J'me coucherai moins conne

The Boy and the Beast -  バケモノの子 ,  Mamoru Hosoda, 2015.

La Reine Margot, Patrice Chéreau, 1994.

French films with ambitions and talents

“ Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”

About Elly

Asghar Farhadi

2009

A weekend at the sea

Kids and couples and a man and Elly

A kite and the waves

Missing

The waves remain

There is something lost upon us about Elly. That’s one of a few recurring thoughts I had while watching Asghar Farhadi’s film. Along with a few scenarios, moral considerations, women’s rights urges, young adult interrogations... It’s hard to resist being caught into this huis clos. Behind the doors and broken windows of a house rented for the weekend by college friends, the talented director has designed a human drama which has many ramifications. We watch this happy moment slip into a human, social and cultural tragedy, leaving a devastating after taste. 

The actors of this tragedy are the same age as us, they are educated, middle class young people, 20 to 30 something years old. And they’re eager to enjoy a long weekend on the countryside. This false closeness we experiment fades as the plot unfolds. We find ourselves shocked at the easiness with which we managed to identify in the first scenes as Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) screams with joy in a tunnel, head out of the window, as any happy weekender has done on European roads. The reactions and actions ruthlessly participate in the stripping of this illusion. This is when it shatters that we can appreciate our unawareness of the subtle and blatant civilisational differences between Occident and the Iranian society. As the handsome Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) lets himself fall for the mysterious Elly by watching her from a hole in the windowpanes, our ignorant look is mesmerized by the peek we get into the societal and cultural structure of the Iranian sociey. A structure which seems quite impossible to grasp except maybe in the observation of the exchanges that draw the relationships between characters’ whose names we spent some time trying to get.

Leaving aside the cinematic qualities of the film, the talent of Farhadi here is to make us dive head first into a very familiar situation (a weekend among friends, a love encounter) which turns into a  liying game of many victims with the sticky and unagreeable sensation that we have also been both the judges and the executioners by taking sides with one character or the other. 

I tremendously enjoyed his ability to reveal the omnipresent risk to view the movie’s stakes as the Occidentalization of a society where tradition is law. This shortcut is debunked by its unique flavour, reassesed by its director in an interview in whichi he states that his society is taking steps towards modernization through the prism of its own culture, which is a most welcome and surprising invitation to change our point of view, we, well-read Western spectators with a somewhat out of fashion tradition of ethnocentricity. 

‘From the affect to our thoughts’, that’s the Farhadi’s wish for his film, and definitely something to remember about Elly.

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A few keys to understanding some cultural notions and the weight of white and darker lies in the Iranian society:

http://terrain.revues.org/14307

Film reviews:

http://www.critikat.com/actualite-cine/critique/a-propos-d-elly.html

http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/movie-review-asghar-farhadis-about-elly.html

Bajirao Mastani

Sanjay Leela Bhansali

Samuel Beckett

HIRAMATSU Reiji

Motifs de nymphéas

Cerisiers et nymphéas

Motifs de nymphéas

Giverny in Spring

Normandie, une saison de rêve (été)

Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain, 1933

Testament of Youth,  James Kent, 2015

Here it is on the black screen. The white words, white lies, we’ve been waiting for since we heard of that movie. You know, the cinematic epitaph to the lives they have just lived for you.

 “xxx went on writing, xxx married xxx and did this and then died, aged xx.”

 Unfortunately, this is the moment when your feelings about the characters, movie, story, photography, all lead to this starting point, from which spreads reflexion and your opinion. And after feeling an unexpected rush of empathy, sadness, indignation, intellectual interest, and other complex little electrical reactions, I remember grinding teeth when I read that pedestrian sentence, quite obscene after what had been shown so far: she was the voice of a generation.

NO. A white, British, educated and relatively well-off provincial young woman was NOT the voice of a generation. She is not representative enough. It was enough though in the aftermath of WWI, it was enough. We’re in 2015. We know a bit more now. 

