© 2020 by James Clark
Our film today brims with startling distemper. It also provides one of the most handsome instances of generosity to be found, in and out, of the once-called “silver screen.” A woman in Paris, Raphael, accompanies, one morning, her elementary school boy son to a carriage trade, very private institute. Then she walks by an antique clock and watch shop which attracts her. She asks to see a waterproof wrist watch which had now become important to her, on account of her becoming an underwater athlete and investigator during her summer with her family at their villa on the Cote d’Azure. She chooses an alpha-trade item, sturdy and designed with great taste. There is an inscription of dedication, which runs, “To my son who sails the seas.”
The love in that missive means nothing to her. But with that good will, the writer, a skilled entrepreneur in the field of premier women’s shoes, has found himself, in his last days, without a valid successor. The shambles that follow are showy, but not terribly unique. What does take our breath away is the father’s benevolence. Claire Denis does not want of a compass, for her intense offerings. She finds all the work in the world in the filmic cataclysms of Ingmar Bergman. With the film, Bastards (2013), that stream of clannish patricians which became disturbing in the film, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and followed even more violently (in subsequent films) when unity failed, transfigured to venomous proportions pertaining to clinging for generations to murderous advantage. Whereas the disinterested father, Mr. Silvestri, who had left Italy for the opportunities of Paris, had become a cosmopolitan, his daughter, Sandra, had remained a lead-pipe savage, not to be dealing in nuance when the going got rough. (Denis’ early experiences in Africa now putting on the table another range of clannish perversity to complicate an already challenged discernment.)
Sandra of the Dark Ages had a husband who had nominally taken over the business. We find him, Jacques by name, in the first scene, committing suicide due to financial and sexual bankruptcy. During the police presentation, to her, of the suicide note, she rails against that agency. “My husband filed a complaint against that pig, that piece of shit. The police questioned Edouard Laponte and our daughter. Then nothing! It’s your fault Jacques died… Alone, I’m not strong enough. I have no one now… besides my brother… who’s never here. He’s always abroad.” (That last remark delivered as if his brother had no right to leave the nest.) A police lady intervenes with, “Marco Silvestri is your brother? The letter is in his name…” Sandra goes on to explains that Marco and Jacques had been good friends, having met at the naval academy, and that Marco had introduced them. Far less routine, however, is Sandra’s response to the cop’s mentioning, “You can read it” [the suicide note]. She glances at it, but soon puts it away. Her excuse for not completing her husband’s last words is, “It’s embarrassing…”/ “What?” the coroner asks. “That you read it,” she says. Perhaps the communication was ambiguous. Sandra being hard to embarrass; but not wanting to touch upon the bankrupt couple’s involvement in prostituting their daughter, Justine, at a sadomasochist attraction and having trysts themselves with several adventurers at Laponte’s, the creditor and brothel owner, for more solvent business clients. Of course, that area of the family has no more significance than rabid hyenas. Our saga, on the other hand, pertains to Marco, who had given his share of his father’s inheritance to them.
At the end of Bergman’s film, Dreams (1955), the gullible but game protagonist is confronted with another’s wisdom that, “One has to say no, at some point.” Marco, on his slow boat to wisdom, had no one to encourage him to wake up to the shabbiness of pleasing gauche and poisonous appetites. That his weakness for being led has to be carefully grasped, constitutes the heart of this film. Some preparatory considerations are needed. While his father could thrill to a son possibly making an important difference, Marco would soon be exposed as unable to maintain the concentration of sensibility by which to reveal and share something very different. As he plods back to a lowest common denominator, we realize that his honeymoon with very rare love has waned, leaving him ready for less demanding adventure. However, Marco’s waning, remains rather wild (or, better, pretty crazy), a function of following in the melodramatic footsteps of Jacques. A wealth of cinematic primordiality being overlooked, along with an irony of cinematic also rans, will help establish the terrain for future venture.
