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Note de Asa_Nisi_Masa2
Giovanni Dé Medici was the ultimate Renaissance "condottiere" (military commander), Captain of the Pope's Army, dubbed "Giovanni of the Black Bands". He was truly fierce, ruthless and proud, but relentlessly audacious on the battlefield. Yet he was also aristocratic, charming, articulate, witty, urbane, and a libertine off the battlefield. Furthermore, as a soldier he was the antithesis of a Machiavellian, and rejected the idea that war was a politician's game. Giovanni Dè Medici may have been cruel, but no one could accuse him of cowardice. In the end, dying from a gun-shot wound at the youthful age of 28, he was also a victim of a very different, new and subtler form of warfare. Olmi's amazing, award-winning movie is set in the last few weeks of the life of Giovanni "dalle Bande Nere", played very convincingly by Bulgarian actor Hristo Jivkov. The movie also features other notable historic figures of the Renaissance, such as Pietro Aretino (the ultimate Renaissance man of letters) and the German army veteran Georg von Frundsberg. As one critic put it, it isn't so much a historic movie, as an "intimate confession from the most visceral folds of history".
The story starts from the end, with Giovanni Dè Medici's funeral. It then goes back to the cause of his death, dating a few months earlier, in the autumn of 1526, when the Imperial Army of German Lutheran soldiers led by von Frundsberg are travelling through Italy from the North. The narrating Pietro Aretino informs us that these "noble and beautiful people" are on their way to invade and punish Rome, following an act of betrayal on the Pope's part. Aware that the Germans are at a military disadvantage, Dè Medici uses quick, sudden ambushes with his fire-armed cavalry. But as an act of ultimate individualism, the Marquis of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga welcomes the Lutheran troops through his fortified gates at Curtatone. He thus allows them easy access to the papal states in order to save his own territory. Meanwhile, just a few hours later, Federico Gonzaga denies access to Giovanni and his Papal troops! This beautifully illustrates the way that the notion of national solidarity simply did not exist among different Italian Duchies and kingdoms.
To add insult to injury, Alfonso D'Este, Duke of Ferrara gives some sophisticated pieces of artillery to the Germans in exchange for von Frundsberg's daughter's hand. Yet Giovanni still manages to catch up with the Germans, despite the fact they are now no longer militarily at such a disadvantage. Meanwhile, the young Medici Captain keeps asking the Pope for additional troops through his wife Maria, who mediates. But all that the Pontiff is willing to do is send the leader of his army his blessings!
Familiar Olmi themes surface. While Olmi's magnificent movie Il Posto (1961) was about human beings as insignificant clogs in the faceless machine of a typical corporation, Il Mestiere is about man's vain individual efforts within the "faceless machine" that is history and fate. But even while being aware that he will probably be defeated, Giovanni's determination to stop the Germans survives. Ultimately, his philosophy is the opposite of a Machiavellian one: actions, even when completely useless, are still important for what they stand for. When Giovanni is shot in the leg in a final skirmish with the Germans, he is taken to the D'Este Palace in Ferrara to have his leg dressed and then later amputated. The final scenes of Giovanni lying in his sick chamber are cinematically flawless, spectacular and subtle. For the first time in his life, he is truly helpless, often in a fevered state, languishing in those magnificently frescoed interiors painted in the style of High Renaissance art. The concept of human beings always dying alone - even when they die young and are supervised by servants and medics - is poignantly conveyed.
Rather than being chockful of the spectacular battle scenes we have come to expect from lavish historical movies, Il Mestiere is mostly a meditative and quiet war movie. Olmi's flick is outstanding at bringing across the nitty gritty of life as a Renaissance soldier. Hypnotic images of ghostly soldiers on horseback and on foot, trudging through the mist, or tending to their weapons daily, also gives a tangible sense of what happened "in between" those battle, which took up maybe only about 10% of a soldier's time. The grim, damp, relentlessly cold weather, the extreme discomfort of constantly wearing an armour and the way that battles were often sudden, fast and deadly is perfectly conveyed by Olmi's movie. Which isn't to say there are no beautifully filmed, and spectacular battle scenes in Il Mestiere
Other scenes, such as those of Renaissance aristocrats at social gatherings and at court, really create the impression you're watching an animated Italian Renaissance painting. The language spoken by the characters in this movie is achingly beautiful, but none of the lines are delivered in a contrived or actory manner - you just simply get the impression that Renaissance aristocrats spoke in such a sublimely articulate and poetic way. Giovanni's wife Maria (not Caterina Dè Medici, as listed by the IMDb!) is shown all the way through the movie reading and replying to her spouse's letters. They contain things as mundane as his detailed laundry lists, alongside crucial requests for political mediation. These were requests that every high-born Renaissance wife should have had the intelligence and sophisticated diplomatic ability to carry out. Meanwhile, Giovanni's mistress, a married Mantuan lady, is sympathetically shown living her clandestine purgatory. Last but not least, the movie has a lovely, evocative score.
