From the Verite Archives: Phoenix and The New Girlfriend

I just answered a question on Twitter asking what our favourite films so far this year had been and in answering it I realised that I had not yet run my reviews, originally written for the now defunct Verite magazine, of two of my choices for that list, which seems important given that the questioner had only heard of one of my selections. Thanks, as ever, to Verite for letting me repost these pieces.

There are spoilers in the review of The New Girlfriend.

Phoenix

Dir: Christian Petzold

Director Christian Petzold has often drawn on other films for inspiration. Hitchcock has long felt like a key influence on Petzold, bleeding into Jerichow, Barbara, and early TV effort Something to Remind Me, but never has Petzold drawn so heavily on Hitchcock as he does in Phoenix, which is steeped in the influence of Vertigo.

Petzold's muse Nina Hoss (in her eighth collaboration with the director), plays Nelly, a Jewish woman who has survived the concentration camps but, when we meet her, has sustained severe facial injuries. She asks the reconstructive surgeon to make her look exactly as she did before. Nelly then returns to Berlin, looking for her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). Nelly's friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) claims that Johnny was the one who betrayed Nelly, but she wants to discover if her husband still loves her. When Nelly and Johnny meet again he is struck by the resemblance but appears not know that she is his wife. Instead, he exploits that resemblance, getting her to 'impersonate' Nelly.

There is something disturbing in this story that goes beyond even Vertigo's obsessiveness. James Stewart's Scottie is trying to remodel Kim Novak into someone different, someone she never was. Not so the case here. Whether or not he's aware of it, Johnny is trying to make Nelly become his wife once more, but to his own exacting standards. It's a goal that can't, in either case, ever be achieved, but the impossibility of such perversity is magnified for paradoxically already having been achieved.

This is a film centered on Nina Hoss, specifically on her face. That should be enough to make you want to see it, because Hoss, beyond her obvious talent, has one of the most distinctive and fascinating faces in cinema right now. This is especially interesting in the context of Phoenix, because that very distinctiveness makes it hard to believe that Johnny could fail to recognise his wife. That interesting/frustrating ambiguity lingers for never seeing the full extent of Nelly's facial wounds (only a soldier wincing at them), and all we know of her before her disfigurement is the picture her surgeon is working from that shows Nelly laughing; not something Hoss gets to do much, here or in other films.

Also worth noting about Nina Hoss' face is the depths of its expressiveness and how its surface can shift like quicksilver. Playing two halves of a splintered psyche simultaneously, with only a glance she alternates between a sure-of-herself Nelly, wanting things to return to the way they were (evident early on in that request to the surgeon) and an uncertain Nelly, trying to figure if her husband did, in fact, betray her, and what he thinks of her now they're reunited. She's also Johnny's doll, playing dress up 'Nelly', trying to become the image he has of his wife in the flesh.

Hoss dons the different personas and confused states of minds like masks her character wears uncomfortably; from the bandages of the first fifteen minutes (more than a little reminiscent of Eyes Without a Face) to how the recently reconstructed Nelly now sees herself, and finally, Johnny's idealised version of the wife he recalls—the one that will make their old friends believe she's the 'real' Nelly. It's a performance that, were it in English, would sweep all the accolades come awards season. Hoss shows us the tangled confusion of Nelly's mind with subtle shifts in emotional temperature that are tiny but telling.

Phoenix is an exceptionally strong film and Petzold's direction matches the lead performance. Characteristically, he plays off his influences without allowing the film to become Hitchcock karaoke, and giving 1945 Berlin historical verisimilitude, he uses the camera to be just as true to the emotions of the characters, capturing every moment of exposing vulnerability that Hoss and Zehrfeld contribute to loaded silences, lending their highly dysfunctional relationship an interior richness. Yet all this subtly and intrigue pales next to the mastery of the final scene. Without giving too much away, Nelly's heartrending performance of 'Speak Low', is built off just a few images and a devastating piece of silent acting from Zehrfeld. With this, Petzold draws the themes and all the film's questions together in an astonishing whisper that goes off like a bang. Where Petzold goes from here will no doubt be interesting, but he's given himself a hell of a mountain to climb in having to follow such a powerful ending.

★★★★★

The New Girlfriend

Dir: Francois Ozon

Francois Ozon has brought a new film to the London Film Festival three years running, but 2013's Jeune Et Jolie suggested that a rate of at least one film a year was starting to take a toll on his work - much of which is soufflé light and fancy free, but even for him, Ozon's last was a shallow film crying out for more depth.  

Thankfully, it seems Jeune Et Jolie was just a blip, as The New Girlfriend, adapted from a Ruth Rendell story of the same name, finds Ozon back on form, blending his mischievous side with a substantial (but hardly realistic) story, full of secrets that are practically impossible not to reveal when talking about the film.

