they will say, A Good Marriage is nothing but a film that puts her back in her rightful place, the passive position. As a woman, she is not subject but object. She has to wait to be ridden like a frozen horse on the carousel of marriage.

But a more informed reading may see Sabine as the prototype of a woman as the aggressive other. We live in a culture that concedes too much to men, and this paradigm is turned on its head in this Rohmer film. Sabine may fail, but not unlike all first timers do. She hits and misses but she will take the attendant lumps and bruises. It is she who pursues; she is predator, not prey for once, that’s what counts.

After all, the film ends where an opportunity seems to present itself to Sabine once again. After all, something has been withheld here, some complicating fact: that Edmond belongs to the haute bourgeoisie, while Sabine is substantially rungs lower on the economic ladder. (Cue in the Marxists.) That Edmond blinks first in a letter he writes to Sabine: he can never sacrifice his freedom. Edmond is not just a snooty rich man, but a man who feels threatened by an aggressive woman. Sabine will get the hang of it. Nature, after all, will bear her out. Predators more often fail than succeed in their pursuit of prey.

Like the five other films in the cycle of Comedies and Proverbs, Rohmer conceived A Good Marriage in such a light but cautionary vein, as seriocomic parables that illustrate the pitfalls of relationships and their less-than-fairy-tale consequences. Rohmer’s direction here, as always, is light and unobtrusive, allowing Beatrice Romand free rein to shine as Sabine. Arielle Dombasle (as Clarisse) and Andre Dussollier (as Edmond) turn in worthy supporting roles. If you fancy a film with simple but lilting charms, with articulate and involving characters, you can do worse than a film by Rohmer. A Good Marriage is no exception.