Recently, Christopher Nolan hailed Stanley Kubrick as the greatest director of all time, mainly for his ability to make nitrate film stock mimic the most sublime visual attributes of great paintings. Though he was thinking of 2001, Barry Lyndon is a better example of this attribute, and Barry Lyndon is the most obvious analog when discussing Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV. This is about as close as we’ll ever get to the richness of Rembrandt on film, and there are whole passages where all we have are closeups of faces that are doing nothing in particular but look like people from the 18th century.
The ostensible “plot” of the movie, based on memoirs of some of Louis XIV’s courtiers, is essentially the last month of the Sun King’s life. Having apparently injured his leg during a hunting expedition, the elderly monarch spends the entire movie succumbing to gangrene while in repose. We know we’re in Versailles not so much because of the extravagant wigs and costumes, but due to the obsequious behavior of the people who crowd around the soon-to-be deathbed, applauding every little gesture, even while the king is obviously in great pain. Played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, Louis is essentially a stoic facade occasionally wracked by coughs and horrible moans. Attempts to keep him in the pink through food and wine are met with impatient thrusts of the hand and withering smirks. In the only show of gallantry, he dons a stupid chapeau (the gesture bringing to mind Dylan’s immortal line of the “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” balancing on the wearer’s head like a “mattress on a bottle of wine”) just in order to please the ladies in his midst. His reaction to their appreciation is the epitome of condescending disgust.
The film’s almost supernatural beauty confounds its theme of hubris in literal decay (the infected leg turns black in frightening degrees), so too much thematic analysis robs the viewer of the pleasure of not only Leaud’s nuanced performance, but the movie’s rightful status as moving painting rather than moving picture. Since the extended conversations among physicians as to the best course of treatment are basically pointless, they simply serve to provide tableaux that makes you wonder which Great Master Serra is ripping off at any given moment. The dialogue is inadvertently droll in that the only person in the room who sees the comic futility of much of the conversation is the dying king himself. Leaud’s face when someone remarks his “expression” has become more stimulating is horrifically priceless. The on-screen tone is solemn throughout, but you can imagine the actors cracking up at the implications of their work between takes.
In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Image Forum, Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
The Death of Louis XIV home page in Japanese
photo (c) Capricci Films, Rosa Filmes, and Ercraun Films, Bobi Lux 2016
As a long-time resident of Japan whose interaction with the local culture is circumstantial, I don’t believe I have much to add to the conversation that has surrounded Wes Anderson’s latest entertainment and which mostly has to do with whether the director has exploited that culture without really understanding it. At first glance, I was more offended by the anti-cat bias of the storyline, but that, as they say, is just me. Narrative films rarely take the trouble to make whatever milieu they depict accurate in every sense since dramatic considerations usually come first. Generally speaking, if the dramatic elements work for me, I will appreciate, if not necessarily enjoy, the work on hand, and while I’ve had problems with Anderson in the past, I have come to like his movies the more I see them, which means he’s either getting better or I’ve just become used to his purposely quirky presentation.
In the rarefied setting that informs Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest luxury, the title “fashion designer” seems imprecise when describing the vocation of the protagonist, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis). He’s a dressmaker. All he makes is fine dresses for fine ladies. He is not, in fact, interested in fashion as an art form, though he obviously sees himself as something of an artist. More to the point, he’s an aesthete, a trait that Anderson emphasizes in the broadly conceived opening sequence, which shows Woodcock carrying out his morning ritual of dressing himself and then eating breakfast, preparations that are as vital to his vision of life as a series of beautiful choices as are his selection of fabric and filigree for his apparel.
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It’s a wonder that the incredible tale of the 1973 kidnapping of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty’s grandson hasn’t been dramatized before (for the record, there is presently a TV series covering the same ground), but as it stands this high-concept, low-ambition rendering by Ridley Scott has become more famous for its casting than for whatever insights it brings to the case, and for what it’s worth it’s difficult to believe that Kevin Spacey, unceremoniously dumped from the film after his scenes had been shot, would have captured the peculiar oily charm of Getty the way Christopher Plummer has.
Atsuko Hirayanagi explores familiar screwball archetypes in her debut feature, and while most have been well presented by other Japanese directors, they’ve never attempted them in a cross-cultural setting. Setsuko (Shinobu Terajima) is an uptight, lonely single woman working a deadend OL job in Tokyo and living in a frightfully messy apartment. She seems this close to self-annihilating breakdown when her saucy niece (Shioli Kutsuna) talks her into signing up for English lessons with her teacher, an earnest American named John (Josh Hartnett). With a pedagogic style that uses hugs and wigs to fortify the role play endemic to Japanese language learning, John wins Setsuko over, and she becomes enamored of not only her new persona, Lucy, but John himself. When he suddenly leaves Japan with her niece in tow, she is eager to join her annoyed sister (Kaho Minami) on the California journey to find them. There, the movie opens up in startling ways and you appreciate not only Hirayanagi’s astute understanding of American differences, but also Terashima’s empathy with an inherently unlikable character. (95 min.)
Both Sides of the Sky
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Black Panther
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