Tag: Mathieu Amalric

My Golden Days

Arnaud Desplechin’s coming-of-age romance finds nostalgia in a very French way.

MyGoldenDaysPosterThe ability to compare your girlfriend to an Italian work of landscape art from the Renaissance, to carry out a long distance relationship of casual sex, or to have an affair with your housemate’s girlfriend without consequence, is all decidedly French. Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Golden Days” follows a romance and coming-of-age story very specific to a Parisian lifestyle in the ‘80s, so frivolous and carefree that watching it feels erratic.

Paul Dedalus (Mathieu Amalric) confesses in casual pillow talk with his current lover overseas that he feels no nostalgia for his country. That romantic tone gets quickly replaced with a flashback to Paul’s childhood, a melodramatic scene of violent domestic abuse. During his pre-teen years, Paul’s mother kills herself and his father checks out altogether.

Back in modern times, Paul becomes detained by a customs official who says a duplicate Paul Dedalus turned up dead several years earlier. In explanation, Paul reflects back on a high school trip to Minsk in the Soviet era when he smuggled in goods and gave his passport to an Israeli refugee. Suddenly the film’s tone assumes that of a tense thriller. Across these different chapters and plays on genre, Paul gets beaten and abused, once by his father, once by his own hand, and once by a jealous boyfriend. And each time Paul describes the situation by saying, “I felt nothing.”

Paul (played by Quentin Dolmaire as a teenager) desperately needs to feel something. The remainder of the film concerns his young-adult relationship with Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), and as Paul’s life becomes consumed with this relationship, Desplechin strives to show how Paul will learn to feel something after all.

Of course, he’ll only learn to feel in a way that matches Desplechin’s (“A Christmas Tale,” “Kings and Queen”) own personal experience in France. “My Golden Days” draws plenty of inspiration from the French New Wave, and even closes with a cheeky freeze frame that feels lifted from “The 400 Blows.” So the revelations and discoveries about life will all be marred in stories of cool young people having sex, arguing with their stuffy, oppressive parents, lying around smoking and dabbling in just a touch of grad-school existentialism. Paul’s character and his experiences are so specific to this culture that it’s hard to truly relate or feel connected to his brand of anguish and grief.

Paul and Esther are both layabouts. He attends grad school but is a lazy student (openly admitting that every class of geniuses needs someone to remind them how brilliant they all are), and she may or may not have settled into a dull, unhappy job after high school, but finds plenty of time to sleep around with Paul’s friends. They’re cavalier about their infidelity and emotionally run hot and cold in the way that teenagers tend to do with first loves.

And “My Golden Days” mimics that frenetic feeling in its style. The early chapters of the movie experiment with tone and framing, with the beginning of Esther’s chapter even briefly employing split-screen wipes that look like something out of an old TV show. Desplechin also uses strange iris close-ups more commonly found in silent film. It’s a way of calling attention to Paul’s more carefree past, and yet nothing on screen feels particularly nostalgic or dreamlike.

It makes for an interesting viewing experience regardless, but like the characters at the center of “My Golden Days,” the film inwardly looks only at itself. Recapping the big moments of his life for Esther, Paul says “I have no idea what else to talk about.” “My Golden Days” isn’t about politics or bigger ideas of the world at large but about these particular people and how they meander through their lives. At the end of the day they might even be interesting, but they still don’t seem to have much to say.

2 1/2 stars

Side by Side: The Sea Inside and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “The Sea Inside” both look at devastating disabilities, but their characters have internal differences.

A disabled person should not be defined by their disability. This much we know, especially in the movies. But should they be defined by the fate they’ve chosen, or should family, friends and society have an impact on what someone stuck in this position should be able to say and do with their life?

“The Sea Inside” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” are two Oscar nominated foreign films about people who have suffered accidents and are now rendered immobile, but not incommunicable. Yet they differ in terms of how they express themselves, their internal dreams, ambitions and wishes for their body, and the movies follow suit.

Alejandro Amenabar’s “The Sea Inside” won the Foreign Language Oscar in 2004 for Spain, and it’s a tear-jerking crowd pleaser about an overall good man who simply wants to die, not out of misery but out of tranquility.

Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” on the other hand is much more surreal, art house and assertively French. Its themes and its story may scream Oscar bait, but its presentation certainly does not. That however did not prevent it from picking up four nominations in 2007 anyway. Its character is miserable enough that he would likely kill himself if he could, or if he could communicate it, but his reasons are much more cynical.

I watched these two films in succession because my sister is currently in a summer psychology course. It points out through these films that there are numerous thought processes that would influence a person to want death, and neither of them have strictly to do with circumstances.

What I found curious about the films is that each plays with its melodramatic overtones, and the tearjerker is not always the most exploitative, nor is the art film the most firm. Continue reading “Side by Side: The Sea Inside and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel was nominated for Best Director for his work on this foreign film about a unique disability.

Julian Schnabel has an extreme fascination with the eye. This is necessary for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” because it becomes the sole tool of Jean Dominique Bauby. But it is an important correlation, the eye being a source of emotion and that which makes us human.

This is a brilliantly directed film, and it’s evident from the first frame. We look out the eyes of a man. The image is blurred, but we can see he is in a hospital. The doctors bend down to speak with him at eye level, but he looks not at their mouths or faces but directly into their eyes as if to say, “I couldn’t care less what your opinion is, but who the hell are you and where am I?” We can hear the man’s internal thoughts, and we can tell he is cynical, impatient, but within moments, both he and the audience will discover he has reason to be.

Jean Dominique Bouby (Mathieu Amalric), or Jean-Do, was the real life editor of Elle fashion magazine when in 1995 he suffered from a stroke that left his entire body, with the exception of his left eye, completely paralyzed. His mind was perfectly intact, but he became trapped in this vegetated state. Within time, Jean-Do learned to communicate by blinking his eye as the alphabet was read to him. Using this process, Jean-Do dictates his memoirs in what is an inspirational beauty each time he begins to communicate.

I was so touched by Jean-Do’s sudden change of heart about his situation and his commitment to preserve his life in the only way he can. In the beginning of the film, Jean-Do is pessimistic, and who wouldn’t be? But Henrietta (Marie Josee Croze), his speech therapist, is such a warming presence, demonstrating care and love for this hopeless man. She serves as a catalyst to his communication, making life possible for him. His other motivation is an old friend that was taken hostage in Beirut for four years. He tells Jean-Do, “Don’t lose what it is that makes you human.” Jean-Do lives by this mantra, but it is his own inner strength that allows him to accomplish such a feat.

And that is the ultimate question “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” proves: What makes a man? As Jean-Do says, he still possesses his imagination and his memories. Only the human mind can accomplish a feat such as Jean-Do’s, but the boundaries of Jean-Do’s mind are no different than an able person. Perhaps a film like this answers the questions for many who live in a vegetated state. Even a man who cannot communicate still possesses the abilities of his mind. So does that make him any less of a man?

The performances are truly something special. Amalric can demonstrate emotion and expression with just a shift of his eye. But similar characters have been portrayed better. The reason behind such a powerful connection to the protagonist is the internal perspective Schnabel provides the audience. We are given a window into the mind of an ordinary man, and the attachment that brews inside you for this person is unlike any other. We see the people he sees, the objects he gazes upon and the brief moment of darkness when he blinks his eye. We don’t just understand this man; we are this man. We admire the same subtleties in his nurses’ facial expressions, like Henrietta’s soft skin or her quaint smile.

Admittedly, Schnabel was given good material. There aren’t many stories that are this heartbreaking and heroic at the same time. But in using the full stretch of his imagination, Schnabel allows us to better understand ourselves.

4 stars