The totally spoiler-free version of the review reads like this. A playful addendum to Ozon's grief trilogy (Under The Sand, Time To Leave and Le Refuge), The New Girlfriend finds husband David (Romain Duris) and best friend Claire (Anais Demoustier) dealing with the death of Laura (Isild Le Besco) in different ways. These coping mechanisms are predicated upon Ozon's chief preoccupation of sexual malleability and confusion. For his fans, The New Girlfriend is full of auteurist traits in the use of colour and offbeat humour, perfectly handled by an outstanding cast.

Discussing the film in any greater detail requires the revelation of a key twist, so stop reading if you want to go in cold, which is my recommendation.

Fifteen minutes in, we discover that David is, in fact, the title character. After his wife's death, he falls back into an old enjoyment of dressing as a woman, becoming closer with Claire as Virginia, a relationship she keeps from her loving but uncomprehending husband Gilles (Raphael Personnaz). Virginia is a persona who grows into a fully realised third main character, with Romain Duris physically, verbally and emotionally defining the split between the two personalities he's playing very capably. Ozon mines much comedy from his star's gender-bending, but its intent and effect are never cruel. The joke is often at David's expense, but Ozon never has us laugh at anything David himself would be upset by. Take for instance an early moment when David is having tea with Claire and his mother in law (Aurore Clement) in his own clothes. Gesturing as if to rub away some lipstick, he forgets he's not dressed as Virginia. Coupled with Demoustier's reaction it's one of many slyly funny, non-verbal embarrassments.

With the less showy role, Anais Demoustier has a grounding effect on the film, lending Claire a straightforwardness that gives us a way in to the characters and the story whenever Duris' dual performance might push the camp factor a little too far out for some. Claire seems a simple character, but her complexities lie under the surface and Demoustier lets them show through slowly. Virginia's observation that her friend often dresses in a masculine fashion is quickly followed by a sex scene in which Claire enacts a masculine cliché; rolling off her husband as soon as she's achieved orgasm and casually asking “did you come?” “No”, he says, “but that's okay.” The gender issues seeded in this scene pay off in a later sex scene between Claire and Virginia/David. Demoustier quietly and heartrendingly articulates Claire's sudden kinship with Virginia. Despite never having been close to David, she like him, is trying to fill the void Laura has left in their lives. 

Laura is glimpsed only briefly (mostly in an opening flashback charting her friendship with Claire that feels like Ozon's take on the opening of Up),  and while Isild LeBesco doesn't have time to give us a rounded character, her radiant presence is more than enough to suggest how much darker the lives of these characters are without Laura in them.

In changing some of its fundamentals, re-calibrating its tone and adding a great deal to Ruth Rendell's ten-page story (including a completely different ending which closes the film out with the most auteurist image of Ozon's career), there's a feeling of a filmmaker at play, despite the grief which subsumes the players. Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie is more along the lines of what might be expected from a straight Rendell adaptation, but with a distinct lack of foreboding or impending violence, Ozon brings a lightness of touch to even the most dramatic of scenes, enabling him to seamlessly shift from frolicsome scenes such as Claire and Virginia's first outing together and moments suffused with a crippling sense of grief, such as David dressing his wife's body for her funeral. Between these contrasting registers, Ozon's customarily unblinking depiction of sexuality against the hetero-normative grain is evident throughout, with one sex scene in particular, the strangest, most emotionally fraught and complex he's ever directed. Like the sexuality, the film's structure is fluidly subversive. The sequence of Laura being dressed for her funeral is echoed at the end, its second occurrence making poignant use of a song that Virginia and Claire hear a drag act sing at the film's midpoint, movingly literalising its meaning. 

For years, Francois Ozon's films fell into two categories; the playful and the severe. Recently, with In the House and now The New Girlfriend, it's fascinating watching him begin to draw those two sides off his personality as a filmmaker together. The mix is less successful here than it was previously, largely because Claire's husband is rather underdeveloped and one note and the existence of Laura's daughter Lucie is almost entirely forgotten for an hour of the run time. Still, The New Girlfriend is a great film, often moving and amusing in the same moment and boasting two subtly soulful lead performances.

Much more than a return to form, it's a superb reaffirmation of Ozon's status as one of the best directors in world cinema, ranking in the top tier of his own rhapsodically tender and strikingly imaginative filmography.
★★★★★

Exploitation Classics: Flesh + Blood [18]

I have just rewatched Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls which, 20 years after its release, seems to be attracting a new critical appreciation. I still think it's pretty dreadful, and easily Verhoeven's worst film.

For me, the Verhoeven film that is most in need of reappraisal and a bigger audience is his 1985 English language début, Flesh + Blood. What follows is a piece originally written as a review of the US Blu Ray release for the blog of the now defunct Vérité film magazine.

