Upstairs / Downstairs at the Court of Versailles

Film review: Les Adieux à la Reine Directed by Benoît Jacquot, written by Gilles Taurand, Benoît Jacquot, GMT Productions

Touring the palace at Versailles today, it’s impossible not to wonder What It Was Like: the well-preserved main buildings and grounds do nothing so much as to evoke refined courtiers and glamorous ladies-in-waiting swanning around the gardens or lolling about the Hall of Mirrors waiting for an appearance from Louis XVI or, on the rare occasion she emerged from her aerie, his queen, Marie-Atoinette.

What visitors are not allowed to see are the servants’ quarters: the grimy back halls of Versailles where an entire shadow population of servants lived out their lives.  Director Benoît Jacquot’s new film Les Adieux à la Reine finally lets us see what life was really like at at the grand palais.  

Set on the eve of the French Revolution, Les Adieux à la Reine takes place behind the scenes, away from the gilded opulence of the royal salons and into the dark garrets and corridors that house everyone from footmen to stable boys to gondoliers (!), and the young courtiers and ladies-in-waiting just at the beginning of their careers – careers that are about to be cruelly cut short when the Bastille is stormed the very next day.

But on this day, life at Versailles carries on as normal, engaged in complex rituals of subservience, backstabbing and vicious competition among the entire hierarchy of court attendants vying for protection, patronage, strategic marriages and, ultimately, favour from the King or Queen.  Seemingly unaware of the unrest in the capital, the Court at Versaille is just as grandiose and frivolous and oblivious as every cliché makes it out to be.

Through the Looking Glass

Young Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux), an educated young woman called upon to read for the Queen, is just as wrapped up in clawing her way to the top as everyone else. When we meet her, she is groggily preparing to wait upon the Queen, trading barbs with rivals, begging perfume from an ally, forced to run all the way to the Petit Trianon and yet appear calm and collected upon her arrival.  She is on the lowest rung of the ladder, a fact driven home when the Queen’s favorite, the duchesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) sweeps out of the Queen’s chambers and past Sidonie as though the poor girl doesn’t even exist.

But no matter: Sidonie is both ambitious and besotted with the queen herself.  As is necessary for all young ladies of good standing at court, she is determined and pragmatic about finding a protector and, ultimately, a husband – despite being charmed by a handsome young gondolier, a drageur both literal and figurative.  She is a girl who gets ahead of herself, as illustrated by her habit of marching through Versailles at such speed she literally pitches forward and falls – more than once.  She’s clearly a girl with a future… if her world were not about to come crashing down.

Presenting herself before the Queen, a simple act of kindness on Marie-Antoinette’s part – calling for and herself applying a salve to ease the mosquito bites that tattoo Sidonie’s arms – seduces the girl so completely that desire mingles with devotion to produce a heady and permanent mix of blind loyalty to her queen.

It is this devotion, bordering on idolatry, which keeps Sidonie at Versailles and in service to Marie-Antoinette despite the mass exodus of servants, courtiers, noblemen and women, guards and anyone else who wishes to keep their head.  Not that Sidonie’s devotion is entirely innocent – she attempts to gather and trade information to be used for her own protection and ambitions, both virtuous and selfish.  Her determination and deft trade in secrets points to what would have been a successful and possibly illustrious career at Versailles, a painful irony since court life is about to come a permanent and violent end.

Let Them Eat Torte

Played by Diane Kruger, this Marie-Antoinette is mostly a mélange of popular historical clichés rather than fact.  She is, at the film’s opening, the frivolous, impetuous Marie-Antoinette that everyone loves to hate, seducing her ladies-in-waiting, barely bothering to get out of her sumptuous bed, spending her days being read to by the likes of Sidonie or designing new gowns for herself and her particuliers, her favored inner-circle of friends that included the beautiful Duchesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) with whom, it was rumoured, Marie-Antoinette was engaged in a lesbian affair.  Writer-director Benoit Jacquot bases his characters upon these rumours and titillates with suggested lesbian encounters and desire that has relatively little to do with the plot, suggesting that Marie-Antoinette was more concerned over her relationship with her lesbian lover than the death sentence she was increasingly certain was inevitable.  To Kruger’s credit, she captures Marie-Antoinette’s growing panic and ensuing resolve beautifully, even if she seems to get serious about the situation a little too late, vowing to stay by her husband’s side while entreating the Duchesse de Polignac to save herself and flee France.

