Fin août, début septembre

I was attracted to this film because of Virginie Ledoyen (The Valet, * Women), and to a lesser extent because it was written and directed by Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate, Demonlover, Paris, je t'aime). I was not thrilled, but I was not terribly disappointed either.

Ledoyen, as were all the characters in the film was self-obsessed. Probably none more so than Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), who seemed to need a constant reaffirmation from his friends, but rejected any criticism of his aimless life.

The film revolved around Adrien (François Cluzet), a writer that lived on the margins while composing novels that no one read. In fact, most all of the characters lived on the margins in meaningless jobs. They just floated instead of trying to build something.

I guess if I wasn't fascinated with helping someone who seems to live a similar life, I wouldn't have found this film as interesting. But the acting rose above the story and it was, indeed a pleasure to watch.

Slow-paced, nuanced portrait of the friends surrounding a dying man. Wonderfully subtle and insightful, with outstanding acting and a marvelous script. Director Assayas' skill behind the camera is evident in every shot, despite lack of variety in locations and little action. Lots of conversation but the best moments come when the camera begins to wander. The kind of film you need to throw yourself into to truly appreciate. Very, very french.

STYLIZED REALISM

A tremendous and moving depiction of friendship and love whose dialogue is obviously French and whose camera-verite is very Dogme 95. Through a hand-held whirl we see stunningly candid and enticingly bare portraits of the goings on and thoughts of a group of friends including all the nuances of relationships. In this regard, Assayas's film is very similar to "La Promesse" and the Dogme 95 films. But the dialogue is extremely French in that it is very dramatic and a little too perfect to be real: dialogues feature characters who engage in dialogue's where they listen and think rather than argue. Yet even this works in the films favor, making you all the more taken in by characters demonstrate such depth.

The performances are remarkable and for the most part, the characters brilliantly faceted.

The movie is a bit longer than it needs to be, but the subtlety of the scenes requires patient development.

If you like Robert Bresson, Hal Hartley, Lars Van Trier, or Thomas Vinterburg, go see this. The style of the camerawork and the lushness of some of the lighting makes this a must see for the screen

Can actors save an otherwise completely bad movie? The answer is of course "yes". Proof, if needed, is the possibly horrible "Fin août début septembre". The only reasons I went to see it, were the fact that the movie was directed by Assayas (who impressed me with "Irma Vep") and that it starred Virginie Ledoyen (up till now excellent in every movie she ever played in). Yes, she was very nice in "L'eau froide", a not so good movie by... Olivier Assayas. Oops! Yet, with Miss Ledoyen and "Irma Vep" in mind, I went to the theatre... and was quite disappointed. The story is so lame I can't even convince myself of giving you a summary. Then we have the director... Well, I can only think of two things that must have happened. Either Olivier Assayas was constantly absent and gave the camera to his five year old nephew, or he tried to make something resembling a Dogma 95 movie. We'll go for reason number one. The camera spins and spins when there is no reason to spin. When your actors sit on the ground, you don't have to make wild images. Unless of course the cameraman is so busy trying not to fall from the stairs at that moment. Maybe falling wouldn't have been that bad: we wouldn't have had the rest of the movie.

But this is going to startle you: I gave the movie a 6/10. Excuse me? A six? Well yes, a six... because the actors (mainly Virginie... again / of course) are so good that you try not to see what Assayas did to the movie. If you are somebody who can look at actors and enjoy their work, maybe you can have a look at this movie. If not, pretend it's poisoned with plutonium.

(P.S. I wonder if I would have given the movie 6/10 if Virginie Ledoyen hadn't been in it. I guess only a remake can tell me that. But in case Assayas accidently reads this: DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!)

In many ways, FIN AOUT is a dismaying and disappointing experience. Assayas' IRMA VEP is the best French film of the last quarter century: thematically rich, stylistically remarkable, emotionally devastating. FIN AOUT is, in comparison, a rather drab, handheld take on Eric Rohmer, filled with dull, aimless, middle-class intellectuals who have such 'financial problems' that they get their uncle to lend them his country villa; they whinge and emote in the most banal terms, in a plot that says nothing and goes nowhere.

