Beautiful ladies of France
Isabelle Huppert stars in White Material
A love affair with French cinema, women, and actresses. When Jake Benson thinks of great movies, they are French such as Chabrol's The Butcher
. His taste in women in French: Emmanuelle Beart, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Audrey Tautou, and Laetitia Casta. Jake shares with us his taste for all things French.
First things first: I am American. This rant about American art, culture, and movies comes not from a European arthouse snob. It's a cry of despair from the American heartland.
Sitting through the Special Features of the extraordinarily bad American movie, Don McKay
, it struck me how gleefully happy first-time director Jake Goldberger was to have duped Thomas Haden Church and Elizabeth Shue into starring in his appalling written and lamely directed film.
Big money fools
It summed up so much of what is wrong with American art, with its focus on names, celebrity, wheeling and dealing. If you can fool big money and stars into backing your abysmal piece of work, you can become an overnight sensation.
Noemie Lenoir. [See African supermodels]
Laetitia Casta. [See foreign movies]
Emmanuelle Beart. [See more Beart]
Eva Green. [See foreign movies]
Morgane Dubled. [See foreign movies]
Audrey Tautou. [See foreign movies]
Isabelle Huppert. [See more Huppert]
Catherine Deneuve. [See foreign movies]
The quality of your work does not matter. Sloppiness doesn't matter. The inability to write doesn't matter. If you can find the backing and the names, you've made it, you'll be praised.
In fact, American art, in which I include cinema, is terrified of being difficult, inaccessible, thought-provoking. It's so commerce-driven that unless you can guarantee to put asses on cinema seats your movie won't get made.
And yet that's not the whole truth because the hustling pitch still plays a big role in the film industry, especially in independent movies. If you can fool agents, financiers, and actors into believing your independent movie is going to give your actors a chance to really act and put themselves out there, you might well get your project made.
Kids and bean counters
There are very few intellectuals working in the movies. It's mostly kids and bean counters. They don't know what art is; they're afraid of intellect, they mistake heavy-handed irony and nihilism for depth and talent.
OK, that's independent American cinema kicked out the window.What about Hollywood?
If anything, Hollywood's story is even sadder. In so many Hollywood movies, if the plot hits a rut, just throw in some loud orchestral music or perform some CGI wizardry, and you kid yourself no one will notice the plot holes.
That's what Tim Burton's crap Disney product Alice in Wonderland
was all about.
Burton replaced good old fasioned storytelling with CGI, quirky set design, and dull directing that had me nodding off after 10 minutes.
Claude Chabrol
I recommend one name to you: Claude Chabrol, the French Hitchcock, who on a tiny budget with zero special affects can have you glued to the screen, totally absorbed by psychological tales of murder, tormet, and despair.
The New York Times, wrote of Chabrol's 2006 film The Bridesmaid
: It is, like so many of his pictures, a thriller that -- calmly, deliberately and with exquisite perversity -- refuses to thrill. He prefers on the whole to unsettle, to disorient, to unnerve and to create the sort of apprehension that cannot finally be resolved.
Yes, that separates him from American directors, who have a perverse and compulsive need to join all the threads and wrap a movie up so neatly that they plummet into an absurdity of coincidences that can only exist in movieland.
New York Times
Again, as spotted by the New York Times: Chabrol rarely makes a thriller that satisfies the (American) audience's expectations of a thriller, even including the childlike hope that good will be rewarded and evil punished.
Oh how delicious that is. Chabrol dares to give us the unexpected. He dares to annoy and thwart us. He refuses to play to convention, and when he does, he's bored. His movies are at their worst when he gives us what is expected of the genre: good overcoming evil, races against time, girl saved, villain thwarted, cue music, roll credits, we're outta here.
Le Boucher
My favorite Chabrol movie is The Butcher
(Le Boucher
) realeased in 1970 and said by Alfred Hitchcock to be one of only two films he wished he had made.
It is everything an American thriller is not. It's extremely slow moving. There are no all-good and all-bad characters. There is no easy, please-everybody conclusion with the hero surviving and the villain packed into a police van to face life imprisonment.
A modern American audience would be bored, frustrated, and angered by the movie. There's no simple morality tale, no pressing of emotional buttons telling you what to think, no car chases, no perfectly choreographed fights, no moments of leaping from your seat as the killer pounces on a victim. This is subtle, psychological drama.
The plot of The Butcher
is simple. Helene (Stephane Audran) is a confident young teacher, loved by her pupils at the school where she works and lives.
She meets the local butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne), at a wedding ceremony, and they become friends.
Unknown killer
The film examines how Helene deals with her suspicion of Popaul as a series of women in the small town are killed by an unknown murderer.
The identity of the killer is no mystery. It is obviously the butcher. As Roger Ebert writes, is The movie's suspense involves the haunting dance that the two characters perform around the fact of the butcher's guilt. Will he kill her, too? Does she want to be killed? No, not at all, but perhaps she wants to get teasingly close to being killed; perhaps she is fascinated by the butcher's savagery.
French actresses
On a lighter note, my love affair with French culture is also about French women, in particular French actresses.
I am not a big fan of Bardot. My love starts with Catherine Deneuve, who has starred in more than 100 films.
It continues with Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Devos, Audrey Tautou, Emmanuelle Beart, and Laetitia Casta.
To me there is nothing sexier, nothing on earth more alluring than a beautiful French woman.
By Jake Benson
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