oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx
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Masks is a gothic mystery of antique origin, successfully updated for a world a century later. To breathe new life into a well-worn story takes style, inventiveness, and brio - all of which Chabrol, co-writer Odile Barski, and a well-chosen cast bring in spades. The traditional shadows and spandrels of the genre are discarded in favour of a uniquely saccharine creepiness.
Philippe Noiret fits his role as smarmy TV show host Christian Legagneur (literally "the winner") like a glove. His program - in which elderly romantics compete in dancing and singing - feels eerily plausible. We spend most of the film at his country estate, populated with familiars, where he has invited a young biographer to hear his story. This biographer, however, has a secret mission that only reveals itself gradually. The setup sounds implausible, but Legagneur is just egotistical enough to be seduced by the flattery of a biographer's attention, and just manipulative enough to welcome an extra puppet into his theatre, even if he suspects the ruse.
Robin Renucci, as the fake writer Roland Wolf, brings youthful brashness and self-assurance to the role, making him a worthy opponent in this quiet battle of wits. Other notables include Bernadette Lafont, gleefully hamming it up as the voluptuous tarotist-in-residence Patricia, and Anne Brochet as Catherine, Legagneur's ailing god-daughter.
It's tempting to think of Chabrol as a New Wave pioneer who drifted into less promising genre territory. But dig deeper, and you find a filmmaker with a remarkably acute grasp of the upper middle classes - particularly the collusive, self-perpetuating nature of class power. Legagneur is no rogue individualist. He gregariously surrounds himself with like-minded confederates who share in the spoils. To put it more simply: the rich don't rock the boat - they eat veal cutlets on the boat and sip fine wine.
Legagneur laughs easily, with his inner circle and at society. He is a law unto himself, creating a hermetically sealed, ideologically baroque world of his own. This is captured in a memorable image: he sleeps beneath an Arcadian tableau, recessed into ornate panelling - the physical manifestation of his dreams. We glimpse the structure he inhabits whether awake or asleep: a world entirely of his own invention and control. He is a dreamer wide awake. Or, to put it plainly: a powerful fantasist. Years before the world came to understand the true nature of TV host Jimmy Savile, Chabrol had already drawn the silhouette.
The 1980s were a relatively fallow period for Chabrol, but Masks - this opiated flower from an unmapped canyon of dreams - stands out.
Philippe Noiret fits his role as smarmy TV show host Christian Legagneur (literally "the winner") like a glove. His program - in which elderly romantics compete in dancing and singing - feels eerily plausible. We spend most of the film at his country estate, populated with familiars, where he has invited a young biographer to hear his story. This biographer, however, has a secret mission that only reveals itself gradually. The setup sounds implausible, but Legagneur is just egotistical enough to be seduced by the flattery of a biographer's attention, and just manipulative enough to welcome an extra puppet into his theatre, even if he suspects the ruse.
Robin Renucci, as the fake writer Roland Wolf, brings youthful brashness and self-assurance to the role, making him a worthy opponent in this quiet battle of wits. Other notables include Bernadette Lafont, gleefully hamming it up as the voluptuous tarotist-in-residence Patricia, and Anne Brochet as Catherine, Legagneur's ailing god-daughter.
It's tempting to think of Chabrol as a New Wave pioneer who drifted into less promising genre territory. But dig deeper, and you find a filmmaker with a remarkably acute grasp of the upper middle classes - particularly the collusive, self-perpetuating nature of class power. Legagneur is no rogue individualist. He gregariously surrounds himself with like-minded confederates who share in the spoils. To put it more simply: the rich don't rock the boat - they eat veal cutlets on the boat and sip fine wine.
Legagneur laughs easily, with his inner circle and at society. He is a law unto himself, creating a hermetically sealed, ideologically baroque world of his own. This is captured in a memorable image: he sleeps beneath an Arcadian tableau, recessed into ornate panelling - the physical manifestation of his dreams. We glimpse the structure he inhabits whether awake or asleep: a world entirely of his own invention and control. He is a dreamer wide awake. Or, to put it plainly: a powerful fantasist. Years before the world came to understand the true nature of TV host Jimmy Savile, Chabrol had already drawn the silhouette.
The 1980s were a relatively fallow period for Chabrol, but Masks - this opiated flower from an unmapped canyon of dreams - stands out.
One of the earliest pleasures of silent cinema was the "phantom ride," where the audience floated along railway tracks, watching the world roll by. Hou begins Dust in the Wind with just such a journey, his camera gliding through a lush green valley. It's a gesture of trust, or perhaps a quiet bargain: this ride is buying our patience for a story about ordinary, cloud-capped lives. That kind of story is a hard sell without Ozu-level virtuosity (which, thankfully, Hou possesses). His characters, though, are grittier, more sweary, and less genteel than Ozu-san's.