The film's final quote regarding fire-arms could be lifted exactly as it is and be applied to our very own "weapons of mass destruction" - a bitter, disheartening paradox. I don't think this is a movie for everyone, but those who believe they might appreciate it are really in for a treat.
The story starts from the end, with Giovanni Dè Medici's funeral. It then goes back to the cause of his death, dating a few months earlier, in the autumn of 1526, when the Imperial Army of German Lutheran soldiers led by von Frundsberg are travelling through Italy from the North. The narrating Pietro Aretino informs us that these "noble and beautiful people" are on their way to invade and punish Rome, following an act of betrayal on the Pope's part. Aware that the Germans are at a military disadvantage, Dè Medici uses quick, sudden ambushes with his fire-armed cavalry. But as an act of ultimate individualism, the Marquis of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga welcomes the Lutheran troops through his fortified gates at Curtatone. He thus allows them easy access to the papal states in order to save his own territory. Meanwhile, just a few hours later, Federico Gonzaga denies access to Giovanni and his Papal troops! This beautifully illustrates the way that the notion of national solidarity simply did not exist among different Italian Duchies and kingdoms.
To add insult to injury, Alfonso D'Este, Duke of Ferrara gives some sophisticated pieces of artillery to the Germans in exchange for von Frundsberg's daughter's hand. Yet Giovanni still manages to catch up with the Germans, despite the fact they are now no longer militarily at such a disadvantage. Meanwhile, the young Medici Captain keeps asking the Pope for additional troops through his wife Maria, who mediates. But all that the Pontiff is willing to do is send the leader of his army his blessings!
Familiar Olmi themes surface. While Olmi's magnificent movie Il Posto (1961) was about human beings as insignificant clogs in the faceless machine of a typical corporation, Il Mestiere is about man's vain individual efforts within the "faceless machine" that is history and fate. But even while being aware that he will probably be defeated, Giovanni's determination to stop the Germans survives. Ultimately, his philosophy is the opposite of a Machiavellian one: actions, even when completely useless, are still important for what they stand for. When Giovanni is shot in the leg in a final skirmish with the Germans, he is taken to the D'Este Palace in Ferrara to have his leg dressed and then later amputated. The final scenes of Giovanni lying in his sick chamber are cinematically flawless, spectacular and subtle. For the first time in his life, he is truly helpless, often in a fevered state, languishing in those magnificently frescoed interiors painted in the style of High Renaissance art. The concept of human beings always dying alone - even when they die young and are supervised by servants and medics - is poignantly conveyed.
Rather than being chockful of the spectacular battle scenes we have come to expect from lavish historical movies, Il Mestiere is mostly a meditative and quiet war movie. Olmi's flick is outstanding at bringing across the nitty gritty of life as a Renaissance soldier. Hypnotic images of ghostly soldiers on horseback and on foot, trudging through the mist, or tending to their weapons daily, also gives a tangible sense of what happened "in between" those battle, which took up maybe only about 10% of a soldier's time. The grim, damp, relentlessly cold weather, the extreme discomfort of constantly wearing an armour and the way that battles were often sudden, fast and deadly is perfectly conveyed by Olmi's movie. Which isn't to say there are no beautifully filmed, and spectacular battle scenes in Il Mestiere
Other scenes, such as those of Renaissance aristocrats at social gatherings and at court, really create the impression you're watching an animated Italian Renaissance painting. The language spoken by the characters in this movie is achingly beautiful, but none of the lines are delivered in a contrived or actory manner - you just simply get the impression that Renaissance aristocrats spoke in such a sublimely articulate and poetic way. Giovanni's wife Maria (not Caterina Dè Medici, as listed by the IMDb!) is shown all the way through the movie reading and replying to her spouse's letters. They contain things as mundane as his detailed laundry lists, alongside crucial requests for political mediation. These were requests that every high-born Renaissance wife should have had the intelligence and sophisticated diplomatic ability to carry out. Meanwhile, Giovanni's mistress, a married Mantuan lady, is sympathetically shown living her clandestine purgatory. Last but not least, the movie has a lovely, evocative score.
