Aching Souls: Love Songs, Declaration of War, Tomboy

Christophe Honore's Love Songs is a dreamy light-kissed romantic musical tragic romance. Because it's French, you know the double-up on romance isn't an accident: when the movie begins Ismaël Bénoliel (Louis Garrel) is in a threesome relationship with two girls, Julie Pommeraye (Ludivine Sagnier) and Alice (Clotilde Hesme). Julie is his girlfriend, the threeway is their mutual desire.

I can't tell you what other French movie's middle-moment is similar to Love Song's without spoiling both movies, but I'll say this movie shares a desire with other movies to explore the emotional trajectory of a single character as the character's life passes through multiple events that could just as well be two or more separate movies.

Love Songs investigates, for example, the role of one's partner's family in one's life when one's no longer partnered with the family, i.e. one's ex's family. When in a relationship, one's partner's family may come close to feeling like one's own, but if one wants to put distance between oneself and an ex, it may be necessary to distance oneself from the family, which might hurt the feelings of the family. In Love Songs, Julie 's family thinks of Ismaël as family, but as his life extends beyond his relationship with Julie, he comes to think of them less. "I already have a mother and father," he tells Julie's sister.

Love Songs showcases emotional details with a graceful elegance that enriches feelings of romance.The narrative isn't flattened in order to untangle emotional complexities. Honoré is faithful to his characters, honors their complexities, and doesn't "fix" them, but simply follows and observes, with a dazzling and intelligent camera that helps sharpen their emotional experiences.

This narrative technique has always been a favorite of mine for the reason that I've never truly felt like I'm the leader of all my own life's circumstances, sometimes I feel the inflluence of forces like fate, chance, chaos, catastrophe, etc. The fact is, things occur in my life outside my ideal script.

Tell you the truth, before watching it, I thought Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War was a romance movie. It isn't. But it kind of is. It's a romance with realworld intrusions, and it's fair to say their story isn't the romance Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm) and Juliet (Valérie Donzelli) anticipated upon meeting each other. Even those names, of course, refer to a terrific romance, but after the movie swiftly establishes their love affair, a child is born, and the child and his brain tumor are almost the center of the rest of the movie.

I say "almost the center" because the movie is still so much about the love affair between Romeo and Juliet, and one can often sense their love, behind a curtain of pain, even when many later scenes are set in the hospital (this makes the outdoors romance more romantic and lovely).


Donzelli depicts realities of existence and being human, and how one's quest for love and happiness is sometimes sabotaged by outside forces. She suggests dedicated love has an immense power (Romeo and Juliet's love for their son is something brave and big), and says part of our happiness comes from a choice made about one's interpretation of circumstances. 

Funny to think a lot of family movies are about kids struggling to like their parents or parents struggling to like their kids or otherwise many variations on unhealthy, damaged, dysfunctional, or broken families. But fatal sickness and hovering death can make these problems vanish, in life as in the movie. Or rather, the problems don't vanish, but there's no greater human problem than death.

Donzelli sneaks her trysts with cinema. As a smile can break a spell of sadness, so too the movie occasionally sparkles; because if the characters are not, cannot always be, sad and dull, it follows that sometimes the voice of cinema has to sing.

I'd seen and liked Céline Sciamma's previous movie Water Lilies, but I'd never seen or read about Sciamma herself. I was delighted to discover a person whom I felt I could relate to, by her age, a curious detail in her IMDb profile, and her no-bullshit and badass IMDb photo.

The underlined portion reads: "She is  totally afraid of dogs no matter their size," and she was born November 12, 1980.

It's interesting that, before I started this entry, I wouldn't have guessed Tomboy was the movie I'd have the hardest time selecting four choice screencaps to use (out of fairness to the other two movies that were given four). I don't think the camera does a great job of moving or breathing, and I don't think the aesthetics are eye-licking, but there's an intelligence to all of Sciamma's cinematic choices, sometimes subtle or subtextual.

The first photo seems important because it portrays Laure's ability to blend with boys (as Mickäel) at her age. The second photo express physical limitations, and the third captures her physical self-questioning.

It makes sense that visuals would be important to a movie about gender identity. Sciamma tends to compose a shot to frame the human elements, and this emphasis over the purely aesthetic grants her movie a lens of empathy.

I felt like Laure and her experience and private feelings were of paramount importance. She's in most shots, and when she's not in the shot she's being talked about.

During the movie I thought a lot about what looking at people means; it was interesting to see Laure observe boys to learn their mannerisms in order to imitate them. She had a special eye, different from everyone else. I thought about how one watches other people in order to learn how to be a person.

Common to each of these three French movies is the idea that characters as the center of movies creates opportunity for anything to happen, and then anything that happens is meaningful and important and relevant. If the story is the focus, character details can be off-topic and irrelevant, but if the movie is stories happening to a person, with an emphasis on the person, it seems like really and truly anything can count. It feels like the freedom of existence, rather than the rules of storytelling.