Dir: Paul Verhoeven

Flesh + Blood is a film that would seem to epitomise the idea of doing exactly what it says on the tin. The course of its running time is split relatively evenly between Jennifer Jason Leigh's flesh, and the blood dripping from the swords of Rutger Hauer and his band of mercenaries. If that were all that Flesh + Blood were offering it'd still be a lot of fun, but coming from Paul Verhoeven, the master of finding substance in schlock, it's so much more than a boobs n' gore-filled guilty pleasure.

In Italy, 1501, Martin (Hauer) and his battle-born warriors are left unpaid by their employer Arnolfini (Fernando Hilbeck) after a claret-soaked conflict. In retaliation they kidnap Agnes (Leigh), the betrothed of Arnolfini's son Stephen (Tom Burlinson), and following a route indicated by a statue of St Martin, take an abandoned castle as their new home. Wanting vengeance and his bride back, Stephen pursues them and lays siege to the castle. These are the bloodied bones of a story that Verhoeven and co-screenwriter Gerard Soeteman pick clean before sharpening them into a set of themes that cut as deep as any of Martin's blades.

In his first English-language film, Verhoeven explores the tendency of power to corrupt, and the abuse of authority by those who hold it, a preoccupation that has informed almost all his subsequent work from Robocop to Black Book. In this sixteenth-century setting, power and authority rest largely with the church, and particularly with Ronald Lacey's easily influenced priest. The film's original suggested title was 'God's Own Butchers', an accusation Verhoeven makes not only of the priest but of Martin, seemingly drunk on the power that his followers belief in St Martin confers on him. The most rational of the group, he sees through the priest's pronouncements but goes along with them to secure his position as leader.

To Verhoeven, the coveting of power and control are basic instincts as hardwired as our sexual urges. Scenes between Martin and the kidnapped princess Agnes are similarly predicated on animal attractions. When we are first introduced to Agnes she is nervous and excited about meeting Stephen, less for getting to know him and more for where it will eventually lead. Her curiosity about sex is such that she orders her maid to seduce another member of their party, so that she can watch.

The extensive nudity is exploitation typical of the randy Dutch director, but with that exploitation comes Agnes' understanding of her doll-like beauty and how to use it in a world of brutes. Raped soon after she is kidnapped, even on her back, Agnes is still the one who wields the power, seemingly hypnotising Martin as he has his way with her and undermining his dominance enough so he is the only one who attacks her. Winning a type of protection, she also gains influence with the savage and watching her manipulations is almost as uncomfortable as witnessing the violation of her body.

The MPAA demanded cuts of course, which Verhoeven details in his commentary before noting with relish that this is the uncut version, but what might have so easily offended works as a wily clash of egos and varying degrees of intelligence, thanks to captivating casting. During shooting, Verhoeven fell out with Rutger Hauer, who'd been his on-screen alter ego up to that point, and they never worked together again. In their final collaboration, Hauer is as good as he's ever been, credibly buffed up as a warrior and charismatic as a leader of men. Martin's unredeemed arrogance, encouraged by the priest's repeated assertions that he has been appointed by God to lead them, is a trait Hauer makes innate without indulging.

Jennifer Jason Leigh spent much of her early career elevating sleaze with her talent, and Flesh + Blood is a fine example of that. While she struggles with an English accent, Agnes' enticing ambiguities are all behind the dialogue. The division of her loyalties is externalised in Leigh's body language, her scheming physicalised, as she writhes this way and that during the sex scenes. Calculating especially when copulating, Agnes looks for weakness and advantage wherever possible. Just watch Leigh as she decides whether or not to stop Martin from eating a particular piece of meat late in the film; the ruthless streak running through Agnes is nakedly on display, in or out of bed.

Tom Burlinson is a blander presence against two strong leads but still manages to make something of Stephen, who's a thinker, not a warrior, only discovering his inner steel after Agnes is taken. His intelligence is a trait Verhoeven has fun with, inventing gadgets that play into the film's action scenes - a mobile bomb in the film's opening siege leaves no doubt over Stephen's ingenuity, and later his smarts are responsible for a disgustingly realised depiction of early germ warfare. The rest of the supporting cast is colourfully eclectic, giving the film more than two-tone mud and plasma. Ronald Lacey and Susan Tyrell are on especially fine form, while an amusingly confused Bruno Kirby is completely miscast.

On his typically forthright and story-packed commentary, Verhoeven lets us know just how hellish a film it was to make, but Flesh + Blood's verve and lack of compromise allowed the director to propel himself into the Hollywood big leagues with his follow up, Robocop. Every bit as violent as that era-defining sci-fi, the stench of battle emanates from every frame, Jan DeBont, then Verhoeven's regular cinematographer (who went on to direct nineties action classic Speed, then killed that career with Speed 2: Cruise Control), keeps the film at ground level, giving it a grimy, gritty look that's overwhelming in HD even if it's not as dirty as the ugly verisimilitude of VHS.

A film you wallow in as much as watch, Verhoeven's most underrated work evokes an unpleasant reality that's raw without being softened by the pulp of the films that followed.
★★★★