Changing Times André Téchiné
its own way is both sensitive and refined, Téchiné takes us again to that place that is also become his film, to Tangier, a city he had already filmed in Far and where He obviously loves his characters walk into this space is the boundary between the finite and the infinite world. This time it's Anthony, an entrepreneur who is not in the city aboard a truck as far in, but by plane and then black Mercedes, a sign of wealth and prosperity. But as far into it just looking for an absolute, a ghost that has haunted him for thirty years, and he can not undo, Cecilia, the woman he loved and whose face haunts her mind . In this frame both romantic and obsolete Téchiné constructed a film of rare power, not only because it does not leave locked up in the tics and clichés of the genre, but because its vibrant lyricism comes contradictions of his history, his way to both slow and uneven set of characters. The beauty of the film comes from his total openness to the other along with some fruitful opposition between the characters and situations.
Oppositions are clear from the start: Antoine is a man whose destiny unfolds around a single fixed idea, Cecile. The time for him does not exist because he could never turn the page of this love, and he continues to feed his fantasy life reunion. His time is frozen, immobile, and Téchiné makes this idea more palpable that it opposes the permanent movement and daily Antony, who, through his work, constantly moves in space. The opposition between inner time, cast in the lava of love, and time outdoors, subject to constant change, and gives consistency to this area congealing inside the character, which otherwise would have been more abstract. Many scenes show Anthony in his yard, overseeing the work, walking in mud and mire, in meetings, and these scenes are linked with other where it is completely driven by his obsession unique. Another factor helping to build this opposition: it is a part of the business that, and then the epitome of the character by Gérard Depardieu. Being an entrepreneur is arguably the least romantic that is, to handle large blocks of concrete, digging the earth with giant machines, not to mention the noise itself detestable that these machines produce, is not, prima facie, to conducive to poetry. The triviality of both aesthetics and ethics of the profession is emphasized many times by Téchiné. Thus Antony, who is currently building a media center in the region, sponsored by the Moroccan authorities to counteract the influence of Al Jazeera, said he does not care about politics and that his only goal is to perform the work that he has ordered. Yet Téchiné emerges from this work, a poetry rarely shown in film. It builds character, it does bury the first scene of the film under the rubble of his yard, a sign that the events and the earth contain always an elusive, risk and danger, as well as the feelings which the cons character can only bend. This collapse is frightening that, in the early scenes, just open the movie and the character to control, to the defeat of all control, at random. Téchiné could titrate his film Destroy, she said, as the opening scene, which is later in the narrative chronologically, begins with a tabula rasa, paradoxically, by the sudden breaking and telluric forces of nature. Similarly, one could hardly imagine at the outset that the actor Depardieu could embody a character so lovesick, also possessed, demonic in the sense of the word.
its own way is both sensitive and refined, Téchiné takes us again to that place that is also become his film, to Tangier, a city he had already filmed in Far and where He obviously loves his characters walk into this space is the boundary between the finite and the infinite world. This time it's Anthony, an entrepreneur who is not in the city aboard a truck as far in, but by plane and then black Mercedes, a sign of wealth and prosperity. But as far into it just looking for an absolute, a ghost that has haunted him for thirty years, and he can not undo, Cecilia, the woman he loved and whose face haunts her mind . In this frame both romantic and obsolete Téchiné constructed a film of rare power, not only because it does not leave locked up in the tics and clichés of the genre, but because its vibrant lyricism comes contradictions of his history, his way to both slow and uneven set of characters. The beauty of the film comes from his total openness to the other along with some fruitful opposition between the characters and situations.
Oppositions are clear from the start: Antoine is a man whose destiny unfolds around a single fixed idea, Cecile. The time for him does not exist because he could never turn the page of this love, and he continues to feed his fantasy life reunion. His time is frozen, immobile, and Téchiné makes this idea more palpable that it opposes the permanent movement and daily Antony, who, through his work, constantly moves in space. The opposition between inner time, cast in the lava of love, and time outdoors, subject to constant change, and gives consistency to this area congealing inside the character, which otherwise would have been more abstract. Many scenes show Anthony in his yard, overseeing the work, walking in mud and mire, in meetings, and these scenes are linked with other where it is completely driven by his obsession unique. Another factor helping to build this opposition: it is a part of the business that, and then the epitome of the character by Gérard Depardieu. Being an entrepreneur is arguably the least romantic that is, to handle large blocks of concrete, digging the earth with giant machines, not to mention the noise itself detestable that these machines produce, is not, prima facie, to conducive to poetry. The triviality of both aesthetics and ethics of the profession is emphasized many times by Téchiné. Thus Antony, who is currently building a media center in the region, sponsored by the Moroccan authorities to counteract the influence of Al Jazeera, said he does not care about politics and that his only goal is to perform the work that he has ordered. Yet Téchiné emerges from this work, a poetry rarely shown in film. It builds character, it does bury the first scene of the film under the rubble of his yard, a sign that the events and the earth contain always an elusive, risk and danger, as well as the feelings which the cons character can only bend. This collapse is frightening that, in the early scenes, just open the movie and the character to control, to the defeat of all control, at random. Téchiné could titrate his film Destroy, she said, as the opening scene, which is later in the narrative chronologically, begins with a tabula rasa, paradoxically, by the sudden breaking and telluric forces of nature. Similarly, one could hardly imagine at the outset that the actor Depardieu could embody a character so lovesick, also possessed, demonic in the sense of the word.