We are ushered into this world, generally speaking, by the high hopes of our parents: hopes for their children to do well at school, to be happy, to succeed, to be extraordinary, and to find love. We mostly disappoint them. Our fates are, more often than not, to be "dust in the wind," as per the movie's title. Yet whatever happens, I'd like to think we retain some memory of hope's flavour, and of the occasional oasis-under-the-stars moment.
Wan is often seen studying, his head buried in books that promise a way out. But no matter how hard he stares, they fail to illuminate him. The path they suggest feels like a dead end. And love, too-what we hoped might rescue or complete us-can become the very dust that hides the rose, to borrow from Clyde Otis and Dinah Washington. The film does give us those brief moments of light, though, such as when friends gather to drink beer and say goodbye to one of their own, drafted into the military.
The story follows Wan and Huen, who grow up in a depressed mining town in the coastal hills. Unbelievably, this is Juifen, the same town that later became a photo-op deluxe for the Instagram set, thanks in part to Hou's City of Sadness. Wan and Huen are two halves of a Platonic whole, bonded from early childhood, and they stabilize one another as they navigate the trials of early adulthood, trying to build lives in Taipei. Love simply means being soothed by the other's presence. Wan and Huen, seated on opposite sides of the barred windows of a tailor's shop, move us not through grand gestures or declarations, but through their quiet, orbital return to each other.
At the end of the film, Wan's grandfather, in a symptom of dementia, repeats three times that sweet potatoes are harder to cultivate than ginseng. We know that quality of life has improved with each generation, but a kind of metronomic falling short of expectations persists. The repetition of the phrase captures this: the effort to grow something meaningful, and the recurring disappointment in the yield.
In this way, the film also refers to Taiwan itself-famously shaped like a sweet potato-struggling through the growing pains of Japanese occupation, followed by the heart-rending separation of destinies from the mainland.
Dust in the Wind can be bitter, but it never strays from relatability. Like the characters in the film, most people who track this down are looking, quietly and patiently, for solace in the cinema.
We are ushered into this world, generally speaking, by the high hopes of our parents: hopes for their children to do well at school, to be happy, to succeed, to be extraordinary, and to find love. We mostly disappoint them. Our fates are, more often than not, to be "dust in the wind," as per the movie's title. Yet whatever happens, I'd like to think we retain some memory of hope's flavour, and of the occasional oasis-under-the-stars moment.
Wan is often seen studying, his head buried in books that promise a way out. But no matter how hard he stares, they fail to illuminate him. The path they suggest feels like a dead end. And love, too-what we hoped might rescue or complete us-can become the very dust that hides the rose, to borrow from Clyde Otis and Dinah Washington. The film does give us those brief moments of light, though, such as when friends gather to drink beer and say goodbye to one of their own, drafted into the military.
The story follows Wan and Huen, who grow up in a depressed mining town in the coastal hills. Unbelievably, this is Juifen, the same town that later became a photo-op deluxe for the Instagram set, thanks in part to Hou's City of Sadness. Wan and Huen are two halves of a Platonic whole, bonded from early childhood, and they stabilize one another as they navigate the trials of early adulthood, trying to build lives in Taipei. Love simply means being soothed by the other's presence. Wan and Huen, seated on opposite sides of the barred windows of a tailor's shop, move us not through grand gestures or declarations, but through their quiet, orbital return to each other.
At the end of the film, Wan's grandfather, in a symptom of dementia, repeats three times that sweet potatoes are harder to cultivate than ginseng. We know that quality of life has improved with each generation, but a kind of metronomic falling short of expectations persists. The repetition of the phrase captures this: the effort to grow something meaningful, and the recurring disappointment in the yield.
In this way, the film also refers to Taiwan itself-famously shaped like a sweet potato-struggling through the growing pains of Japanese occupation, followed by the heart-rending separation of destinies from the mainland.
Dust in the Wind can be bitter, but it never strays from relatability. Like the characters in the film, most people who track this down are looking, quietly and patiently, for solace in the cinema.
L'Argent is a film about the distorting power of money. It is a loose adaptation of a Tolstoy story about the moral earthquake provoked by the use of a counterfeit banknote, a small fraud that ripples outward, shaking lives and testing souls. It's also broader in its enquiries than this implies, making contact with many of the soul's pressure points; spiritual chiropractice is performed in watching L'Argent as Bresson intellectually and poetically kneads beliefs we take for granted and experiences we have suppressed.
It's necessary to take a quick look at what money is or at least the original vision for it. One of money's main functions is to act as a medium of exchange: as a ferryman you can pay a blacksmith to reshoe a horse with free trips, and this is known as barter, but it's not very convenient if the blacksmith never needs to cross to the other side of the river, or has more pressing needs. If you insert money into this situation you have a medium of exchange, money becomes symbolic of work performed and resolves many of barter's limitations. Bresson gently nudges the viewer along this path of enquiry by clinically showing multiple actual barters occurring during a prison mass.
L'Argent investigates the ways we have perverted the money system (perversion: "distortion or corruption of the original course, meaning, or state of something"). Watching this film can protect you against the distorting effects by recognising examples and revisiting hurriedly formed conceptions of money we acquired in adolescence.
