Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.
Dear Leo and Danny,
Danny, I’m glad you brought up Three Thousand Years of Longing, a film whose conceptual explorations of myth and storytelling sustained my interest for quite some time. The fundamental question it raises—and which is studied by narratologists and students of comparative religion the world over—is whether there is a finite number of narrative patterns and character archetypes, whether there is a theoretically enumerable list of story structures which we simply repeat again and again. In Three Thousand Years, the basic idea, voiced by Tilda Swinton's academic, is whether it is possible to tell a story about wish-granting that is not a cautionary tale? In its exploration of this, the film played, for a time, a bit like Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room (2015), only with a commitment to hyper-plastic computer generated imagery instead of the look of decaying two-strip Technicolor. But the comparison, while useful, only goes so far. Unlike Maddin’s film, which never stops anatomizing its own mise-en-abyme storytelling, culminating with a literal “Book of Climaxes,” Three Thousand Years eventually shifts into the territory of romance, transforming into love story between Swinton’s narratologist and Idris Elba’s djinn. The success of this conceptual move likely depends on one’s emotional response, and while I appreciated the look of the film's uncanny digital skies, my interest in it was, by the end, largely academic.
Still, Three Thousand Years offers a useful starting point for thinking about our relationship to the art of the past. How does the task of filmmaking change with one’s knowledge of, say, classical Hollywood films or European post-war cinema? How does one go about making films in an era when the cinema has, as it were, become conscious to itself?
Emmanuel Mouret’s Diary of a Fleeting Affair, which includes posters of Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949) and Bresson’s Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), and whose main characters at one point watch Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973), belongs to a tradition of French cinema that explicitly engages with such questions. The film, playing in the Cannes Premiere section, opens with a bar meeting between Charlotte (Sandrine Kiberlain) and Simon (Vincent Macaigne), virtual strangers who are meeting for only the second time. It is soon clear that they are going to sleep with each other. It is also evident that they each have very different levels of experience in such matters. She is an experienced single woman who, by her own admission, does not like “passion”; he is a married man nervous about embarking on his first affair, and who, by his own admission, tries his best to keep from imposing himself on others. Preceding each of their meetings by title cards that tell us the date, Diary chronicles their entire affair and nothing more, comprising only scenes featuring the two characters. Not unlike the way Three Thousand Years foregrounds its central premise, Diary explicitly asks whether it is possible to tell a story about an extra-marital affair without having it take either a tragic or comic turn.
Apart from the easy chemistry between Macaigne and Kiberlain (both superb), much of the appeal throughout is Mouret’s lively staging: Most every scene has some sort of foregrounded visual concept or reference point. The initial meeting between Charlotte and Simon—a scene whose non-stop conversational rhythm approaches that of His Girl Friday (1940)—unfolds in a fluid but unshowy sequence shot, laying out the physical space of the bar while the pair probes the boundaries of their relationship. One meeting plays out over a close-up of their hands, another in a wide shot, composed such that the two are but silhouettes against a museum display. Like so many great Hollywood comedies and romances, Diary includes significant jaunts away from the city—a pastoral vision to contrast the bustle of urban life—at one point incorporating a hushed visit to a rural church, recalling similar scenes in John M. Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939) and Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939). A significant plot development later in the film, involving another woman (Giorgia Scalliet) whose marriage to her architect husband is on the rocks, even suggests the possibility of a modern, gender-flipped update of Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933).
The cumulative effect of all this reflexive stylistic construction is to keep the central couple’s ardor largely submerged, complementing their own attempts to deny their desires and longings—that is, until Mouret finally allows the story’s potent emotional undertow to burst forth toward the end. Diary’s final shot suggests that Mouret is ultimately something of an ironist; nonetheless, the film conveys the distinct pleasures of romance.
On the basis of Diary, Mouret is clearly a filmmaker unwilling to give up the pleasures and risks of narrative fiction. And in a contemporary environment dominated by an interest in autofiction, documentary “hybridity,” and an immersion into the real, Mouret’s is arguably a minority position. It is a position shared, though, by fellow French filmmaker Serge Bozon, here with Don Juan, also in the Cannes Premieres section. The film's script, co-written by regular collaborator Axelle Ropert, is constructed around an explicit reversal of the Don Juan archetype: What would happen if, instead of him leaving the women he seduces, he is the one who is abandoned? The film thus begins with Laurent (Tahar Rahim), a theater actor rehearsing for the role of Don Juan in a stage production, being left at the altar on his wedding day by Julie (Virginie Efira).
