Olivier Assayas Poll

Richard Brody didn't like it.

I did.

he's kind of a chameleon, in terms of the thematics and subject matter of his films. something about his body of work feels modish--not as obviously or as crassly as, like, gus van sant or tsai ming liang or something, but just like he's making films to be cool or something. i know that's not a very sophisticated criticism. he just doesn't seem to have a recognizably original approach, and he ends up doing the same boring handheld camera thing for most of his films. i admit seeing "irma vep" twice--when it came out, and then about four years ago--and didn't "get" it either time... by which i mean, didn't get what critics seemed to feel was so startlingly original or incisive about it. it felt like he was making the film _for_ critics, in a way, and thus everything kind of reduced to this low-frequency feedback loop.

i admit i kind of put him and arnaud desplechin in the same box in my mind, though i recognize that he's probably a more interesting filmmaker than desplechin (whose films i mostly cannot stand).

my mom really liked summer hours.

i really liked cold water and, to a lesser extent, carlos.

also the poll skipped a few of his features, no? or maybe just désordre (which I haven't seen)?

how do you pronounce his name, anyway? ah-say-ahz?

he ends up doing the same boring handheld camera thing for most of his films.

disagree? At some point in his last three films his camera will lose interest in people and note these people's interaction with the environment. It's quite moving. He's probably my favorite living director, which sounds more pretentious than I intend.

Where Brody is hopelessly wrong is noting how Assayas is modish in the best sense: his characters have lived through the allusions they make to literature, film, poli sci, etc.

There are some lovely camera movements around the French countryside, then iirc, those crane shots are mirrored in the last scene in the studio as they are making a film-within-a-film.

Gilles and Christine are relatively bland, albeit pretty, ciphers...the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.

They were young, enthusiastic and waywardly trying - and that to varying degrees? Besides, to have a film showing a kind of "drama of their times" when you look around today n Europe - where it seems little has changed, or that there is so much left to change - would be simply wrong.

Only Assayas and Denis come out with anything that happens to be both French and worth seeing.

saw this a couple of days ago, and really liked it. tho it's decades earlier, i kept seeing certain friends or myself in gilles, & i thought of a young hoos more than once. sexy dark-eyed anarchists are still out there trying to deal with maoists & trotskyites, god love em.

christine dealing with her partner's conflation of feminists with lesbians! u know she has to do her activist work and then take care of everything else while the men talk. that shit is often elided when we look back like this, and since early the film had shown girls were well-represented in the lycee movement, this was a strong & kind of necessary scene to me.

when her & gilles meet on a street at night post-break up & stand close together having one of those conversations u have when there's enough distance to evaporate ill feeling but not enough to deaden all the other stuff, you can see the attraction flashing back & forth between them. when she says "you know i always liked all your stuff" her voice wavers and her love wells up like something tangible.

but gilles has a thing for laure that feels in the nature of a first love; laure who looked cold-eyed at his work, rejecting this, selecting that. i wondered what it meant that his most representational art was of christine.

something else going on in that scene with christine when he points out they took liberties with his work. it's not just the complaints and depreciations of a young person praised for an example of limited success, but of a kind with the gels for the band & the ridiculous british film. tho the camera lingers on their creativity, they are disappointments woefully short of society re-imagined.

even tho there is so much talk of form and style in the film, i seem to have been too interested in the melieu & characters to notice the film's own technique. but it didn't seem at all similar to the hand-held restlessness of irma vep, which often produced dramatic close-up off-centre framings. even when i noticed laure moving around the party in an extended take with lots of camera movement, she's fully in frame or caught in mid-shot, and the shot is stately and dreamy, which is probably how her last hit felt.

http://logger.believermag.com/post/53036565653/bringing-your-ghosts-to-life-interview-with-film

On Assayas' remake of The bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2014/10/9/nyff-maria-dances-on-the-mountain-tops.html

clouds of sils maria was p good

I watch it tomorrow.

stoked to see, love this guy

yes, stoked for the madness.

I liked it quite a bit more the second time I saw it, but I don't think I'll ever be a big Assayas fan.

