Skunkeye le Fou

Anyone who really, truly knows Skunkeye is aware of his love for French New Wave Cinema and the spirit, style, and song of the late sixties. In fact, if you were not aware, the icon for The Skunkeye Consumer Guide is taken from a famous still of Anna Karina from Jean-Luc Godard’s visionary Pierrot le Fou. I spent my childhood in Paris in the seventies and the images and sounds just stuck with me. Since my teenage years, I’ve been tracking down films, music, photographs, and books on this period – it certainly is a bit of an obsession. All year, I’ve been reading a great deal of press on Bernardo Bertullocci’s The Dreamers. Although I’m not a die-hard Bertolluci fan, the subject matter of the film truly excited me and appeared to be right up my alley. So I’ve really been eagerly awaiting the film. And wanted to enjoy it fresh, before it gets spoiled by the massa…

Nearly a week later I’m still processing The Dreamers – I was somewhat in rapture when I walked out of the theater. Skunkeye has managed to collect (but not necessarily organize) a few thoughts:

Stole out of the office to Georgetown early last Friday after a particularly draining and pressing week – freedom, at last! - to catch The Dreamers before the crowds rolled in. I was relieved that the theater was relatively empty but still managed have annoying people situate around me. The movie-going experience is a sacred thing for me – like psychotherapy or church– and Skunkeye prefers to experience it alone and without distraction. I know… absolutely high-strung. And I like to be close to the screen to get completely enveloped by the experience. So the obnoxious girls with their feet propped on the seats (how disrespectful! Like standing on the pew!), the tittering matronas behind me, and the loud, opinionated, ostentacious aging cultural elite types yammering nearby – all of it completely annoying – forced me to move to a row even closer to the screen. Settling in, with the safety of a healthy amount of empty rows in the rear and not a soul to block the screen before me, Skunkeye was able to sink in comfortably and relax.

So it was ironic, no?, that the action begins in a movie theater – the legendary Palais de Chaillot – with a voice over from Young Amercain Matthew.. about how he always sits in the front row of the theater so to catch the experience before any one else in theater – before it gets filtered and dissipates back through the rows. Later in The Dreamers he says that the back rows are for lovers. I’m strictly front row these days.

A while back, The New Yorker ran an illuminating piece about the situation in Paris in 1968, when the government fired Henri Langlois, the founder and director of the Cinémathèque Française—the state-sponsored film archive—and changed the locks at its home, the Palais de Chaillot, and the demonstrations which erupted. I highly recommend this article as reading prior to seeing The Dreamers. The film is set against this backdrop.

Certainly an exciting moment. Film critic Roger Ebert was in Paris at the time and recalls:

In the spring of 1968, three planets -- Sex, Politics and the Cinema -- came into alignment and exerted a gravitational pull on the status quo. In Paris, what began as a protest over the ouster of Henri Langlois, the legendary founder of the Cinematheque Francais, grew into a popular revolt that threatened to topple the government. There were barricades in the streets, firebombs, clashes with the police, a crisis of confidence. In a way that seems inexplicable today, the director Jean-Luc Godard and his films were at the center of the maelstrom. Other New Wave directors and the cinema in general seemed to act as the agitprop arm of the revolution.

A familiarity with Godard is really key to understanding much of the spirit of The Dreamers. Isabelle tells Matthew shortly after they meet, “I entered this world on the Champs Elysees in 1959, and my first words were, “New York Herald Tribune!” Bertolluci then cuts to the unforgettable opening scene in A Bout De Souffle (1959) of Jean Seberg, as the expat Patricia Franchini, hawking newspapers in Paris streets and uttering the immortal lines – symbolically and virtually announcing the birth of la Nouvelle Vague. After getting to know each other, Isabelle, Theo, and Matthew, like Odile, Franz, and Arthur, race through the Louvre, re-enacting a scene from Godard’s Bande à Part as a challenge, test of friendship and act of solidarity. The Dreamers owes a lot to Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, not only in its liberal use, during key scenes, of Antoine Duhamel’s haunting score from the film. From the exciting opening montage panning the Eiffel Tower in filters of allegorical red, white, and blue, one picks up on the reference early on. The playful, tesing, and taunting, verging on dangerous, discussion of film, the dichotomy of feelings and ideas, what is active and what is reflective, and what is real - and politics, sexual and topical - among the young lovers matches the tone of Ferdinand and Marianne in Godard’s masterpiece. (The kids are playing a twisted game of Triivial Pursuit and Charades combined with Truth or Dare - and Russian Roulette.) As the film develops, Bertoluccci’s use of symbolic color, movie in-jokes (a cameo by French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, who appeared in Last Tango In Paris, film clips from the Cinemathethque Francois library, and newsreel footage of Francois Truffaut, Godard and Nicholas Ray), and the forboding sense that the strange relationship that develops between the characters will turn out to be an amour fou…maybe fatal - The Dreamers is truly the offspring of Pierrot le Fou. Perhaps the child of incest…

