When the Sea Rises
Directed by Gilles Porte and Yolande Moreau
The most obvious style difference between American and European dramatic movies is their willingness to let scenes play out without rushing them. American films are, and always have been, very cut-to-the-chase; as screenwriting teachers keep telling their students, the goal is to get into and out of every scene as early as possible. European dramas are often more willing to linger, to contemplate the silences between words, soak up the atmosphere of a particular setting, or just enjoy an apropos-of-nothing moment.
Gilles Porte and Yolande Moreau's When the Sea Rises—about a female comedian who edges toward an affair while on tour—is a succession of silences, settings and moments. It doesn't attempt anything revolutionary, but it's sweet, sad and engaging, and part of its appeal lies in its willingness to enter the characters' world and loiter there, letting us see what they see and hear what they hear. (It's the opposite of the storytelling in The New World, which is incessantly mediated, fractured and recontextualized.) Like Last Resort, Satin Rouge, Keane and other such features, When the Sea Rises is very much in the moment and comfortable with (even proud of) it smallness.
There's some reality/fiction overlap here. Moreau is playing Irene, a version of herself—a forty-something, non-glamorous (plump) stage star who travels around northern France performing her one-woman show Dirty Business (Moreau's real-life stage show). It's a very dark comedy in which an elderly woman who has just murdered her husband muses on sex, love and mortality. Moreau says she was inspired to create the character after observing old women behaving girlishly at dance halls; her stage character wears a paper mache mask with a bulbous nose that effectively abstracts the actress, making her a living caricature.
Her unreal appearance, combined with Moreau's deliberately tiny, hollow-sounding stage voice, is both eerie and charming, but certainly not sexy, and that's what makes the attraction between Irene and a trucker named Dries (newcomer Wim Willaert) so surprising and wonderful. He's not simply attracted to her – a fact he has to work to convince her of. He's attracted to her talent. After helping Irene with car trouble on a rural road, Irene gives him a couple of free tickets to her show, and he goes and falls in love with her and the show. The spell Irene casts as a performer is what ignites the spark in Dries' hound-dog eyes; she calls him up onstage – self-interestedly, because she wants to make the experience more powerful – and he's enraptured.
Usually films about performers reverse the gender equation and make the man the creative powerhouse and the woman the groupie; here it's the opposite, and this reversal creates a low-level electricity you don't usually feel in movies this small and quiet. Between the sight of a simple man worshiping a woman's talent and the woman's decidedly non-Hollywood appearance—she looks a bit like Roseanne—and the filmmakers' refusal to mock or even kid their hopeless ardor, it's as if a whole medium's assumptions are being turned on their heads.
There's guilt in the movie (Irene is married, and often talks to her absent husband on the phone), but When the Sea Rises is not about condemning mistakes or demonstrating the right way to live. It's about something that happened – a narrative spun across a series of documentary-like moments: Irene giving Dries a ride home, him smoking in the passenger seat while the tires rumble and hiss on the road; Dries giving Irene a tour of the warehouse where he stores the giant mache and plastic heads he transports via truck; Dries and Irene frolicking at a street festival, then sinking drunkenly in a bar; Irene in a car, following Dries and his pals toward a coffee shop after the show, the camera following the scooters as they rip through quiet streets, the sputtering whine of their engines presented without the adornment of music. They connect; the world goes on about its business.
Other mountains. Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain is an excellent, often powerful film, and its social significance can't be denied. No gay-themed drama released last year contains an image as subversive, as revolutionary, as mainstream-baiting, as that Fourth of July image of Heath Ledger's stoic queer Ennis looming against a sky full of fireworks after thrashing two guys who refused to stop cursing in the presence of his children. It's truly iconic – a visualization of the incendiary passions rattling around inside this stoic frontier queer, and the greatest fuck you to homophobes in American movie history. (Its says to any bigot who might be watching, “If this guy was John Wayne, doing the exact same thing in the same circumstances, you'd love him — so go ahead and love him.”) Twenty-five years after the box-office disaster of Making Love, a major entertainment company has released a star-studded motion picture that is specifically and unapologetically about the love between two men, and the movie is shaping up to be a hit (scattered protests notwithstanding). That's progress.
But it's not the year's best movie – not by a long shot – and to say so is, in some sense, to mistake social significance for art. (The Los Angeles Film Critics chose Brokeback for top honors.) In actuality, Brokeback is this year's Million Dollar Baby; it's emotionally and even politically resonant, but aesthetically, it's not inventing or even refining anything, just reiterating. Even the gentleman Ang Lee seemed to allow for this possibility at the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner Sunday night, when he presented the award for Best Foreign Language Film to Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, an equally serious and passionate but much deeper and more aesthetically daring film. Lee admitted that when he looked at his colleague's movies, he was jealous. What artist with eyes and ears wouldn't be?
The near-unanimous praise for A History of Violence—winner of the Village Voice poll, and near-winner of the National Society of Film Critics' award for best picture—continues to puzzle me. It's an excellent film, for what it is – an intellectualized gloss on the assassin-living-a-quiet-domestic-life-until-he's-dragged-back-into-the-life movie. But after having read what seems like ten jillion reviews of the damned thing, I have yet to see any convincing evidence of an “ambiguous” or “conflicted” attitude toward the violence it shows us. The family is pure and decent and kind, the marriage is strong—the Stalls are like a Norman Rockwell couple that still enjoys a good 69—the villains are ugly, nasty and horrible, and the sweet, super-deadly hero only kills them, and never, say, a person tangentially connected to them (the subject of Munich's disturbing middle third) or, God forbid, an innocent person. When defenders of the film describe an ambivalent or shocked attitude toward violence, are they talking about Cronenberg's ghastly close-ups of torn flesh (which frankly aren't much worse than what you'd see in a mid-90s Schwarzenegger picture) or the admittedly great final scene, which retroactively shrouds the movie in an aura of hushed shame?
According to both the Oscars and the New York Film Critics Circle, the best picture of 1947 was Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement, in which Gregory Peck's gentile journalist goes undercover to expose anti-Semitism in America. At the time, I'm sure critics felt they were striking a blow for social justice by voting for it, but in hindsight, that movie seems more earnest than artful. In any case, it can't touch Monsieur Verdoux, Shoeshine, Out of the Past, Great Expectations, Black Narcissus, Kiss of Death, The Lady From Shanghai or another polemic on anti-Semitism like Edward Dmytryk's searing, superior Crossfire (which was originally supposed to be about homophobia). The National Board of Review went with Monsieur Verdoux, which now seems, if not the right choice, than certainly a wiser one. As I've said before, awards are just the first draft of movie history. First drafts are full of mistakes.