This very aimlessness seems to be the film's theme. Although the title is very specific about time and the seasons, the film itself seems to exist in a timeless vacuum. Each episode has a temporal subtitle (eg 'six months later'), but no month is ever specified, and could therefore be any or none. This is not the film's failing, but that of the characters, who are locked in their own solipsism, flailing desperately, but unable to escape.

Gabriel says of Adrien, the writer, that he was minor because he could only see the world from his limited viewpoint, but this is a much more general malaise - all the talk about friendship can't hide the fact that each character is fatally limited in perception of others, because of obsession with self (figured in the cramped interiors. The trips to the country are literally bursts of fresh air). This doesn't mean that Assayas isn't generous with his characters; he is probably kinder than some of them deserve (Gabriel, in particular, needs a good shaking). The search for an apartment, therefore, is not a trite subject - these rootless characters, forming their own community, are so desperate for a sense of place, home, that they search everywhere for it: the country, abroad, the past, death.

FIN AOUT has in common with IRMA VEP a concern with the crisis of expression in this era of post-modernism. The crucial figure here is Adrien, significantly a receptacle of death (the funeral is becoming a recurring motif in modern French cinema, as in THOSE WHO LOVE ME TAKE THE TRAIN); focus for all the other characters.

The question is: in an age of pastiche and reprodution, is it possible to insist on authentic personal expression (the film's structure focuses on a shifting series of pairs: uneasy doublings and reproductions)? And does it matter that the person making an art of the personal (both the director in IRMA VEP and the writer here) is rather objectionable as a human being? Is the insistence on the personal elitist and restrictive?

In IRMA VEP these questions were urgently juggled up to the end, with no clear answers. Here the writer is unrecognised until he dies, perhaps confirming our decadent dependence on the past, and our inability to come to terms with and express the present (although even this is undermined; as his publisher remarks on Adrien's perceived success, 'I wouldn't go that far').

Unlike the director in IRMA VEP, we get no example of Adrien's work, save a self-serving and cliched letter (significantly breaking up a relationship of the May/December variety that has nearly stifled French cinema). There is no transcendental moment, like the final sequence of IRMA VEP; in essence an archetypal post-modern artefact - a fragmentary, abandoned, incomplete, distorted, scratchy, uncontextualised piece of film; a haunting palimpsest from another age (a call to return to the beginnings of cinema, when possibilities were endless, before ossifying into the codes we are stuck with now?); it is also the locus for Assayas' faith in cinema, personal expression and emotion. This issue is left rather vague here, because we have no evidence with which to judge.

Well, except this film of course. It is this that raises FIN AOUT - Assayas' complete, mature mastery of the medium. Although his material is banal, he electrifies and enlivens it with his style: the fluidity of his camera movements and editing; his emotional use of colour, light and space; his mastery of the techniques of melodrama (many scenes echo the godlike Nicholas Ray); his intimate ability to capture and make profound every seemingly trivial gesture; his enlarging every detail to convey and enrich meaning.

Chris Darke has called FIN AOUT a cubist work, but it seems to me more like an obsessive Monet serial: the characters and place, for all the narrative perambulations, never seem to change, or resolve the problems that opened the film (even if they leave a place, it's back to somewhere they've been before), but Assayas' impressionistic eye, in capturing the moment, asserts the beauty and depth of the transitory.

In fact, the film's nearest peers, for all its cinematic brilliance, might be literary - especially Proust and Beckett, in its avoidance of the dramatic (the main death occurs off-screen) in favour of the phatic, the continuous and the elliptical, giving a truer account of lives dominated by lack (the film's credits have the actors' names split apart, figuring the personality crises depicted within).

I have been using a lot of superlatives, and here's another. Assayas is now, along with Tim Burton, Takeshi Kitano and Wong Kar-Wai, the greatest director in the world; he has often been compared to the latter, although he hasn't yet quite reached Wong's offhand, melancholy poetry. This film, then, is his HAPPY TOGETHER, an absolutely astonishing example of cinematic authority, wasted on a rather monotonous psychodrama.