The actress playing “the woman in Paris,” with her child at the school house door, and her monied, sea-sport, has a fascinating and incisive pedigree. She is Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of actress, Catherine Deneuve and actor, Marcello Mastroianni. In her role in the film, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), she is tasked to bring her elementary school brother, Boo-Boo, to the school house door every morning. In another of her roles, namely, the film, Donkey Skin (1970), she, a princess, finds nothing amiss about marrying her father, the king. The former film is implicated in the naval port of Rochefort. The latter film becomes implicated, for Denis’ purposes, with Sandra and Jacques’ resort to incest. (Jacques Demy being the filmmaker of the Deneuve “comedies.”) Mastroianni starred in the film, La Dolce Vita (1960), pertaining to anything goes. Good luck, Marco! The gloom pervading this gloomy tale could—and largely does, for the pundits—resemble the strictures of film noir, becoming neo-noir. However, the woes and woos of this action do not coincide with the sentimental perils of sweet but unstable business. The jaunty Raymond Chandler slogan, “Trouble is my Business,” does not even begin to touch the conflict, beauties and love which our protagonist had begun to fathom. Out there on the L’Avventura aerie, we find him on the craft’s bridge for the last time, embraced by light and waves and skies, soon bound for darkness and hatred.
After the tantrums at the police station, Sandra gets into her stylish and reddish car (reddish factors early on in a film being a staple of Bergman’s), and she slumps over the steering wheel, unable to drive. She’s seen from outside at the front, and the overhanging trees convey a reflection on the windshield, all but submersing her self-pity, a magical moment from our point of view, but entirely lost upon her. With narrative so nearly complete to being a travesty, such figuration as that reflection becomes an elicitation of what life can be. (On the other hand, the first imagery we encounter in the film is a torrent of nocturnal rain, its one-track force approximating the odds which Marco had recently retreated from, without consulting the gamut of knacks to turn the tide. Along with the rains, there is the soundtrack of the band, Tindersticks, beginning with a singular drive which transcends to richer ambiance.) It is such cinematic invention which we will track in detail here, the melodrama being oddly close to those Bergman parodies of Hollywood “sensations.” However, Marco’s mad bid, to dovetail his early seaboard serenity with subsequent mean Parisian advantages, increases the dimensions which Bergman found urgent about not speaking the same language.
We’ll march right through such optics and sonics, in order to touch upon agencies of sensibility defining the drama. Jacques, en route to his suicide, overlooks, in his mundane office, another crushing blast of nighttime rain, making of the façade of the factory a relentless and attractive cataract. His death is metaphorically presented by his gradually backing out of the film frame. A touch of couth, after a lifetime of tastelessness. Along with that, an aural complement of ringing maintains that life itself goes on. That the exiting executive is bald might imply that his was an anxious life, bereft of a poise which nature calls for. Three lights are displayed vertically upon the exterior. A pan to the sidewalk, like a fast-moving stream. Steel and cement. The triad could have rung out in a joyful achievement of sharing. But it didn’t. A life of harsh interruptions. A white shroud on the pavement. This is followed with a nude young woman wearing high-heeled shoes, walking away from us in a square. In this of the first of two such apparitions, she vaguely evokes the mysterious nocturnal nudes of the surrealist painter, Paul Delvaux. The school seen in the early part of the film is called, “Ecole Action Bilingue,” which is to say, “not speaking the same language.” (Meaning heavy weather for many, in the world of Bergman and the in world of all of us.) The school might have a sanguine touch. But its focus of advantage at that juncture could be enough to kill. In the second meander of Sandra’s daughter, she is bleeding from her vagina, having submitted to sadistic assault. This shock brings to light many concerns—a major embrace being “marionettes,” as in the Bergman film, From the Life of the Marionettes (1980). (Now underway to the impossible, Marco’s last glimpses of a once-seeming-Mediterranean-idyll evokes a filmmaker, Michelangelo Antonioni, whom Bergman hated, but shouldn’t have. Denis knowing better, along lines of something missing.) Now on the hunt in Paris, he’s seen driving up to the enemy’s chic digs in an Alpha Romero, which, from the perspective of upper floors (one of them now being his) recalls a batmobile. (Marco, in classic crime adventure style, having sold all he has but that prop, not to mention nearly a dozen of $400 white shirts. Such trappings being a reprise of bourgeois, same-language advantage, conformists in several Bergman films.) The amateur sleuth, having no trouble pretending being a majoritarian, checks his laptop for Laporte’s wherewithal: “a personal success-story… biggest chairman ever… seen in “The Expansion”… dancing with the stars… a golden girl [the mom at the schoolhouse]…” The latter being a chain-smoker, like chain-smoking and non-patrician, Katarina, in Marionettes and chain-smoking