At the start of the movie a child from a rich family walks into his father's office to demand rather a large sum of pocket money. The reason, it's the first of the month, it is not, it appears, a reward for work performed, such as chores, and this child becomes literally 'entitled' (read the text on early banknotes) by the possession of money. He asks for more than usual with the perverted logic, "other parents give their children more", the link in his mind between labour and money is severed if it ever existed. This is a highly significant original sin rather than an arbitrary starting point for the story.
The clearest perversion is to counterfeit money, you then possess documents that assert you have performed labour - but in fact, a smaller amount of anti-social labour is misrepresented as a larger amount of pro-social work. There are clearly innumerable ways to distort the system, fraud is another touched on here. The film encourages further independent study on the topic. What other distortions exist? (Consider: lotteries, seigniorage, inheritance, usury, etc).
Yvon, an honest everyman, becomes trapped in the workings of the perverted system and stripped of his humanity, duped by those more knowing than he. From this new zero he pupates into a rather violent wasp, all-too-aware of the coldness of society's machinery and the vast distortion of its original moral vision.
Whilst on the lam, Yvon, as counterpoint, shares incredibly tender moments with an ageing woman who shelters him, picking and sharing nuts in a garden. This moment gestures towards a return to a more authentic form of existence. A reminder of the blessing that nature provides to us. Literature has the 'mot juste', the occasional perfect aptness of expression, in his films Bresson was able to pick the 'image juste', slow-burning, poetic, unmannered shots that perforate through avoidance. The hazelnuts in their frilly husks (elegance of nature); upturned potatoes (real labour); spilled coffee (interior consequence of receiving violence made exterior).
L'Argent, as a cinematic accomplishment, can be praised for its apparent effortlessness and its eschewing of didacticism. I didn't fully appreciate L'Argent until I awoke from the nightmares it provoked the night after watching it. It made me feel the true horror of incarceration and of the pursuit of money. It certainly provoked conscientious stirrings. While we must acknowledge the benefits our systems have brought, we must also remain vigilant against the alienation they breed.
It's necessary to take a quick look at what money is or at least the original vision for it. One of money's main functions is to act as a medium of exchange: as a ferryman you can pay a blacksmith to reshoe a horse with free trips, and this is known as barter, but it's not very convenient if the blacksmith never needs to cross to the other side of the river, or has more pressing needs. If you insert money into this situation you have a medium of exchange, money becomes symbolic of work performed and resolves many of barter's limitations. Bresson gently nudges the viewer along this path of enquiry by clinically showing multiple actual barters occurring during a prison mass.
L'Argent investigates the ways we have perverted the money system (perversion: "distortion or corruption of the original course, meaning, or state of something"). Watching this film can protect you against the distorting effects by recognising examples and revisiting hurriedly formed conceptions of money we acquired in adolescence.
At the start of the movie a child from a rich family walks into his father's office to demand rather a large sum of pocket money. The reason, it's the first of the month, it is not, it appears, a reward for work performed, such as chores, and this child becomes literally 'entitled' (read the text on early banknotes) by the possession of money. He asks for more than usual with the perverted logic, "other parents give their children more", the link in his mind between labour and money is severed if it ever existed. This is a highly significant original sin rather than an arbitrary starting point for the story.
The clearest perversion is to counterfeit money, you then possess documents that assert you have performed labour - but in fact, a smaller amount of anti-social labour is misrepresented as a larger amount of pro-social work. There are clearly innumerable ways to distort the system, fraud is another touched on here. The film encourages further independent study on the topic. What other distortions exist? (Consider: lotteries, seigniorage, inheritance, usury, etc).
Yvon, an honest everyman, becomes trapped in the workings of the perverted system and stripped of his humanity, duped by those more knowing than he. From this new zero he pupates into a rather violent wasp, all-too-aware of the coldness of society's machinery and the vast distortion of its original moral vision.
Whilst on the lam, Yvon, as counterpoint, shares incredibly tender moments with an ageing woman who shelters him, picking and sharing nuts in a garden. This moment gestures towards a return to a more authentic form of existence. A reminder of the blessing that nature provides to us. Literature has the 'mot juste', the occasional perfect aptness of expression, in his films Bresson was able to pick the 'image juste', slow-burning, poetic, unmannered shots that perforate through avoidance. The hazelnuts in their frilly husks (elegance of nature); upturned potatoes (real labour); spilled coffee (interior consequence of receiving violence made exterior).
L'Argent, as a cinematic accomplishment, can be praised for its apparent effortlessness and its eschewing of didacticism. I didn't fully appreciate L'Argent until I awoke from the nightmares it provoked the night after watching it. It made me feel the true horror of incarceration and of the pursuit of money. It certainly provoked conscientious stirrings. While we must acknowledge the benefits our systems have brought, we must also remain vigilant against the alienation they breed.
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