It’s summertime for Dissidenz too and you will therefore receive our newsletter on a monthly basis in July and August -the usual frequence will resume in September. In July, two films have drawn our attention: the first one was selected at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes this year and the second one was made back in 1963! Yet, they have in common two points: they will both open in France on July 15 and they both deal with escape. But they are not about foreign exotic lands, they’re all about escaping a social condition, a destiny experienced like a prison. On the one hand: The King of Escape, French director Alain Guiraudie’s latest feature, and the re-release of a 1963 Japanese rarity on the other hand: Each Day I Cry (Hiko Shojo) by Kiriro Urayama.

Midlife Crisis
Armand Lacourtade is an agricultural machines salesman. He is now 43 year old and as his homosexuality begins to feel like a burden, he questions himself about the heterosexual way of life: a woman, children, a lovely house “if the majority of people live this way for ages, it mustn’t be that bad”. He meets with a 16-year-old girl named Curly, with whom he will live a passionate story. Acclaimed for his short films, Sunshine For The Poor or That Old Dream That Moves, Alain Guiraudie directed No Time For The Brave and Time Has Come before The King Of Escape, which was presented at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight this year. Far from all the clichés about gay people in French cinema (mostly young, bold and beautiful trendy Parisian people) Guiraudie depicts a rural homosexuality made of road rest areas and semi-clandestinity. From this start comes out a rejoicing tale about a forty-year-old man living an identity crisis. In a fantasized southwestern France, in which 90% of the population is gay and share the secret of an extraordinary plant combining the effects of Viagra and cocaine, the fabulous “dourougne”, Armand sees in Curly his chance to escape from what he thinks to be his destiny as a homosexual picking up single farmers. Though his friends try to stop him and against the will of the parents of the young girl who are mad at him, Armand will flee with Curly but when it will be time to build something with her he’ll flee again and will find peace in a reconciliation with himself. As funny as inventive and deep, The King of Escape is a rejoicing and peculiar film with a particularly sensual look upon upon bodies.

The Queen of Escape
Wakae is a fifteen-year old girl living in a small coast village in Japan. Her father, a poor alcoholic, doesn’t really take care of her since her mother died. A hostess in a bar, she meets with Saburo after she stole a pair of shoes. Saburo lives in the shadow of his older brother and starts to live a passionate relationship with Wakae. When he finds out about her thievery he rejects her and the course of things leads her to a reformatory. Directed by Kiriro Urayama in 1963, Each Day I Cry is the second film by this former assistant of Shoei Imamura and Yuzo Kawashima in the Nikkatsu and received the Grand Prize at Moscow Film Festival. Narrating the ordinary life of a rural poor girl, the film strikes by its beauty and its use of the ellipsis in an inventive narration.
Even if Wakae has to put up with events she has no control upon, she shares with the character Armand Lacourtade of Alain Guiraudie the will to escape the path others trace for her. Like Armand, she will find a kind of peace in the acceptance of the events she has to cope with. Playing Wakae, Masako Izumi, later to be seen in Seijun Suzuki’s films, does a great performance. As determined as fragile, she gives out all the necessary complexity to incarnate this crucial teen age. Fast-paced and well written, Each Day I Cry is a real rare gem, from which you can expect much more than from its English title (which has nothing to do with the original title!).

Francis Chérasse

What is most disturbing in UNITED RED ARMY is Wakamatsu’s film does not comply with any rule nor any code and obeys no other system than his: a total liberty of speech and action, which made him produce and direct UNITED RED ARMY the guerrilla way, i.e. by financing the film all by himself, by having his own house blown up for the film purpose, by mortgaging his movie theatre –he owns one in Nagoya–, by supervising production management, editing, through distribution and exhibition in Japan.

The film is 190 minutes long (screams, cries and protests from those who have decided that a film more than 2 hours long was definitely bad for their health), mixes unexpected genres (documentary, action feature, political lampoon, a flavour of terror) and above all does not butter up the audience –no identification is possible– while drawing its strength and legitimacy in History itself since Wakamatsu made it a point of honour to describe real historical facts. Novices should not worry: “I think there is non consequence in being aware or not of Japan’s situation at the time to understand what is going on, Wakamatsu explains; besides, the first part made of archive footage and comments from the time places the action in its historical background. The starting point is the fact that students were the targets of political power and police repression.”
What is additionally unprecedented –but which the non Japanese audience is not necessarily aware of– is that the Asama events the films refers to, which traumatized Japan in the early 1970s and have had a tremendous impact on the political history of the country and on an international scale as well, are told for the first time from the inside. There have been indeed at least three other films on the same subject told from the point of view of the police, which persuaded the former-yakuza-turned-filmmaker he should make a film –based on his long conversations with Kunio Bando (one of the Asama hostage-taker still in on the run) –, “to restore the truth and pass it on to future generations.” By doing so, Wakamatsu was neither on the side of the students nor on the one of the police of course. Still, he points out the young people were ready to die. “Those who don’t understand that some people are ready to die when they enjoy a comfortable situation, without ever having to fight for it, have no right to judge them.”, he adds. After a pause, he resumes: “Unfortunately, they ended up reproducing among themselves what the state made them undergo. Victims and attackers were in the same logic and the revolutionaries ended up yielding to the logic of absolute power. It should be repeated over and over again: power kills. If there is a message in my film, it is that one.”

Françoise Duru

Watch United Red Army international trailer:

View also the Interview with Koji Wakamatsu

A filmmaker with a protean work, whose documentaries are as fascinating as his fictions, Werner Herzog has been one of the most important German directors for more than forty years.

We essentially know Werner Herzog for his emblematic films starring his favourite actor Klaus Kinski -the fantastic Aguirre, The Wrath of God, the titanesque Fitzcarraldo, or his versions of Woyzeck and Nosferatu. Yet neither those films, nor his films starring Bruno S. -The Ballad of Bruno or the magnificent The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser- or his brilliant recent documentaries like Grizzly Man can lead to the categorization -whether formal or thematical- of the work of a filmmaker constantly looking for inventions. “I directed a lot of documentaries over the last few years because I couldn’t find money for my fictions. But in my work, the frontier between documentaries and fictions is not obvious. My documentaries are deliberately stylish and inventive because I hate cinema-verite -all those films that pretend to catch reality with accountants manners. The truth I’m looking for in cinema is poetic, ecstactic”, a profession of faith that certainly won’t be contradicted by the full retrospective of his work in fifty five films, which is showing now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through March 2, for the first time in France -a remarkable opportunity to explore the multiple facets of one of the most fascinating and uncompartmentalizable figures of European cinema.

Olivier Gonord

Read the full program of the Werner Herzog retrospective.

In 2002, the Cannes Film Festival paid Aki Kaurismaki his due respect. The Man Without a Past received the Grand Prize of the Jury and his favorite actress, Kati Outinen, won for Best Actress. The award was well-deserved: the Finish filmmaker has become a leading cinematic figure in little over twenty years, with fifteen films to his credit, thanks to his disillusioned and affectionate style.

Above all, Aki Kaurismaki has proven his inimitable way of expressing the bleakness of the world and of the “little people” who inhabit it, antiheroes whose untiring equanimity render them both dignified and quirky. As the characters drag through the no man’s lands of urban and rural settings, they are somehow akin to Droopy, Tex Avery’s dog, and like him, seem to be saying, with a deadpanned expression, “You know what? I’m happy.”
With his sketchy minimalism and burlesque stylization, Aki Kaurismaki also depicts resistance against life in the fast lane and against a world that rejects anything that “doesn’t fit in.” With the mere image of a woman seated in a party waiting in vain to be approached, he manages to portray loneliness. A bouquet of flowers is enough to recount a nascent romance. His actors are not particularly good-looking, but through poetry and humor they incarnate the grandeur and the poverty of the human condition. His “loser trilogy” (Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk) and his previous “worker’s trilogy” (with the cinematic gems Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl) are pathos-free portraits of “working stiffs,” losers of all sorts who try to survive in a hostile universe without ever forsaking their dignity.
That his films are so consistent, however, does not preclude them from being diverse. From the fold suddenly emerged Bohemian Life, in a reconstructed Paris, and Juha, in sumptuous black and white, “the last silent movie of the 20th century.” The DVD of his complete works especially offers viewers the occasion to treat themselves to several rarities, such as his musical short films, including the ineffable Those Were the Days, where a cowboy and his donkey seek refuge in a Paris café. And then there is Calamari Union, his second, but as yet unreleased, film, a sort of black and white, quick-paced sketch showing a group of dysfunctional, over-aged delinquents all named Frank who make their way across town (at their own risk!). The spirit of the “Leningrad Cowboys” – a very bad rock band with elaborate quiffs and extremely pointed boots, and a box-office success in 1989 – is already present.
Lastly, this complete set offers the chance to meet the “Kaurismaki family”. Indeed, the Finish director’s films are also a story of loyalty: the same director of photography from the very beginning, and several favorite actors, including Kati Outinen, with her chin pulled in, and her heart-rending and unsettling loneliness, and Matti Oulippää, an unflagging accomplice starting with his first appearance, hair parted on the side, in Crime and Punishment, and up to his early death. “I don’t understand why you’d need to replace the perfect actor by another one just for the sake of change,” he has said. “John Ford and Howard Hawks kept John Wayne in their Westerns because he was the best for that kind of role.”

