Preview: Laurent Cantet

After winning the Golden Palm at Cannes and opening this year's New York Film Festival, Laurent Cantet's The Class comes to Santa Fe. The film follows a diverse group of French students and their teacher (François Bégaudeau, author of Entre les murs on which the film is based) through a year of public school in a working-class district of Paris. Unable to say much more at this point (I'll be at the front of the line at the festival), it does appear Cantet is exercising a familiar political perspective. His previous films--Human Resources (1999), Time Out (2001), and Heading South (2005)--discuss power systems of the capitalist-machine persuasion and the hardships that come out of being trapped (willfully or resentfully) in THE SYSTEM.
Time Out sketches this capitalism-induced claustrophobia adeptly. Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) is a husband and father of three who loses his job as a mid-level/consulting/ finance/ managerial SomethingOrOther, a job which allowed an upper-middle class lifestyle near France's Swiss border. Instead of facing the matter straight on, he creates a series of stories that eventually grow large enough to dupe his parents, his wife and kids, and his oldest and most treasured friends. The lie at the center of the film swells slowly, quietly; Cantet stirs up suspense with a gentle hand and an ether of anxiety collects and hovers in the fog of the Alps and in the stress-lines on Vincent's face. Knowing the lie cannot last, I racked the Hollywood-schooled side of my brain for too long, trying to figure out what catastrophe, what car-crash/ oil-rig explosion/ murderous rampage might rest in the pit at the bottom of Vincent's slow fall. But, the resulting trauma and punishment from these lies leaves Vincent not mangled on a roadside but quite simply back at work. After the loss of his job conjured such shame, denial, and such a strange kind of retaliation, Vincent signs another contract to let a similar job take hold of his life. And with this, the film's suspense feels strangely satisfied by the most logical, the most realistic of endings: a defeatist jump back into the fire.
The Class may have a different goal and a different perspective--I'll just have to see it. But, I will be looking (and hoping) for the same approach to folding politics into narrative, one in which the movie breathes the issue at hand but never utters it aloud.

For more on The Class, click through to Vadim Rizov's article and Manohla Dargis' article covering its play at NYFF '08. Or, take a look at this list of mostly non-English coverage.

Waltz With Bashir and The Fog of War

The Festival has the good fortune of screening Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir as one of this year's Gala Presentations. The film received six awards from the Israeli Film Academy-- including Best Film, Director, and Screenplay--as well as critical acclaim from festivals around the world.

As an animated war documentary, from the outset Waltz With Bashir operates on intriguing ground. After all, documentaries are supposed to at least tip their hats to that murky, malleable concept of objectivity, so why the cartoon medium in this business of uncovering truth? This film makes these somewhat contradictory modes of form and genre work in a strange kind of tandem by which animated images, the film medium, dreams, individual and collective memory (or amnesia), and history all come under interrogation. Folman's findings show these soldiers' pasts, Israel's past, and--by explicit extension--all stories of war as mediated and re-mediated. Venturing through (and learning from) the layers of emotion, through the clouding forces of time, through attempt after attempt at self-preservation, through the mind's purposeful gaps and holes in its powers of repression, leaves Folman and all of us at last staring at the overwhelming and revolting truth--at least a far less mediated version of it.

An Israeli veteran from the 1982 war between Israel and Lebanon, Folman opens the film with his realization that he has virtually no memory of the war and thus ventures on a personal and cinematic quest to uncover what actually happened. On this point, Waltz with Bashir embarks on the kind of fact-finding missions of more traditional documentaries and halts on familiar questions of post-war reflection, namely, who and how did I hurt. He interviews classmates, other soldiers, the first Israeli reporter on the war, and his best friend who also happens to be an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder. Slowly, the pieces start to come together around the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, an astounding incident that left thousands of Palestinians dead by the hands of Lebanese Phalangist militiamen and by the acquiescence of Israeli forces.

Such interviews and historical descriptive elements could have thrived on film or video as another talking-head/news footage documentary, but Folman’s movie demands more. Waltz with Bashir is made complete not by mountains of facts but by the fog of memory, the fluidity of dreams, and a severe emotional and aesthetic darkness. In other words, a revealing interview with the ex-reporter carries the same narrative significance as a friend's dream in which he jumps the boat to war and finds refuge on the curves of a giant naked woman backstroking in the sea. A pack of wild charging dogs, their ferocity other-worldly; a vague and repeating vision of silhouettes emerging from water; a surreal dance through gunfire–these elements necessitate the animated image in order to realize their full effect. “I knew it had to be this way,” says Folman, “if I couldn’t animate the film, I couldn’t do it at all.”

And so, Waltz with Bashir manages a difficult harmony of elements. The animated image pulls us into personal dream worlds that, side by side with interviews and bits of historical exposition, compose Waltz with Bashir’s truth, a truth which lies both in the hidden intimacies of one man’s memory and in the assertion that universally, war is hell.