That said, Testament of Youth brings us back to 1914, a beautiful spring, young people romping about among fields and trees in the lovely countryside. Love sprouting from all sides, hopes high for the young Vera,  a determined young woman who will do whatever she can to attend Oxford next term. It almost makes you forget and want to be this young girl, falling in love, asserting herself, writing poems and diving into books to get into the dream university (especially when your love interest is Kit Harington, I admit). 

Then they make you remember. They make it soft, so soft and sweet this first part, before the war. It feels lik cotton, it’s painted pastel and it smells like sun on young skin. Like a memory of yours, a memory of youth. They got me there. Then it just happens. You didn’t feel it creep because your head was turned the other way, but it’s been building up for some time. You find yourself at a loss for words, you who used to be so deft at them. Flower petals fall, and blank leaves soak in mud. And you can barely hear them . Swallowed by the dirt. You can only see the ink in the blood smeared over her nurse apron. Once were white. 

I was expecting the worst movie of the year. It’s  conventional. It’s full of soul though. Stamped on our retina with a new palette arfully mixed by Alicia Vikander. She has that directness, that look, grave and full, like she couldn’t lie to you even if her life depended on it, she could not give up until she’s told you that story her way. Like it matters.

It wasn’t the worst movie of the year. It has many flaws. It’s BBC shaped for the worst, for the best. It will flatter our dysfunctional political consciousness for a few days. Without troubling us further.It has the great quality to display interesting women characters (even secondary ones) and to draft those of a variety of men even if they quickly get lost in the quick pace a 2 hour movie has to assume when summing up a 600 page book. It only makes us see what we have and what we could lose. It shows the absent and the vanishing by focusing on what remains. But then, in a few weeks, we will turn to the news and similar irreversible heartbreaks, over there beyond a narrow sea, or a few metro stations away. But their story is not being told well enough. 

So, like the 99% lazy audience, I am still remembering a week after seeing the movie. I want to remember in every decision I make. I want to remember now that if we let it creep up like they did, even without welcoming it, we might get entangled in one of these conflicts our negligence lets happen. So I’m just going to read the book to write it more definitely in my memory. And keep on doing these little things to make people think around me, whatever the ignition is, be it a blockbuster movie or the most obscure poetry book lost on a shelf of the school library. I just hope, probably in vain, that it won’t come to that again. But hey it’s 2015. New century, old habits. 

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Review by the Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/11182988/Testament-of-Youth-review-stirring.html

Review by the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/movies/review-testament-of-youth-recalls-the-great-war-with-little-nostalgia.html?_r=0

Review (in French) and interview with James Kent

http://www.lalibre.be/culture/cinema/testament-of-youth-14-18-si-loin-si-proche-55f6c65035700fb92ee1a1e5

Encounter with Brittain’s daughter:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11342068/Testament-of-Youth-Vera-Brittain-film-preview.html

Review (and revision of review) of the book Interesting take on how Brittain seems to be the only suffering, like the representative youth she is

The Chopin Project, Alice-Sara Ott & Ólafur Arnalds @ Le Trianon, Paris Friday 11th September 2015

I spend a few of my days trying to convince people, young and far from young, that classical music is not the name of a mysterious sect, where you can apply  only if you know how to wear a bow or a gown properly.

It’s only music. It’s notes, colours, chords maybe, it has a refined script, but it’s primarily made by human beings for human beings (even if some forget it), because we feel like it.

Ólafur Arnalds is one of these guys who can play several instruments, compose for TV shows and have side projects with heavy metal musicians. He is part of a category of artists that traditional music lovers consider with suspicion if not disdain. He’s from Iceland, steps softly all over the stage with great socks and looks like the adorable friend you’d love to have. He also enjoys the concept of cross-over and hybridation, from which sprouts some of the best theatre, literature and music. He therefore has everything to get on our nerves, us French. Alice Sara Ott, his Chopin Project mate, has at first glance a more conventional profile. From German and Japanese descent, she decided at an early age that she wanted to become a professional pianist. She won a certain number of prizes before meeting Arnalds and assessing her will to expand her horizons.

