Successive Slidings Of Pleasure

Tether Report

Successive Slidings Of Pleasure
France 1974 Directed by  Alain Robbe-Grillet
BFI DVD Region 2

I’ve already reviewed two films by Alain Robbe-Grillet on this site... Eden And After (here) and Gradiva (here). He also wrote the wonderful movie Last Year In Marienbad but that one didn’t highlight his themes of sexual fetish as much as those two above, at least not as overtly as he does in films like this one.

I do find the films he directs himself a bit wearing on the brain and hard going at times, in spite of his content and this one is similarly hard to penetrate. It’s interesting to note, actually that he’s considered one of the French New Wave these days (as opposed to when I used to read about him) because the tactics he uses in this film to make the viewer aware all the time that he is watching a man made piece of art as opposed to something which one should immerse oneself in absolutely fits in with the aesthetic of the man who I think of as being the absolute father figure of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard. Indeed, the very few pieces of Michel Fano’s score in the movie are mostly used to heighten the viewers awareness in contrast to the images and reminded me of the use of music in Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris).

So the opening credits sequence of Successive Slidings Of Pleasure, where dislocated shots which are, it transpires, excerpted from the main feature are assembled almost hap-hazardly with mismatching sounds such as shattered glass, gun shots and images of actors looking directly into the screen from different situations, cross cut with images of things like spilled egg yolks, really pushes home the fact that, as an audience member, you are not going to be in for a passive time here. Nor indeed a totally coherent one, it has to be said, because there is no real story development or logic to the film, although it hangs around the plot frame of a woman called Nora (played by Olga Georges-Picot) tied to a bed naked by her girlfriend and main protagonist/antagonist Alice (played by Anicée Alvina), who then paints patterns on her. Nora is then found with Alice, with scissors impaling her heart after her death 'in situ' and Alice is then locked in a convent (which includes a handy dungeon) and interrogated by various ‘visitors’ who, as she unfolds events in an almost but, not quite, entirely illogical manner, seduces each of her visitors in one way or another and enacts various sexy things such as painting her own naked body.

What you have to understand though is that the minimalistic, inappropriate sets and the complete non-sequitur responses sometimes of the people who are, on the surface, trying to get to the bottom of the events of this young, alleged murderess are huge indicators that this is just the directors game. No realism is intended. Indeed, the heightened, stylised form of acting (reminiscent sometimes of Hal Hartley’s movies) and the carefree attitude of the two lovers in flashback, as they cut up and bloody a mannequin on the beach when they are not being prostitutes and murdering clients, gives the film a slightly surreal attitude which undermines any attempt to decode the main text in any way other than as a redundant part of the narrative thread, such as it is.

It’s simply not believable as something to be taken that seriously and scenes where, for instance, Alice breaks eggs over Nora’s nude body for a bit before covering her in wine and investigating her crotch with her foot certainly push the film into an almost erotic mood... which is often killed by the absurdity of the responses from various characters... many of whom are taking their ‘story arc’ very seriously. If you want to see Michael Lonsdale, who played Bond villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker, doing something totally different to what you’d expect from him... as his character slowly seems to go insane with obsession to ‘crack the case’ after he’s sucked Alice’s foot 'to remove blood from it'... then you might want to check this one out. Other famous actors in this are Jean-Louis Trintignant and a very young Isabelle Huppert (who, even though I knew she was in it, I still couldn’t recognise).

One thing that is present in the movie is the director’s eye for a good shot. I’ve already said that the majority of the sets are quite simplistic, with barely any set dressing and I believe this is a deliberate play to emphasise the fake nature of the so called plot but he does make things look visually attractive throughout... in addition to the obvious enhancement of several naked women draped over the sets in various scenes of course. So quite often he will be sectioning areas of space for characters to balance against but, in this one, he often has two styles of sectioning combined into the same shot...

So he might have vertical sections on the right part of the screen offset with the chequered frame of a window dominating the left of the screen. or he’ll have different levels of rooms manifesting as open doorways (an old Roger Corman trick) or as an angular look down and across to a spiral stairway adding a different depth to that part of the frame. Indeed, he even has one shot with a curly, iron bed head with Alice peering through different parts of it in front of the camera and constantly shifting so her eyes are perfectly framed in the twirly bits (a technical term). It all looks splendid and, indeed, if it does get just a little pretentious and dull in places, the visual splendour of the shot design often more than makes up for it.

And that’s me done on Successive Slidings Of Pleasure I think. I bought this as one of those ‘add on at the counter’ DVDs when I was in Fopp and got this for just £3. I don’t regret it and I may, I guess, even watch it again some day. It’s not something I would lightly recommend to most casual film viewers but if you have a passion for decoding visual and textual layers which appear to support each other but are really saying contrasting things then you might want to give this one a go. I might try another one of his in another year or two, I think.