Art vs. Reality

In reality, Marie-Antoinette was, during this time, mourning her eldest child, the Dauphin, dead only a month before of tuberculosis.  She had already turned her back on the duchesse de Polignac, whose continued extravagances and frivolities at court in defiance of the budget reforms adopted by the King wasn’t doing Marie-Antoinette’s reputation any favours.  For her part, the duchesse de Polignac abandoned ship in May 1789, leaving not only France behind, but her children as well, abandoning Queen, country and kin two months before the storming of the Bastille and the removal of the royal family from Versailles.  

But Les Adieux à la Reine is not so much about historical fact as it is about the people lost to history. The panic behind the scenes in the back stairs and rooms of Versailles – crowding into candlelit corridors stricken rats on a sinking ship when the first list of condemned is circulated – contrasts beautifully with the strange, dream-like tension playing out in the royal halls.  While Sidonie moves between the two, increasingly desperate to steer events far beyond her control, the two worlds eventually merge to create a night-terror of fear, confusion and despair.  Historical figures are often writ large against the backdrop of the events that cement their place in time; we never learn what happens to the little people, the common men and women with no control over the events of their time but who often suffer most.

May 2012, France Magazine

Cry the Beloved Country: 24 Mexican Artists on Mexico

Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000 / 2012 at Musée d’Art Moderne April 2012

The curators of Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne claim in the exhibition literature that in today’s world of globalized economies – artistic, technological, financial – featuring the art of a single nation seems almost dépassé while at the same time throwing into sharp relief questions of identify and specificity.

Regardless of European unions, NAFTA, and the borderless regions of cyberspace, if ever the relevance and purpose of art is called into question, witness the work produced by artists whose country is in great flux.  The best 20th century example of this is the German Expressionists, who started out merely playing with color, line and form and ended up creating a visual language that aptly gave voice to the jagged, broken horror of Germany – and Europe – under the Third Reich.

Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012 creates a visual zócalo of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary artists as they comment on their country’s current state of flux.  The commentary is not bright – there is no evidence of margaritas or Mariachis, no Virgin of Guadalupe, no quirky Dio de lo Muertos, sombreros or cumbia. Instead, the 24 artists featured are quite clearly (and understandably) angry, bitter, dark and bordering on apocalyptic.  

Over the past 15 years, Mexico has been (not so quietly) been going through a revolution.  In 2000, after 71 years of the ruling PRI’s stronghold on the country, Vicente Fox won the presidency.  Ushering in a new era of democracy and transparency, the Fox administration’s main accomplishment was to lay the groundwork for the current president, Felipe Calderón.  In office since 2006, Calderón has introduced sweeping social, economic and political changes across the country – mostly innovative and good – while his infamous war on drugs has resulted in escalating violence between the military, law enforcement and the drug cartels, and more and more innocent Mexicans getting caught in the crossfire.  Meanwhile, the country is painfully wrangling itself onto the world economic stage; painful because it’s the world’s 5th largest economy, but is perpetually constrained by the complicated social and economic relationships with the United States that often seem designed to give Mexico the short end of the stick.

Art in Mexico has a way of relating to the elements that North American art does not.  It is both indoors and out, invites the dust and the heat and the foliage and the blue sky in while at the same time straining to be released back out into the wild, into that very same blue sky.

Walking into the exhibit it is this longing for flight that first impacts the viewer. Arturo Hernández Alcázar’s Black Kites (Bird of Ill Omen) / Papalotes Negros (Ave de Mal Agüero) is a flock of lamp-blackened children’s kites are tethered to the ground by bricks and stones while they strain against the museum’s ceiling for release.  The effect is both breathtaking and heartbreaking: the beauty of those kites aloft both tethered to the ground and trapped by the ceiling a poignant metaphor for Mexico’s future which, as long as it is chained to its past, can never truly soar.

Bayrol Jiménez’ Maldito, a wall mural in line-drawing that is both graphic art and baroque masterpiece, explodes across the gallery.  Beginning with a cherub whose guts literally spill all of Mexican history onto the canvas, the wall, the floor and all the way across the room, Jiménez’ pen saunters past the majestic Aztec and Mayan ruins, meanders through the cult of San Muerte, wanders across the drug wars and immigration, and ends in  Catholicism, presided over by a perverted Mexican coat of arms, the snake strangling the cherub and the Mexican eagle bearing a death’s head and American stars on its breast. It’s an incredibly busy piece that at first overwhelms, like a Mexican oilcloth shopping bag brightly covered in images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, cherubs, stars, rays of divinity, and who knows what else – a jumble of kitsch at first glance, but significant and often charming once the eye gets used to it.  Of course, there is nothing charming about Jimenez’ Maldito, although it’s all as significant as the words painted across the floor that bridge the two separate parts of the work: Una piedra en el camino me enseño que mi destino es a robar y robar y robar y robar… (a bump in the road showed me that my destiny is to steal and rob and steal and steal… ).

