"The fact that the world is like is not mysterious, but the existence of the world is mysterious."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (6.44)
It's been seven years since P'tit Quinquin (2014) was released, and bruno Dumont can no longer be blamed for the prevailing Bressonian demands. Words like "ascetic", "serious", and "heavy" – describing his two earliest works, The Life of Jesus (1997) and Humanity (1999), are already very limited – can only mean that the evaluation of his recent films is a bit stretched, from Ma Loute, 2016) The ravages of carnivalesque twist to the extreme display of musicals in his "Joan of Arc" film series. Still, on the surface, Dumont's approach to filmmaking (especially his increasingly frequent use of professional and non-professional actors) and Bresson's claims drifted apart, but the deeper connection between the two filmmakers became clearer. Compared to Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), Mar Rutte is more effective at demonstrating bresson's assertion of the emotional qualities of "involuntarily expressive models" and those like Juliette Binoche or Fabrice Luchini) is not an irreconcilable two extremes between them, but should only deal with the same fundamental problem from two different perspectives. Now, in the film France (2021), in which Léa Seydoux plays the TV reporter France de Meurs (as the title suggests, she is also a veritable protagonist), Dumont has chosen a more ideal setting to explore this approach.
On the face of it, France is not a satire on the contemporary media environment – or, in terms of what it achieves, it doesn't seem very interesting. A scene at the beginning of the film uses digital technology to insert french President Macron's press conference, and France simulates sexual gestures with her assistants before asking the president about the "current serious reactionary atmosphere in French society", which leads to a relaxed and pleasant atmosphere, but for the next film, it has no specific significance. Similarly, when France's car accidentally hits and injures a motorcyclist (Jewad Zemmar), the accident doesn't become the central event of the film as we expected, but rather just one of the many crises she faces.
Even as he engaged with the visual jargon of the media, Dumont continued to focus his attention on what he had always been most interested in: those features of an event that transcended its circumstances or historical causes, namely that Deleuze was in Charles Péguy [1]... Continue reading, dumont has now twice adapted his work) in what he calls "the mystery of the moment," or, as Peggy herself puts it, "intrinsic." In Jeanne (2019), Dumont cast 12-year-old Lise Leplat Prudhomme as a teenage Orleans maid, which helps highlight Joan of Arc's inner, indelible qualities that persist beyond the historical facts of her life, trial, and death: not only her innocence, but also her fundamental antagonism to the secular society of the church and the state. While there is no such obvious rift between the actor and the character in France, the film offers a similar dynamic change: even as it expands outward to outline the social attributes and professional world of its protagonist, it converges in most scenes into a veritable "Saidu-style French" portrait study. Thus, when France is seduced and betrayed by a journalist (Emanuele Arioli), Dumont shows little interest in the act of seduction and betrayal itself; instead, he focuses on the imprint that these experiences leave on France: the camera pushes in and stays on her face, as if looking for evidence of the existence of something that has not been detected.
Like Joan of Arc at the time – despite the fact that the film's social and historical circumstances were very different from the latter – Dumont was interested in his heroine's plight, not as a test, but as a passion. Given that France's occupation and circumstances seem to make her more fickle and serene than Joan of Arc, played by Prudence (not to mention cynicism and opportunism), one naturally tends to think that she is less authentic than her predecessors. Thus, in the aftermath of the motorcycle accident, France experienced a minor breakdown and took a leave of absence to recuperate in the snow-capped mountain resort, where it was felt that her decision was not so much a real reaction to the trauma as a shrewd pry move, and her later return to the press seemed to confirm one's previous suspicions.
However, the key to this judgment lies in the existence of the problem, which is the basis for Dumont and Bresson's personal practice. The two film directors' shared interest in the intrinsic nature of their performers did not come from their concern for how things existed, but, as Wittgenstein put it, "they exist." Bresson's approach tends to be characterized by subtractive metaphors, "emptying" or "stripping" of his (mostly) non-professional actors' reactions in order to better reveal their inner nature; thus, when his "model" is confronted with extreme events or in harsh circumstances in a cinematic narrative, what we see in their reactions is not so much emotion as the body—not "sadness" but tears.
