Brief reflection of cats growing in trees

"The fiction is already there. A writer's task is to invent the reality." J.G. Ballard

The Bourne Ultimatum, thrillingly directed as in the 2004 The Bourne Supremacy by Paul Greengrass, is Robert Ludlum for hard-hitting political doco fans. Greengrass' roots were, of course nurtured in TV current affairs and docu-drama. The hand-held doco camera work of his United 93 is used here by Oliver Wood's to help Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) probe for his real identity and purpose in life. Apart, that is, from keeping one step ahead of a CIA 'save the world' splinter group headed by David Strathairn's Noah Vosen. United 93 was based on the 9/11 hijacking, Bourne on Ludlum’s fiction. When MP Clare Short declared back in 2004 that Kofi Annan's United Nations' office was bugged by Brit spooks, there was outrage. Yet writing a fictional novel like Le Carré or Ludlum is absolutely fine unless your name was Graham Greene, of course, and you'd first hand knowledge. Greengrass makes the plot of Bourne so real, so now, so precise that we are most certainly thrilled but not really quite spooked. There's certainly no time for Greene character meditation. The plot begins with Bourne meeting up with a Guardian journalist (Paddy Considine) at Waterloo Station, both constantly ducking and diving to avoid the CIA surveillance on ground and on camera. The CIA of course can hack into the CCTV cameras along with any other technological gismo at will. The film keeps up this breathless pace for its entirety. We're intrigued by a world we thought we knew from umpteen spy thrillers but seen through Greengrass' lenses we feel not so much intimacy but cleverer and more on par with the act of feverishly turning the novel's pages and missing our train or bus stops. This Bourne film has no time for character development, back-story (excepting Bourne's own flashbacks) or bon mots, only life and death situations.

Alain Resnais' 1980 My American Uncle (Mon Oncle d'Amerique) opens with the gnomic "A being's only reason for being is being" and follows the relationships of Rene (Gerard Depardieu), Pierre (Roger Pierre) and Janine (Nicole Garcia) swimming in the wake of that aphorism. Like most of Resnais' oeuvre his camera hover glides around the characters, here punctuated by the scientific sociological experiments of French socio-biologist Henri Laborit or less successfully by bursts of old B/W Jean Marais and Jean Gabin clips. Laborit: "Knowing the laws of gravity doesn't make us free of gravity, it merely allows us to utilise it...Until we have shown the inhabitants of this planet the way their brain functions, the way they use it, [how it's been used to dominate people], there is little chance anything will change." 27 years later and that's still as true as ever. Pristine DVD transfer print, too. Artificial Eye has his latest Cinemascopic Private Fears in Public Places on general release.

Resnais' equally fascinating Stavisky (1974) can be found in Optimum's brilliant Jean-Paul Belmondo set. With a characteristically jaunty, whiskey sour score by musicals' eminence Stephen Sondheim (also cajoled into doing Reds), Belmondo's Stavisky is suave debonair 'boy made good from gutter' based on the real life swindler who flooded France with fake bank bonds in 1932/3. It resulted in their closure, resignation of the PM, and rioting on the streets the following year. The actual anti-Semitism towards Stavisky is played down here while France's vast political ocean liner is drifting towards Fascism and Stavisky is only gambling at the same table as everyone else. Meanwhile, there's a parallel narrative of Trotsky's French exile with his young French acolytes living the dream as well.

Belmondo (first trained as a boxer then as an actor at the Paris Conservatoire) seems to have aged little between Godard's Pierre le Fou in 1965 and his 1981 Le Professionel. French secret service Joss Beaumont (Belmondo) is sent to Malawi to assassinate President N'Nala (Sidiki Bakaba). He fails, escapes prison work camp and returns to Paris to finish the job. Only, politics have changed in two years and the President is now France's friend. This is surprisingly great stuff with delicious cinematography from Henri Decaë and an Ennio Morriconi score. Beaumont is like Jason Bourne. Ultimately he's a dead man walking which ever way he turns and he's nothing to lose. Unlike Bourne, Beaumont does die in the end, but not before an ingenious set-up of watchmaker precision on his part, ensuring that the French Secret Service is the one who assassinates the President not him. Henri Decaë is also cinematographer on Chabrol's third film À Double Tour (A Double Tour -1959) with Belmondo dishevelling his way into a bourgeois Aix-en-Provence family and the murder of the husband's mistress. Here the camera sweeps, snoops and probes around the characters and their environments long before 'steadicam' was all the rage. With the vibrant Eastman colour film stock and character passion, there's almost more than a hint of Douglas Sirk sexual bourgeois critique in this early Chabrol. Hopefully I'll report on more Chabrol next week with Arrow's new set.