The rest of the works in the first rooms are more conceptual, although equally moving.  A giant structure of windsocks called Credibility Crisis is on the one hand blatantly obvious in its statement about hot air blowing in every direction, but then its overstatement becomes again symbolic.  Niños Perdidos is a series of tiny photocopied reproductions of the missing children flyers plastered all over Mexico’s major cities, the images themselves often blurry and vague as though the longer the child is missing, its image disappears too.  A wall of bricks without mortar is meant to represent Kafka’s The Castle, but works also as a comment on the walls and fences America keeps threatening to build along the Mexican border as futile attempt at stemming illegal immigration.

Unfortunately, the curators saved all the best works for the beginning of the exhibition.  It’s a great way to seduce you into the following rooms, looking for and expecting to be as powerfully impacted by the first few paces.  This isn’t the case.  While there are notable installations, they are either so abstract or performative as to effectively lose their punch.  The most sensational piece in one of the subsequent rooms is a room – sit in a dark room and watch a videotaped interview of a killer for the drug lords, a highly disturbing (or satisfying, depending on your kind of kink) experience that recreates the videographer’s experience of being locked in a hotel room with a man who has, unconscientiously, killed literally hundreds of people.  Other film and video installations include Carlos Reygadas, Nicolás Pereda, and Natalia Almada’s El Velador, a far more subtle and strange documentary of one of the most incredible cemeteries you’ll ever see.

The final piece is video installation of a women’s football game played at high altitude. The curators called the combination of female teams in a traditionally male dominated society playing a match against the backdrop of the ancient ruins “surreal” (although: have they not seen Mexico’s National Women’s Football Team?  They came in second in the 2010 Women’s CONCACAF). Without the liner notes, I’m not sure I would have come to the same conclusion as the curators, but sitting and watching for a while – that blue sky, the hot dust, and two teams straining against their environment to win a game – it does strike one as surreal, especially when you consider that the real struggle in that breathtaking geography is against each other.

Vingt Paris Magazine, May 2012

The Birth of Burton

Tim Burton - L'exposition 7 March - 5 August 2012 @ La Cinémathèque

written by Susie Kahlich and Brian Clark

In 2009, curators Ron Magliozzi and Jenny He of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) decided that what the world needs now is a full retrospective of the work of American filmmaker Tim Burton.  Rooting through boxes and file cabinets and even Burton’s childhood home, the two intrepid curators dragged out for display everything from childhood illustrations to high school projects to rejection letters to script notes, accompanied by special works commissioned of Burton specifically for the show and other props and ephemera from Burton’s films.  The exhibit was such a hit that Burton, Magliozzi and He, with MoMA’s backing, decided to take their show on the road, aiming for a single European location to remount it and introduce Burton’s world to his fans on the Continent.  Burton chose Paris, and La Cinématheque Française, who opened the show with great fanfare on 7 March.

Tim Burton’s fetishes, obsessions and stylistic influences aren’t much of a secret at this point. Anybody who has seen even one or two of his films already knows that Burton’s is a brain fueled by Gothic and German Expressionist sensibilities, 50’s B-movie nostalgia, melodrama, and gleeful, juvenile humor. With a career spanning almost 30 years, Burton’s distinct visual style and quirky storytelling have made such films as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Nightmare Before Christmas downright iconic.  

But while Burton’s style is admirably bizarre and often engaging, it’s hardly mysterious, and the artwork on display here (some of which dates back to his high school years) never diverges much from what we expect. Paradoxically though, the consistency and sheer volume of work proves rewarding on a deeper level; by the end of the exhibit it’s hard not to be impressed and even inspired by Burton’s tenacity, as well as the obvious joy he takes in creating. The exhibition itself is less of a display of all the cool stuff Burton has done, and more of a witness to the fascinating process of the evolution and development of an artist.  Because whatever you think of his films, Burton is an artist in the true sense of the word: someone who cannot help but create, as evidence in the sheer volume of artifacts on display.

The exhibition begins in an appropriately carnivalesque fashion with a series of giant Polaroids taken by Burton.  The subject matter are typically Burton-esque, but the real interest lies in the giant Polaroid camera Burton took them with.  Only one of six in the world, the Big Polaroid actually takes instant big Polaroids – the perfect toy for the director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and a man who clearly still delights in being a kid.  