and non-patrician, Pauline, in In the Presence of a Clown (1997), she discovers late at night that she’s out of smokes and rushes to the tobacconist’s. Her grotty concern is not without magic. The dark reflections of the street with its bumper-to-bumper parking, and a swatch of gold light on the wet cobblestones reign as if in absentia. One of Marco’s young daughters from his divorce several years ago spends a weekend, where, at the beginning of the get-together, she is stranded at the Montparnasse train station due to his being late. She tells him, “I’m not here to be treated like shit.” At the premises, with a mattress on the floor, he presents her with a very stylish jacket, and is rewarded with a quick kiss on the cheek. The roiling mood has, however, unearthed a heaven on earth, in the presence of the Montparnasse district, where more than 200 years ago a site apropos of the arts of the City sprang up and thrives to this day. Denis’ trademark of an instance of “naïve,” art for the sake of food for thought, appears here in the form of the enormous woman’s shoe on the roof of the now defunct profit centre. A case of big shoes to fill, aspiration and its perils. The license plate of the Alpha: W319EK—WEAK. At the cigarette handoff, early on, Marco is graced with two lights, desperately needing a third. As he turns away, a third, being a blue neon, to the right of his head, appears—to no effect. The ship Marco sailed was a freighter. Do the mundane factors swamp the poetry? Raphael congratulates a young man working as a concierge while his mother recovers from some malady. He signs off with, “It’s family…” The virtually empty bivouac of his lodgings exposes his disarray in a field of great beauty. Something more directly gratifying finally emerges. He not only sells his expensive car at a premium, but the buyer is another former naval academy grad having enjoyed together the volatile two. (The three of them constitute a loose but quite striking dialectical process, only due to the disinterestedness of the newcomer. A “businessman;” a “daredevil;” and, now, someone who can see and feel.) The latter tells Marco, “There’s no denying I miss it” [the deep sea]. (But he, and his wife, have a sailboat—a dynamic force; and a solvent business, buying and selling cars.) More than a casual friend, Marco, unaware, is in the presence of an oracle—oracles being very important in Bergman films. Soon Marco is back. “I need a car and I’m broke.” The dealer doesn’t hesitate to say, “I think I can count on you [his having made a bid that few can]. Take back the Alpha. I don’t need it… We’ll figure something else later.” A moment of vision in a dynasty of blindness.
The most deeply ranging visual resource announces itself in the least auspicious form. Raphael, the mom and Laporte’s wife, is lying in bed and Laporte, nude, lies down with her. They clasp hands gently. He says, “Jerk me off…” Next morning, Raphael and the boy bump into Marco, and he repairs the boy’s bike. He expertly does the repair, his hands and fingers displaying grace and strength. She watches him with envy. Raphael misses that closing time of the tobacconist’s and alert Marco, again to the rescue, tosses down from the balcony several cartons wrapped up in one of his white shirts. As she retrieves the godsend, her fingers on the white cloth and the plastic sheets describe ironically receiving a treasure. The treasure in those hands carries far more than she recognizes. The ambient ringing which accompanies that moment complements a further nudge for the sake of disinterestedness. Lying in her bed, smoking, she misses the best part of such a manipulation. He’s wakened by a nightmare, and his fingers are frozen stiff. As the suspicion of Laporte rises, there is a moment showing the magnate and the boy with hands clutched. A statement, not a launch. During their first reckless swing at coitus, both of their hands caress each other like an insurrection. Their hands and fingers create a grinning mask. Her fingers are splayed on his chest. His hands and fingers are at her mouth, and then his fingers light upon her his arm. A gung-ho maneuver, lost in hostility and impotence. Then Marco walks through her doorway as if she were a stranger. Marco and Sandra, on the proceeds of the Alpha, crash the “daredevil’s” brothel in the afternoon, where a huge red ottoman, not so different from the playground of death in the film, From the Life of the Marionettes, becomes prominent. A girl matches her red fingernails with that bed. Her fingers are frozen on that surface. The second lovemaking at the best of Paris, this time in the stairwell, shows nuance and knack (that latter word being magic in Bergman’s endeavor.) Laporte takes the boy away from the lovers. On a large sailboat, the two enjoy the navigations, the handiness. Laporte’s skills match Marco’s bicycle repairs. Right touches; lost finishes. Raphael storms Marco’s flat, in fury that her son has been taken away. “He took him because of you… Because I slept with you. You used me.”/ “I had my reasons.” During the fracas, one of his fingers is in her face, in her eye. The film on the expensive key, shows Jacques, Justine and another woman—with Laporte watching in the wings. Also there we find an anonymous player outfitted with very long fingernails, for pain or gain. The gain occurring with the clown in the Bergman film, In the Presence of a Clown (1997), whose elongated touch could, given the right heart attending, race or poise, to lend a hand in nature itself.