The film's final quote regarding fire-arms could be lifted exactly as it is and be applied to our very own "weapons of mass destruction" - a bitter, disheartening paradox. I don't think this is a movie for everyone, but those who believe they might appreciate it are really in for a treat.
... this one's very far from being one of them, unfortunately.
Populist detractors of French cinema, knee-jerk Europhobes, phobics of subtitles, blinkered viewers who divide all cinema between Hollywood vs. "pretentious" art-house: if you really want to pick on a French movie that you think embodies all the clichés of Gallic cinema you so love to hate, take your vitriol out on this one! Leave masters like Rivette, Truffaut, Resnais, Rohmer, Denis, Varda and other, much better Leconte movies alone!
La Fille Sur le Pont's main players: Gabor, a middle-aged man played by the ubiquitous, but always pleasant to watch Daniel Auteuil and Adèle, a lithely beautiful, gazelle-like young woman who has the face of Vanessa Paradis. Predictably, Adèle is emotionally messed up, fragile and yet sexually promiscuous. The two meet when the charismatic grouch, Gabor, intercepts the girl on a Parisian bridge and prevents her from committing suicide (wasn't that also how Emmanuelle Béart's character and her boyfriend met in La Belle Noiseuse?). Gabor is an itinerant knife-thrower, by the way - sans toit ni loi. Naturally enough, since we are talking about a girl who has nothing to lose, Adèle becomes his target. Despite the rocky beginning, in which the two spend much time squabbling, there is naturally a strong attraction between them (in fact, as clichéd as all this may sound, the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which Gabor and Adèle's relationship is first established, were my favourites). We even get to meet a previous living target of Gabor's, a woman now performing in another circus number, at the venue where Adèle is about to perform for the first time. We see that this "ex" of Gabor's is also fragile and messed up, besides still preserving a clingy dependence on the knife-thrower. So, it seems that what Gabor has to offer women is somehow life-affirming, and better than sex. And in fact, watching Gabor and Adèle at work, you cannot help thinking: who needs these two to literally have sex when all that knife-throwing is more suggestive of penetrative sex than a steamy Tinto Brass scene of your choice?
In retrospect, I think this movie's main merit was to make me discover how charming and beautiful Johnny Depp's squeeze is - I had no idea. Sadly, Vanessa Paradis could not save the little movie from being just a nice-looking, superficially funny, substanceless piece of fluff, furthermore a hit-parade of French movie clichés that I thought would be beneath Leconte. Beineix's Betty Blue, Senta from Chabrol's silly La Demoiselle d'Honneur, Romane Bohringer's character in L'Appartement, even Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules et Jim, and countless others: why are so many women in a certain category of French cinema invariably characterized as fragile and irrational, unsettlingly unpredictable and self-destructive, even suicidal? Yet, they are also intoxicatingly seductive and sexually voracious, fickle and capricious. They're the ultimate misogynist's sex fantasy, a woman that frightens (the vagina dentata myth being a symbolic exasperation of this fear of femininity) and enslaves the male (because sexual attraction is biologically inescapable). Paradis's Adèle was in fact a rather tone-down, sweetened version of one such stock female creation - in fact, perhaps a part of Leconte was distancing himself from this prototype and playing with it, though the other part of him was embracing it. But the fact that in the end Leconte shows us Gabor's fragility and Adèle's nascent strength goes some way towards showing that the director was also partly turning the stereotype on its head. The "Betty Blue" is what I call the female French movie prototype of the fragile-sexy-doomed heroine, which DOES certainly also exist in other cinematic traditions, though I seem to observe it more often in French movies. It's a fictional embodiment of womanhood that can be traced right back to the doomed "femme fatales" of the 19th century French artistic movement The Symbolists.
