Small Change

With Small Change, François Truffaut returns again to the topic of childhood, one of the recurring thematic focuses of his films ever since his famous debut feature The 400 Blows. It's a loose, anecdotal film, charming and sweet if perhaps also a little lightweight. There's little structure here, simply a series of vignettes involving various children living in a small town, as well as their teachers, particularly Richet (Jean-François Stévenin), whose wife is expecting a child of their own.

The film meanders along at an easy pace, bouncing lightly from one gently comic anecdote to another. One continuing subtext throughout the film is Truffaut's focus on the dawning of sexuality, the first stirrings of feelings about the opposite sex. The boys are always spying on girls, catching glimpses of one woman's skirt riding up as she bends over or another girl bathing herself, naked, in her window. These flashes of nudity and sensuality have the illicit erotic charge of something not fully understood but powerfully felt regardless. Similarly, Truffaut captures the infatuation of one boy, Patrick (Georges Desmouceaux), with his friend's mother (Tania Torrens), gazing rapturously at her and associating her with a poster he sees of a man and a woman on vacation in a train car, locked in a pose that, for the young boy, seems replete with sexual promise: Truffaut cuts rapidly back and forth between closeups of the man and the woman in the poster, as though visualizing the way that the boy tries to make sense of the obvious attraction between the poster's couple.

Truffaut also drops a few subtle movie references into the film, in particular to Hitchcock's Rear Window. Patrick's father is confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed, and at one point he looks out his window and sees a man in the opposite flat stringing film through reels for a projector. But the Rear Window references are most potently realized in a clever sequence where Sylvie (Sylvie Grezel) is left at home by her parents because she's being stubborn, so she appeals to her neighbors in the adjoining buildings by using a bullhorn to announce that she's hungry. Truffaut's camera pans around the courtyard, where all the residents gather at the windows, and finally conspire to use a basket and a pulley system — like the basket used to raise and lower a dog in Hitchcock's film — to deliver some food to Sylvie for her lunch.


One curious scene is the one where the toddler Grégory plays with his cat by a window and hangs off the ledge when the cat falls to a lower balcony. Truffaut builds the obvious tension of this scene, in which the boy's mother has gone out and he's been left home alone, getting into a dangerous situation, edging into ever more precarious positions as he clambers clumsily along the balcony, hanging off the small rail that's the only protection between him and a fall of several stories. Down below, people start noticing and can only watch helplessly as the boy hangs off the rail and finally falls to the ground. At this point, Truffaut abruptly breaks the suspense by having the kid land on his butt and simply giggle, unfazed and unharmed by the fall, which in reality would certainly have injured him severely at the least. It's a totally puzzling scene, followed up by a conversation between Richet and his wife in which they conclude that kids are tougher than one thinks, which must be the trite moral that Truffaut wants to communicate here. But it comes off as a bizarre piece of fantasy, a surreal fracture in a film that is otherwise committed to low-key realism, really offputting in its casual dismissal of the danger of this scenario.

It's especially jarring because, while the film generally has a pretty light and rosy outlook on childhood, Truffaut doesn't flinch away from the story of Julien (Philippe Goldmann), a poor kid whose family is abusing and beating the boy, a discovery that only comes out during a school physical. This plotline is treated with real honesty and directness, and it provides the opportunity for a speech from Richet that sums up the movie's treatment of childhood: "life is hard, but it's wonderful."

For the most part, Truffaut leans more towards the "wonderful" here, and the film is charming and pleasant from beginning to end, with nicely naturalistic performances from all the amateur child actors. It's a low-key film, with only sporadic traces of the more emotionally intense approach to childhood that Truffaut had explored in The 400 Blows. For the most part, he gracefully and tastefully covers sexual awakening, friendship and teasing, petty stealing and pranks, with a light touch and a warm, affectionate sensibility. A sweet, unassuming film, Small Change is a slight trifle that's nevertheless often moving and quietly funny.

The Castaways of Turtle Island

It took the criminally overlooked New Wave auteur Jacques Rozier a decade to follow up his debut Adieu Philippine with the charming Du côté d'Orouët, but only three years later he'd completed his third feature, The Castaways of Turtle Island. This absurdist, whimsical comedy of tourism and European exoticist fantasies is quite different in tone from Rozier's charming but melancholy first two features, though it shares with them a fascination with escapism and seaside vacations, a love of the sun and the ocean, and a tendency to see in the bourgeois holiday an expression of desperation. Ridiculous, alternately satirical and goofy, and beautifully shot, this is yet another fantastic film from this nearly forgotten French master.

