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EuropeJason Solomons takes a look at the films that are rejuvenating French cinema
When director Laurent Cantet accepted the Palme d'Or at Cannes last May, he took to the stage surrounded by a large cast of children. African, Caribbean, white, Arab, Chinese - these French faces were the young stars of his film Entre les murs (The Class). It was a stirring, televised spectacle for the host nation - not only was it the first time in 21 years that a French film had picked up cinema's most prestigious trophy but it was a film about youth, hope and multi-culturalism that had achieved it.The Class is a magnificent film tracing a state school year in the lively, racially mixed classroom of one teacher, François Bégaudeau. A winning blend of documentary style and improvised drama, the film reflects the changing nature of French society in microcosm, using these 14-year-old Parisian kids' identities and personalities to touch on themes of race, postcolonialism, language and law. Cantet's film is not typical of traditional French cinema, but does its success at Cannes mean that, finally, France's film-makers are opening up to the possibilities of reflecting the new world around them?Perhaps the cosy, traditional French bourgeois drama is becoming a thing of the past. Such films have tended to fall into two categories: the country house affair, with large family gatherings on sun-filled terraces; or the urbane Parisian comedy, packed with bistro meetings, girls in summer dresses, chic women in Chanel suits, fabulous apartments overlooking the Seine and strolls in the Jardin du Luxembourg.Perhaps the optimism inspired by France's victory in the football World Cup that it hosted in 1998, when the 'rainbow nation' team of Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry and Youri Djorkaeff paraded along the Champs-Elysées, has now filtered into French culture. 'All I know is that this film struck a chord with this particular jury at Cannes in this particular year,' says Cantet. 'I greatly enjoyed making the film and spending a year with these wonderful young people, so, personally, I think there is great cause for hope in the future of our country and it is encouraging to see that hope reflected in French cinema.'These are heady times for French film, which seems finally to have found a new voice after many years spent emerging from the long shadows of the Nouvelle Vague and battling the influence of Hollywood. French films are taking centre stage around the world and the names of French directors are once again rolling off the tongues of cinephiles: Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, Olivier Assayas, Agnès Jaoui. Is this the start of a new New Wave?This group of directors is disparate but certainly brings a new edge to French film. Cantet has been building a distinctive career with socially aware films such as Human Resources and Time Out, films about men caught in suffocating systems and workplaces. Kechiche, born in Tunisia, has also - in films such as L'esquive (The Dodge) and last year's César-winning Couscous - concentrated on a social realism more in tune with the films of Britain's Ken Loach than anything in the French tradition. The films of Assayas, a former film critic, range widely, from twentysomething Parisian bourgeois angst in Fin août, début septembre, to a spin on period drama among a porcelain-producing family in Les destinées sentimentales, to doom-laden global futurism in Demonlover.'We're not a family, that's for sure,' says Agnès Jaoui, the writer, director and actress whose new film, Let's Talk About the Rain, is now playing in UK cinemas. Jaoui - known for polished ensemble comedies such as the Cannes-winning Comme une image (Look at Me) and The Taste of Others - was brought up by poor immigrant Tunisian Jewish parents in Paris. 'I don't feel that we're part of a new school or fashion or movement. But, yes, we are, we must be, united by something - the fact that, somehow, 15 years or so ago, French cinema survived.'Jaoui is referring to 'la loi Toubon', the law introduced in 1994 by culture minister Jacques Toubon which protected French language and production. Two out of every five songs on the radio, for example, must be in French. The laws on film production led to tax breaks and levies pouring money into French productions and keeping French films playing in multiplexes.According to Jaoui, all European countries would benefit from such laws. 'French cinema was nearly destroyed by the weight of its own history and by the power of Hollywood on its young people,' she says. 