Love in the Afternoon – dir.Eric Rohmer, 1972

Fredric (Bernard Verley) has a nice house and a charming and clever wife, with whom he has a cherubic child, with another on the way. Frederic is unable at present to objectively appreciate his domestic situation as he is faltering in the midst of a somewhat premature seven-year itch.  When he takes the morning train his intense gaze at a young woman, sitting ripe and deliciously mysterious in the morning sun, could smoulder the meanest of young hearts. Fredric, whilst sitting in a café on a bustling Parisian street, reveries of controlling the crowds of woman, that pour out from nowhere, to be gone in an instant, never to be known by him. As the last of Rohmer’s ‘six moral tales’ this film has a narrative clout to it that engages with the protagonists own moral quandary, on reacquainting himself with the enigmatic Chloe (Zouzou).  Chloe is the anathema to Frederic’s marriage.  Chloe is loose, free and cool, she flits from job to job, and man-to-man, a totemic temptress, offering Fredric an opportunity to take action and nullify his otherwise meandering passive café-sitting placidity.  She is an alluring thing that Fredric finds a place for in the afternoons.  Chloe’s character is oppositional to Frederic, who is comforted by domestic security.  Chloe is spontaneous and unreliable, which offers excitement yet she never displays any notion of needing anyone, what she offers Frederic fits perfectly for his marriage.  Chloe’s face and body is utilised by Rohmer to bestow a sense of her fragility.  Waiflike and girlish, topped off with high cheek bones and sad eyes, Zouzou’s own mischievousness is an undeniable factor in much of Chloe’s allure. The film is an exploration of the male gaze, the power it has over woman in its objectification, yet there is a warm heart to the story.  Frederic epiphanies that he is in love with his wife, from his crisis has arisen the realisation that he loves her more than ever.  It is a tender seen when he tells her this, as though a light has come on from in the darkness, her reaction is to cry, can’t you see I’m laughing, she tells him.

★★★★☆

Cache – dir.Michael Haneke, 2005

Cache is a superbly unsettling film and stirs in the viewer an explicit sense of discomfort and confusion. The very theme of the film, voyeurism, is a practice human beings deplore as victims, and yet are guilty of, in the very action of watching this film. Similarly, the notion of blurred innocence with guilt is an affliction we come to surmise of the protagonist Georges (Daniel Auteuil).  Georges, who has recently received some primarily nonthreatening yet suspicious surveillance tapes showing the exterior to his Parisian home, eventually associates the source of the threat with a childhood incident.  Georges’ wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), confused by the tapes and the accompanying crude crayon scribbles, is both a passive observer and yet quietly threatened by this domestic disturbance.  Watching the events unfold, the subject of the threats, it transpires, is her husband.  Haneke plunges the viewer into the dark with the opening scene.  Are we watching a still or a moving image?  Who is filming, victim or perpetrator? We are from the onset unclear of where the malevolence lies. Surely though, to warrant such animosity Georges must be guilty, but of what?  Before purging his soul to an unsuspecting Anne, Georges tracks down the conditional culprit.  One could read the film, and the terrible sadness at the heart, as an application to approach the French guilt for the Paris massacre of 1961.  Indeed Georges’ bourgeois persona, most definitely receives a little light ridicule, if only in dichotomising his intellectual pomp with the tragedy and asceticism of the Algerian Majid (Maurice Benichou).  This film however is not wholly concerned with retribution, for neither Mijad nor Georges is offered any comfort or replenishment from either’s predicament.  The end subtly induces the plot to hang on, the final scene adding another layer of complexity to the story.  Ultimately the viewer  does not feel to have found any moralistic culmination or otherwise to the story. Cache is a little too enigmatic and harbours too much uncertainty to be a political stance. It is a little too complex, fragile, and loaded to be an out and out thriller.  The story Haneke weaves is a murkier narrative than most, combined with clever scenes that we witness fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, at a giddying pace.  The viewer becomes the eyes of Georges, someone desperately searching for clues, pointers, anything, whilst truly anxious and afraid.  Training our astuteness for the one final clue that could just as easily slip past as the credits roll.   Georges’ guilt is ostensibly born from the actions of human weakness. It is the consequences of his actions that we are asked to judge. The questions stack up as the sprawling tragic story unveils, for all the answers to ultimately remain hidden.

