Two lauded directors' most recent charms

I had long been in anticipation of Wes Anderson’s latest, The French Dispatch, since before the pandemic. I finally saw it last week at a Cineplex, the first mainstream theatre I’d been in since the pandemic began. As all things Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch is highly idiosyncratic, whimsical, ironic and slightly absurd and with a cast of dozens including a great array of well-known contemporary actors. It’s based on Anderson’s love of The New Yorker magazine. And the magazine in the film is called The French Dispatch. The characters are based on famed New Yorker editors and writers. Bill Murray plays an editor based on New Yorker co-founder Harold Ross, Owen Wilson on New Yorker travel writer Joseph Mitchell, Jeffrey Wright on James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling. Among the cast are such stars as Liev Schreiber, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Elisabeth Moss, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Jason Schwartzman and Anjelica Huston. From here the film departs. It’s set in France not New York City. And it’s framed around the apparent demise of this writer- writer’s magazine, though the movie insists on calling it a newspaper. The staff must dredge up articles which best represent The French Dispatch’s past glories. And so, Anderson takes us through four separate vignettes – videos taking us inside the articles, if you will - all set in the French town of Ennui (translates as boredom; get it?) And here is where Anderson and his co-writers including Jason Schwartzman have a field day. Every post-war French movie cliché is on display. From down at the heels working class neighborhoods with their butchers and bakeries, to beret-wearing tough guys and classic Citroens to tarty backstreet hookers. This is the real humor of the film. The stories themselves are hugely intricate, sometimes confusing and at times listless. But what Anderson has brought to their production is magnificent, with elaborate sets, costumes merged with cartoons, and a great score by Alexandre Desplat, one of the most prolific movie composers around (The Shape of Water, The King’s Speech). So, while there’s a lot to cinematic marvels to gaze at and plenty of laughs at these mocked clichés, you’re basically left with the feeling, “Okay, good on Wes, give him an E for effort.”

After watching Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World at Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinema, I thought the characters on the screen were an exact mirror of the audience – young, kind of hip, probably trying to find their ways in careers and life, maybe struggling in relationships, right down to their yoga sessions and environmental consciences. Trier hasn’t made a lot of films but he’s a bit of a cult director for his edgy subjects (addiction and suicide in Oslo, August 31^st (2011) and world strife and a female photojournalist in Louder Than Bombs (2015). I’ve seen all his films except his supernatural thriller Thelma (2017) and Worst Person is his most accomplished. Everything comes together in this story of Julie (Renate Reinsve) who, like much of the youngish audience, is trying to get her life together, walking a tightrope between loyalty to friends and lovers and what’s best for herself (hence the film’s guilt-implied title). The film's structure is at the heart of its appeal. Trier's telling of Julie's story in 12 chapters plus epilogue creates anticipation and pacing and we become truly absorbed in her sometimes wayward life. But the genius of the film is that what's depicted here isn't particularly extraordinary. In fact, the storyline isn’t so much different from most people’s lives (especially those in a Montreal film festival audience). But this true capturing of the utter commonplace is what makes the film so great.

Gaspar Noé's latest both moving and disappointing

France-based director Gaspar Noé has been a festival and fan favorite here at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, which I’m attending. And Noé has been a favorite of mine. Last night I saw his two latest, Vortex, made earlier this year, and Lux Aeterna, made in 2019. Vortex is a major turn from his previous work. From his first film, I Stand Alone (1998) through Irreversible (2002), Enter the Void (2009) and Climax (2018), Noé’s oeuvre has been characterized by fantastic stories of the base instincts of human beings in nihilistic worlds fueled by psychological repression, drugs and exuberant partying (no doubt a reason he has such a cult following among certain film hipsters). I Stand Alone is a mesmerizing story of a horse meat butcher (Phillipe Nahon) who descends into human butchery as we follow his increasingly alienated internal monologue. Irreversible, told in reversed chronological order, is the story of a harrowing rape and revenge. Enter the Void is a literal out of body experience through the nightclub skies of Tokyo by an assassinated drug dealer.  Climax is an ensemble story of a group of dancers’ afterparty that goes terribly wrong. But Vortex is very different indeed. Calm, quiet and with a cast of mainly two people, it’s a reflection on aging and dementia.  Noé says the film was inspired by his own near fatal brain hemorrhage in 2019 when he realized how close to death he was, and by a visit to his aging father in Argentina. The two hours and 22-minute film follows an aging couple (Italian giallo film director Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun) in very close surroundings as they go about what turns out to be their final days. Their cramped apartment is teeming with books, magazines, video cassettes, a testament to their previous careers as Paris intellectuals, he a cinema scholar and she a psychiatrist. But in a matter of weeks their lives decline precipitously as the “dream within a dream” - which the husband philosophically describes as life at the couple’s last normal dinner together - comes to an end. While a quiet picture light years removed from his previous hip hop and psychedelia inspired cinematography, Noé is still inventive enough, screening the ending credits, in reverse order, at the film’s beginning, and shooting the movie in split screen, as if telling the stories from the characters’ individual viewpoints. There’s nothing particularly special about the story itself and in this way it kind of disappoints. It’s one we’ve all heard of or seen, of the cruelty than can be a person’s very last years. But what is remarkable is the acting, so realistic you wonder if in fact these people really are going through these experiences and only Noé, enfant terrible that he is (or was), would capture it on film. Though even he wouldn’t stoop to that level of exploitation…...The

earlier film, Lux Aeterna (Aeterna in Latin meaning indestructible), clocks in at 52 minutes, and is kind of a novella and send up of the world of filmmaking, filled with feminist imagery and themes of strong women, witchcraft, Joan of Arc and burning at the stake. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg it has more to do with a film like Climax, with an ensemble cast caught up in disorganization and turbulence during a B movie film shoot. Personal recriminations abound as the characters almost laughably try to assemble a scene of super models being burned on the pyre. But despite the unruliness and rancor the film, perhaps because of its brevity, lacks a completeness and is unsatisfying. Vortex, by comparison, is deeply satisfying though very disappointing for anyone expecting the exuberant mayhem that has characterized Noé’s past work.