The exhibit next funnels the viewer into another black-lit room featuring a carousel with characters inspired by the monsters in Beetlejuice, and created specifically for the exhibit.  And here is the first taste of what, on the surface, appears to be a rather predictable retrospective of Burton’s whimsically twisted imaginings but, on further reflection, reveals something of Burton the Artist, a man who’s art is inspired by his own art, in the cyclical way art so often feeds upon itself.   

Finally dark gives way to light, and visitors find themselves in an expansive room decked out floor to ceiling with paintings, drawings, poetry and short animations by Burton, as well as sculptural creatures brought into 3D existence based on old sketches.  Certainly, you can try to examine all of the artifacts individually, but the room functions more effectively as a whole; a joyful, dizzying testament to just how deeply-rooted Burton’s influences and obsessions are.

The art ranges from giant canvases covered in dark colors and Jack Skellington heads to doodles on napkins and hotel stationary. The main aspect of Burton’s art here that doesn’t already dominate his films is a series of illustrated poems that owe as much to the playfulness of Dr. Seuss as they do to the macabre sensibility of Edgar Allen Poe (as noted by a Disney executive to whom a teenage Burton had sent the illustrated manuscript and who, rather gently as one can read in the letter on display, rejected it).

Eventually, the exhibition settles into a mostly chronological and incredibly thorough timeline of Burton’s life, including early films, abandoned projects and rejected illustrations, as well as community posters Burton created as a kid, doodles and notes from art classes, and early animations for Disney projects that Disney rejected as “too dark.”

The final, least expansive section consists of props, concept art, and occasionally script notes from each of Burton’s films. Here, what could have been a merely diverting collection of memorabilia for die-hard fans instead takes on a new dimension of clarity, when coupled with the staggering parallels to the art from previous rooms.

Burton developed his talents at California Institute of the Arts, a school specifically designed to develop apprentice animators for Disney. There’s even a wall of bizarre drawings he made during this period in order to keep from getting bored with the generic animation required of him. Also, his completely-unused concept-art for Disney’s The Black Cauldron would have probably terrified even parents who accompanied their children to the film.

From there, he went straight into the studio system with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and he hasn’t left since. And so perhaps we can thank the overwhelming normalcy of the mainstream studio system for spurring Burton to create such bizarre, iconic heroes as Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice.  

Ultimately, the exhibition cultivates a portrait of Burton as an outsider who turned to art as a means of rebelling against the overwhelming stagnation and conformity of his suburban Burbank upbringing – the Goth misfit at Sunnydale High School, the weird punk kid at the junior prom, the dorky freak who could draw that the jocks both scorned and admired. And perhaps this hypothesis helps explain why Burton has held so tight to the same imagery and style for so many years.

For, while it’s never explicitly explored, it seems he never quite escaped this world of conformity that drove him to create in the first place. Burbankian influences appear in every one of his films.  The picture-perfect, candy-colored housing development in Edward Scissorhands is a direct reference to Burbank itself, one of the first planned suburban developments, houses all of a type and streets laid out on a strict grid pattern, almost brutal in its conformity.  The creepy, saucer-eyed child props in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are clearly based on the Bob’s Big Boy, the original of which is still offering a giant burger to passing cars on Burbank Boulevard.  

Whatever the reason though, Burton’s steadfast commitment to his strange world and his ability to push it into the mainstream is ultimately inspiring and kind of sweet, even if the imagery itself is rarely surprising at this point. During the press conference, when asked what a Tim Burton police drama would be like, the soft-spoken director mused that even when he tries to branch out, he always comes back to the same ideas and images, whether on purpose or not. And, given that one of the most important traits of any artist is the ability to be honest with themselves, and also, that Burton is damn good at what he does, who can really blame him?

The exhibit itself is an inspiring contemplation of what it takes to be an artist in the world: persistence in the face of rejection, commitment to a belief, courage to be different, and the intelligence to go where the love is.  It’s telling that while these days Burton calls Notting Hill home (“I like weather,” he quipped when asked why he doesn’t live in Southern California), he chose Paris as the only location of his expo rather than the more obvious choice of London.  “The French speak about film so lovingly.  Even if they don’t like your movie, they still speak about it beautifully. But in London they don’t like me so much and they’re not very kind.”  And La Cinématheque Française loves Tim Burton.