Bozon has from the very beginning been keenly interested in genre, and no less so here. La France (2007) played with the elements of war film and musical, Tip Top (2013) functioned as a policier-cum-comedy, Mrs. Hyde (2017) melded an urban classroom drama with elements of a supernatural monster movie, while Don Juan fuses a Pirandellian stage concept with the emotional logic of a movie musical. After Laurent is abandoned by Julie, he becomes haunted by her in his subsequent encounters with women. Save for the director of the Don Juan production (Jehnny Beth), Marina (Louise Ribière), the younger actress playing the role of Elvira, and the production’s set dresser (Colline Libon), Julie/Efira is all the women Laurent meets. When Marina quits the play, things only become more confusing for him when Julie steps into the role of Elvira, and after a tense period, the two tentatively rekindle their romance. The lingering question becomes whether or not things will last.
Throughout Don Juan, Bozon’s staging is intentionally, intensely claustrophobic. There is, to begin with, the movie’s uncannily depopulated atmosphere: The script makes almost no room for supporting characters, and even Laurent’s manager Naël (Damien Chapelle) and the aforementioned set dresser (Libon), who get married toward the film's end, never emerge as more than background figures. More crucially, there’s the way Bozon creates the sense of an ever-expanding stage. Images of nature, particularly of the sea, recur like motifs throughout, most obviously in the theater where they are rehearsing Don Juan, whose stage background literally opens onto the outside. But the film's images are often lit and framed such that nature becomes but an extension of theater, such that every exterior becomes an interior. Bozon’s choice to remove any sort of connective tissue between scenes and locations likewise adds to this effect: Scenes float free of any rigid spatio-temporal determinants, connected not by action, but by emotion, the latter heightened by cinematographer Sébastien Buchmann’s dramatic lighting and Benjamin Esdraffo’s score, and culminating in an extended dance sequence in a garden wedding, in which the film’s various threads finally converge. The proverb “all the world’s a stage” was once a commonplace, used for instance by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Like so many who came after, though, Bozon effectively reverses this saying, giving us a movie where the stage is all the world, and turning Don Juan into a tragedy of a man who cannot escape his role.
The desire to escape also informs Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon, notably the director's first film in Cannes' competition since Chocolat in 1988, a fact that says more about the festival’s programming than anything else. The film opens in Nicaragua during a time of precarious political balance, following an American journalist Trish (Margaret Qualley) as she navigates the uncannily depopulated streets of Managua. It soon becomes clear that she has not been commissioned for press work in quite some time. Her press card expired and her letter of authorization annulled, she mostly wanders around looking for air-conditioning, scrounging for dollars, and trying to find some way to leave. She eventually falls in with Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a consultant for a British oil company, whom she approaches at a hotel bar and subsequently sleeps with for fifty dollars. He, though, turns out to be no more capable at navigating the opaque intricacies of the region than she, and the two find themselves wedded to each other, attempting to make their way across the border to Costa Rica.
Stars at Noon is adapted from Denis Johnson’s 1986 novel of the same name, though Denis and co-screenwriters Léa Mysius and Andrew Litvack have transposed its events from their original 1984 setting to the COVID present. The choice is an unexpected one, all but dissolving the broader context of the Nicaraguan Revolution and CIA meddling in Central America into the ambient unease and isolation of the pandemic era. But the decision makes some sense given that Denis’s focus is largely on the intense, carnally driven relationship between Trish and Daniel. Few filmmakers are as adept at Denis at depicting the impulses of desire, and Stars at Noon is filled with any number of memorably sensual, texturally appealing images: a pair of entwined bodies soaked in sweat; a car window shot to look like a diaphanous curtain of light; a close-up of Trish and Daniel swaying under neon purple lights; and, yes, a shot of a clear daytime sky dotted with stars. Indeed, Stars is a film more attentive to the quality of light in different hotel rooms than to the details of a border crossing, and so it makes sense, too, that Alywn and Qualley don’t play “real people” so much as shimmering psychological archetypes. It is likewise understandable that the film's peripatetic narrative tends increasingly toward abstraction. By the end, this latter aspect, coupled with the film's general emphasis on freedom of movement (or, more importantly, the lack thereof), so significant in the context of the pandemic, provides an indication of Denis’s intentions here. Stars at Noon is an attempt to find romance within a world where it’s been all but extinguished—a world where, to borrow from Foucault, espionage has taken place of adventure, and the police have taken the place of pirates.
Warmly,
Lawrence