★★★★★

Vivre Sa Vie – dir.Jean-Luc Godard, 1962

Has any other film approached the subject of life itself quite so masterfully? As a series of vignettes, Vivre Sa Vie, explores the hopes and the subsequent decline of Nana (Anna Karina).  Nana, who’s Rimbaudian ‘I is another,’ detachment to the present, aspires to become an actress. Unable to make a break for herself, having abandoned her husband and facing impoverishment, Nana drifts into prostitution.  Godard crafts the film so that the scenes are perfectly compact in themselves, using innovations in sound editing; the frames melt into one another. Glorious, rich, and luxurious shots of  Paris, and the beautiful Nana, crank the film along. The inside of the brothels, stark and monochrome, with windows looking out on to the moody Parisian streets, brings forth the realities of the social situation. The girl here is a definite dreamer, she is looking to be saved, looking for an escape route, she asks some shady journalist to take her photograph.  She is content at being the woman watched, but at what price must she pay when perhaps all along it was that she wanted to be listened to.  The philosophical undertone to the film is most conspicuous on Nana’s meeting an elderly man in a Café.  He tells her about the thinking life and how it is more difficult and painful but ultimately more rewarding than the elementary one.  Bemused and girlish, but unfazed by his sagacity, she asks him about love.  He tells her that love is a solution on condition that it’s true.  The wisdom of the film is far superior to the fatalistic story, intended to highlight the social cause at its heart. The tragic end comes soon after Nana is told by a lover that ‘art and beauty is life,’ which in that moment she embodies. Wide eyed and loving, it is a strange fleeting scene, which whistles past as though it were a moment, not in Nana’s, but someone else’s life.

★★★★☆

2 Days in Paris – dir.Julie Delpy, 2007

Though this film will inevitably draw comparisons to Before Sunset, same girl, same city, it’s an original in its own right.  The film zings along endearingly, largely due to its own self-conscious parodying of a light French farce.  French lady, Marion (Julie Delpy), and her American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg), have come to Paris for two nights, where they are to stay in Marion’s flat, on the floor above her enfants terribles type parents.  Jack is a little uptight, he’s a New Yorker don’t you know, so whilst he preoccupies himself with the pitfalls of hypochondria, Marion takes off her spectacles and explores the possibility of romantically moving on from this quirky foreigner who has come along, seemingly  to just humiliate and isolate himself from the footloose Parisians at every available opportunity.  Jack gets threatened when Marion’s exes crop up out of flower stalls from nowhere, he gets a little paranoid when he interprets some questionable French text messages that he sneakily reads on her phone. ‘Paris is hell!’ Jack declares as they break up on the banks of the Seine. A quip to Sartre perhaps, or as it transpires later, he just stayed up watching ‘M’ all night. The strengths of this film are most definitely in the credulity of the relationship that we witness unravel.  Jack is a tattooed totem of neurosis who finds himself out of depth with the laissez faire wooziness of Marion’s family, friends and exes.  Marion, who we are primarily to believe is  cooler and calmer than her boyfriend, her self offers a glimpse of amusing hypochondria.  Convincing herself at a party, that she has had an allergic reaction to some muscles. But perhaps her anxieties run even deeper than that, she is afraid, she tells Jack, of being with just one person for the rest of her life. He accuses her of being a squirrel, collecting men like nuts to have for winter. This film is at its weakest and most disjointed with scenes that seem inserted to politically punctuate the plot, such as Jack sending a group of Bush voting American rednecks the wrong way round Paris.  The film’s successes lies mostly with the fluidity and likability of the performances.  In particular Goldberg’s, whose stand out is the metro scene, where he comically attempts to ward off a strange little man, by casting stern animated faces at him, well at least it made him forget about the threat of terrorism for a while, George Bush, his sinuses, his headaches…

★★★★☆