I was reading a review about last Friday’s concert. The writer seems to have fine arguments shared by some people over the web. This article struck me as typically French , as it points at the issue of ‘excellence.’ I heard this week, in a very different context, a man talking about the idea of excellence and what it means to us. In France, among the 99% who don’t excel at what they do, many are prevented from enjoying a serene and harmonious life because of our distorted conception of achievement. I realized the same thing while spending some time in the US. In France, you have no right to fail. It can go from the 6 year old who doesn’t raise his hand in class for fear of giving the wrong answer to the grown-up student who fails freshman year in college and ends up doing a job that does not match her competences. It’s in the lack of entrepreneurs here. Just because we have been taught that one failure is really all one can tolerate. Failure is not seen as it should: a stepping stone towards growing and becoming better at what you do and who you are. Is it coming from our Greek heritage or the Romantic period? Thinking that a privileged few were chosen by the gods to excel is what makes our life less worth it. This tendency to hate and fear failure is of course accompanied by the French habit of despising success. Which makes it very hard to draw some happiness and harmony from our existence.

As I strongly believe in the perfectibility of men & women - children get better every day, why not us?- I believe in the benefits of discovering the Chopin Project (live, if possible). For the simple reason that it holds and projects all around us the cure to our national disease: inspiration.

Out of their encounter over their mutual love for Chopin (and whisky), both Ott and Arnalds decided to make some great old music a personal journey. This is what music and art are supposed to do; inspire people, put you in motion and push you to create something. The hour of music we were given last Friday seemed to inspire people in the room. The concert was made of silences, some technical insufficency, swings of mood and metaphorical places, different lighting and tastes, and especially different spaces. The music Arnalds sounded atmospheric, straight out of his world, and designed to respond and echo Chopin’s Nocturnes, his ‘Raindrop’ Prélude and a few others, interpreted by Ms. Ott. Arnalds’ pieces are not my favourites of all time, they keep a  soundtrack quality that does not always match Chopin’s pieces in my opinion. But they do have a special part in this duo. They fill the spacetime; and the advantage of this is that they emphasise the magnificence of Chopin’s music as one that creates its own space and time.

The musical encounter of these two personalities over Chopin’s shadow was full of grace and intimacy. We will remember the sound of numeric raindrops falling on an imagined glass roof; the flow of notes in the warm light enveloping a slender figure sitting on the floor, both of the musicians’ story of loss and gain around Chopin, shared as our time together was drawing to an end.

The freedom and lightness displayed by them should inspire musicians and non-musicians in the audience alike. They remind us we should try to find inspiration wherever we can, while remaining critical. We should remember their freedom and playfulness because it’s been removed from our education and DNA by previous generations. 

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Presentation video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv_4zWwUwn4

Tour trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Vgy0zPNw3E

Music video ‘Reminiscence’ (starring Game Of Thrones’ very own Mountain)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hffMLTmRe9A

Video from the live @Trianon, Paris

concrete liquidity

sky used to be the limit

After 3.11, Japan is not that silent. You can still hear the wave and see what it brought to the shore. Destruction, despair, hope, creation, indignation. It's all over the streets of Tokyo thanks to the artist 281_Anti nuke

Let's go play in the rain

Let's go swim into the ocean

Let's go eat our dinner

Let's make sure it's not contaminated

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Artist's website

http://www.281antinuke.com/gallery/

Interview with the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/10/an-interview-with-281-anti-nuke.html

Videos:

Short documentary presenting the artist and his work in TOKYO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI4pBzXhmUg

The world after Fukushima  (documentary, fr)

Date & Place_ Saturday, April 26th, Opéra de Paris (Bastille)