The premise is absurd right from the start, though Rozier, never one to rush his films or overload them with narrative, takes his time getting to the actual story. The film opens with a leisurely character study of the Parisian travel agent Jean-Arthur Bonaventure (Pierre Richard), a dreamer who, during the opening credits, stares into a lamp in his apartment and imagines a beautiful black girlfriend for himself. He's bored of his routine, of his job, of his fiancée (who never even appears in the film, she's so irrelevant), and he wants to escape. As his name already suggests, he wants adventure, a romanticized retreat from his prosaic life. And adventure, for him as for so many white Westerners, means the exotic, the foreign, the non-white, so he fantasizes about having an affair with a black girl, and sure enough the girl he's imagined turns out to be real, and offers to have sex with him virtually as soon as they meet, a sure sign that Jean-Arthur is still immersed in his fantasy, turned on by the otherness and the unlikeliness of this affair.

Soon, Jean-Arthur and his friend Joël (Maurice Risch) decide to take this exoticist fantasy to the next level, and this is where the film's real plot kicks in: they concoct the idea of a tourist package that has no package, no plan, just a trip to a desert island where the vacationers will have to "fend for themselves" like Robinson Crusoe. The agency's owners love it because there's no overhead and a huge profit margin, and soon Jean-Arthur, together with Joël's brother Bernard (Jacques Villeret), is haplessly leading a troupe of tourists on a Caribbean adventure. Bernard, AKA "Little Teddy," is the Sancho Panza to Jean-Arthur's Don Quixote, calmly trudging through this increasingly absurd adventure as Jean-Arthur gets more and more into the spirit of this retreat from civilization, forcing ever more ludicrous restrictions onto the tormented tourists, who had just wanted a relaxing holiday in the sun and instead find that they're marching through the jungle hauling their luggage and enacting a shipwreck fantasy in which the dictatorial Jean-Arthur throws their bags overboard and demands that they swim to shore with nothing but the clothes on their backs.


It's obvious that the film is a manic parody of the touristic impulse, explicitly connecting this kind of exotic Western tourism to the evils of colonialism. When Jean-Arthur and Bernard first arrive on one of the "desert islands" they're exploring, Jean-Arthur plants a flag and claims the place like an old-school colonialist, declaring it a property of France and promising to import slaves to work the land. Bernard then declares it a republic instead, says they'll free the slaves and set up hotels and casinos, and make a huge profit — which will, he disingenuously insists, help the natives and former slaves as well, since "everyone is free to invest their capital." Obviously, this capitalist tourism is just a different kind of colonialism, a friendlier way of exploiting picturesque, "exotic" locales for the benefit of Europeans. The film is a prolonged reductio ad absurdum in which Rozier ceaselessly mocks these clueless urban Westerners who have romanticized the exotic islands of the Caribbean and decided that they want what they think will be a glamorously "authentic" tropical adventure.

Rozier's films have a tendency to get quietly sad and contemplative in their final acts, and though The Castaways of Turtle Island never quite sheds its weird sense of humor, it does slow down momentarily for a gorgeous, meditative sequence in which the group finally arrives at their ultimate island destination, and night descends slowly around them. Most of the group has stayed behind on their boat, while Bernard has gone ashore with Julie (Caroline Cartier), one of the most practical and citified of the tourists, and Jean-Arthur, enraged by the group's resistance to his latest looney demand, tries to swim to the island by himself. Rozier beautifully captures the moody descent of night onto this tense scene, the sun glistening at the horizon, everything turning shades of purple and blue, Bernard and Julie silhouetted against the water, watching as Jean-Arthur flounders around in the currents.

Indeed, for all his mockery of the touristic impulse, Rozier is very attuned to the natural splendor and sensual pleasures of these Caribbean vacation destinations, and the film is consistently lovely: one feels, in Rozier's images, the cool rush of the breeze, the bouncing and swaying of a boat on the ocean, the warm and wet atmosphere of a jungle path winding around towards a majestic waterfall. This is a beautiful, savagely funny, often bizarre film, a comic adventure that adds another dimension to Rozier's small but incredibly impressive oeuvre.

