Harry here... Mr Ertia wrote in with his defense of the French Film TIME OUT. He was also appalled by Copernicus' take on it. Why post a review by someone not intimately familiar with the wondrous layers of French cinema? Because, there are lots and lots and lots of people unfortunately that have not seen those films. Copernicus' review was their voice. However, Mr Ertia seems to be someone with a working knowledge of French Cinema History (this should also be all of you... take a month out of your usual rentals and dvd purchases and give his list of titles a run. I guarantee each and every title he listed as being BRILLIANT! Go ahead... Here ya go....
Harry,
I was appalled enough by Copernicus's TIME OUT review to feel obligated to write you. It, along with several other great films, played the Portland International Film Festival. And while it wasn't quite the best film in the festival that I saw (that honor belongs to the incredible Israeli film LAST MARRIAGE, which deserves to be on the front page of your site every day for months until everyone hears about it), it was damn good.
But first: why did you even run his review? I mean, Copernicus basically indicates that he thinks pretty much the only worthwhile French films are BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF and AMELIE. Let's see ... WAGES OF FEAR, THE 400 BLOWS, CONTEMPT (which you just praised last week!), RULES OF THE GAME, ORPHEUS, DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST, RIFIFI, LE SAMOURAI, L'ATALANTE, VAGABOND, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, JEAN DE FLORETTE ... and that's only counting one film each by Clouzot, Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Renoir, Clouzot, Bresson, Melville, Varda, et al. (And I'm just listing what I've seen; there's plenty of gaps in my viewing that I know of, like Ophuls, Carne, Tati, and so on). That's history, of course, but recent years have brought us (in addition to the Jeunet/Caro stuff) the work of Leos Carax (MAUVAIS SANG), Patrice Leconte (GIRL ON THE BRIDGE), Francois Ozon (UNDER THE SAND), Claire Denis (BEAU TRAVAIL), and countless others, including Laurent Cantet, director of the powerful HUMAN RESOURCES and now TIME OUT.
But before I get to TIME OUT: I want to re-iterate the question: why go to the trouble of kneecapping a completely obscure French film with a review written by somebody who doesn't like almost any French film to begin with? (Why did he even go see it is an interesting, albeit unrelated question.) If you really need something to bash, isn't Hollywood turning out targets fast enough, targets that are more worthy of bashing and will wind up separating more disappointed people from their hard earned cash than TIME OUT ever will?
At one point Copernicus says that Cantet would be kicked out of film school for this script. Considering what film school graduates have wrought on Hollywood in the last ten years, I consider that to be a compliment. Or, hell, let's just look at some of the great Hollywood offerings of this year: IMPOSTOR. SNOW DOGS. ROLLERBALL. SLACKERS. CROSSROADS. QUEEN OF THE DAMNED. SORORITY BOYS. THE SWEETEST THING. And it's not even May yet. If this is what we have film schools to thank for, I say: burn them to the ground.
(Of course, I realize film schools have also produced some singularly brilliant filmmakers, and it's possible that some of the above didn't come from film school graduates. I just felt like taking an absurd extremist position that's intellectually indefensible. I guess reading Copernicus's review inspired me.)
Anyway: why I think TIME OUT is a very good movie and Cantet is an excellent filmmaker. It's a film that takes a character whose actions are virtually incomprehensible, and brings you inside them until they make sense to you. Vincent's not really that different from the rest of us, in a lot of ways. He'd like to be recognized for being important, a good father, a good husband, a good provider. But he'd also really like to not be constrained by the inane fetters of the day job, and once he's cut free from it he embraces that. It's a joyous ride, but one where we can clearly see the tragedy it's bound towards. Yet, it's still really seductive. Think about what you're doing right now at work (where, let's face it, you're probably reading this): wouldn't you rather be driving around in the countryside? Or whatever it is you do that makes you feel free?
As Copernicus indicated, it's not a movie that has the Syd Field/Hollywood default programmatic conflict every fifteen/ten minutes. In some ways, it's almost Hitchcockian (think, say, ROPE) - by avoiding earlier conflict, Cantet gradually raises the stakes. Or visualize it as watching a juggler - instead of watching him drop something every ten minutes, you slowly watch him add greater and greater numbers of objects, realizing simultaneously that it's incredibly impressive but it can't go on definitely. Making this approach to storytelling work (at least, for me) is one of Cantet's skills: the other is to take issues that are central to our lives - specifically, how we spend eight hours of every day - and dramatize the issues around them in such a way that is not at all artificial but is not cloying political, either. Here (as well as in his arguably superior HUMAN RESOURCES), there's no heavy-handed "This is right and this is wrong". Moral ambiguity may be anathema for film schools, but for me, it's pivotal to great filmmaking.
Regardless of what I've said above, I can understand people not liking TIME OUT. It's not escapist. It's not zany. It's not fun. It doesn't have eighteenth-century kung fu and flash edits and wacky CGI. Most damningly, it's largely about interior conflict. Some people don't like films that don't have explosions or super-fast editing, or films that raise questions that linger beyond the end of the film. Thankfully, I suppose, Michael Bay and a gaggle of other film school graduates are going to keep making films to make these people happy. For people who like a film that gives you a bit more to chew on, and films that don't insult you with easy answers about the most unknowable parts of humanity, and films that actually relate to our real life in some way, filmmakers like Laurent Cantet are keeping another vision of cinema alive, and I'm grateful for it.
Call me Mr. Ertia.