'Maybe even film-makers were against these laws at first, but now I would say that, among us all in the current generation, there is a general feeling, a mood, of survival and of diversity.'In France, 2008 has been a landmark year. Not only did The Class win the Palme d'Or but Marion Cotillard won a Best Actress Oscar - the first French language performance ever to do so, propelling her film, La Vie en Rose, to impressive international box-office figures (£1m in the UK). France also produced its most successful film ever in Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks), a culture-clash comedy based in small-town northern France, which brought 20 million French people into cinemas, grossing more than $200m and, so far, racking up more than two million DVD sales. No film, French or American, has been more popular.In the UK, French film dominates the foreign language releases. The number of French films in 2008 stands at 42, with receipts expected to be above £15m. According to Unifrance, which promotes French film abroad, the number of tickets sold in the UK for French films in the past three years has increased fivefold.What we are seeing, in other words, is a new wave of commercialism in French cinema. Rather than wowing the world - as the New Wave did with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle or Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups - with a new style or a new film grammar, France has positioned itself as a powerhouse of production, cultivating a domestic scene that also feeds international reputation and demand. For instance, it is not seen as a commercial risk to have French actor Mathieu Amalric as the latest Bond villain.French cinema is using this new internationalism wisely. Guillaume Canet, for instance, is perhaps best known for starring with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. But he is also the young director behind Tell No One, a stylish thriller that enjoyed a long run in British cinemas last year and is now enjoying cult success in New York and Los Angeles. You would not call it traditional 'arthouse', but it does trade on being more upmarket simply because it's in a foreign language. It also depicts a grittier, urban France, which is also reflected in one of the most anticipated French films, Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One, an epic, two-part crime saga starring Vincent Cassel as one of France's most notorious gangsters. This year's current stylish French mystery - complete with bluesy guitar slides reminiscent of Tell No One - is I've Loved You So Long, which looks likely to earn several awards nominations for its leading lady, Kristin Scott Thomas, who also appeared in Tell No One, and is, of course, familiar around the world.The global reach of French cinema is both a blessing and a curse, according to a veteran observer of such things. Agnès Varda, often labelled the 'grandmother of the New Wave', is now 80 but has just completed a beguiling personal film called Les plages d'Agnès. 'Nowadays, French cinema has to be international to survive. There is so much competition, so much pressure. Now you have films from a dozen other countries. We never had that. Our only competition used to be from the Italians.'Varda thinks highly of Abdellatif Kechiche whose La graine et le mulet (Couscous) is a wonderful film which follows an elderly Arab immigrant, Slimane, as he tries to build his dream: a fish couscous restaurant on a disused boat in the town of Sète, near Marseille. Again, like Cantet, using improvisation and documentary techniques in a realist tradition, Kechiche's masterly work brought to the fore a cast of characters - mostly Arab in origin - ignored by French cinema for too long. An unexpected commercial success at the French box office, Couscous introduced the actress Hafsia Herzi and she is now on her way to becoming French cinema's first female Arab superstar.France's leading Arab film star is Jamel Debbouze, who first became known through TV comedy but who has now moved to the big screen in films such as the Asterix adaptations starring Gérard Depardieu, Amélie opposite Audrey Tatou and, most significantly, the fine revisionist Second World War drama Days of Glory, directed by Algerian-born Rachid Bouchareb, about the contribution of African troops in liberating France from the Nazis. Debbouze is now starring in Let's Talk About the Rain. 'Jamel is a phenomenon in France, not just a star,' says Jaoui. 'But would you believe we still got some sniping in the press, that we were seeking bigger audiences by working with Jamel, that we were somehow dumbing down our usual ensemble to include him. That's just rubbish, but it shows how hard it still is to change things around in France.'Even more traditional French films have been given a twist. It's interesting to note that idiosyncratic director Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale and Olivier Assayas's recent hit, Summer Hours, starring Juliette Binoche, are both about old French families coming to terms with the death of their matriarch and the divvying up of the family home. Let's Talk About the Rain has similar themes. All three films show a big French family shaken up by modern life, with its taxes, globalism and multiculturalism. For Assayas, a return to making bourgeois drama was, ironically, the route for him to say more about the future of French culture. In the film, family members (including Binoche, Jérémie Renier, Charles Berling) meet to discuss what to do with the valuable art collection left in their family summer house after the death of their mother (Edith Scob), once the lover of a great artist. The film borrowed many fabulous artworks from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.'I was surprised how easily this kind of bourgeois story was the canvas for talking about issues that obsess me,' says Assayas. 