Be Yourself! ('30)

"Say, if he can sue me for what I did to him in the cafe,
they can send me to the chair for what I'll do to him in the ring. Hohohoho. Ahahahaha."

BE YOURSELF!

a boxing melodrama musical comedy from 1930

directed by Thornton Freeland

A goodhearted and successful nightclub singer volunteers her lawyering younger brother as the boxing manager of her nightclub-regular alcoholic knuckleheaded crush.

The movie is their quest to transform him from the belly-up boozing loser he is today, into the world boxing champion they know he can be tomorrow. The multi-limbed movie throws constant entertainment punches. For example, Fannie Field (Fanny Brice) listens with her gal pals to her beau's bout on the radio at her club,

is pulled away for a musical number,

and returns to the dressing room to hear the end of the boxing match on the radio,

which is intercut with her personal victory in a fight in the dressing room.

The second film from director Thornton Freeland, who went on to direct 24 more movies before retiring in 1949. None of his movies are particularly famous. This is a rare screen presence for Broadway sensation Fanny Brice, who was the subject of the Barbra Streisand movie Funny Girl and its sequel Funny Lady.

The movie's boxing scenes are silly in a regular silly way. Boxing isn't taken very seriously.

The night club performances are silly in an awesome way.
One stand-out sequence involves a devil-on-stilts, a bunch of backup dancers, Fannie behind a towering podium,

and a little movie magic.

 

F. U. N. "Serious" obstacles, like alcoholism and boy stealing, aren't investigated or developed in a way that leads to revelation or insight; these things are temporary and included to keep things forward traveling and to give the protagonists more victories.

 

They're punctuations in the story, little cheap thrills meant to seduce an audience. This is around the beginning of the Great Depression. It's commonly accepted that people's lives were horrible and bleak enough off-screen at that time, and gloomy material wasn't necessary on-screen. Like, life was horrible, let it be great in one place: the silver screen. I like these movies not only because people wear sweaters with boats on them,

but also because they offer porthole views into the world of the 30s, their clubs and art,

child entertainers,

and this feeling that everything, all misery and everything else,

can be danced away.

Trail of Robin Hood

What the fuck is this movie.

Like a flying saucer landed on Melrose and cowboys firing pistols came screaming from the ship.

Roy Rogers plays a character named Roy Rogers who helps charcter Jack Holt played by actor Jack Holt. The horse, Trigger, credited when Rogers is credited, plays a horse named Trigger. The dog Bullet plays a dog named Bullet, but is not credited, which is fucked. Several times Bullet rescues Rogers.

Within the movie they show a silent Holt movie that doesn't appear to be a real movie:

There's a line that's like "the squares are putting on a turkey shoot" and there are wagons and cars -- the movie is from 1950 and I think set in 1950, with a town, and cowboys on horses, and actors who play cowboys on television shows.

Are these people pretending or what, what is happening. What the fuck. I felt like it was a time traveling movie in which characters were time traveling without acknowledging it.

The plot of the movie concerns Christmas trees. Holt wants to sell Christmas trees cheaply "so every child can have one," but this other company wants to keep selling them for 10X the price because money. The other company is headed by a dad whose daughter does a thing that's and then and als--

Sometimes Rogers sings positive, family-friendly country songs^};"@,(.

The little girl pictured above (right) is a tough and brave badass who shoots guns and slingshots. Her dad or big brother or whatever is her bungling and cowardly foil. They're funny.

Her dad is like "you like the turkey so much you should sleep with it" (she won a turkey, whom she named Galahad, at the local turkey shoot) and the girl is like "so what you slept with a horse once" and the dad is like "I had to, it was his blanket."

animalsloveeloveanimalsanimalsloveanimalsloveanimalsloveanimals

I cried at the end of this movie. All these other dudes who I guess were also cowboy actors came to help. Like these dudes who were actor-cowboys in real life played within the movie actors Holt knew from his acting days. Neither in the movie nor in the 'real life' the movie suggests is being a cowboy in the 1950s considered fucking insane.

Besides that everything was simple and made total sense. The good people wanted kids to have Christmas trees. They wanted to sing songs and they wanted girls to wear dresses and cook dinner. The other people, the meanies, can go to eitch ee double-hockeysticks. (HELL!) They wanted only rich kids who could pay $8 for a Christmas tree to have Christmas trees, and they were tricksters, connivers, and saboteurs. The good guys fought the good cause; two would-be evildoers converted from the middle; and bad guys were plain as shit wicked.

The movie was directed by William Witney, whom I want to further explore in future posts, and get into how I heard about him, and discover what the fuck is going on.