The scenes of La Fille Sur le Pont that were set in Italy, Greece and Turkey were rather dubious in their astonishingly twee and simplistic stereotyping as well. They were the equivalent of accompanying any scene set in Paris with sappy accordion music and a view of the Eiffel tower in the background. Was Leconte trying to be "Fellinian" in that raffle scene in San Remo? Oh, puhleez! Give me Tandem, Ridicule or L'Homme du Train any day over this candy floss, Patrice.
Populist detractors of French cinema, knee-jerk Europhobes, phobics of subtitles, blinkered viewers who divide all cinema between Hollywood vs. "pretentious" art-house: if you really want to pick on a French movie that you think embodies all the clichés of Gallic cinema you so love to hate, take your vitriol out on this one! Leave masters like Rivette, Truffaut, Resnais, Rohmer, Denis, Varda and other, much better Leconte movies alone!
La Fille Sur le Pont's main players: Gabor, a middle-aged man played by the ubiquitous, but always pleasant to watch Daniel Auteuil and Adèle, a lithely beautiful, gazelle-like young woman who has the face of Vanessa Paradis. Predictably, Adèle is emotionally messed up, fragile and yet sexually promiscuous. The two meet when the charismatic grouch, Gabor, intercepts the girl on a Parisian bridge and prevents her from committing suicide (wasn't that also how Emmanuelle Béart's character and her boyfriend met in La Belle Noiseuse?). Gabor is an itinerant knife-thrower, by the way - sans toit ni loi. Naturally enough, since we are talking about a girl who has nothing to lose, Adèle becomes his target. Despite the rocky beginning, in which the two spend much time squabbling, there is naturally a strong attraction between them (in fact, as clichéd as all this may sound, the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which Gabor and Adèle's relationship is first established, were my favourites). We even get to meet a previous living target of Gabor's, a woman now performing in another circus number, at the venue where Adèle is about to perform for the first time. We see that this "ex" of Gabor's is also fragile and messed up, besides still preserving a clingy dependence on the knife-thrower. So, it seems that what Gabor has to offer women is somehow life-affirming, and better than sex. And in fact, watching Gabor and Adèle at work, you cannot help thinking: who needs these two to literally have sex when all that knife-throwing is more suggestive of penetrative sex than a steamy Tinto Brass scene of your choice?
In retrospect, I think this movie's main merit was to make me discover how charming and beautiful Johnny Depp's squeeze is - I had no idea. Sadly, Vanessa Paradis could not save the little movie from being just a nice-looking, superficially funny, substanceless piece of fluff, furthermore a hit-parade of French movie clichés that I thought would be beneath Leconte. Beineix's Betty Blue, Senta from Chabrol's silly La Demoiselle d'Honneur, Romane Bohringer's character in L'Appartement, even Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules et Jim, and countless others: why are so many women in a certain category of French cinema invariably characterized as fragile and irrational, unsettlingly unpredictable and self-destructive, even suicidal? Yet, they are also intoxicatingly seductive and sexually voracious, fickle and capricious. They're the ultimate misogynist's sex fantasy, a woman that frightens (the vagina dentata myth being a symbolic exasperation of this fear of femininity) and enslaves the male (because sexual attraction is biologically inescapable). Paradis's Adèle was in fact a rather tone-down, sweetened version of one such stock female creation - in fact, perhaps a part of Leconte was distancing himself from this prototype and playing with it, though the other part of him was embracing it. But the fact that in the end Leconte shows us Gabor's fragility and Adèle's nascent strength goes some way towards showing that the director was also partly turning the stereotype on its head. The "Betty Blue" is what I call the female French movie prototype of the fragile-sexy-doomed heroine, which DOES certainly also exist in other cinematic traditions, though I seem to observe it more often in French movies. It's a fictional embodiment of womanhood that can be traced right back to the doomed "femme fatales" of the 19th century French artistic movement The Symbolists.
The scenes of La Fille Sur le Pont that were set in Italy, Greece and Turkey were rather dubious in their astonishingly twee and simplistic stereotyping as well. They were the equivalent of accompanying any scene set in Paris with sappy accordion music and a view of the Eiffel tower in the background. Was Leconte trying to be "Fellinian" in that raffle scene in San Remo? Oh, puhleez! Give me Tandem, Ridicule or L'Homme du Train any day over this candy floss, Patrice.
