TIFF '11: The roles we play

In the last few years I’ve been able to interview Werner Herzog several times in connection with his Toronto International Film Festival premieres, and as much as I enjoy these experiences—Herzog is nothing if not entertaining company—our conversations, if you can call them that, along with his public appearances, have made me increasingly suspicious: Has the filmmaker become too much of a showman? Has his schtick become too wrote, his eccentricities token, a put-on, an extension of the sort of too-recognizably Herzogian branding that threatens to over-burden films like My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, converting them into a sort of check list? When I speak to him I feel less like he’s responding to my questions than he’s launching almost randomly into his prepared anecdotes, which are part of his hard-sell. (“Herzog always delivers!”) But I’ve just seen Into the Abyss, his new film about two inmates in Texas—one on death row, one serving a sentence that wouldn’t see him up for parole for another 40 years—and the families of those inmates victims. It has no trademark Herzog voice-over, and features no exotic landscapes (unless you consider rural Texas to be exotic). And watching it I realize that, while Herzog the public figure may seem less than engaged with an honest and open exchange, Herzog the filmmaker is in fact more invested in people at this point in his career than at any other. In Encounters at the End of the World he was as interested in the people who filter down to the bottom of the world as he was in the Antarctic undersea strangeness. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams he was as curious about the scientists at work in the Chauvet Cave as he was in the cave’s astounding Stone Age art. Into the Abyss is an extraordinary film precisely because of Herzog’s faith in his subjects, all of them struggling to come to terms with different kinds of murder, to supply the film with its wonder and meaning. He listens exceedingly well. He provokes, he seeks out quirk at every chance, but he also exudes real compassion without flamboyant sentiment.


On a somewhat similar note, Alps, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, which had its TIFF premiere to some very enthusiastic fans last night, echoes Dogtooth, its predecessor, in its obsession with role-playing and heavily constructed modes of behaviour: the film is about a group of people who rent themselves out as surrogates to people who have lost a loved one, pretending to be the dearly departed for as long as it takes to get over the loss. Of course, it’s kooky and formalist as all hell. It’s also fascinating, and surprisingly poignant. A potential point of contention for some will lay in the fact that while the flat performance style of Dogtooth was contained within a cloistered family unit, Alps opens up the canvas to the rest of the world—and it turns out that everyone else acts like that too. But this filmmaker, so drawn to intricate, rule-laden systems and the process of how they inevitably break down, is not as schematic as the oppressive patriarchal figures he creates. As rigorously Bressonian as his films’ now apparently de rigueur performance style is, there is still room for spontaneity. There are moments when his protagonist—beautifully played by Aggeliki Papoulia—becomes so immersed in the people she’s temporarily resurrecting that emotional or guttural responses break up, or rather transcend her deadpan. There are real people with real feelings in Alps—it’s just that they’re placed in situations that interrogate the very notion of how feelings are expressed.

Disappearing act: The Last Metro on DVD

There are numerous levels of masquerade to enjoy in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980). Not only do we have a movie about the mounting of a play, but one in which virtually every character must deceive the others as a means of survival. This is Paris in 1942, and the Germans have moved in.

Actress Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve) has assumed management of the Théâtre Montmartre following the disappearance of her husband, the admired yet conspicuously Jewish director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent). They rehearse a play called, aptly enough, Disappearance. It stars Marion and Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu), a doggedly persistent pussyhound and fresh transplant from the Grand Guignol. Just as the icy Marion maintains a secret life whose locus lies within the bowels of the Montmartre, Bernard’s amiability seems a cover for some conspiratorial activities that find him skulking in the alley. Of course the real conspiracy ’s been designed by Truffaut and co-scenarist Suzanne Schiffman, who only gradually reveal the ways in which Marion and Bernard are unwittingly aligned.

Oscar-nominated and César-showered, this was the most commercially successful, audience-friendly film of Truffaut’s late career. Yet there’s something quietly subversive about its tone. Rather than portray occupied France as a grim, claustrophobic and inherently corrupting environment, Truffaut, reflecting on his own childhood memories, paints it with unapologetic nostalgia. His attention to detail is often whimsical. A voice-over informs us that the theatres and cinemas were always full, the offer of warmth, escape and the community facilitated solidarity through spectatorship. The Nazi presence isn’t trivialized, yet neither is it dwelled on. It’s a potentially catastrophic nuisance that must be endured, and Truffaut’s Parisians, the compromised and courageous, do what they must. For all the ostensible desperation underlying The Last Metro, it’s played as elegant lark rather than grave drama.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given this approach, what makes Marion and Bernard memorable characters has everything to do with the actors and little with the material. Bernard especially feels only sketched out by the script, leaving a disproportionate share of the fleshing out in the thankfully capable, burly hands of Depardieu, whose presence, as always, is considerable. (I loved the scene where he tries to analogize his lust as being “like craving a hot croissant.”)

