I suppose you have to commend French Cinema for the wide range of its subject material. And you get the kind of cerebral films – like this one – that wouldn't see the light of day here in the UK. Maybe they get made in France because they've got such a deep and rich legacy of Art-House Cinema to draw from, going back to the late 50′s and 60′s with "Auteurs" like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut etc. Its quite heady stuff at times. We Brits like to deride them as too abstract and intellectual, a load of "pretentious" bollards etc. But i can often feel a sly regard: because they gratify the wannabe Albert Camus that hides sneakily away inside me.
And i was being sneakily gratified for about the first half of this film. Bruno (Laurent Lucas) is a twiddly fiddly experimental electronic musician; not a visual, but an auditory, voyeur. He's secreting samples from a f-in-the-dark kinky liaison he's having with some anonymous Lisa he's contacted off a sex chat line; he then twiddle-fiddles their invisible couplings as the sound source for a new piece of electro doodling. You've got creative and romantic obsession spliced engagingly together. "Your voice is intimate, wet it wets the words" he's saying to her. I'm liking it. This is quite interesting in a typically French kind of way.
But before long what was playfully artful spirals off into clumsy confusion. There's a perplexing – perhaps deliberate – loss of narrative clarity. What is night and day, fantasy and reality, Lisa or not Lisa, is disappearing fast. No wonder Bruno is looking "So pensive". Laurent Lucas does perfect Pensive. As in, "Lemming" and "Harry He's Here to Help", his default facial expression seems to be perpetual worry pierced through with existential panic thrown out at you by a pair of acutely anxious eyes.
"People don't connect these days" says fat jazz loving concierge. Or they connect in funny disconnected sorts of ways. Which could be saying they don't really see one another. Or know one another. There's contact. But there isn't understanding. Something like that. I'm probably reading my own little agenda into that last bit. Anyway, I've now become officially baffled. The film has managed to disconnect me from its intended meaning.
Quite quickly any attempt at comprehensible story has deteriorated into heavily stylised self-absorption; the narrative has overstuffed or oversampled itself you could say. The dim and dark dialogues, and the cut and paste music collages deliberately being used as context less content, there to distract from the characters lack of visibility. Image as Sign has been superseded by Audio as Signifier. Or something like that. As an intellectual exercise in bemused bafflement its got French Art House egged all over it.
By the end its successfully returned, and reasserted, a condition of sarcastic stupor to my thick Anglais head.
And i was being sneakily gratified for about the first half of this film. Bruno (Laurent Lucas) is a twiddly fiddly experimental electronic musician; not a visual, but an auditory, voyeur. He's secreting samples from a f-in-the-dark kinky liaison he's having with some anonymous Lisa he's contacted off a sex chat line; he then twiddle-fiddles their invisible couplings as the sound source for a new piece of electro doodling. You've got creative and romantic obsession spliced engagingly together. "Your voice is intimate, wet it wets the words" he's saying to her. I'm liking it. This is quite interesting in a typically French kind of way.
But before long what was playfully artful spirals off into clumsy confusion. There's a perplexing – perhaps deliberate – loss of narrative clarity. What is night and day, fantasy and reality, Lisa or not Lisa, is disappearing fast. No wonder Bruno is looking "So pensive". Laurent Lucas does perfect Pensive. As in, "Lemming" and "Harry He's Here to Help", his default facial expression seems to be perpetual worry pierced through with existential panic thrown out at you by a pair of acutely anxious eyes.
"People don't connect these days" says fat jazz loving concierge. Or they connect in funny disconnected sorts of ways. Which could be saying they don't really see one another. Or know one another. There's contact. But there isn't understanding. Something like that. I'm probably reading my own little agenda into that last bit. Anyway, I've now become officially baffled. The film has managed to disconnect me from its intended meaning.
Quite quickly any attempt at comprehensible story has deteriorated into heavily stylised self-absorption; the narrative has overstuffed or oversampled itself you could say. The dim and dark dialogues, and the cut and paste music collages deliberately being used as context less content, there to distract from the characters lack of visibility. Image as Sign has been superseded by Audio as Signifier. Or something like that. As an intellectual exercise in bemused bafflement its got French Art House egged all over it.
By the end its successfully returned, and reasserted, a condition of sarcastic stupor to my thick Anglais head.
