"Accomplishments"
At home: At this point, I think we can call movies shot on small isolated islands off the coast of Britain and Ireland a subgenre unto itself. Tim Key actually manages a touching performance despite the cringe comedy as a lottery winner living on a lonesome island in The Ballad of Wallis Island. He has his reasons (no spoilers) for paying his favorite folk duet to play a private show, though there's a problem. They've been broken up for almost a decade and forcing them together in a kind of romcom situation brings all the bad stuff back. Carey Mulligan is just a step away from her character in Inside Llewyn Davis; Tom Basden is our entry point and actually wrote the songs (some nice stuff there). Given its structure, it doesn't go where you think it will, and given Key's buffoonishly folksy character, it packs more of an emotional wallop that you expect. And it's clever, too, layering in asymmetrical images (a faulty faucet, a one-sided tennis game) to hint at the results of the artistic reunion. So fine, I'll keep going to these lonely islands...
Amalia Ulman's Magic Farm lands a (trashy) documentary series crew in the wrong Latin American town, fruitlessly looking for their subject... so they decide to create one out of whole cloth. That's the set-up for a raucous comedy, but that's not where Ulman takes it. Rather, it's one of those "film crew abroad" or "hang out movie" type deals, filled with new meetings, brief love affairs and flirtations, and other shenanigans. The unethical faking of a documentary subject is secondary, as is the notion of "plot". It's still a comedy, but one based on quirky characters, some of them rather affecting (the bicurious hotel manager, the locals with birth defects, Ulman's own assistant manager), and ultimately, the irony of their being in a place where there's TONS to document, and the crew simply not seeing it because of their crappy remit and navel-gazing. Ulman uses go-pros and other modern docu-series tricks to achieve the right look, but may frustrate some audiences by not really looking for story resolutions. There's the feeling of one, however.
Back when Camille Claudel came out, Gérard Depardieu's participation made it appointment cinema, although it's really Isabelle Adjani's show and she doesn't disappoint as the 19th-Century sculptress who apprenticed under Depardieu's Rodin, had an affair with him, and eventually met a tragic fate. Looking at it now, it's a frustrating affair. I do like the discussions on art (even if the characters seem to speak in an unnatural style), but the film so often turns to melodrama as to lose my interest. I found the love affair pretty basic stuff - the sensuality of sculptors only takes me so far - and the family scenes often pointless. There's something wrong with the editing, perhaps, but we find ourselves shuttled in and out of scenes without always grasping why we were there. The score is an obnoxious "Grand Film" orchestral affair. And in truth, I was ready for the "biopic cards" an hour before the end. Taking the completist route makes the film out of focus. Sculpture is, at least in part, subtractive, chipping away at a block to expose the shape within. The film fails to do this and comes off as rough and unfinished. Bruno Nuytten is a gifted cinematographer, but his first directorial effort shows he hasn't mastered other skills.
Anna Faris is very stoned stoner in Smiley Face, a comedy signed Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin, Nowhere, The Doom Generation), so you know it's gonna be pretty wild. Her journey "from A to Z" is filled with quirky characters (played a large and very recognizable cast - we kept saying, "oh, that guy!") and happenings, and is marked by consistent self-sabotage as she vacillates between euphoria and paranoia, often forgetting what she's supposed to be doing, or jumping to insane conclusions. I don't have Clue One as to what being stoned feels like (look, I was a teenager in the 1980s Just Say No era), but I've seen it on other people, and Faris perhaps incarnates one of the best shit-faced stoners ever put to screen, up there with The Big Lebowski. It just FEELS right and doesn't cut corners. And I just love all the weird details - the use of an economics degree, the alphabet structure, the dreamy transitions, the hallucinatory flashes... It all amounts to a strangely charming picaresque to nowhere.
[Myanmar] Sure, Michel Hazanavicius made The Artist, but also those terrible O.S.S. 117 comedies, so going into Godard Mon Amour (Le Redoutable, a title with a playfulness lost in English translation), I wasn't sure what to expect. ESPECIALLY since I'm on record as not liking Godard's work - I think it's inventive, but unbearably pretentious. So it's not without some personal glee that the biopic, picking things up from Godard's more political (failed) phase, takes him down a peg or more. Godard apparently hated it, which is proper. He's portrayed as a narcissistic, insecure, angry, lisping blowhard, but more than that, the many "Godardisms" in the film (which I'm sure I would have caught more of if I could sit through his movies, I've finished only a handful) poke fun at his stylistic choices. This is really the story of his young wife Anne and her struggle to keep loving a man for whom "revolution" is a state of being and is therefore incapable of constancy. Can you love someone who keeps drifting away from what made you love them? More that drifting... who REJECTS what you love about them? Stacy Martin eats up the screen as Anne. In The Artist, Hazanavicius showed he was good at emulating cinematic styles, and his Godardian derivations are a lot of fun. Better, unlike Godard, he doesn't sacrifice emotional truth for his stylistic ends, so he doesn't keep me at arm's length the way Godard does. Props to the English translators, by the way, for crafting new English puns to replace the French ones (I get to enjoy both).
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