Cat's Away 2: Assessing Assayas

We've now crossed the halfway mark in the nine nights my wife will be out of the country, during which I'm squeezing in as many movies as I can.

I've only seen two movies by Olivier Assayas, which is a surprisingly small number of movies for someone I have so many opinions about.

I guess I should say I don't have opinions about him personally, as I have never heard him interviewed and don't even know what the man looks like. (Not that my opinions about him would have anything to do with his appearance, of course.) But the two movies of his I've seen have stuck in my craw, in a bad way, to the extent that I roll my eyes when his name comes up in conversation.

The first Assayas I saw, Something in the Air (also called Apres Mai or After May), didn't offend me or anything, and I probably would have considered it merely shrug-worthy had Adam Kempenaar of Filmspotting not sung its praises so vociferously. It's a semi-autobiographical look at a young revolutionary coming up in the radical late 1960s in France, a sort of coming-of-age story about a young man finding his voice and heading down a path that leads to him becoming a filmmaker. It's made very well but I just found it boring, and in the context of knowing it is autobiography, probably just a tad indulgent and self-congratulatory.

It was my second Assayas, The Clouds of Sils Maria, that made me really grumpy about the man. I found this to be an over-long bore that was pedestrian where it thought it was profound, was extremely curiously paced, and was not even as well acted as it received acclaim for being. Meanwhile, that acclaim for the film in general was deafening, and I just couldn't make sense of it. That led to my Unified Theory of Assayas, which is basically that the man makes pretentious movies that are not nearly as good as people seem to think they are.

I probably ought to see Summer Hours before I feel like I can really judge the man, but I didn't say my judgment of him was rational, did I?

Not being on the same wavelength as Olivier Assayas did not mean I was not going to see his newest film, Personal Shopper, despite some people repeating back to me my own complaints about Assayas in the context of this considerably more divisive film. I'm a fan of Kristen Stewart, even though she didn't do it for me in Sils Maria, and I always like a good ghost story. So I held my nose and took the plunge, with 22 days remaining on my 30-day iTunes rental.

And now, finally, I "get" Olivier Assayas.

So yes, I liked Personal Shopper quite a bit, though I suppose saying that I "get" Assayas is a bit misleading. That suggests he's doing the same thing he always does, but a switch has been flipped in me, and now I understand it better. This movie feels like him doing something different -- something different that I get.

Yeah, there are a fair number of superficial things it has in common with The Clouds of Sils Maria -- Kristen Stewart, her character's relationship with a female celebrity, the existence of unexplained and supernatural occurrences. But there's a big formal difference here that privileges Shopper over Maria. Part of the reason Maria felt so elongated is that it has an overabundance of dialogue-heavy scenes, many of which serve little purpose in pushing the narrative forward. Shopper has far fewer of these. It's much more of an atmospheric film that shows rather than telling, and makes good use of the little telling it does do. I didn't emerge from this experience feeling exhausted by the amount of dialogue that had fallen on my ears without really getting anywhere.

I was also genuinely surprised, and for the most part pleased, by the extent to which Assayas went for the traditional scares of a ghost story. When I heard that this film involved Stewart's character trying to commune with her dead twin brother, I imagined the supernatural elements of it being very low rent, not for budgetary reasons, but in order to fit with the sensibility I imagined Assayas to have. I figured it would be along the lines of "it's a ghost story because if you squint very hard, you might be able to trick yourself into believing it's something other than the wind moving that curtain." But no, this film goes for it on several occasions, even using genuine visual effects to create a spiritual presence whose physical existence is virtually indisputable. This surprised me and chilled me. In fact, it's rare that I am this chilled by a movie that does not explicitly try to align itself with the horror genre.

I'm not saying every part of the movie totally worked for me, and I must admit that in the last 20 minutes or so, four straight nights of starting more than two-and-a-half hours of movie viewing after 8:30 finally took their toll on me, and I was nodding off a bit. But it was a kind of "atmospheric nodding off," where the film's ethereal aesthetic choices and themes kind of blend with your exhaustion to bring something profound to the fore.

Keep surprising me, Assayas. Maybe we'll get along fine.

Persona is having a moment

The fact that a number of films set in San Francisco should come out the same year, as discussed yesterday, does not seem quite as unusual as the fact that there are a number of concurrent films that are duplicating the essential relationship dynamics of Ingmar Bergman's Persona.