'Namely, how to respect the past yet also to embrace the future and appreciate its styles, fashions and ideas as much as what came before. I was surprised, too, by how popular this type of story still is with audiences, particularly abroad.'It's interesting that this generation of film-makers see themselves as reacting to the New Wave. 'The films of Godard and Truffaut are fine,' says Jaoui, 'but I think it took the new generation so long to come out of the shadow of the Nouvelle Vague that they did as much harm as good. You know, the Cahiers du Cinéma [France's leading intellectual film magazine] and the critics, that sort of snobisme held back film-makers for too long - it made us scared, lacking in experimentation to find our own voice to say: this is who we are, this is how we want our films to sound, to look, to be about.'I'm French but I'm the child of Tunisian parents, so I don't know if I would call my film French in any typical way. What is that now? Is it sophisticated comedy or realist social drama or big budget action? What we see now is very talented film-makers realising, hey, we're all still here, we're all alive, so let's just make the films we can and enjoy it. If that's a movement, then that's what we're all part of.' ? The Class opens in FebruaryWhat do you think? Email us at review@observer.co.ukNew classics: Cinq to see Irreversible (2002) Violent stunner from Argentinian-born director Gaspar Noé, a long, dark Paris nightmare about Vincent Cassel seeking revenge for the rape of his lover, Monica Bellucci. Prompted walk-outs and fainting at Cannes.The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005) Career-making performance by actor Romain Duris in Jacques Audiard's urban thriller about a property repo-man among immigrant squatters who really wants to be a concert pianist. Hidden (2005) Directed by Austrian Michael Haneke, Hidden gripped audiences with its unsettling mystery about a couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) sent incriminating video tapes - a brilliant film about post-colonial bourgeois guilt and the first to mention a police massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris in 1961.La Vie en Rose (2007) Olivier Dahan's biopic of Edith Piaf earned Marion Cotillard the first-ever best actress Oscar for a French language performance. Controversially skated over the Nazi occupation of Paris, and Piaf's performances for German officers.Couscous (2007) Released in France as La graine et le mulet, it was the surprise winner of four Césars earlier this year. The long family Sunday lunch is one of the great food scenes in film.World cinemaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:03:35 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the articleEuropeA life in art: Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor's studio, a sprawling collection of warehouses in a quiet street in south London, is both artistic crucible and thriving workshop, the kind of place where charts stuck to the walls indicate what kind of hot beverages are preferred by the employees (should Kapoor ever pop round, offer him black coffee, not tea). Twenty-five people labour here, either coolly in the fresh white offices above, or in the sweat of masks and overalls below. As we meet, Kapoor has just designed two stage productions: Pelléas et Mélisande for La Monnaie in Brussels, and a dance-theatre piece called in-i for Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche at the National Theatre in London. He is also preparing to open an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London; and he has a clutch of projects, ideas and commissions simmering away - not least Britain's largest piece of public sculpture, for the Tees valley, and a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts next year.Kapoor stands alone in the British art world: he is a touch younger than the so-called New British Sculptors such as Richard Deacon and Richard Wentworth, though he has often been spoken of in the same breath since he is represented by the Lisson, the gallery indelibly associated with that group of artists. And, when he won the Turner prize in 1991, aged 37, he was the senior artist on the shortlist, a decade or so older than the other contenders, who included Rachel Whiteread - this was a new generation of Young British Artists snapping at his heels. But he also stands apart because his work is entirely sui generis: strongly voiced, unmistakably his. Kapoor conducts a vigorous tour of his studio. The first thing he shows me