Comédie de l'innocence

I'm beginning a serious affair with Ruiz and what an adventure it is turning into!

I originally was directed to Ruiz because of my public esteem for Greenaway; several readers suggested Ruiz. Ruiz clearly comes from the Latin tradition of floating narrative, where layers and magical realities penetrate each other. Where sex and related emotions weave with intellectual perspectives. Where floating without anchors beyond the anchor of lightness itself is the very idea of life.

Medem is the one I appreciate the most in this Latin world, though there are many others and I suppose the future of film now — the next episode at least — is in their hands.

Its in the nature of this floating for some artists to fold in layers of extreme self-reference, including notions of what constitutes art, the instant artifact, and in other directions, essays on illusive realities and the charms or multilayered love.

Greenaway is something a bit different. His floating is usually bipolar, between the Latin layers on one hand, soft and ephemeral and impulsive — and codified frameworks on the other. Frameworks like ordering systems and symmetric containers. Cosmological and human machines for managing reality. The written word, itself dual. For Greenaway, it has to be an artifact first for him to escape the nature of artifacts.

Ruiz superficially appears similar, but in fact he inhabits a whole different world. Where Greenaway registers against geometric cosmologies, Ruiz simply works within the form of French cinema. It makes him less because French cinema — how to say this gently — is bankrupt. Yet, like modern religions of the book, it refers to times and frames of vitality.

Yet, it is a haunting notion, to bring this layered Latin floating of realities to a form that supposes that there is only one layer in life and that it is light, somewhat capricious and animated by the female urge.

What we have in this film is a space where every character is creating multiple realities: each person is in control and mad at the same time. In control, because he or she creates the realities we see. Mad because they cannot control them or separate them. each of these reflects into the artifact of the film.

We have the boy, who is an obsessive filmmaker, already by his ninth birthday his life and film have merged. He splits into three persons: the one his mother bore, a second one another woman had and lost and a third, Alexander, seen as imaginary by his mother.

We have the mother (a theater designer and painter) from whose perspective she splits into two women, both vying for the boy who died two years ago. One reality of this woman is that she is simply floating, French-wise, though intimate peelings that reveal ever more soft a soul. Another is that she is the other woman, a violinist inmate in a madhouse where she imagines her doctor to be her brother. She sees the madhouse as the family home, the other inmates as statues.

There's Serge, who the mother sees as her brother and in her other self as the psychiatrist of the madhouse. He is the fellow who sees. He blends with the boy, their toy-films are shared. It is because of Serge's lunchtime screws with the housekeeper/governess that the boy is unattended and drowns.

This is the French core, sex generated folded realities. In the DVD extras Ruiz says he had to do it this way because it is "against the law" to have ghosts in French films. That young sexy girl is the fulcrum of the thing, her torso locked in throwing the dice and always getting the same number, what she calls "inverted probabilities."

It isn't lifealtering stuff. But it is fine, Very fine, the house as the character.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

With this one Ruiz redeems himself well for some of the more hollow stuff he produced in the 90's. It is, as so many times before, a fiction about possible fictions as assembled in the imaginative mind. About various figments of the one mind enacting their roles in a fantasy unfolding as the unfathomable echoes bubbling in some far surface of reality.

At first, it seems to be about a child intuitively guided to look for his true face, the true motherly source from which we are all outsourced at birth and to which the biological mother is only the affectionate mask. The kid is miraculously drawn to another mother, tied to the first by the strange coincidence so favored by surrealists.

But it soon turns out that we are not with the child in this, rather with the discarded face of the mother. The woman drawn to her reflected image in the eyes of the kid and made whole in it. Two women as one, each the other's surrogate mother, each the surrogate daughter in turn.

And then it moves again, starting with a dinner scene that reverses the one that begins the film. Now the characters have switched places, the room is dark. A film-within guides us further, footage captured by the kid in his strolls around the park. There is an imaginary friend who turns out to be real, and a madhouse in the countryhouse where only those admitted can leave at will.

Then the mysterious ending suddenly seems to pull everything back into the surface of reality (we can never be sure though). Was after all the kid only the mother's helpful aid (like her brother, Serge, inside the fantasy) in recovering the husband who is away on business (imagined as an inner child, susceptible to allure of the female figure) from the imaginary hands of a deceitfull mistress?

It's a fascinating ploy and the overall construct, though occasionally thin, resonates with the illusionary reality of the mind. How we weave portentous narrative around us with us center stage in the myth, what masks we choose to hide behind or let fall. Lots of Oedipus, transported to suburban France as surreal essay into the conundrums of fiction.

The device is film noir. The execution is French. Not a bad thing to have, aye?