Greta

Hands Held And Greta

Greta
2018 Ireland/USA
Directed by Neil Jordan
UK cinema release print.

I’d never even heard of this film, Greta, until sometime last week when I saw... gasp... a poster up at my local cinema promoting a movie starring one of the greatest French actresses of our time in the title role, Isabelle Huppert. I was pretty much up for anything with her in it so I watched a trailer on YouTube and, although it looked vaguely like one of those bad and tediously predictable serial stalker movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s (the likes of Fatal Attraction and Single White Female, you know the kinds of films I’m on about, I’m sure) I was pretty much up for even going to see one of those because, with Huppert in the role of a psycho, I assumed this would be very special indeed.

If I’d had bothered to check the credits to see who had directed this I might have hesitated briefly because I find Neil Jordan mostly misses for me but, even then, his last film was an absolute beauty (the amazing vampire film Byzantium, reviewed by me here) so I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have steered clear of this one. I also quite like Chloë Grace Moretz, who plays main protagonist to Huppert’s smouldering antagonist so, yeah, there wasn’t much question about me going to see this one.

Alas, there are some things about this which worked for me and other things which... really didn’t.

The performances were all pretty good... even though the writing was kinda clichéd throughout. Huppert plays a standard Hollywood style psychopath with style and relish but there doesn’t seem to be much else to distinguish her character from dozens of other such characters since cinema began. She does it very well but I kinda felt this great actress didn’t have enough to get her teeth into, to be honest. Similarly, Moretz plays a pretty good, slow burn of a victim and Maika Monroe, who played the lead in the excellent modern virus/curse horror It Follows (reviewed here) does a pretty good job as her flat mate.

The set up hook is pretty good too. Instead of the main antagonist slowly building up an obsession with someone they already know, we have a crazy lady who is baiting possible victims by leaving handbags on subway trains, waiting for each one to be returned so she can start a twisted relationship with them (you know all this anyway, from the trailer). So far so good but, alas, the course of the film rapidly strays into familiar territory which, frankly, I’ve seen too many times. It’s done well and I am often the first to point out that just because something is a cookie cutter template of others of a certain genre, then that doesn’t matter as long as it’s done competently. I think for me though, even as much as I like a decent thriller, this particular kind of overdone Hollywood sub-genre is just something I’m not that into. Other people who are into this kind of thing, though, will eat this one up, I suspect.

And, to be fair, there are some nice moments in the movie. There’s a sequence where we are slowly zooming in on a cup of coffee being heated in a microwave and then, as it pings to an end, the background music cuts off and we are left with just a shot of a dark microwave door. Alas, rather than holding that shot for a while, the director chooses to immediately go into something else after a second... I wish he’d have rested on that shot aftermath for just a little longer, though, because it was one of the more effective moments in the film for me.

Another thing he does is a nice thing with a dream sequence and, though what he does is not exactly original to the movies (I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment by mentioning what he does here) it did take me a little while into the scene before I figured out he’d deliberately entrusted that the audience would decode the visuals in a specific way before pulling the carpet out from underneath their feet. Alas, I was still sufficiently ahead of the game here to realise what was going on way before it happened but it was still quite skillfully handled and I have to applaud him for that.

Another nice thing about this one is Javier Navarrete’s very appropriate score and it goes way over the top into the jagged, chaotic, almost atonal territory of a horror movie but, used in a thriller like this, the style of music proves very powerful and certainly adds significantly to the tension created in some of the scenes, I think. Also, it’s quite well 'spotted' and so the absence of music in certain scenes is just as good an artistic decision as when the score cues enter and exit the movie. Jerry Goldsmith would have applauded that, I think.

And... yeah, I don’t have much more to add to this, I’m afraid. The cast were good but I felt they were kind of wasted here, to a certain extent. Ditto for Neil Jordan who had held me spellbound with Byzantium but here just disappointed me with the sheer ‘yuppie Hollywoodland’ feel of the entire movie. Bottom line, I probably wouldn’t recommend this to any of my friends but certainly most people who like these kinds of thrillers, even those who can see the cookie cutter nature of the scenes, not to mention, the nature of the ‘cookie cutter’ scene (no, I won’t explain, you’ll see it coming before it even happens), will probably get a lot more out of this one than I did. So, certainly not a pan from me but something I don’t personally have to watch again at any rate. Greta wasn’t a great film but it was well put together for what it was. I’ll leave it at that.

Elle

Palindromic Vengeance

Elle
France/Germany/Belgium 2016
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
UK cinema release print.

I’ve quite liked some of Paul Verhoeven’s films in the past, with Robocop being the stand out one for me. It has to be said, though, that the films I’ve seen by him have tended to be American productions and, somehow, feel more like comic book movies than real films for consenting adults. Not a pop at Verhoeven, by the way... I think this applies to most theatrical releases these days and sometimes that kind of stylistic choice goes down a treat. However, I’m not used to seeing a film which is a, relatively, complex and subtle picture like we have here from a director like him.