is an enormous, deep resin tube, on which one of his masked accomplices is working amid the noise and dust of the workshop. It looks like an enormous semi-erect penis, I cannot help observing. "But it isn't!" Kapoor laughs . "It's the opposite. I'm interested in the opposite, and in the not-opposite. It's both. It will have a very, very dark interior. The idea is that a person will be able to walk in ... I have always been interested in antiphallic form - the opposite of which, of course, is deeply phallic. Hahahaha! It's not onwards and upwards ..."It is inwards and downwards: Kapoor is a psychic tunneller and excavator. Seeing his sculptures en masse in the studio, it makes one almost queasy sensing how many of them are concerned with feminine holes, clefts, entrances, slashes - often sculptures in a deep, primal red that screams of female human flesh, menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth. But Kapoor has never been interested in anything other than abstraction. The exploration of the feminine bypasses a lurid fascination with the specifics of the female form; it is more, perhaps, to do with an investigation of the dark places of the imagination. Not for him the world of art as commodity; not for him irony. He says: "Donald Judd used to say that art doesn't get made, it happens. The implication of that is that the studio is a place of a certain kind of practice. And there things occur that hopefully have deep quotidian recall - but are not directed by the quotidian world. So the post-Warholian notion that everything in the world is all art - it's fine, but what it avoids is the truly poetic, or the poetic of a slightly different order. And it's that order I am interested in."Figures such as Damien Hirst represent one branch of post-Duchampian art; Kapoor, however, takes on that history in a rather different way. "If Duchamp declared that all the objects in the world are art," he says, "then I am interested in the next stage of that argument, which may have been prompted by Beuys in some way - that all the objects in the world are symbolic. Now Duchamp, to be fair, was very careful about what was the found object; the found object was always deeply symbolic. So the arguments in fact come together and they don't get confused by the idea that you can put anything in a glass case and it's art. It isn't. It is the artist's duty to find poetic meaning in things." More baldly, he declares of the Hirsts on sale recently at Sotheby's: "It's just stuff , you know. It's not an artistic challenge. it's just stuff ... It's completely irrelevant." Later he adds: "It's almost not art. I'm going to go as far as to say it's not art."From the Hephaistian busyness of the artistic forge, Kapoor now ushers me into another large warehouse, silent and empty but for a number of tables covered with maquettes and models for large-scale sculpture. This is normally Kapoor's private space, the thinking place. The models are laid out in preparation for display at the Riba headquarters in London. "All these projects are about a certain kind of architecture," he says. "Many of them are thoughts about a certain kind of almost religious space. This, for instance, is a very crude model of a piece made in a museum in Japan - a void in the floor - called L'Origine du Monde, for obvious reasons." He laughs. This, he says moving on to a model of a silvery bridge that resembles an elongated bead of mercury, "is a bridge that we've been working on for years and years and years. Whether it happens or not is another matter. It's a kissing bridge. It opens in two halves, and both parts open and slide across the channel." Where is it? "I'm not allowed to tell you. I'm not going to tell you because it's still a bloody confidential pain in the backside, but anyway. It's quite a heavy shipping route in the UK."He's off again, to another model. This seems to be pure fantasy: it is an enormous circular hole in a valley in a mountainous landscape, a deep void leading to nothing and nowhere. "It's massive. It's kilometres across - and completely dark," he says. "One of the things that has emerged out of my work over all these years is this idea of the non-object, the absent object, the immaterial part of the material."Kapoor is very interested in negative space, in spaces filled with a nothingness that is, paradoxically, deeply present. He recalls: "I made a work at Documenta [the five-yearly sculpture exhibition at Kassel, Germany] many years ago. You walked inside a building like a bunker, and inside there was a hole in the ground. It was completely dark - so dark that the hole resembled a carpet on the ground. One person was let in at a time. And there was a man who waited for 45 minutes, and when he went in he was absolutely furious. 