How, the question is now, having seen an infrastructure of sensibility ignored in favor of hardware and software, can we confirm that Marco is not a killer but a tedious gamester, having overcome his fondest reflections because they were extremely difficult? Soon after reaching Paris, he visits an insurance office to max out his premiums. He tells the clerk, “It’s just a year off. Everyone is entitled to one.” (I doubt if Denis is a subscriber to that term.) “It’s nice in a man’s life. One year…” One year to do some good and have some thrills. The baying of Sandra (though the suicide would definitely have a melancholy appeal) must probably have come to Marco of more of the same hyperbole. Whereas his sister is a walking prehistoric, Marco, as we see him in action, is something more recent, more ambiguous. Though he was pretty much obliged to take seriously the crisis, he was not at all obliged to become a murderer, despite his sister’s personal and cultural hysteria. The cat and mouse game would, perhaps, get to the bottom of Sandra’s small war, which hopefully, to Marco, might develop into something, “nice in a man’s life…” Jacobean drama, with its fiery revenge, worked with a will in 17th century England. Those days are gone. Hot heads abound, and drag thigs down. But the complexities of major urbanism demand innovation, not devotion to the old.
Having not what it takes for his father’s hopes of dynamic logic, Marco faces a problematic in Paris not that far from where he deserted. His last moments on the bridge face a fixed fog in the middle distance. His early moments in the orbit of his sister come in the form of a fixed fog of calumny, clearly without transparency. “You’re hiding things! I gave everything up! I need to know, goddammit!” With this lack of acquiescence, she declares, “I wish I were dead!” (People like her being unfortunately and insectile resilient. Justine will insist she’s in love with her pimp. Marco had spoken to her in her hospital bed, “I’m here for you…”) Marco signs several checks to keep Sandra out of penury. She complains, “You’ve changed styles.” In face of the inventory of shoes, he complains, “Low quality and tacky.”/ “Thanks,” is her non-care. She hands over her dad’s gun. “What do I do with this?” is his response. She tells him, “Hold on to it, please. You’ll need it.” Hoping to solidify a modern love, he tells Raphael, “I can’t believe there’s any love. You’re not even part of his life. He treats you like a concubine. He’s turned you into his slut.” She argues, “He was younger when I met him. He gave me the confidence I never had. I had no ties. I was floating. Then I got pregnant with Joseph. I don’t judge…”
The doctor on Justine’s case also knows more than he says. We find him being dragged over the coals by Sandra, for one of Justine’s getaways. “You should have done your job beforehand. We pay enough. You’re in charge here. It’s your negligence.” He, fortunately, has drawn a more incisive bead upon his attacker. “You’re one to talk. She’s underage. You’re her guardian.” (A choir tone ironically sums it up.) Later that night, the doctor notices Marco at a bus stop and gives him a ride. “I figured a captain would be more serene.” The short-cut exponent excuses his disarray by way of poor form. “I came back for them. My kid sister and my niece… How am I supposed to stay calm with a suicide.” The no-nonsense doc states, “Justine has problems to work through. Part of the trouble comes from her family. Something went wrong.” By this time, Marco is able to report, “I’ve broken off from my family… I know little about them… I’ve cut myself off from everyone.” The driver adds, “It’s for what Marines do.” He trolls a red-light district, to confirm his sense of mountainous decadence. A solid citizen in the making. (The key, detailing the ways of the brothel, opens Marco’s eyes about as wide as they can be. To a refrain of Sandra yelling, “I’m so ashamed!” and adding, “You can’t understand. It all went wrong!” he slaps her and she falls to the floor. “Get up!” he demands. She sits on the floor, bawling. He grabs her by her hair and says, “You disgust me!” She cries out, “You weren’t here!” Then he prudishly declares, “I’m glad I divorced. My girls won’t be contaminated. So this is my family!”
Being prudish, as Marco will find to his horror, won’t get you far in the world of high stakes. Back at home, as it were, he enacts a nightmare, where the Alpha has been stolen for a joy ride by Sandra, Justine the pimp and Raphael. (A Hollywood melodrama, for prudes.) He goes on to interrupt the neighbors’ preparations for their summer, a brawl ensues and Raphael, picking up the gun from the floor, shoots him dead. The doctor accompanies Sandra for a viewing of the family at play. That big shoe being taken to the junkyard could be one way to start again; but where could it go? The treasure in the cinematic current awaits a true voyager, “who sails the seas.”