It takes a lot of work to make Boston a place that hits above its weight-class in smartypants culture, but the Harvard Film Archive could soldier on singlehandedly if it had to. Monday was no exception when the HFA brought us “An Evening with Arnaud Desplechin.” Desplechin is one of the most important French filmmakers working today — a point that was made right off the bat by the evening's host, Jean-Michel Frodon, the managing editor of Cahiers du Cinema.
When Desplechin was introduced, with his thin face, high forehead, and rumpled hair, it was hard to ignore his resemblance to Roberto Begnini. Despite this, I felt no urge to punch him in the neck. The first film shown was Desplechin's 1991 debut, La Vie des Morts. It focuses on a rugby team's worth of college-aged cousins descending on a household where another cousin has just shot himself in the head. With the grieving nuclear family pushed to the side — you barely even clap eyes on Mom — La Vie des Morts demonstrates Desplechin's early understanding that there's more to a film than the storyline, that mundane life continues to surge around tiny islands of profundity.
After the film, the floor was opened to questions. Most audience Q&A's get seriously embarrassing, since people's questions generally boil down to:
1) "I noticed something and aren't I terribly clever?"
2) "You didn't make choices that the one artist I know anything about makes."
3) "I have a crazy agenda that has nothing to do with your work."
Of course, Cambridge is the epicenter of this sort of behavior, but Monday's crowd refrained from intellectual spaz-outs. Someone asked why so many first-time directors take on tragic topics. Desplechin countered that his film, "isn't about people who are suffering, but people who are witnesses of people who are suffering. They are on a kind of elegaic holiday."
The second film shown was 2004's Kings and Queen, which was the best movie I saw that year. The film follows the contrasting arcs of two ex-lovers — Ismaël, an unstable violist, and Nora, a successful art dealer. As the film progresses, we see that Ismaël's madness is of a piece with his integrity, and that Nora's self-possession is a cover for the fact that she's hollow inside, a facade of a person.
Or so I thought. One of the first questions hinged on the film's focal point, where Nora discovers a letter from her recently deceased father. While Dad was doting in life, post-mortem he rails against Nora as a bitter monster of his own making, whom he hates as much as he adores. It's a singular, devastating moment — one that turned my perceptions about the characters completely around.
But in answer to the question, Desplechin said, "I'm on Nora's side." He explained that he felt Nora's father was using this stormy alloy of hatred and love to brand her, to make her his own forever. Desplechin compared it to King Lear's "firing" of Cordelia, which Desplechin described as a meaningful moment that nonetheless remains beyond understanding.
Someone else in the crowd prodded him on the film's happy ending. Desplechin rejected that his ending was happy. He pointed out that his final scene was a man telling a ten year old boy that he won't adopt him, that although they love each other circumstances have made it impossible and they won't be able to see each other again. Desplechin also complained about how the need for unhappy endings has itself become a cliche, a holdover from Marxist diatribes against "incorrect" writing.
This confusion over motive and meaning might be taken as evidence that Desplechin's films are too murky for greatness, but I think that's a shallow view. His films are so overstuffed with compelling life and opaque intentions that they don't bear the blatant fingerprints of a human crafter. Rather, his films feel like they were stamped whole from whatever factory it was that gave us our own perplexing world.
?Chris Braiotta