Did not even know about this. Like the Film Experience blog post above says, I love Assayas, Binoche and Petra von Kant, so I am favorably disposed. Can totally see Binoche in that role.

should I have seen pvk before seeing this

I should really get around to it anyway

Everyone should see PVK! It's great.

ya but do I need to have

iyo

I haven't seen the Assayas, so I don't know. Probably be interesting to compare the two no matter what order you see them in.

i doubt there's a strong stylistic similarity

Affecting, and in the last half hour shrewd. Assayas' use of a Rohmer-indebted natural wonder as conceit and structural framework is better than his leaden dialogue, which often sounds like Woody Allen thinks his intellectuals in the eighties sound like. Stewart is never not boring.

ya but do I need to have

― nults of 2 ppl don't amount to a will have beens in this crazy (wins),

No. This turned out to be a publicity MacGuffin.

was v impressed by its world creation, & also what it withholds -- ie the "new" pages of the play & what binoche's perf of the younger role was like

Are we ready for spoiler-discussions of this film? I have a biggie I want to ask about.

Go for it.

saw Mia Hansen-Love's Eden recently, and was struck by how reminiscent it was of Something In The Air. In fact it's basically the same film with the (in)action transposed to the French house scene in the 90s/00s

I was grousing about this to my viewing companion who slightly blew my mind when he told me that she and Assayas are married

Ok. SPOILER WARNING!

Does Valentine kill herself? The first time I saw it, I just thought that she waited a bit, and then left the other way, but right before she dissapears, she and Maria discuss the ending of 'Maloja Snake' and how Helena's suicide is never shown, but just intuited because the actress disappears from the stage. And more to that, what happens between Valentine and the photographer? There are hints of something really dark going on with Val, which nobody seems to bother figuring out, while every little detail of Jo-Ann's life is blown-up and magnified.

I thought it was an Antonioni-esque reminder of Valentine's unimportance. She's an employee. She can be replaced at any time. She may have died, wandered off, who knows.

I didn't care much about her fling w/the photographer -- not enough information.

Jo-Ann's novelist boyfriend? Rowr.

you probably wnted to read an analysis of this film AND Furious 7 in the context of poptimism, right?

http://filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-pop-pop-pop-popular

LOL at that:

I detect something like the language which has been used in the discussion around the by-no-means-new issue of rockism vs. poptimism, one of the defining dichotomies of the last decade of pop writing. To recap: the rockist is a devotee of small-band guitar/bass/drum music; he is also, the grievance goes, usually a “he,” and touts the authenticity of the music that he listens to over that of the poptimists. The poptimist is open to various pop/hip-hop/electro/R&B/dance idioms which invite an ethnically diverse/female/LBGTQ fan base, idioms dismissed as synthetic by the rockists who, until relatively recently, at least, held all of the most important positions in music journalism.

Don't they teach anything at school these days!

I live in fucking envy of ppl who need the recap

whoa nice

Mess of a piece.

tl;dr but how many Furious films are better than Nick Jonas?

How many Assayas films are?

Its barely literate but at least history will validate his opinion that Assayas > Fast and Furious 7. In the end, this is all that matters.

well i'm pretty sure Best Coast > Demonlover

xp

Nick Jonas >>>>> Changing Gates

er Boarding Gate, although I did want to change gates.

we need a comprehensive poll of alfred's always-marketable malaprop titles

as soon as I rescreen the real ones

It seems inevitable that Pinkerton's column will eventually conclude that everything is pointless and we should all just give up. He might be right.

Sils Maria kiiinda sucks!

Nah. My complaint is how rubbish Assayas' ear for dialogue gets when he gets thematic.

Only liked the scene where Binoche laughs hysterically when Stewart tries to convince her of the depth of X-Men movies.

He's thematic for 124 minutes!

Most of the outdoor scenes with Binoche and Stewart have a nice snap, and it's a relief to watch a director find ways to avoid static two shots. And the hotel bar scene with Jo-Ann was particularly elegant.

For all the didactic dialogue Assayas does allow himself the escape valve of letting Binoche express contempt for the shitty play she starred in all those years ago.

but not the shitty movie we're watching her in.

started from the bottom
now we're here

dreamlover on Criterion Channel!

er Demonlover

Finally watched Something in the Air after meaning to forever. Very much enjoyed it, I thought it was charming and evocative. Traffics in a certain level of nostalgic romanticism, but that's OK with me. I'm kind of a sucker for that whole era.

Have you seen Cold Water? It's like a blueprint for Something in the Air, and--I think--much better.

No, it's also been on the mean-to list for a while. I should.