Admittedly, this actor has a long history, it has previously embodied in his prolific career, characters owned and mystics. Pialat in Diary of a Country Priest made him do a course Christ, and he epitomizes the priest at once massive and clumsy, which opposes the ecclesiastical institution thrust force of his faith. But what one sees first an actor, this body is to give life to the characters, their presence gives to see the visible and invisible. The body mass and thus opposes gargantuan Depardieu this ethereal and absolute love he professes. His love is disembodied and transcendent, while the massiveness and the frame of his body closer to the picaresque loves more than dreams ethereal and eternal. The beauty of the character comes from this opposition between appearance and essence, between the frame and changing external and permanence of his dream.
If Antoine embodies the temptation of the absolute, the relentless search for an eternity of love, not subject to change, not evolutionary, fixed in one eternal stasis, Cecilia, she is the opposite this system. She turned the page of this love, she has rebuilt her life with another man, she had a child, Sami, who returns from Paris with his girlfriend and child of his girlfriend. Cecile is certainly not happy in her marriage, but she continues to struggle with his own life, to go ahead and not let engulfed by sorrow and dejection. Her son is gay, he has a Moroccan friend he met in secret, and with whom he shares a kind of immediate sensuality but without illusions. He lives with Nadia he loves dearly, a sister. It also has a loaded history behind it: it is Moroccan, but she left her country a few years ago to live in France, probably in search of freedom and empowerment that she had failed to achieve in his country. She is also a drug addict, and she has a twin sister who refuses to see her, preferring a radical separation tear departures. The sweltering heat of the narrative side of Cecile opposes almost inconsistent and tenuous nature of the side of Antony. In sum, it is a kind of exploration of the possibilities in life, it causes germination, ad infinitum, as if Téchiné by focusing on these parallel stories, also wanted to capture all the developments that real life creates, and which, once set in motion the machinery, can be looked at opportunities to be multiple. The reduction of the narrative is the very manifestation of destiny and choice of Cecilia.
The opposition between the absolute and relative, the transcendent and the immanent, the permanent and changing, realism and idealism, personified by two characters, however, is not so clear that there appears at first sight, and Téchiné is a filmmaker who believes too the possibilities of cinema to stay in a problematic and also antithetical to let the characters in positions too Manichean. He had an event giving rise to a dialectic, that is to say, at the intersection of two logics, and perhaps even to their merger into one movement. This event, this will be the landslide site and the burial of Anthony under tons of earth scene as we said opening, not only because it opens the movie, but because it is the same pivot the narrative, thus, in the lava of the earth in the mud material unleashed in the work of matter, the mix of nature and history of the two characters, thus giving shape to a new trajectory, unpredictable and unimaginable at the start. The beauty of the film is also Téchiné this way of using the film as a metaphor for meaning generating force and movement of the narrative. All the matter of the film is enriched by fertilizer and so powerful cinema called the assembly, and allows to undermine the certainties and patterns too rigid scenario. The last image of film is that the hands of two characters, one intertwined in the other, filling the screen image of that union impromptu and probably perish.
If you go back to editing, we see that the changing times is characterized by many inserts that cover the film about the unseen. It is thus crossed by scenes that are all gaps that engulfed the impalpable. The staging of violence is through feelings of shifted images of violence. In many scenes, the irruption of images sacrificial slaughter like sheep, the blood flowing and pervades the earth, the mad dogs Sami and running after the bite, the gears that move the bowels of the earth, as many instances of this reality and spasmodic murderous. If the camera is Téchiné crossing and by the temptation of very low, if a force of attraction swung suddenly to the ground to record everything he methodically shuts as teeming life and cursed, it is only for power movement that other, perhaps more tenuous and invisible, the gateway to the other, toward the beyond of the space, and to the inexplicable magic of infinity. Thus, in many scenes of the film, a Panning, which starts on land and meandering paths of Tangier, ends with the image of the sea, opening the stage to the breathing of elsewhere. Similarly, one might think that the choice of Tangier as a city diegetic contributes to this openness, as Tangier is both the limit or the tip of Africa, but also the departure point for immigrants to Europe, c ' that is to say towards the dream into a fantasy life, to the mirage of life. The choice of the city and enrolled in the topography of the place, this dialectic of this world and beyond, that has been Téchiné to explore and to stage throughout his film.
What do you recognize a great work? likely to meet the style and idea, which allows to find in all elements of the staging, the first impulse of the narrative, and comes together, seeping into the lower part of film. The construction is both rigorous and flayed the Changing Times for understanding the internal coherence of this major work.
0 comments:
Post a Comment