Although Dumont took a very different approach in France, he still placed his audience in a slightly odd comparable position. Faced with saidu's tearful faces in every context – tv interviews, several war zone trips, a Mediterranean refugee crossing – we reached the limits of acting similar to those of Bresson's non-professional actors, except that they came from different angles. In the face of an actor whose outward performance is extremely "rich", people may still question whether France's grief is true or false, and always ask whether they believe that her tears this time are real. One will realize, though, that in Dumont's films, as in Bresson, existence is paramount. This is not to say that the narrative context and performance conventions we have known in the past are not important, but only that our knowledge of these should not diminish our participation in the "inner" emotional dimension of any given moment.
Dumont decisively shows this in the film's most brilliant scenes, which can also be said to be the film's crudest narrative turn. After a disastrous public blunder in France, drone aerial footage shows her husband (Played by French singer Benjamin Biolay) and her young son (Marco Bettini) driving through the mountain pass to an unknown destination. Then, then comes one of the most brilliant absurd car accidents in the history of cinema: a murder process with perfect slow-motion footage (some of which are in The GoPros[2]...). Continue reading), the live sound was entirely voiced by the late Christophe (October 13, 1945 – April 16, 2020), French composer and actor. , replaced by the soundtrack collaborator in Dumont's film Joan of Arc). The scene seems a bit shoddily made. But, like the physical comedy of a young and tender girl in Joan of Arc confronted with a pretentious, comical man embodying church and state power, Dumont understands that the impact of this tragedy on his heroine is not diminished by a rough, highly incongruous atmospheric shift. Thus, while Christopher's score is still ringing, the film cuts to the way Saidu is in a paris cemetery with tears on his face, and we find that in the film's blatantly designed plot and performance, France's enthusiasm is still there.
In this moment, there is a belief that runs through all of Dumont's works: no matter how violent or extreme, there is no secondary context (narrative, history, or otherwise) that can ultimately determine the existence of a person or event. Like Bresson, Dumont was often accused of letting his characters go through stations of the cross at will, thereby affirming the absurdity of so-called metaphysics. But at the end of his films, people tend to feel how ridiculous it is our own sense of expectation of the film's narrative patterns and our desire for clean coherence. From this perspective, the undeniably shocking endings of Twentynine Palms (2003) or Hadewijch (2009), like the car accident here, are not intended to provoke us or convey some sense of ambiguity without ultimate meaning. Rather, they are designed to propel our cognition beyond the capricious wonders of causality in order to see the unconquerable beauty of existence – again, not the mystery of how things exist, but their very existence. "Only now is it still there. Right now. France says at the end of the film, "Let go of all your visions of the future." Its return is as surprising and inevitable as the ending of Pickpocket (1959), when Dumont pushes the camera into Saidu for a close-up of his face for the last time, reminding us to be grateful for the moment.
| originally published in Cinema Scope Magazine Issue 88 Fall 2021 pp.52-53
References
| ↑1 | From 7 January 1873 to 5 September 1914, a French writer, poet and essayist, had been a socialist and nationalist in his early years, but from 1908 onwards he began to practice Catholicism again. In his work, he combines polemical styles and political stances with lyrical and mystical forms and content. The postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze sees him as a source of inspiration. |
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| ↑2 | Founded in 2002 by Nick Woodman, a technology company headquartered in San Mateo, California (near San Francisco), it specializes in the development and production of high-definition video equipment for extreme sports, as well as the development of mobile applications (Moblie App) and video editing software. |
| ↑3 | 13 October 1945 – 16 April 2020, French composer and actor. |
Canadian film critic, film articles are commonly found in magazines such as Cinema Scope, Film Comment, and websites such as AV Club and MUBI.
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