... and while you're about it save the plot. I am always going to see anything Isabelle Huppert does. She is far and away the finest French actress currently working and few international actresses can touch her but she does have a wilful side and in the last few years seems drawn to anything from off-the-wall (as here) to sleaze (Deux, The Piano Teacher) so fans don't have it easy and given her current track record we can only assume 8 Femmes was an aberration. This is a case of style over content, everything hinges on the unrealistic premise of Huppert saying 'okay' when she should have said 'get a life' as ninety nine mothers out of a hundred WOULD do in similar circumstances. It's not really enough to pepper the cast with certifiable nannys and neighbors because that only makes the SEMI intelligent viewer shout WHY. Why does Huppert continue to employ a nanny/au pair who declines to eat as one of the family and is constantly throwing dice which always turn up 7 and neglecting the nine year old when they are out together. Why, for that matter, does Huppert's brother, a psychiatrist, no less, become disturbed if anyone touches his toys (Huppert has inherited the family home, where she and her brother grew up, from her parents and the brother's toys are still stored there), given that Huppert has, by definition, lived in Paris all her life and that Paris is a very compact city, why is she TOTALLY unfamiliar with other arrondisiments other than the one in which she lives, why, when Huppert, a total stranger, calls on Jeanne Balibar only to find her out, does Balibar's neighbor, who has a key, cheerfully let this stranger into her neighbor's apartment (perhaps 'cheerfully' is the wrong word, given the neighbor's penchant for gloomy predictions. I could go on but you get the picture. As long as we're asking pertinent questions, why did Denis Podalydes, an established and respected actor, agree to what is little more than a cameo, and why, for that matter, even ask a well-known actor when an unknown would do. On the credit side Huppert is tremendous and Balibar not far behind but it's Class Acting that feels like an Acting Class and not a movie.

Ariane (Isabelle Huppert) mother of young Camille has a frustrating problem on her hands. Her son says that she is not his real mother and that his real mother lives in another part of town. Also he insists that Ariane take him to her. What has happened to parental control? Mother and son seek her out. Her name is Isabella ( Jean Balibar) and she had a son Paul the same age as Camille but he was lost in a drowning accident. From this moment on Isabella seems to take over insisting Camille is Paul and Camille insisting that she is his mother.

It's very unlikely to happen in real life and the whole set-up is rather laughable. Things get worse when Isabella moves into Ariane's home to be near her so-called Paul. While there she tries to seduce Georges. "Why are you doing this?" he asks".....I need a father for my son" Because Isabella is so difficult to get rid of, family and friends suspect she could be a witch. Need I go on?

The acting is excellent throughout. Huppert so gracious and serene, and Balibar well cast as the post-traumatic mother with her ever too ready smile. The dialogue is strange. Many sentences are unfinished. Many idea are not resolved. There is a vague feeling of inactivity and helplessness. The au pair is strange and loves to play the dice. The whole house is littered with busts of men and women so weird-looking in the shadowy light of evening. Great for atmosphere but surely difficult to live with. No wonder the household was a trifle mad.

One scene tends to send shivers down one's back. It's when Isabella decides to re-enact the drowning of her son by dunking Camille off the side of the barge. She is completely crackers...quite pathetic really.

Camille's favourite plaything is a video camera which he likes to poke into everybody's face. It is said the camera does not lie and in this case what is captured on video happens to resolve the situation.

The late director Raul Ruiz has declared that what interested him when making films was the middle ground between traditional narrative and experimentalism. His movie The Comedy of Innocence (2000) is based in a novel by futurist writer Massimo Bontempelli, The Boy with Two Mothers, and recreates as in an unstoppable nightmare the archetypal fantasy of the child that imagines that his parents are not the real ones. The family lives in a strange Parisian house besieged by the remembrance of a dead incestuous eternal grandfather. The father is frequently absent, and the mother- theater designer- is suddenly refused as such by his nine years old unique son. Another mother, the ideal one that in fantasy every child wants to possess, will appear "really" in the world of the movie and in the video that the child shoots in that world. He harasses alternatively the two mothers with his camera. On his side, the director, perversely too, plays the same game with the spectators, moving the camera menacingly. We are introduced into two houses abundant in statues, paintings, mirrors, that duplicate "reality", and revive in us the ancestral fear before images of resemblance (those obvious elements of cinema) and some inanimate objects that seem to earn life. Ruiz has said in an interview that all his features, and he shot dozens of them, have "film" as their theme. The child uses the camera not only for reproducing but for torturing, and the mothers are ready to collaborate providing that the child will choose just one of them ( see the last scene, for instance). The need of possession and the anguish of abandonment succeed in impregnating each one of the characters, driving them to incredible behavior. The supposed legitimate mother (if there is a legitimate identity in the world of this movie) not only tries to recuperate her son, but to become even the fantasized mother. Ruiz plays convincingly with the impossible until a denouement that dubiously gives resolution to mystery. Like the young nanny who when throwing the dice gets the same results, the picture doesn't cease astonishing the viewers.