Antares

In case we were not clear on the matter, the closing credits of this film feature a constellation that contains this eponymous star, one of the brightest in the firmament we call the visible universe.   One may suspect that the name was chosen to show the interconnectedness of the lives of the film's three young couples, one of whom is no longer a couple, in a building complex in the greater Vienna area.  With such a premise one may also suspect that Antares will inevitably devolve into what is lovingly termed hyperlink cinema, in which an unfathomable amount of coincidence (to the point, in many cases, of lottery–like odds) brings together the whole ensemble cast in a most execrable miniature of globalization.  That this plot–avoiding technique has become a cliché of modern filmmaking is bad enough; worse still is the supposition that many takes on the same happenings may teach us about the complications of perspective and, ultimately (here we feel the director tensing and getting giddy), relativity.   It is one thing to offer several views of the same events or issues; it is quite another to assume that because different people see different things, these events and issues are imbued with greater significance and profundity.     

 

Despite my antipathy to coincidence, overlaps of fate do occur, and the chances of their happening are increased exponentially by physical nearness.  A cause–and–effect chain stretching across continents is not only ridiculous, it essentially confirms the possibility that everything is so closely related that the slightest gesture may bring down a mountain (there is a theory, a wildly inventive theory for this type of outlook), which might make you think twice before you drop that banana peel in the middle of the road. Nevertheless, director and writer Götz Spielmann gets this one right: if you're going to have an overlap, make everyone bump around the same concrete prism.  So we meet three couples who are more or less neighbors, each of whom gets its own vignette: Eva (Petra Morzé) and her lover Tomasz (Andreas Patton); Marco (Dennis Cubic) and his girlfriend Sonja (Susanne Wuest); and Marco's lover Nicole (Martina Zinner) and her highly abusive and estranged partner Alex (Andreas Kiendl). Marco and Sonja live together in the complex, while Eva resides nearby with her melomane husband and their teenage daughter.  Nicole also lives in an adjacent building with her young son, which renders Marco's midnight dog–walking expeditions all the more efficient. 

 

The movie does the right thing by getting the least explicable (and perhaps most absurd) of the three vignettes out of the way first, more than suggesting how alienated the characters feel.  Eva seems to sleepwalk through her domestic tasks and local hospital shifts as a nurse, although we are never told how and why she takes up with the equally married Tomasz.  Their lovemaking, if one could call it that, is peppered with the usual hijinks that emotionally unattached people are supposed to do in bed.  The problem is that Eva is becoming increasingly fond of Tomasz while all he wants to do is take rather compromising pictures, and their practically anonymous and often wordless encounters recall another recent film with a similar story line.  But the downright weirdest element is the person whom Eva and Tomasz run into after carelessly deciding to be seen together in public, and how Eva subsequently addresses that situation.

 

The two other vignettes are more tightly intertwined, with another extrarelational affair as the fulcrum.  In the second part, Sonja, who does curious things to magazines in her job as a supermarket cashier, pretends to be pregnant to fend off the pleas of her family−obsessed Croatian boyfriend Marco.  What she doesn't know is that Marco may want to have a baby with her, but he has other urges that require attention elsewhere.  Perhaps then we shouldn't be surprised that Marco's favorite Croatian song, as he summarizes the lyrics for her, relates the story of a man who leaves his wife, becomes rich, loses everything, and then wants to come back and see her one last time.  There are some obvious turns and twists, such as when Sonja pretends to be asleep and then emerges, fully dressed, to follow Marco to his lover’s apartment.  It is also the only movie I have ever seen in which a toy giraffe is used as a hostage. 

 

The third movement chronicles the daily activities of a horrible excuse for a human being who doubles as the bellicose ex–husband of Marco's lover Nicole.  You will be happy to know that certain things one might expect in a lesser movie do not take place here, except for one critical coincidence towards the end that is a function of fate and comeuppance working in tandem.  A pale blue metaphorically reminiscent of infirmity or depression coats every scene, and Spielmann is not averse to headless shots exploring otherwise neglected parts of his characters.  Numerous moments that have no effect on plot events reveal flaws and strengths that can only result from close observation and a love for the vicissitudes of humankind.  If you are not interested in detail, this will not be enjoyable.  But if you find the smallest of facial ticks or half–swallowed sentences to be sources of insight, Antares, in its restrained eccentricities, may show you something new.

The Color of Lies

Rare is it that a translated title outdoes the original: director Claude Chabrol released this film as Au coeur du mensonge, "at the heart of the lie," which has a similar if more idiomatic flavor in French. More importantly, the English version suggests that more than one party may be lying, or, as is generally the case with liars, that deceit pervades every aspect of their existence.  We modern beasts like to smear the term "pathological liar" on the untrusted as if such a label weren't redundant. But lying really is a habit and not an exception. Throughout the annals of history, it has remained the easiest and laziest way for us to improve aspects of our lives and dreams.

 

The film is set in this coastal region of France famed for many things, including the shibboleths of the natives. Outsiders and settlers should plan on keeping those credentials for their entire stay. Such is the fate of  René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), a crippled teacher of drawing, and his wife Vivienne (the always remarkable Sandrine Bonnaire), a nurse whose persistent good humor is as much a product of lifelong study as René's art. They are being watched by a newly promoted police inspector (Valeria Bruni–Tedeschi, soon to become the sister–in–law of this world leader), not only because they, like she, do not belong in this provincial community. A horrible crime (quickly featured in the opening minutes) has also been committed and René, who imparted to the young girl his knowledge of drawing once a week, just so happens to be the last person to have seen the victim alive. 

Regardless of these circumstances, it seems a bit ridiculous to suspect René at all; without his cane and the patience of his wife he would be little more than a wheelchaired invalid. Yet his soul, now almost completely resigned to its dreary end as a failed artist, has little room for mercy or pity, and the subject of its loathing could not be more perfectly represented than by Germain–Roland Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), an overhyped and talentless celebrity writer. Chabrol wisely does not grant us the mildest opportunity of sympathizing with Desmot, because Desmot is a caricature who deserves nothing but contempt. He is foul to his ex–wife on the phone, negligent of their child, arrogant and condescending to the locals, whom he sees as barely evolved past the shellfish they harvest, and lascivious towards the few pretty women in his vicinity. Worst of all, he stands for and believes in nothing except this degradation of the lives of others. Perhaps there is no Tolstoyan truth to be found among these simple folk, but Desmot (whose name is a homophone of "words") has nothing but lies to offer the world both in his books and speech.

Yes, Desmot is more involved than initially suspected, although this admission gives nothing away. What is more relevant are the immediate models for Chabrol's morality tale of the artist against the non–artist (a crystal–clear stratagem), and how unclear the morals in question actually are. There is another tale of, at once, supreme moral justice and moral ambiguity, and the antagonists in that story are an older man by the name of Chillingworth and a young priest called Dimmesdale. Vivienne makes a lovely Hester, both a sinner and readily sinned against and despised. And it is hard to live in truth if the only things people believe about you are all lies.

Blue

The hyphenated bond of Franco–Poles, from this composer to this extremely accomplished scientist to the late director of this film, is corroborated very surreptitiously by the two nations' most fundamental symbols: turn the Polish flag on its head, make it somewhat more squarish, and it will comprise two–thirds of the French tricolor.  That is not to say, of course, that Poland is two–thirds the country France is, although their populations and areas would suggest those figures are not far off; rather, there seems to be a strange nexus of creative energy hovering between the two states that has persisted throughout the course of modern European history.  France admires Poles for their resilience and intellectual activity in the face of ever–vacillating borders and governments, and Poland gazes with unenvying pride at the French and their ideals and freedoms.  And although the comely trilogy Trois couleurs, of which Blue is the first and most serious part, is a Polish product, this opening color is most definitely French.

French, despite the fact that the film's primary conceit is the creation of a symphony for all of Europe.  This was the task assigned to famed composer Patrice de Courcy, a noble name, who does all of Europe the disservice of getting himself into a fatal car accident at the beginning of the film (he dies, says an eyewitness who approaches the wreck, repeating the punchline of the joke that distracted him in the first place).  He also takes his seven–year–old daughter with him to the grave, leaving his wife and her mother Julie (a peaking Juliette Binoche) completely and utterly alone.  They have fabulous wealth and reputations, so she will not endure the banality of indigence; but her solitude could very well be the death of her.  So although she initially wishes the music destroyed, when a copy turns up she decides to make the most of her melancholy and finish the symphony.  A woman finishing the symphony of Europe!  Indeed, and no one seems to raise one woolly, traditionalist brow at this circumstance.  Things have definitely changed (and for the better).  

There are, as always crop up in these studies of the habits of lonely artists, complications.  Julie is according to most tastes radiantly attractive in mind and appearance, so she must have a doting admirer (Benoît Régent).  She must also find out something about her husband that she may have expected or wished to ignore during his lifetime (we will skip this section).  And finally she, like all interesting fictional characters, must not be quite what she appears to be.  These are the prerequisites for this type of allegory, the finest kind: that of the nature of art itself.  That Julie takes more than an acute interest in concealing the fact that she has anything to do with her husband’s work, and that such completion comes so naturally to her that she might have considered a career in the field herself had it not been for her child let us concatenate all the links that Kieślowski provides because they all fit quite nicely together.   