Weather_ Cloudy, strong probability of rain

Number of vacant seats_ None

I was too early to this public presentation of Benjamin Millepied's new creation, Daphnis & Chloé. I was not the only one. But I'd like to think I was among the most sceptic in the audience when I took a seat in the full amphitheatre room. A couple of weeks ago, I had seen an extract of another creation by the next Directeur de la Danse of the Opera. It was performed by the young dancers of the Corps de Ballet, who really did their best to make something out of an utterly uninspiring choreography. Unoriginal, flat and dull as the screen behind them. That piece of decor projected colourful geometric forms on a white background, drifting into oblivion, and were reminiscent of the poster for the upcoming double night of ballet at the Opera, George Balanchine/Benjamin Millepied. 

Which I decided to question by attending this encouter with the public session with M.Millepied, bringing along my prejudice and a mind open to change.

I was expecting a conference. I was wrong. The choreographer entered the small stage with a wide smile, American style, and casually annouced he and two of the company's dancers would be rehearsing a Pas de Deux that, at the 5th week  of rehearsal, they did not master yet. 'Goody goody,' methought. 

Accompanied by a pianist, the young dancers Léonore Baulac and Marc Moreau gave in bravely to the exercise of public rehearsal. The ethereal music of Ravel's Symphony in C helping, the trio delivered a very interesting performance, with Millepied as the unpretentious, exigent and good-humoured choreographer.The contrary of what the above mentioned-extract  had led me to think. Jumping away and onto the stage, then into Daphnis's character, he offered an image of his profession only the audience can dream of. 'Damn it, thought I, I'm seduced.'

Benji, as the highschool girls who were sitting by me surely call him, has already been criticized a lot for his lack of originality. And for his previous artistic choices. And for being a New York City Ballet dancer. And for his wife. And for his money. And... Still, let's hope that this ballet will bring something different in the game. Either by establishing him as a unaffected choreographer that draws from both American and French traditions, or by a huge failure, which would probably change his conception of choreographic creation. But let us judge him on this only for today, and on his choices as Directeur for tomorrow.

I am glad I went to the crowded amphitheatre that day. 1/ because it was probably raining outside. 2/ because I like to give people second chances. 3/ because you don't get to see this kind of rehearsal for free everyday. 4/ because I need to daydream a little like anyone else. And 5/ because I'm ready for next round, M. Millepied. 

 pictures:

n°1: poster for George Balanchine/ Benjamin Millepied, @ Opéra National de Paris, from May 10th to June, 8th. 

n°2: M.Millepied posing in the Palais Garnier, as the new Directeur de la Danse.

n°3: 'Ballet',  original drawing by Marc Chagall for Daphnis et Chloé.

n°4: set design study by Léon Bakst.

n°5: costume design by Léon Bakst.

n°6: The finding of Chloé by Marc Chagall.

n°7: M. Millepied, at a rehearsal.

+ Sources / To learn more about Daphnis et Chloé:

http://www.memopera.fr/FicheOeuv.cfm?OeuCode=DAP

http://leschaussonsverts.eklablog.com/daphnis-et-chloe-1912-sous-le-signe-des-nymphes-et-de-pan-a23252194

angular grace

burnt hair

eerie-go-round

emptier than paradise

  (voiceover: man announcing next hollywood masterpiece in the 50s trailers)

Jim Jarmusch explores his obssessions further in time and space. With humour coming from all sides, a true romantic tale of vampiric spleen in the modern age.For our spinning delight... Between Detroit and Tanger, let your heart get caught in a tidal wave of dissonances and one perfect harmony. 

For real. You need to see it. 

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On Detroit:  

http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/books/review/detroit-city-is-the-place-to-be-by-mark-binelli.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/books/review/detroit-an-american-autopsy-by-charlie-leduff.html?_r=2&

On Old Movie Theatres in Tanger:

 http://www.tanger-experience.com/?p=3903

On Nikola Tesla: