Un conte de Noël
It’s been a few years since I have felt this physical pain in my chest while I watch movies. I think such a pain happened when I saw “Citizen Kane”, and the last time was probably when I saw “101 Reykjavík”. Apart from that I could never be bothered by seeing a film that I wholeheartedly disliked.
Now, this one is probably not all that wholehearted, and there was one single scene that I found impressive, namely the one when Sylvia confronts Simon with his love for her. “Let me choose my lover!” I like that. However, the power of that confrontation just completely crumbled when she decided to cheat on her husband. Where was the point of Simon suffering through all those years if they end up getting together anyways? Ugh. It’s about the first time in my life that I was annoyed with a film character who plays with two men.
But holy crap, this is the kind of pretentious movie that shows exactly the type of artist I dislike: Overuses of oh-so-artsy cinematographic effects, bad hip hop and electronic music coupled with oh-so-sophisticated classical music, and then the whole story is about family issues over and over and over. As if these people have nothing besides their family. How disgustingly un-french. If we look at the Nouvelle Vague characters only few of them even have families, and except for the case where Anna Karina talks about her mother in “Pierrot le Fou” I can’t even remember them mentioning their families. And where is the comedy? This humour isn’t even black, and I always I know enough about French humour to get it if it were there. And why do we have to confront ourselves with so much oh-so-obscure cultural references? The whole movie just feels so dead that it made me wanted to die.
Today, I had a discussion with 6451 where we remarked that no matter how much knowledge, culture and education we would amass, we would never want to become part of the stiff bourgeoisie with their prescribed canon of ‘elite’. Desplechin just oozes of it by mistakening complexity with a confusing storyline, and as much as it tries to be ‘everything’, there is one thing that is entirely missing (and that you can find in literally every other French movie). That is love for life and everything in the world. Even criticism of the world can be interpreted as a subtle homage to it by depicting the world or even showing what could be different, but film just feels like it’s annoyed by itself. As much as this love might look like hate sometimes, about every single movie I like is an ode to life; and ode to what is possible with a little wit, creativity and a good degree of observation. Just like about every Japanese over age 25, the family in this film is just so dead in their mix of bourgeoisie and neurotism that it serves as a beautiful counter example of how life should not be.
And oh God, I should never go with whatever critics like, it just doesn’t work well for me it seems.