Je, tu, il, elle

Chantal Akerman's first feature-length film is a striking, minimalist work about love, loneliness, desire and gender. Actually, "minimalist" doesn't begin to do justice to the film's narcoleptic pacing and sparseness of action. The film opens with a young woman played by Akerman herself (named as Julie only in the post-film credits) alone in her room. In a series of long, mostly static shots, this woman sits on the floor in a corner, eats sugar from a paper bag, moves her furniture around, writes letters, strips naked and walks around, looking out the window or examining her body in a mirror. The camera occasionally tracks to follow her, when she's actually moving, but more often the camera sits as patiently still as the protagonist herself, locked into stasis and repetition. It gradually becomes apparent that she's recovering from a breakup, missing her lover and writing letters that she'll never mail.

This portion of the film, which last around a half hour, is a powerful and suffocating depiction of loneliness and depression. Akerman perfectly captures the sense of being locked into stasis, alternately numbed and pained, unable to break free of a series of repetitive, minimal tasks. She writes the same letter over and over again, crossing out most of it and then starting again, periodically laying all the pages out on the floor in front of her. She unthinkingly spoons sugar into her mouth as her only sustenance, then spills it on the floor and methodically spoons it back into the bag. The black-and-white photography is high contrast and alternates between crisply defined daytime sequences and shadowy scenes where Julie/Akerman is just a silhouette, her face hidden by her long dark hair. The pacing of this sequence is slow and patience-testing; it is quite deliberately empty of incident, and as a consequence the smallest movements, the smallest shifts in the familiar patterns of nothingness, have great impact. These scenes are accompanied by a voiceover in which the protagonist describes her time alone in her room. Tellingly, the action onscreen often lags behind the narration by a good amount of time, as though the narrator is anticipating what she'll do next — and it then takes a supreme act of willpower to actually go through with these tiny, insignificant actions. This disconnect between narration and visuals thus enhances the impression of a woman struggling to force herself into action, to break free of this self-imposed black hole.


In the second segment of the film, Julie abruptly decides to leave the apartment, flagging down a passing truck on the highway and hitching a ride with the driver (Niels Arestrup). This sequence is initially as static and tranquil as the scenes in the apartment, as though the woman has still not fully emerged from her exile into the world. But soon the driver asks Julie to give him a handjob, and after this extended and strangely compelling scene — in which Akerman films the man's profile while he dispassionately narrates the experience from start to climax — the driver becomes more talkative. In an intense and rambling monologue, he talks about his wife, his children, his jobs, his brother and his cousin who are both more successful than he, his thoughts while driving late at night on his cross-country truck runs. It's a great piece of writing, all the more startling because it's the first extended verbal sequence in the entire film, coming well after the halfway mark. Throughout this sequence, Akerman holds a static shot on the driver, smoking a cigarette and occasionally looking away from the road, bathed in the grainy, shadowy quality of the image, which is packed with dancing, shimmering film artifacts that counteract the static shot.

The subtext of the driver's monologue is male discontentment and the impersonal nature of sexuality. The driver has been married a long time and long ago began to see sex with his wife as an unexciting duty; he is more excited, he says, by random hook-ups with hitchhikers in his truck, and also by the simple experience of driving, alone, at night, getting an erection for no reason as his truck drifts through the night and his mind wanders. His descriptions of his sexuality are all tangled up with his boredom with his marriage, his ambivalent thoughts about his kids, his jealousy of other men who have gotten better arrangements for themselves, and his feelings of duty as a man with a family. It's a remarkable speech, and the dysfunctional view of sex presented here, in which sex is simply a needed release found outside of any emotional bond, sets up a contrast against the much different view of sexuality found in the film's final act.


Julie takes her leave of the truck driver shortly after this scene, arriving at the apartment of the lover (Claire Wauthion) who she had missed so profoundly during the film's first half hour. Julie's girlfriend tells her immediately that she doesn't want her staying the night, and the subsequent scenes are full of awkward, hesitant interaction: they embrace, the girlfriend makes Julie a sandwich and serves her some wine, and they stare at one another while Julie chomps on the sandwich. Then Julie reaches across and unbuttons the other woman's dress, while her girlfriend smiles and shakes her head, not as though saying "no" but with a faint air of admonishment and disbelief that they're going to go through this again. Akerman then cuts to the two women naked in bed, caressing and kissing one another, rubbing their bodies together and rolling around so that sometimes one is on top, sometimes the other.