One of the partial reasons for this, apart from the writing, is that he’s filled the roles with incredible actors, most of whom I don’t know but many of whom seemed familiar and recognisable. Recognisable or not, though, they all do some great work here... not least the true star of the piece, Isabelle Huppert. I’ve not seen too many of the films made by this outstanding French actress, living in a small town which is even, technically, in London means the opportunities to see anything other than big budget US movies is fairly limited... but I’ve been a fan of her work ever since seeing her in the lead role in one of my favourite living director’s films... Hal Hartley’s Amateur. Truth be told, it was her name that brought me to Elle rather than Verhoeven’s (well, actually it was a train). Plus it had some good word of mouth so I took a trip out to the Hackney Picture House to give it a look (the film isn’t showing locally to me... surprise, surprise).

Elle stars Huppert as Michèle Leblanc, the joint founder and director of a video game company. She’s a successful business woman but her character is a lot more interesting, emotional, devious and complex than her seemingly muffled exterior might lead her friends to believe. Part of this wealth of depth which, in all honesty, I imagine very few actresses other than Huppert could have successfully  pulled off, stems from an extremely traumatic incident from her childhood which has obviously left a mark on her and which, perhaps, gives some insight in the way her character reacts to things in certain scenes. Which is an observation I couldn’t imagine myself writing all that often about a female character in an American film, to be sure but, if cinema is good at one thing it’s good about its diversity of expression, so maybe I’m being a little unfair to Hollywood in this comparison.

The film starts off with a black screen and the sound of Michèle’s struggles and cries on the soundtrack, followed by a cat watching what she is going through before Verhoeven’s camera reveals a scene of Michèle being beaten and raped in her house. The killer, wearing a body suit and mask which makes him vaguely reminiscent of the comic book character Diabolik, leaves her recovering on the floor. The scene is quite intense and, as the film plays out, we see the impression it has made on Michèle’s mind as she flashes back to it internally, replaying and sometimes changing the outcome of the encounter. This is a good tool to help the audience grasp the weight of the incident on the central character, actually, because the way she deals with this event externally is with considerably less alarm and upset than one might reasonably expect from a woman placed in this kind of situation.

The first half of the film is basically a mystery as, while still getting threats and a humiliating computer game movie of her made public, she tries to learn the identity of her assailant who, by the way, doesn’t stop at attempting just one attack on her through the course of the film. Meanwhile, she has a convoluted life to handle, having an affair with her best friend and business partner’s husband, amongst other amorous interests, and dealing with her ex-husband, her mother and her son. When she finally reveals who the rapist is in the movie, I have to admit I was just a little disappointed, at first. I can usually figure out the identity of the mystery at the heart of most movies I watch and, alas, in this movie I had already figured the identity of this person the first time we see him in a social context without his mask. That being said, it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the movie and certainly, this mystery is only the first half of the film. The next part is the long played out vengeance of Michèle as she takes stock of her social situations and slowly pulls together various threads of her own convoluted life to bring about a denouement which I didn’t really, quite, see coming but which absolutely fits her character’s history. The path to the conclusion of the film is not a black and white one and, I’m glad to say, not all the scenes in this movie follow that dull, cause and effect pattern endemic to a lot of modern movies. For instance, Verhoeven includes a sequence where Michèle gets one of her employees to teach her how to use a gun, setting up the idea that she will buy and use one at a later point in the film. But she doesn’t and it’s exactly this kind of detail in the drama of these kinds of richly woven movies that make them so much more interesting than a lot of product around. Scenes in a story don’t always have to lead to something else, they can just be about re-enforcing the inner state of where a character is at, rather than lead you onto the next stage of the journey.

Anne Dudley’s score to the movie is somehow slow, light and more ponderous than I was expecting from this film but, once the character of Michèle is in your head and you see the way she deals with events in her life, it makes perfect sense and seems completely right for it. I’d like to hear it away from the movie but the CD is so expensive compared to others that I probably won’t rush out to buy this one straight away (and I’m certainly not going with a cheap download option... thanks but no thanks music labels). It certainly maintains an atmosphere of ‘muffled reality’ in some scenes which perfectly reflects the way Michèle conveys herself to her friends and relatives.

Elle is a dark work of art with a wonderful cast and some nice choices by the director which don’t push the movie over the top in its exploration of, in all honesty, the kinds of events and incidents which could easily be exploited in a more spectacular fashion. Despite figuring out who the main antagonist is (and even that word may be too strong for his character, in some respects... this movie greyshades its depiction of events pretty well) I had a really good time with this and would recommend it to anyone who wants to see something a little different to the kind of stuff you usually get in cinemas these days. Lovely film. Not enough of these kinds of affairs are given a release in this country. Which is a shame.