For me the dominant source of pleasure in The Last Metro however is simply its craftsmanship, the culmination of several talents having worked together over many years. The images, photographed by the great Néstor Almendros, are washed in a warm array of reds, oranges and browns. The quick fade-outs fall over clipped scene endings like a soft hush. There’s a wealth of sensuality generated from the mere—and oft repeated—glimpse of Deneuve’s legs as they’re caressed. And there is in this a portrait of a no-longer young but still tender marriage that’s rendered moving by a touch so light it almost has to be French.

Department of youth: The Class under review

Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les murs) follows a group of racially mixed adolescent students over the course of a school year. Much of it is set in the French class of a energetic young teacher. Other scenes capture students interacting in the courtyard, teachers meeting in staff rooms, where they sometimes vent their panic, and, in some of the film’s most entertaining and unnerving scenes, parent-teacher interviews. Tensions between kids and instructors rise and fall. Khoumba, who used to be congenial, suddenly refuses to cooperate in class; Wei, A Chinese student still working on his French, has a parent deported; Souleymane acts tough and chilled but lashes out when cornered; Esmeralda, who wants to be either a rapper or a cop, talks back relentlessly—and she does so with enjoyable brio.

The modus operandi is simple and clean. The narrative is subordinate to the natural order of events. The aesthetic, somewhat reflective of the filming process, resembles documentary. There’s a deceptive veneer of artlessness to The Class that contributes greatly to its arresting charm, but the elegant rhythms, un-telegraphed bursts of insight and resonant ambiguities represents a masterfully gauged collaboration between highly alert filmmakers and an unusually large and evenly represented ensemble. (The techniques of Robert Altman or Mike Leigh come to mind, though either would have made a very different movie.) The talk is at times sublimely spontaneous, and the editing by Robin Campillo, also one of the credited screenwriters, renders it lively and fluid. You ask me, the result is a genuine masterpiece.

The students are actual students from Françoise Dolto Junior High in Paris ’ 20th arrondissement. Their parents, with one exception, are the students’ actual parents. These facts alone don’t ensure verisimilitude—not to mention entertainment or intelligence—and its telling that while improvisation around set scenarios seems to have been the approach, few of the players are “playing themselves,” as though such a thing were strictly possible. Cantet facilitated weekly workshops with the students for eight months. A key participant in these workshops was François Bégaudeau, an actual teacher and the author of the book on which the movie’s based. Bégaudeau also plays “François,” a version of himself. He’s a charming, challenging ringleader, with a policy of open, respectful exchange, encouraging students to talk about their personal interests and insecurities to the point where we’re provoked into wondering whether privacy is finally a detriment to learning and the self-realization that ideally accompanies it.

Maybe what’s most fulfilling in this is the sheer power of performance as it occurs naturally in certain social contexts. The performances by Bégaudeau, whose laid-back theatricality is clearly a major component of his talent as a teacher, and the students are not virtuosic. They are the product of a natural inclination to discover some aspect of ourselves through interaction with others, pushing boundaries, thinking out loud. It’s an inclination that’s been cultivated here beautifully. The Class looks like it was as much fun to make as it is to watch and listen to. And when its over, when the rooms are empty and the chairs left askew, there’s something just a little sad about it’s passing, yet also something exhilarating in its promise of renewal.

Saved by the Bégaudeau: Laurent Cantet discusses The Class

The films of Laurent Cantet exude that rarest of things: a sincere interest in how people relate to their work. His films explore the role, meaning and residual effects of work, as well as the ways our institutions shape our sense of who we are as individuals. In Human Resources (1999), Franck assumes a white-collar position at the factory where his father’s been a welder for 23 years, his crossing over from one class to another ultimately symbolizing a betrayal of his roots. In Time Out (2001), Vincent is laid off by a prestigious consulting firm and cannot confess to his family that he’s unemployed, so he drives around France and Switzerland, naps a lot, reads the papers, and dabbles in crime. Work, or lack of it, defines these characters, however extraordinary their cases may be, in ways that ring alarmingly true.