Sensuous and sensual, passionate and joyful, tender and desperate, it's a forceful answer to the mechanized orgasms of the truck driver, a vision of a much more beautiful kind of sex built on real emotions. Those emotions can sometimes hurt and wound those who give themselves up to them, as they did to Julie during the film's opening, but that's just because the stakes are so high, and the rewards so transcendent. This lovingly filmed and lengthy sex scene can be read as a feminist/lesbian rejection of heterosexuality and marriage, but it can also be read as simply an ode to the beauty of real loving sex, no matter who's involved, as contrasted against sex as duty and sex as simple biological imperative. All of the film's patient minimalism was building towards this sequence, and when it's finally over, the next morning, Julie simply gathers her clothes and sneaks out, leaving the other woman sleeping peacefully, and the film ends. Je, tu, il, elle is a simple film in many ways, as symbolic and schematic as its title suggests. But for such a small, quiet film, it has a lot to say in its silences and its stark, still images.

Films I Love #54: Mr. Klein (Joseph Losey, 1976)

Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein, made in France during the director's long post-blacklist exile from the US, is a chilling (and chilly) parable about identity, fascism, exploitation and oppression. Set during World War II in occupied France, the film centers around the titular Robert Klein (Alain Delon), an art dealer who exploits the situation in his country by buying cheap paintings from fleeing Jews, who are mostly looking to get just enough money to escape the increasingly restrictive Nazi regulations. Klein is indifferent to those he exploits, caring only about his own luxurious life, until one day he receives a Jewish newspaper addressed to him. He realizes, soon enough, that there is another Robert Klein in Paris, a Jew disguising himself as a collaborationist Frenchman, and he becomes obsessed with ferreting out this other Klein, this mirror image alter-ego. This, in turn, attracts the attention of the Vichy police, who become suspicious of this Klein as well.

Losey's mise en scène is methodical and austere, evincing a cold distance that suits the abstract story of a man losing himself in a doppelganger he never quite meets. The multiple shots of Klein standing alone in a tightly wrapped overcoat and hat, isolated even in crowd shots, deliberately echo the hyper-cool image of Delon from his iconic role in Le samouraï. He wanders around, earnestly staring with his cold blue eyes, encountering various mysterious figures who fail to aid him in his search — with an impressive supporting cast populated with the likes of Jeanne Moreau, Juliet Berto, Francine Bergé, Michael Lonsdale and Rivette muse Hermine Karagheuz. The film's most stunning scene, however, is its first, a seeming non sequitur in which a doctor examines a naked female patient, clinically reciting various attributes that suggest an "inferior race." The cold horror and bureaucratic precision of this scene sets the tone for the remainder of the film, immediately establishing Klein's milieu as one in which human beings are treated like animals, their teeth examined like racehorses — an association recalled in the next scene, when Klein's pampered mistress examines her own teeth while applying lipstick. Losey's unforgettable film is concerned with this matter-of-fact horror, and with the oblivious mindset that ignores such things, insisting that everything is normal, everything is OK, even in the face of tremendous evidence to the contrary.

Desert

Desert is a phenomenally sensual, evocative film from Stan Brakhage. It is an examination of literal and metaphysical deserts, extracting the essence of the desert and exploring both the physical place and its abstract equivalent — red-hot sun, hazy heat-blurring, hallucinatory mirages, wavery color fields that suggest the horizon line dividing sand from sky. It is a film about deserts both external and internal, in keeping with Brakhage's insistence on the continuity between sensation, mental processes and the world outside. The film opens with images that are defined as desert-like only in relation to the film's title, scratched into celluloid in Brakhage's distinctive jittery handwriting just moments before. Without that context, there would be little suggestive of the desert about these abstracted fields of brown and gray, these Rothko-like color fields, divided by horizon lines that seem to shimmer in the distance. A red-brown haze is complicated by a pattern of cracks and cobbles that evoke images of dry desert hardpan. A dried-out, bare bush appears, with its spiky branches sticking up into the sky, looking like bones, a rib cage stretched out on the desert's empty ground.

This film is all about the landscape of the desert, and more a mental landscape than a tangible one. It feels like the desert. Watching it, one can feel the heat, can feel it in Brakhage's images of a shimmery yellow sun hovering in a red, gritty sky, the red thick with clusters of film grain. The landscape below is black and silhouetted, this dark land of hills and long dry plains stretched out beneath what seems to be an eternal red sky. At one point, Brakhage captures the sunset and, by placing his finger partially in front of the camera lens, distorts and warps the sun, compressing it into a flattened oval, expanding and contracting in the haze of the twilight hour. These kinds of distortions are at the heart of the film, distortions that evoke a kind of ideal desert, romanticized and haunting, the sun always in the process of setting, the land always bathed in deep shadows, the heat creating mirages that waver unpredictably at the edges of the frame, like the shot of what seems to be children playing, a flurry of unclear movement out of focus in the background. The children seem like ghosts, fuzzy afterimages that shift unpredictably in and out of view, only half-existing at the fringes of perception.