If anything, that should come next year, when the movie celebrates its 50th anniversary. But I guess there's no accounting for when a certain movie starts to really express itself in the artistic collective unconsciousness.

For those who don't know -- and that might have included me before I actually saw Persona last year -- Bergman's film deals, very elliptically (would there be any other way with this subject matter?), with the blending of personalities of two women who are holed up together for a period of time in a seaside bungalow. They are an actress who's lost her voice, and her nurse. It's considered by some to be one of the greatest films ever made. I don't consider it that, but I can't deny that it has a certain elemental power that you just have to see to understand -- to try to understand, anyway.

The same feeling, more or less, struck me when I was watching The Duke of Burgundy on Tuesday night -- only I think I like Burgundy even more than I like Persona. Peter Strickland's follow-up to Berberian Sound Studio (which was my #5 film of 2013) also features two women in a confined space, a comparatively confined space (it's a mansion), though they do also spend time apart and with other women. (No other men, though.) They have some kind of dominant-submissive sexual relationship, though it's not always clear who's the dominant and who's the submissive, and to even get caught up in the fact that their relationship is kinky tends to belittle just how much profound other stuff is going on here. In any case, comparisons to Persona seem obvious, though apparently Strickland was surprised to hear them as that was not what he was thinking of when he made the movie.

The Duke of Burgundy may have been the first of these movies in 2015 -- it was released cinematically in the U.S. way back in January, though not until last week here in Australia -- though it was not the last. Next came Clouds of Sils Maria, in which a fortysomething actress and her twentysomething assistant have some personality overlap as they run lines for a play, which also features two characters about their same ages. Making matters more complicated, the actress actually played the younger role when she was an ingenue, but is taking on the older role now that the play is being revived. Though I didn't particularly care for this movie, and have decided I'm fairly cold on Olivier Assayas in general, it's sat with me enough that I probably need to revisit it. Again, the comparisons to Persona seem fairly obvious, as the film's key moments take place while they are staying together in a remote cabin.

Lastly -- or at least, I think it's lastly -- there is Queen of Earth, which has yet to open in Australia and which is the latest film from Listen Up Phillip's Alex Ross Perry. This film apparently features another two women, this time both young (as is the case, more or less, in Persona), staying by themselves at a lake house. As I understand it, they were once close but have discovered they have grown apart, and the movie becomes a full-on psychological thriller. It's the poster as much as anything that probably makes a person think of the emotional dissolution of a movie like Persona:

So why are all these filmmakers trotting out their influences -- acknowledged or otherwise -- at the same time? And why don't we ever seen any movies where men exchange personalities? Is the female mind considered more malleable, more subject to destabilization? And if so, isn't that kind of sexist? Or is it just that women are more mysterious, which is less sexist but still sort of sexist? Would men blending personalities be "too gay" for us?

It may be no coincidence that these are all males directing females. Could a woman directing men get away with the same thing? If Sofia Coppola wanted to make a movie about two men blurring identities, would we question her authority to do so? Or her motivation behind doing so?

It's just an extreme continuation of what male directors have always done to their female stars, molding them and shaping them and turning them into inscrutable figures. And though I certainly don't want to get on my high horse about gender politics -- especially considering how much I like both Burgundy and Persona -- I do have to wonder.

But wait, there's more! One of the movies I'm most looking forward to later this year is Carol, directed by Todd Haynes, about a relationship (with psychologically bizarre overtones?) between a young department store clerk and an older, married woman. Can this be just a lesbian love story, or will it have to make us question what is reality and what isn't?

Well, I look forward to finding out, anyway.

One side note about The Duke of Burgundy, which I'll throw in here so I don't have to devote a whole post to it: There's a particularly unusual type of service credited in the opening credits. No, I'm not talking about who provided the lingerie, though that's unusual enough. I'm talking about who provided the perfume. That's right, a production element that you could not possibly detect if you tried, and in fact is completely unnecessary even for the performers, was credited. "Perfume by" and then whoever it was. I love the idea that they considered perfume such an atmospheric, essential part of filmmaking that they went so far as to let us know who provided it. I hope that gives you some sense of the type of experience you're getting involved with here.