Given this investment in the links between work and self, and given that both his parents were teachers, it’s perhaps inevitable that Cantet would build a film around the institution that ostensibly does more to prepare us for work, nurture our social skills, and mould our identities more than any other. Cantet was already cooking up an idea for a film about a rebellious African student named Souleymane when he discovered Entre les murs, François Bégaudeau’s acclaimed roman à clef about his experiences teaching French at a Parisian inner city school. Cantet abandoned his idea, or rather dissolved into a loose adaptation of Bégaudeau’s book. “What I immediately liked about François is the fact that he is willing to take risks,” Cantet explains. “What some people consider as provocative in his attitude is for him a matter of putting the students on the same level as himself, a way of talking as peers.” The Class is an extraordinary chronicle of one scholastic year in the lives of François and his students. It won last year’s Palme d’Or, and is now an Oscar contender.

Among The Class’ more extraordinary elements are its performances, with Bégaudeau himself playing the role of the teacher François and unseasoned kids playing each of the students. Cantet used three cameras on set, one to follow François, one to follow the central characters with whom François interacts, and one to catch spontaneous activity occurring outside the confines of the roughly established scenes. What emerges is akin to documentary, yet through its modicum of artifice it gets at truths that cinéma vérité often fails to yield. I, along with two other writers, spoke with Cantet via translator in a Toronto hotel, where he was asked about how he managed to capture such tremendous performances from his young, non-professional actors.

“By working with the students a long time, getting to know them, and respecting who they are, they came to trust me,” Cantet explains. “But it was also through creating characters on the basis of what they themselves proposed. Take Wei. Originally in the script there was a Chinese character named Ming, and he was very shy. He wouldn’t speak for fear of making mistakes. Then we met Wei Huang and he was essentially the opposite. He loves to talk, loves a good argument. There was no point in asking Wei to shut up and become something he’s not. As it happens, Wei’s a lot more interesting than Ming would have been.”

Souleymane survived the project’s evolution and, in contrast to the Ming character’s adapting to fit more fluidly with Huang’s outgoing persona, Franck Keïta was asked to reverse his normally shy demeanor. Clothes, that crucial component of teenage identity, played an enormous role in Keïta’s ability to bring out a side of himself that could plausibly behave like a bully. And the tension between Keïta’s tendencies and those of the character make Souleymane compelling, and ultimately sympathetic. As Cantet puts it, “you can see that behind this tough look is a very vulnerable sort of fragility.”

With slight exceptions, The Class unfolds entirely within the confines of the school—within the walls, as the French title states. Thus whatever we learn about these characters is gleaned through the rituals of school life. But what we learn composes not only portraits of individuals but some semblance of contemporary France’s sometimes fraught multiculturalism.

“The idea was to show that the school was neither a sanctuary not a fortress,” says Cantet. “Therefore, everything that happens in the country has an effect on the school. It does happen that people get deported as illegal aliens. It does happen that kids who don’t do well in school get sent back to their home countries. Yet classes continue.”

Running parallel to situations stemming from contemporary cultural phenomena are others that are at least as old as the pedagogical tradition. A key scene where the mischievously charming Boubacar “outs” Souleymane’s curiosity about François’ sexual preferences reveals how closely questions about sex cling to young minds attempting to bring order to their surroundings.

“The part about François’ sexuality is actually in the book,” says Cantet. “Teachers have told him they’ve often encountered similar questions in the classroom, because at that age boys are very interested by anything sexual. Homosexuality is something that intrigues them, but they tend to respond with homophobia. Many teachers refuse to deal with a question like Souleymane’s, but François sees it as an opportunity to discuss, to widen horizons, to show them what’s problematic in their homophobia.”

I asked Cantet about François’ call for openness in his classroom, exemplified in the self-portraits he assigns. François’ policies prove precarious, yet there remains a bold polemic in his story about the importance of balancing privacy with a willingness to publicly share feelings. It gets François into some trouble when he steps out of bounds, yet it also allows some students to transcend the dominant rule of repression that keeps many in their shells.

“One of the things that François has been reproached for is using too much intimacy,” says Cantet. “But it’s so much more interesting when you deal with students on the basis of what is real, what a person’s real feelings are, where they stand, rather than glossing over things. François is an idealist. He tries to create a level playing field between himself and his class, and the system can work against him. Yet perhaps between these conflicting ideologies something valuable can emerge.”