At other moments, Brakhage's images suggest a desert found within civilization: light flares shifting within an abstract space, occasionally taking form just enough to suggest that Brakhage was filming cars moving along a highway, the sun or their headlights creating reflections and star-like bursts in the grainy clouds. Brakhage captures the loneliness, the emptiness of the desert, the feeling of one lone leafy tree — an incongruous palm tree, symbol of fertility and tropicality, made to seem desert-like in its isolation — rising up out of the bare, dark hills. This is a very existentialist movie, because the desert seems to inspire such existential thoughts; there is something about the isolation of the desert that provokes the kind of bleak romanticism that Brakhage conveys so powerfully here. His images lack the clarity of specificity, though the film was shot on a trip to Southern California. There is no suggestion that this is a road trip movie, a document of a particular place or time. It is instead general, not to say generic. It is timeless rather than of its time.

In fact, Brakhage's actual locale, the place where the movie was shot, was not the desert, was in fact a tame suburban area, as seen occasionally in the shots of parking lots and highways. Brakhage is creating a mental desert out of nothing, shaping the space around him into an ideal desert where none existed in reality. Many of the film's textured shots might be interiors, even, shot out of focus in order to make them indistinct and abstract, so that they might be merged into Brakhage's desert fantasy.


This is all leading towards the film's striking final image: the sun setting rapidly and, at the last moment, transforming into a blurred purple cross of light suspended just above the horizon, a moment of profound transcendence and beauty. It's a trick of light, the way the sun morphs and shifts over the course of its descent, culminating in this spiritually suggestive final image, but then these kinds of tricks of light are never just that for Brakhage. An illusion, a manipulation, is never just an illusion to Brakhage, who sees these evocative images as truthful representations of internal, if not external, realities. If a faked, manipulated desert landscape suggests spiritual inquiry and heightened emotional states, Brakhage's warped images will privilege that subjective perspective over the more objective depiction of actual physical landscapes.

Films I Love #45: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is, at least superficially, John Cassavetes' stab at a gangster thriller. In fact, though, the film's genre trappings are incidental to its central purpose, a character study of the charismatic loser Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), a strip club owner who fancies himself an artist as he arranges his club's lame, unsexy nightly shows. Cosmo is a kind of vaudeville showman, orchestrating grandiose entertainments in which his dancing girls gyrate on stage while "Mr. Sophistication" (Meade Roberts), a fat, balding little man with white-face makeup and a greasy combover, sings out of tune and tells stories. The whole thing is rickety and appalling, and Cassavetes (at least in his longer, original cut of the film, before a 1978 recut) lingers on these painful stage shows, punctuated by occasional hoots and hollers whenever a girl flashes a breast. It's all so joyless, so self-evidently amateurish and boring, and yet Cosmo believes that he is an artist. He cares deeply about his club, loves his dancers, and pays careful attention to every detail of his shows. In his own weird way, he's a perfectionist, it's just that his idea of perfection is poorly staged strip shows with very little skin showing.

Basically, Cosmo is afflicted with the belief — or maybe just the half-believed hope — that he's bigger than he actually is, cooler than he is. He seems to view himself as a real player. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sad faux-glamour of Cosmo's big celebration after he finally pays off the last of his loans on his club. The film's opening scene, with Cosmo making his last payment, is his moment of glory, his apex; he has nowhere to go but down from there. He immediately decides to celebrate by taking out three of his dancers for a day on the town. He hires a limo, dresses up in a tux, and goes to pick up each of the girls in turn, acting as though he's picking them up for a prom. They all go out to a ratty gambling parlour, where the girls, in their glam makeup and slutty, shiny dresses, lounge around rolling their eyes and looking bored, while Cosmo tries to act like the high roller they all know he isn't. It's a sad, pathetic affair, this very limited man's idea of living the good life. Moreoever, Cosmo quickly undoes the fleeting victory he enjoyed in the opening scene: after a spurt of wasteful gambling, he winds up deeply indebted to the mob, who insist he pay back what he owes by committing a murder for them. For any other director, this would be an excuse for a gritty, violent mob thriller; for Cassavetes, Cosmo's entanglement in this gangster drama only reinforces just what a lonely, out-of-place figure he is, comfortable and happy nowhere except in the shoddy fantasy world he's created within his strip club's boundaries.