De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, read my review Options

[moazzam]

http://moazzamsheikh.blogspot.com/2009/09/...est-arrete.html

thanks,

-moazzam

[kolmogorov]

An insightful review, Moazzam. Quite intrigued by how you see the tension between French colonial experience and the desire to view France exclusively as a bastion of liberal, humanist tradition play out in the New Wave films. I thought that desire to whitewash history kind of won out. Battle of Algiers was made by an Italian. Not sure, if before Hanecke's (an Austrian btw) Cache - there was any attempt to deal with that colonial legacy. You see the same dynamic with respect to Vichy France - where the dominant French narrative has been that the resistance fighters represented the real France (the France of sweet-smelling Enlightenment values) while the collaborators and the Vichy regime is considered an aberration. Even fascism with its own deep roots in French political and cultural spheres is considered a transplant in this view.

Getting back to the film, Jacques Audiard is quite a favorite director of mine. I love the exquisite precision and rigor of his direction, but his strategy of always rubbing the viewer's nose in quite explicit and bloody violence at the end of the movie (both Read My Lips and Beat That My Heart Skipped do that) - which seems an ideological move on his part - sort of mars the experience a little bit for me - though I assume that is indeed his intention.

You bring up Pakistani/Indian films - and it is my favorite hobby-horse on this forum - that India does not have a film culture. Indian films can be compared to indian soccer. Yes we play the game but we do not know what it is. Ray was our original mimic-man and we have a few in bombay enthralled to mainstream hollywood - another sort of mimic men - but other than that it's a f***king desert.

PS: When I indulge in such broadsides, I cannot help recall all the members of the bourgeoisie shown in Ray's Nayak who condemn Bengali mainstream cinema without having deigned to see one. That is almost a running gag through the first half of that movie.

This post has been edited by kolmogorov: Oct 16 2009, 01:34 AM

[Trips]

Thanks to Maureen for this:

[kolmogorov]

I laughed more at the accents (I know I am childish that way) than at the actual satire. It has dated quite badly, I thought (hand-held cameras are not the exclusive preserve of "art cinema" any longer). Also Audiard is squarely a genre film-maker.

[Trips]

Oh dear, the video clip was not a follow-up of Moazzam's review or Kolmogorov's review of that review, or Audiard's films. Film mod may move that post to some appropriate thread in the member lounge if (s)he wishes.

[kolmogorov]

Hi Trips,

The video is a perfectly fine spoof of a certain kind of eggheaded-ness. Being taken for one in a public forum, by others, if not by you in this instance is fine with me.

K.

This post has been edited by kolmogorov: Oct 21 2009, 11:19 PM

[abhiruchi]

Watched "The beat that my heart skipped" today after reading through these posts & Moazzam’s review. I liked the movie & thought that it was well crafted & very well paced. It was interesting to watch Jacques Audiard's interview afterwards in which he mentions that he simply replaced the Italian mafia in the American setting (of the original ‘Fingers’) with a Russian one in order to make sense with the French setting. He also says that he chose dodgy real estate crime as apposed to say loan-shark mafia because he wanted to choose a crime that does wrong to ordinary people who don't cross their paths with these criminals willingly but are still affected by it.

This post has been edited by abhiruchi: Nov 1 2009, 08:16 PM

[kolmogorov]

It was interesting to watch Jacques Audiard's interview afterwards in which he mentions that he simply replaced the Italian mafia in the American setting (of the original ‘Fingers’) with a Russian one in order to make sense with the French setting.

Well maybe, but it is a little hard to take JA at his word. His latest film, for example, while being hailed for showing the iniquities of French prison system - is also far more violent than is supposedly true of that milieu - that is fidelity to a French setting in a realist way does not strike me as his primary objective. Moazzam thinks the Russian gangster bit to be racist - and while not going that far - JA's explanation is of a somewhat glib move-on-nothing-to-see-here-folks-just-substituting-russians-for-italians nature to be entirely credible.

This post has been edited by kolmogorov: Nov 5 2009, 11:03 AM

[kolmogorov]

this is so exciting! my second chance to point people to Gadamer on AS! - this particular conundrum - of what an artist thinks (in mechanistic dare i say, engineering terms) and what the observer imputes turns out to be long-standing problem in the philosophy of aesthetics - will post the exact quote later.