Observation of character is also what made Jacques Becker renowned. Melville went so far as to call Becker's last film Le Trou (The Hole - 1960) one of the finest French films ever made. Becker was initially offered a job with King Vidor in the States but declined and instead began assisting Jean Renoir. He died shortly after completed Le Trou. Based on the novel by former La Santé prison inmate Jose Giovanni, Le Trou follows five cellmates digging a hole from their cell into the sewers below for a prison break in 1947. All except the traitor are non-actors and Jean Keraudy (Roland) was actually an ex-prisoner. Becker's definition of character goes without saying, but it's the same minute attention to detail that makes the non-action of a well-trod story so compelling. A guard feeding an insect into his pet spider's web on his rounds in the prison's basement (will the escapees inadvertently break the web and get caught?), the keyhole lookout mirror fashioned from a shard of mirror and a toothbrush, and we easily identify with the brute force, frustration and determination of every blow to break through the concrete even though we've only struggled with home improvement. These prisoners don't have Jason Bourne's kit but they share his survival instincts. In the Behind the Scenes featurette, we learn that the film was screened for a group of judicial prosecutors. Why do you sympathise with these characters they asked? Becker's reply was that it wasn't so much that as the right that these people had to want to escape. They even manage to fashion a demi-hour glass with pilfered sand and glasses. For all their precision they could never foresee the vicissitudes of love and their newest cellmate's wife dropping charges against him giving him a potential release.

It's this survival instinct that makes Becker's perhaps most famous film Touchez pas au Grisbi (Hands off the Loot-1954) so intriguing. Max (Jean Gabin) and Riton (René Dary) are aging gangsters who pull off a gold bullion raid at Orly Airport. But Max's former gal Josy (Jeanne Moreau) tips off a rival hood Angelo (Lino Ventura). While the story doesn't surprise us after so many hommage remakes, the minutia still do as a cliché is always rooted in a truth. Max and Riton retire for some kip to his Paris pied-à-terre one night. Two men with 30-50 million French francs of bullion on their mind, munch on cruton bread and a pot of pate, brush their teeth, don their pyjamas, one to the bed another to the sofa. Gangsters with everything and nothing in common but gangstering.

The other Becker (all single discs) is Casque d'Or (Golden Helmet-1952) so called for gangster's moll Maria's (Simone Signoret) golden locks. "I wanted my actors to behave as though they were living at the time, not as if they were wearing costumes," said Becker. Here is the underbelly of 1900 belle époque Paris. Signoret's Maria is like a feisty Brünnhilde with a kitten purring inside and you can't take your eyes off her. The film was well received in England on release but not France. Manda (Serge Reggiani), fresh out of prison falls for Maria, kills her boyfriend in a duel, gets Maria's love but is also a dead man walking. All these Becker B/W prints look great.

Criterion released the US DVD's back in 2005:
Grisbi
Casque d'Or
Le Trou


Another Optimum disc is Nanni Moretti's Aprile (no extras, full price) from 1998. Moretti also uses documentary style in his films as a dialectical discussion of his place in the Italian political scene. If Woody Allen had been born Italian he'd probably have ended up more like Moretti than the madcap comic Benigni. There's a Bergmanesque soul searching in Moretti's films and in Aprile he chronicles his real life wife's pregnancy through birth simultaneously documenting the problems of the Italian left and the realpolitik around him. He even ventures to Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park where anyone can air their views but is so frustrated that he dreams of making a 50's musical about a Trotskyite confectionist. Not as profound as Moretti's The Son's Room (La Stanza del Figlio) but fun nonetheless.

Last year's Cannes Camera d'Or winner 12.08 East of Bucharest (A Fost Sau N-A Fost)directed by Corneliu Porumboiu starts unpromisingly in Bucharest social realism but ends up pulling quite a punch at the end of it's short 90 minutes. 16 years after the fall of Ceausescu, an entrepreneur in a small eastern town has set up a TV station that looks more like pirate radio with its one room studio and solo cameraman trying unsuccessfully to convince his boss to use the modern technique of hand-held. Two locals go on air with the boss for a phone in discussion on whether or not there was a revolution in their town or whether they just followed after every town. If they took to the streets after 12.08 on December 22, 1989 there wasn't a revolution in their town. What was a life and death situation with the Securitat is made look somewhat ludicrous and humiliating as one of the guests' claims to be a hero is disproved. Sullenly he tears little strips of paper to the audio annoyance of the TV's boss. The other guest Piscoci (the local Santa Claus) sums it all up: "Revolution is like the street lights, they light up from the centre first then the whole country."

Bucharest's distributor Artificial Eye also released on DVD a little while ago their unmissable double disc of documentaries on the late Andrei Tarkovsky. His was a visionary aesthetic of time and place in film "sculpting in time". Alexander Sokurov, whose feature length Moscow Elegy is included, also has his Mother and Son out on DVD. But like all Tarkovsky's films it too really needs to be seen on the big cinema screen particularly for its strange, disconcerting use of the anamorphic lens.

While not in the same realm as Tarkovsky, John Curran's The Painted Veil is out on DVD with Stuart Dryburgh's stunning widescreen photography (wonderful in a big cinema) of Guangxi province in southern China. An adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel inspired by an incident in Dante's 'Purgatorio', it's set in 1920s China and the onset of the Kuomintang and anti-English unrest with the unhappily married Kitty (Naomi Watts), wife of workaholic Walter (Edward Norton) an English bacteriologist studying the cholera epidemic. Kitty's affair with married Brit vice consul Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber) ensues before she is forced to leave with Walter for the wilds of Guangxi. Her only friend there is local Brit deputy commissioner Waddington (the ever fascinating Toby Jones). The DVD looks impressive (though obviously no match for the cinema version) and has a Making of doco: "The characters are absorbed in their own problems in a self-centred way and it's not until they connect with the culture [and the dynamics of the country] that they lift the painted veil," says director John Curran. Everything about this film is first rate including the haunting Satie-like piano (Lang Lang) score of Alexandre Desplat. It's also a fully fledged Chinese co-production (Warners Beijing and Bob Yari,Mark Gordon). An uplifting wide appeal film that doesn't compromise detail and emotion for commercial ends.

A very different film realm is Jean-Luc Godard, and Optimum now has their Vol.2 set out. Like Vol.1, this set is excellent value and again has brilliant extras. Pierrot le Fou (1965) is the gem with a full audio commentary by crime writer Jean-Bernard Pouy. There's a freshness and unbridled enthusiasm to his comments, though it's probably more useful if you're not au fait with Godard than a die hard fan. "In living in the film we become Godard the film maker...Time isn't wasted with connections between things...we don't know who the protagonists are...Godard was perhaps the first custard pie thrower in the history of cinema...Nothing seems realistic," Pouy chuckles. All the discs in the set (as in Vol.1) have very useful introductions by Colin MacCabe (author of the book Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy) and all the prints are pristine. Compare the dullish hues of the Pierrot German TV trailer to the DVD transfer where the Cinema’ Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard leaps out of the screen. Compare too the Godardian French trailer to the 'Die Hard' German version: "an explosive action film in Technicolour portrays people swept into the undertow of criminal machinations." Guess it got more bums on seats. There's a 'to die for' one hour interview on the Vol.1 Bonus Disc between Godard and Fritz Lang The Dinosaur and the Baby: "I have nothing against films made for entertainment. But once you've seen one you've seen them all..Films are like loaves of bread. Made to be consumed today, in a week, a year. The public decides what goes on to become art," says Lang.

If you've ever read anything of philosopher Walter Benjamin then Godard will seem a visual equivalent to Benjamin's life's work, particularly his unfinished Arcades Project. "The allegorical mode allows Benjamin to make visibly palpable the exposition of the world in fragments, in which the passing of time means not progress but disintegration," says the preface, "progressive because it interrupts the context into which it is inserted," he says of the idea of montage, "shock-like segments of 'empty time' " as Proust wrote of Baudelaire. "Every epoch dreams the one that follows it” writes Benjamin, "Revolution is innervation moving the technical organ of the collective, like a child who learns by trying to catch the moon in its hands." Pierrot's love scene is exactly that with Belmondo and Karina by the sea under a daylight moon above. "I remember an article at the time," says Pouy's commentary, "saying that poetry would be destroyed by going to the moon." Pierrot is full of ellipses where time doesn't flow in a regular way, fake continuity shots, and even a fragmented movie musicals sequence between the lovers as in Une Femme et une Femme (his 3rd from 1961) again with Belmondo and Karina. "In disposing with suspense, he opens the film up to another genre- the adventure film, a children's film..." says Pouy.

Alphaville (Vol.1) from the same year as Pierre le Fou has Coutard's B/W evocation of a totalitarian world but shot using the Paris of '65. It was so acutely off-putting to some that the lead Eddie Constantine was shunned by his old producers after making the film. "A future that was already happening," as McCabe notes in his introduction. A dystopian balletic masterpiece where people are numbers and the word 'love' is forbidden and forgotten. The students plotting of a revolution in their parents' bourgeois flat in La Chinoise, 1967 (Vol2) was made the autumn before the Paris riots of '68. Can you have a revolution without violence the film asks? The raison d'être of government is always to pacify its denizens and convince them that there is no threat, and if there is then everything will be in hand. Made in the U.S.A (1966) discusses "the inability of the left to deal with the realities of contemporary life..How do you make a political film?" McCabe again. Or as Giles Deleuze put it "A society is defined by its amalgamates not by its tools, and they exist only in relation to the interminglings they made possible." Godard is equally Deleuzian in his creation of a filmic space for intuition, a pre-cognition not provided by the norm of the POV (point of view) shot. Godard is both engineer and poet trying to find a filmic equivalent to quantum theory. The moment you observe something it changes for ever. Detective (1985) is set in a posh hotel with four disparate groups of people and an unsolved murder from several years ago. The stars of the film are credited in Godard's characteristic play of typeface titling as Stars, Nathalie Baye, Claude Brasseur, Johnny Halliday, Jean-Pierre Léaud with the film co-dedicated to Clint Eastwood. The classical music score is constantly fragmented and overlaid. A manipulation or rather Benjamin's innervation of our observation. No less manipulative than a Hollywood score but a whole lot more nutritious for our neurons.

In a Godardian segue, the New Zealand film Eagle vs Shark (work shopped at Sundance) from first time writer/director Taika Waititi has its protagonist out for the kill, or in Jarrod's case the slapping around of a Samoan guy who used to bully him at school, "He's gonna reap what he sowed and it sure ain't wheat." In his small town, Jarrod (Jemaine Clement) thinks of himself as the Jason Bourne, king of the computer games and always keeping track of the Samoan up north, "It takes more than cool moves to defeat a champion." By exacting revenge he naively thinks his life will change. It's meeting the awkward, shy Lily (Loren Horsley) who gets ousted from her Meaty Boy burger job that does this, "Life is hard but in between the hard bits there are some lovely bits,” says Lily. It's a wonderfully funny, quirky film in US indie style with segments of animated apple core and time lapse photography. These elements, though, lead you to suspect that director Waititi has lots of other innervations lurking in her talent to come.

Jason Bourne buys three new mobile phones at Waterloo Station to outwit his masters. The CIA was perfectly capable of foreseeing this or were they? Just as if you'd suffered the trials of a trip down the Amazon only to slip on the wet floor of your kitchen. As we know from autistic savants, the brain is the most remarkable bio-computer; meanwhile, artificial intelligence is all about finding a parallel way to deal with infinite variables. And there will always be man's need to escape and an accompanying ingenuity.

Fritz Lang quotes from Friedrich Hölderlin's dialectical The Poet's Vocation: "But man, when he must, can stand fearless and alone, before God. His candour is his shield. He needs neither arms nor wiles, until such time as God's absence helps him."

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