March 2012, Vingt Paris Magazine

March Film Events

One of our favorite words in French cinema is séance: for all its straightforwardness to the French filmgoer, it cannot help but evoke Ouija boards, candles, spirit possession, crazy old ladies, and other haunting fun for the Anglophone.  Genius Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin bridges the gap with his SPIRITSMES at the Centre Pompidou as part of Un Nouveau Festival 2012.  Channeling the ghosts of long forgotten scripts and abandoned projects from some of the worlds greatest directors (lovingly tweaked by the great American poet John Ashbery), Maddin invites the public on set as he creates one film per day by putting his actors in a trance and allowing them to be “possessed” by the wandering spirit of forgotten art.  With Udo Kier, Mathieu Almaric, Maria de Medeiros and more.  It’s only the coolest thing ever.  Now through 12 March.

Spiritismes, un proposition de Guy Maddin
Centre Georges Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou, 75004 Paris
Métro: Rambuteau

I love Paris in the Springtime!  Now that the bitter cold has gone and we are in that balmy, slushy limbo between winter and printemps, it’s hard not to make like a Parisian starling and sing, sing, sing, non?  Forum des Images brings us the city in song with its new cycle Paris en chansons, covering everything from documentaries about the early days of Paris radio stars to the beloved musicals that have scored every cinematic version of the city from organ grinders on the banks of the Seine to rap in the banlieue.  Begins 2 March.

Forum des Images
Porte St Eustache, 75001
Métro: Chatelet-Les Halles

Tim Burton – L’exposition!  Influenced by the German Expressionist mise en scene, filmmaker Tim Burton’s feature work is further informed by his own drawings, sketches, animated short films and other ephemera.  Following the highly successful exhibit of these lesser-known and often never before seen works at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2010, Burton has chosen La Cinémathèque Française to introduce these works to European audiences.  Presented in conjunction with MoMA, the exhibition features screenings of Burton’s feature films, as well as a live-streaming Master Class through Arte TV, broadcast 5 March at 3pm.  Exhibit opens 7 March.

La Cinémathèque Française
51, rue de Bercy 75012
Métro: Bercy

Combining the best of literature and film, the 23rd Festival Théatres au Cinéma de Bobigny this year celebrates the films of Barbet Schroeder, one of the most famous auteurs of the French New Wave and beloved for his adaptations of Fernando Vallejo (La Virgen de Los Sicarios, 2000) and Charles Bukowski (Barfly, 1987), among his vast body of work (also: Mad Men, and a delightful cameo in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!).  Discussion, debate, screenings and Carte Blanche in the lovely theatres of Bobigny.  Begins 7 March.

Magic Cinéma
Centre commercial Bobigny 2
Rue du Chemin Vert 93000 Bobigny
Métro: Bobigny, Pablo Picasso

Be a part of film history!  The Goethe Institute is gearing up for its 50th anniversary in Paris with Jubilee celebrations all summer long, and and invites anyone with memories to share about all the cool stuff they’ve done at the Institute to send in a short film clip and be included in their Jubilee Documentary, screening at the Jubilee celebrations in May.  Personally, we fondly recall the Goethe Institute as an oasis of free Ritter bars and Gummi bears on one very long Nuit Blanche.  Deadline is 15 March.  

For more information email hesse@paris.goethe.org or visit www.goethe.de.

Goethe Institut
17 avenue d'Iéna, 75116 Paris
Métro: Iéna

VINGT Paris Monthly Film Series!  The VINGT Paris Film Series showcases independent feature-length film and documentaries from France and beyond. This month, enjoy the cinematic stylings and house beats of writer-director Mikis Fernandez’s feature debut, Living In Extasy.  The story of four childhood friends seeking sex, salvation and a good techno beat on the night of the summer’s biggest House Party, Living In Extasy combines a throbbing soundtrack and inventive animation on a rollercoaster ride from rave to redemption and back again over the course of one very long, hot night.  25 March @ 7:30pm.  Tickets €10.

Le Beverly Cinema
14, rue de la Ville Neuve 75002 Paris
Métro: Bonne Nouvelle

One of the most important festivals in the world, Festival International de Films des Femmes, kicks off in Créteil and remains concerned about the artistic, political and social engagement of women in the world via the medium of film. Held primarily at Maison des Arts in Créteil, séances can be found at other two venues at Les Cinéma du Palais and La Lucarne.  Begins 30 March.

Festival International de Films des Femmes
Maison Des Arts, Place Salvador-allende, Créteil 94000
Metro: Créteil-Université

March 2012, Vingt Paris Magazine