So, I finally saw the third installment in the famous alienation trilogy (the other two movies in it being La Notte and L'Avventura). All three star Monica Vitti, Antonioni's muse of the time and girlfriend of four years' standing. Typically, L'Eclisse starts with a break-up, that of bourgeoise Vittoria (played by Vitti) and her equally bourgeois fiancé Riccardo (Rabal). The movie also ends with a break-up of sorts
or rather, the conclusion of a fledgling affair that fizzles out before it even has a chance to live, however briefly. In fact, this so-called "love affair" would have probably been but the external shell of an emotional union between a man and a woman. The rightly famous final sequence of the movie is indeed memorable - I cannot fault Martin Scorsese for gushing about it as he does in his homage to classic Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy. I can't imagine any film student not being advised to watch the last 10 minutes of L'Eclisse by a wise course teacher.
Alain Delon could not have been better cast as a shallow and materialistic, young proto-yuppie prat. Though she was only on screen for a brief while, I admired the performance of Lilla Brignone as Vittoria's Stock Exchange-obsessed mother, completely oblivious to her daughter's emotional states throughout.
Monica Vitti, with a wardrobe as varied and flattering as Maggie Cheung's in In the Mood for Love, looks beautiful but is possibly the weakest, or most predictable of the movie's performers. It's often not in Antonioni movies that I've enjoyed her performances the most. In my view Vitti is mostly in her element as a comedienne, more specifically in the tragi-comedies known as commedie all'italiana. This is the genre that she is mostly associated with in Italy anyway, often with Alberto Sordi as a co-star. Antonioni seems to get slightly affected, over-stylised performances out of Vitti. I never get a sense that the actress fully enjoyed working for her then-boyfriend. I suppose, though, that Monica's natural comic timing and slightly goofy manner could never have been put to good use in something called "the alienation trilogy"! The nocturnal sequences of Vitti and her neighbour visiting their strange Anglophone acquaintance, whose home looks like a caricature African colonialist's haven, added some subtly dark humour and a surreal touch to the central part of the movie. When the three women go looking for the African-born expat's escaped poodle, I smilingly realised how many different forms a comedy moment can take.
Last but not least, as a Roman born in 1972, I was fascinated to see the smart but cold suburb known as EUR (originally founded by Mussolini) as it looked in the early 60s, when whole sections of it were still only half-built and semi-deserted. It was indeed an architectural embodiment of alienation! If Antonioni had been an architect, he probably would have been a brilliant one, as he completely understands what effect urban and architectural spaces have on human states of mind.
Alain Delon could not have been better cast as a shallow and materialistic, young proto-yuppie prat. Though she was only on screen for a brief while, I admired the performance of Lilla Brignone as Vittoria's Stock Exchange-obsessed mother, completely oblivious to her daughter's emotional states throughout.
Monica Vitti, with a wardrobe as varied and flattering as Maggie Cheung's in In the Mood for Love, looks beautiful but is possibly the weakest, or most predictable of the movie's performers. It's often not in Antonioni movies that I've enjoyed her performances the most. In my view Vitti is mostly in her element as a comedienne, more specifically in the tragi-comedies known as commedie all'italiana. This is the genre that she is mostly associated with in Italy anyway, often with Alberto Sordi as a co-star. Antonioni seems to get slightly affected, over-stylised performances out of Vitti. I never get a sense that the actress fully enjoyed working for her then-boyfriend. I suppose, though, that Monica's natural comic timing and slightly goofy manner could never have been put to good use in something called "the alienation trilogy"! The nocturnal sequences of Vitti and her neighbour visiting their strange Anglophone acquaintance, whose home looks like a caricature African colonialist's haven, added some subtly dark humour and a surreal touch to the central part of the movie. When the three women go looking for the African-born expat's escaped poodle, I smilingly realised how many different forms a comedy moment can take.
Last but not least, as a Roman born in 1972, I was fascinated to see the smart but cold suburb known as EUR (originally founded by Mussolini) as it looked in the early 60s, when whole sections of it were still only half-built and semi-deserted. It was indeed an architectural embodiment of alienation! If Antonioni had been an architect, he probably would have been a brilliant one, as he completely understands what effect urban and architectural spaces have on human states of mind.