 

You will find, if you use the intergalactic weapon known as Google, that Kieślowski thought blue, apart from the obvious mood associations, was for Julie the color of emotional freedom in the spirit of the revolutionary liberté that spawned the flag.  She has lost her family and is now left with her (husband’s) unfinished business.  We will take the director at his word and add that since, to paraphrase this Franco–Irishman, the artistic spirit is inherently reductive, Julie is weirdly stripped (one of the supporting characters is, among other things, a stripper) of all shackles that might prevent her from achieving the unity of Europe in her music.  Sorry, I mean her husband’s music.  That music, by the way, is the work of Kieślowski’s fellow countryman Zbigniew Preisner, noted for his haunting accompaniment to this work of genius, as well as to just about every one of Kieślowski’s films up to the director’s death in 1996.  The soundtrack, which left me with a splendid impression when I first watched Blue in the mid–1990s, now sounds frantic and thunderous, a tad too unwieldy for its own good.  But who said writing for all of Europe was supposed to be easy?

Kira

Back in the golden days of necromancers and exorcists, a certain subsection of people was thought to be steered by unspeakable things.  They would rave and rant, act irresponsibly and unpredictably, and smash apart relationships, families, homes, and dreams.  Having successfully isolated themselves from everyone else, including those who loved them and wished them only happiness, they (collectively termed “the possessed”) would then almost invariably turn towards bolder violations of the law.  Idle hands are the Devil’s work, the Devil made me do it, I was not myself, and so forth.  And because we cannot possibly match wits with Old Nick, many of them met horrible deaths at the hands of inquisitors, mobs, and other enforcement teams.  Now it is believed that no demons were ever involved.  Brain damage and syphilis have replaced Beelzebub and succubus, and while these poor people (now known as “the mentally ill”) have not become any less helpless, society at large has become more empowered.  Lock up them in a sanitarium, apply copious amounts of uppers and downers in some secret binary combination, scare them straight with pictures of ink blots, and discharge them back into the world benumbed but docile.  Surely, they are many who are helped by modern science’s tools and techniques, but many others (American streets are often their residence) are set free of everything except themselves.  As a rule, they have only one or two goals in mind.  But these goals are necessarily unattainable, because they and their goals are so far from one another as to be in different worlds.  That they try nonetheless to achieve these aims, at whatever the cost, has become one of the most famous definitions of insanity.

Ole Christian Madsen’s Kira is about a woman (Stine Stengade), a young vibrant mother and wife, who is coming home.  We learn very early on where she spent the last year, and why her two little boys cannot possibly understand.  Her tall, handsome, praying mantis of a husband Mads (Lars Mikkelsen) is all too eager to have her back, perhaps because he wants to move on from some other part of his life, perhaps because he is tired of answering his children’s questions, but also because he really does love her.  He treats her to an old–fashioned hero’s welcome, as if she had been in a war and returned home decorated and revered.  Things turn predictably sour and the excuses and embarrassment, the sudden end to an otherwise civilized gathering, all of it comes rushing back.  And when Kira, with the utmost sincerity, threatens the life of their young and pretty au pair, we know why Mads looks and acts like a man of infinite burdens.  There is, of course, more to this story.  Kira is half-Swedish, and that Swedish half has little to do with his family now, preferring the company of frivolous women and cold drinks.  The chasm between father and daughter has widened to such a point that everyone – including, most unforgivably, Mads himself – sees Kira as the one at fault (after all, Kira’s father is morose, selfish and fractious, but at least he’s perfectly sane).  As such, Mads treats Kira like a delinquent and grounds her.  And just like a recalcitrant teenager, she then proceeds to doll herself up, wander into a bar, and take up conversation with a cynical Swede who is convinced that he will never again have a one night stand with a beautiful woman.  The next day, Kira calls Mads from Malmö to inform him that the Swede was wrong.

After a brief period of mourning and accusations, an uneasy truce is reached.  The upshot is that Mads needs to hold a business dinner and Kira wants to organize it.  All she wants is to be a good mother and wife, and that is precisely the one thing she is most incapable of doing.  She organizes it and Mads holds his breath, although by now he probably has been holding it for years.  Which brings us to the last part of the film, so remarkable and right in every way that I am loath to reveal anything.  I will just say that Kira writes a big, bold letter – as if, in fact, she were writing on an asylum wall – to her husband and is asked by a stranger whether she is mad.  The self-awareness of being mad is, we are told, impossible for the truly mad, but Kira’s response and subsequent behavior are quite interesting.  From here, a very good reason emerges for her illness (her father, bless his soul, has nothing to do with it); and, indeed, the usual English title is Kira’s reason: a love story.  The original Danish, however, is simply A love story, which is far more accurate.