Emmanuelle Mougne

Ferrare, Italy, 1938. The vast Finzi-Continis domain opens its doors to the middle-class youth when sports clubs access is suddenly denied to Jews. The rich Jewish noble family welcomes here their children’s friends. In this closed preserved space, Giorgio and Micol, only daughter of the family, live their lives, which grows from friendship to love for Giorgio.

As Italy is going deeper into fascism and Europe is on the edge of war, the Finzi-Continis are shown as living in a protected closed world, keepers of an art of living on the way of its destruction. The story runs through four years that will cover the evolutions of the relationship between Giorgio, the educated middle class boy, and Micol, when, all around them, the mentalities are changing, due to the rise of fascism. Ignored, underestimated, the new order that overcomes Europe will finally break through the domain and definitively destroy it.

Like beautiful Micol (marvellous Dominique Sanda), the family seems desperately passive to face the changes that occurs in Italy, caused by mussolinian racial laws and the rise of the brown shirts. Shot in a stunning way, as the photography evolves in time with the periods, Vittorio de Sica’s film is a wonder like -in a different way- neo-realism classics were (The Bicycle Thieve, Umberto D.). Adapting the novel by Giorgio Bassani, De Sica, through the Finzi-Continis, evokes a certain idea of Europe, its culture and its values, through its aristocracy facing the rise of fascism. “When I show this people so little anxious of the threats upon them, when the father says “Mussolini is better than Hitler”, when the son blames his father’s lack of reaction against persecutions, I think I reflected well theses times”. De Sica’s will is not to tell about Micol’s love affairs but to make her a living image of European aristocracy’s position in fascist Italy and in whole Europe. The Finzi-Continis will be blown away by History, and, with them, a certain idea of European aristocracy which definetly ended with world war two.

The DVD is now available. More information about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Jean-Claude Brisseau was discovered by Eric Rohmer in 1975 at an amateur film festival, where his first movie, La Croisée des Chemins, shot in Super 8, was being screened. At the time, Brisseau taught French in a Paris-suburb middle school, a profession he exercised for more than twenty years. Shortly afterwards, he was hired by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, which in 1978 produced his first feature-length film, La Vie Comme Ça (Life The Way It Is), initially made for television. His next films, shot directly for theatrical release, dealt with big-city cruelty and violence, both physical and psychological; into this urban reality he incorporated spiritual and metaphysical elements, the secret to his unique approach, and combined fantasy, social commentary and romance. Mysticism and irrationality abound in the urban housing developments of De Bruit et de Fureur (Sound and Fury, 1988) – the film made a name for him at the Cannes Film Festival that same year – and seep from the walls of the provincial abode in Céline (1992). He also offered unique roles to actresses with a strong public image, going against their usual current, whether it be Vanessa Paradis in Noce Blanche (White Wedding, 1989), her first movie role, or Sylvie Vartan in L’Ange Noir (The Black Angel, 1994), which costarred Michel Piccoli and Tchéky Karyo, while the mesmerizing music was composed by Jean Musy. Six years later, Jean-Claude Brisseau shot Les Savates du Bon Dieu (Workers for the Good Lord), starring Stanislas Merhar and Raphaële Godin; director and film-critic Louis Skorecki heralded the movie as “a sublime Hollywood melodrama, a cross between Under Capricorn and The Barefoot Contessa.” With Choses Secrètes (Secret Things, 2002) and Les Anges Exterminateurs (The Exterminating Angels, 2006), which was shown in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, he turned his attention to transgression and female desire in a singularly unprecedented way.

An extraordinary cineaste, and an avid fan of Hitchcock and Buñuel, Jean-Claude Brisseau makes films that walk a cinematic tightrope and divert from the norm with utter control. His movies are both popular and marginal, traditional and experimental, uncompromising, fearless, are free of moral judgment and recognize no taboos. “Buñuel went through hell during the last thirty years of his life,” said Skorecki, “and Brisseau is courageously looking at two or three decades of being misunderstood.”

More informations about Jean-Claude Brisseau 4 films Box Set.