New York Film Festival Update #3:
Déjà Viewed
A look at Belle Toujours and 49 Up.
By Aaron Hillis
Posted October 4th, 2006, 6 P.M. EST
It helps but isn't entirely necessary to watch Johnnie To's Election before relishing the Hong Kong gangland action in this year's sequel and official NYFF selection, Triad Election (known overseas as Election 2), and the same can be said for two other commendable fest titles whose characters were first introduced in the '60s. Soon to celebrate his 98th birthday, Portuguese-born filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira still flexes his prolific muscles in the sweetly picturesque Belle Toujours. Unlike Bergman's Saraband, a three-decades-later follow-up to Scenes From a Marriage, de Oliveira's latest can't quite be labeled a sequel; instead, it's an intimate homage to Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière's 1967 masterpiece, Belle de Jour. In the opening sequence of a Parisian symphony orchestra performance, we're reintroduced to the older, balder, and still lecherous Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) as he spots the former bourgeois wife-turned-prostitute Séverine Serizy (Bulle Ogier, replacing Catherine Deneuve as "Belle") in the crowd. Eager to reconnect and find closure to 38 years' worth of secrets, lies, and related baggage, Husson attempts to track her down following the concert, then immediately loses her in the streets of a city that de Oliveira so clearly loves and chooses to preserve with a lingering economy of shots. A breezy hour-and-ten-minutes long, this beautifully affecting film is less about these beloved characters than its aging filmmaker's wistful reminiscences of cinema itself and a long lifetime's worth of material pleasures. "I'm a different woman now," says the standoffish Séverine with conscious irony, a woman played by Ogier instead of Deneuve as both an homage to Buñuel (the actress playing the female lead in the director's That Obscure Object of Desire is replaced by another halfway through) and to underscore the idea that memories and their passing can only exist in the subjective mind; we watch the film through Husson's eyes and worldly agenda. Fans of the original will hopefully smile at the visual references to that mysteriously buzzing box, the random rooster that clucks past a hotel doorway, or the painting that faintly mirrors Deneuve's iconic over-the-shoulder naked gaze, but it's within the astute pub confessions and dinnertime silences where the magic of this wholly liberated story lies.
49 Up
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Way back in 1964, a handful of seven-year-old British kids from both the upper and working classes were cutely interviewed about their worldviews and documented in their natural schoolyard habitat for Paul Almond's now-legendary Seven Up! Built around the Jesuit aphorism "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man," the film investigated the consequences of class backgrounds as part of Granada Television's progressive journalism series World in Action. An uncredited researcher on the original film, director Michael Apted (Enigma, Gorillas in the Mist), took the idea even farther seven years later by assessing the children's lives as 14-year-olds in 7 Plus Seven, which begat 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, and 42 Up. Easily one of the most fascinating sociological experiments in not just film history but history itself, the Up series returns in the remarkably upbeat 49 Up, the highwater mark and the first in the cycle to be shot in DV. Nearly half a century old, the remaining participants (Charles dropped out at 21, Peter at 28) now grapple with middle age, maintaining their marriages, coping with divorces, becoming parents and grandparents, rising and falling in their careers, and all the other regrets, fears, and yearnings of mankind that are likewise dramatized in Belle Toujours. But this is not fiction, and as the incisive barrister John says — after returning from a 14-year hiatus — these films are more important than that bane of the airwaves, reality television. It's true that the basic formula for these cinematic temperature-checks is validated for not stooping to cheap gimmicks, sensationalism, or instant gratification, and each sees how the times look different even when the people don't (Bruce's gray hair looks the same as it did when he was seven, and John still dresses like he did in boarding school). Deeper still is how the collages of flashbacks reveal just how molded their personalities were at such early ages, how even when their lives take unexpected turns (Neil was homeless and afraid of going mad in his twenties, and now actively sits on his local council board), their idiosyncratic behaviors repeat themselves. How 49 Up differs from its precursors for the better is that it's the first to have its participants interact with Apted the filmmaker, no longer a one-sided interviewer. "By the end of each film, I hate you," says Simon, estranged from most of his kids as chronicled for the world to see. "I like when you shout at me," replies Apted to Jackie, who berates him for playing God with an editing bay. Much as if Jim Carrey's character found the door in the middle of the ocean and still agreed to star in The Truman Show, these now disparate citizens share a generation and a complex responsibility to have their lives picked over, as Suzy declares, "for a couple of minutes, then it's yesterday's news."
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