Actress Eva Green, as Isabelle, rules The Dreamers, and recalls Godard’s muse Anna Karina with her insane beauty, dark hair and wild-eyed charisma. One moment she’s charming, spirited, and fancy-free. Playful and flirty. The next moment she’s got a gun at your head or is about to fling herself off a cliff. I’ve known girls like that. She’s one to watch. And watch out for.

Isabelle even wears a red dress like Marianne (Karina in Pierrot) for first “real” date. (Francoise Hardy’s “Tous Les Gracons et Les Filles” innocently and evocatively playing in the background.) Am I fetishisizing?

The imperious and commanding Nina Simone notoriously announced to Parisian audiences in a concert that only under certain conditions would she would deign to remain in France: "I insist on being not one of your clowns, but one of you." While strange siblings Isabelle and Theo include Matthew in their games, make him feel at home for a while- he will always be the American and will, ultimately, never truly be a part of their circle. The Yank is merely their puppet, their plaything. The innocent abroad is nearly slaughtered on the altar of their continental decadence – very Henry James. Sadly, I’ve found myself in similar situations – both abroad and at home.

Although the film concluded with a painfully just wrong, clicheèd and potentially mood-killing choice of song – Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” I walked out of the theater into the night newly galvanized and full of life. The Dreamers dug up a lot of feelings and sensations in me. For a while I didn’t even want to talk about the film, thinking that would just spoil my special moment. Did the film change my life? Non Will it be one of my all-time favorite films? Absolutely not. The film brought me back to the days when I was innocent and hopeful, exploring and falling in love with cinema and art and music and at the same time falling in love (or my youthful understanding of such) for the first time…of making mistakes, getting in over my head, and my certain naïve inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, of what is on the screen opposed to what really goes on. In my highly personalized take, The Dreamers really a celebration of things that have changed me and in formed my sensibilities and who I am – however jaded – today. I could go on on about the film. But I won’t.

Skunkeye could not have asked for a better Valentine (although I got sweet and lovely ones from mum and sis this year).

Certain works of film – and art, music, and literature, for that matter – are a source are tremendously personal to me. Alot of it has to do with the moment, the initial moment and impact (which is why I tend to re-visit favourite works only every couple of years or so.) And I’ll spread my joy and enthusiasm and celebrate and share my feeling with others. Although I’ll defend my views and feelings I’m hardly ever up for debate. That would just trivialize it, make it vulgar. Because the work has become so personalized it would just be opening myself up to get hurt. Skunkeye is sensitive like that. I’m fully aware of the flaws of The Dreamers, certainly it has its mawkish qualities, and has been over-shadowed by the NC-17 rating and over-sensationalized by the nudity (which I did not find gratuitous at all)… I enjoyed the film immensely. When asked about choice of reading material, Anna Karina’s character in Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie says in “The story’s dumb but it’s very well written.” The same could be said of The Dreamers.

With all the hype, or despite it, I'm hoping The Dreamers will inspire young minds - not to be dirty and play mind games with eachother (hell, they'll do that anyways) - but to fall in love with film and especially the French film of that era.

Skunkeye also saw Les Triplettes du Belleville last weekend. Needless to say he loved it and ate it up comme Bruno. Will never eat frog legs again however. I was expecting (and REALLY wanted to see) the restored and completed Disney & Dali short Destino as advertised to accompany it but, alas, Georgetown wasn’t carrying it.

Back to reality, after successfully surviving a few hurdles at work, and realising I can still roll with the punches and summon the charm, courage, and wit to slide through the next fight - last night a temporarily at peace Skunkeye started suffering panic attacks about taxes! Ah, it never ends… Ay, whatta mess!

The comforts of cinema - 'dems calling. And so much safer.

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