Film director Arnaud Desplechin visited the country to show three of his movies, including the brand new "Kings and Queen" (2004, shown for the first time in Japan), and appear in teach-ins and talk events (1/28 & 2/3 at L'Institut franco-japonais de Tokyo). The visit and events coincided with the "11emes Semaines des Cahiers du cinema", where Desplechin seized the occasion to prove that "Kings and Queen" deserves its reputation as another masterpiece (distributor in Japan is Gaga Communications, theatre dates are yet to be determined).
Protagonist of the film is the 35-year-old Nora, who is preparing for her second marriage with a wealthy man. While everybody seems happy in the beginning, the first scenes are interlarded with hints at the eventful story that lies ahead. As expected, the plot takes one dramatic turn after another, whereas in a way the entire film follows the French tradition of illustrating slowly and extensively a sort of cinematic blissfulness in images combining bitter, sweet and pathetic flavors. The technique of composing sequences out of cuts from several takes proves helpful in order to make the movie seem shorter than its actual 150 minutes. Desplechin plays with details to a tolerable extent, which lends the rather bizarre settings a pleasant feel of reality.
If I were asked to categorize the movie in a single term, I'd probably call it "adult cinema". Making no exception among the long list of French film directors, Desplechin bases his works on the French filmmaking tradition since the Nouvelle Vague, which means automatically that also the tradition prior to the Nouvelle Vague are taken into consideration. Just like Chabrol, Godard or Truffaut, who learned from Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, Desplechin has been watching, studying, analyzing, quoting, and ultimately trying to surpass the works of his own masters. The 150 minutes of this movie are in fact a condensation of 110 years of cinema history.
Different from many Nouvelle Vague artists, who started their careers writing for "Cahiers du cinema", Desplechin has no experience as a film critic. This, however, does of course not mean that he has no critical eye. As if to prove this, the "La vie est un roman" film festival that is currently held at the Institut franco-japonais (through 3/31) is showing films selected by no other than Arnaud Desplechin. "Life is a novel" is how the title would translate, and a novel-like quality (in a cinematic frame) is what all the 17 titles in the program, from Sacha Guitry’s "Le Roman d'un Tricheur" (1936) to Edward Yang’s "Yi Yi" (2000), share.
The flyer that was produced by the Institut contains an introduction written by Desplechin himself, in which the director displays his exceptional insight as a critic and producer, and makes clear what he expects from a movie. Let me quote part of the foreword:
"After being proposed this 'carte blanche', I was undecided for a while about what kind of program I wanted to put together. I finally settled on the idea to assemble a set of films that belong to totally different genres, but share a certain lineage that makes them fit into the same group." "Every time I loose confidence in the world that surrounds me, I go and watch a movie. But is that in order to remember my own, real existence, or rather to fill myself with the sweet conviction that I do NOT exist…?"
A new publication by a writer or philosopher may contain a summary of its author’s intellectual history, while a musician’s new composition may incorporate in a digested and sublimated form all the music he or she has listened to up to that point. The same scheme applies to theatre, dance, design, etc. In this sense, all works of artistic expression should be understood as reprints of all the experiences and works their creators made and consumed during half their lifetime… Unfortunately, this is the ideal, but in reality it’s often different.
However, I hope to see more of this type of events happen in the future, like for example festivals showing films selected by Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Aoyama Shinji or Miike Takashi. In any case, it’s interesting to see what movies a skilled filmmaker selects when given the "carte blanche". I guess that, if we had the chance to watch their own movies and at the same time study their "cinematic intellectual history", that would certainly deepen our love for movies in general. Martin Scorcese’s "My Voyage to Italy" makes one feel like watching movies by Rosselini, Fellini or Antonioni, which Scorcese refers to in his film. That’s the nature of the species known as film afficionados.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO