| As regular readers of this column will know, I enjoy a pretentious French art film as much as the next snooty Francophile weaned on the nouvelle vague. Fortunately, old-timers such as Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol and Varda continue to make excellent films, although it is a generation of somewhat younger directors – such as Claire Denis (Beau Travail), Gaspar Noé (Irréversible), Bruno Dumont (L’humanité) and Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep) – that represent the cutting edge of contemporary French cinema. Younger still, and much less belligerent, is the populist wunderkind François Ozon (Swimming Pool, 8 Women), whose cinematic sensibilities have proved exportable enough to earn his films international distribution and a sizable audience in North America.
Yet, for every Ozon, there’s a Delphine Gleize, a talented stylist who nevertheless mistakes pomposity for profundity. Gleize’s debut feature Carnage (France, 2002) seems to have been smuggled to this side of the pond by stowing away inside a vessel marked "Winner of the Prix de la Jeunesse, Cannes 2002." Of course, festival awards must always be regarded with skepticism, but even the fact that this award is specifically handed out to a young filmmaker doesn’t make it any easier to tolerate the artistic and philosophical immaturity of Gleize’s ruminations on the interconnectedness of all beings.
Carnage links various characters and stories through the remains of a bull killed in an Andalusian bullfight, but the apparently mystical significance of this particular sacrificial animal is never clearly communicated. Moreover, the use of an inanimate object – and there are few things less animated than a dead 455-kilogram bull – to suggest a bond between otherwise disparate characters has become a narrative cliché. Seen in numerous films – from Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983) to François Girard’s The Red Violin (1998) – this kind of device has been employed more successfully in the past, and often to express a much more compelling artistic vision.
Not to say that Gleize is thoroughly untalented as a writer and director. Carnage does contain some unusually offbeat characters, including a young epileptic girl who draws self-portraits in which she is dwarfed by large animals. There’s also an ice-skating philosopher, a taxidermist who has a disturbingly co-dependent relationship with his elderly mother and an actress who attempts to find her inner scream by participating in aquatic self-help workshops.
Yet for all these zany personalities, the film’s aspirations toward surrealist comedy are not fully realized. One never gets the sense of a personal vision orchestrating the ponderous pacing and unsophisticated observations about coincidence, fate and the imperceptible connections between strangers. Instead, it’s as if the situations in Carnage are absurd for absurdity’s sake, not because Gleize has some deep-rooted need to express an idea about the absurdity of existence. She’s decided that this is a surrealist film, and that the story therefore ought to play out in a certain way.
Certainly, Gleize isn’t the first young director to be guilty of emulating the films she admires to the detriment of her own work, but her pretentiousness is tiresome. What’s most disappointing, though, is that despite the strength of contemporary French cinema, titles like Carnage have made a bigger impact in North America than films like Assayas’s Demonlover (2002) or Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001). Oh, well, at the very least we’ve got Ozon, and, given the choice, I’ll take his entertaining mainstream populism over Gleize’s vacuous palaver any day. |
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