'I've done many things in the cause of contemporary art,' he said, 'but I have never stood in line for all that time to look at a piece of carpet.' And he took his glasses off and flung them on to the carpet - and, of course, they disappeared down the hole. And then he was truly terrified. That's what I am interested in: the void, the moment when it isn't a hole, it is a space full of what isn't there."Kapoor has also investigated this notion by way of his mirror pieces - a large group of sculptures of varying scale that include concave, circular wall-mounted mirrors several feet in diameter, and the huge Sky Mirror that was mounted near the Rockefeller Centre in New York in 2006. His Cloud Gate, a 110-tonne sculpture with a reflective surface for the Millennium Park in Chicago, also perhaps falls into this category, though it is a three dimensional piece, shaped somewhat like a kidney bean. He talks about these objects in terms of painting: the effect, he explains, of a traditional painted surface is to draw the viewer into a space that apparently recedes beyond the picture plane. In the mirror pieces, by contrast, "the space doesn't recede - it comes out at you ... a new sublime that's forward of the picture plane."We are now in a quiet warehouse, where various sculptures sit awaiting their fate and the scrutiny of their creator. One mirror has a surface made up of a tiled pattern of squares and hexagons. Looking into it, parts of your reflection seem to dance in the space between you and the mirror; others seem to float back in the distance. Kapoor says: "I'm interested in the almost idiotic phenomenology of this. On one level you might say it's not art, it's a silly game. But I think there's something in that little edge which is interesting and problematic. There is something going between the meaningful and the banal."Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, his mother an Iraqi-Jewish daughter of a rabbi, his father a hydrographer in the navy. He went to the prestigious Doon School, in Dehra Dun. "The good thing about education in India in the context I knew it was that it was really cosmopolitan. We learned just as much about Jahangir and Akbar as we did about Louis XIV and Elizabeth I." His parents were "modern, wonderfully modern"; and for Kapoor, there was a deep sense - as a Jewish boy with a white mother growing up in a household speaking English in India - of being an outsider.Kapoor's parents were keen for both their sons to see something of the world. "In those days, a plane ticket cost more than my father's salary for a year. So we were both encouraged to emigrate to Israel, because they paid for the plane ticket." It was there that "being an artist became not only an option, but something I could actively do something about". He moved to London, where he studied at Hornsey College of Art and at Chelsea School of Art, as it was then known. College was "a total liberation" - partly from a state of deep psychological disturbance that afflicted him in his late teens. "I was seriously fucked up, full of inner conflict that I didn't know how to resolve." To tackle this turmoil, he eventually went into psychoanalyis, which lasted for 15 years and ended just before he met his wife Susanne (they now have two children, and have just built a new family home in Chelsea).Art college was a "kind of respite" from his psychic turbulence. He recalls his student work, much of which was performance-based. "The pieces were all very symbolic and they normally involved interaction between two people. They were non-narrative, but there was a process; and it was normally left to the two people to enact the piece with props. The props were really important - quite sexual. All the language was there already, dammit!" He left art school in 1977. At that time, Kapoor reckons there were perhaps 10 artists in Britain who were able to make a living just from selling their art: he assumed he would find some kind of teaching post. He rented a studio in Wapping, and for a while scraped money together by making furniture for the society decorator Nicky Haslam."Then," he says, "in early 1979 I went to India . . . and I suddenly realised all these things I had been making at art school and in my studio had a relationship to what I saw in India." And this relationship? "It was a certain attitude to the object. I was making objects that were about doing, about ritual. It was that 'doingness', that almost religious doing, that I saw everywhere ... It felt like a huge affirmation."It was from this idea of ritual that his first significant works sprang: his pigment pieces ? bright shapes set on the ground covered in pure pigment. "I would almost ritually lay on the pigment; they are very much performed," he says. "I made them all in three years. It was an incredible time of discovering something new every single day. I really didn't know where they came from; I felt that they had tumbled out into the world."This feeling of unforced creation still happens, once in a while, for Kapoor. He shows me something he has been working on over the past couple of days: a model for a huge installation for the Grand Palais in Paris for 2011. What eventually gets seen in that vast space may bear no relation to what he shows me, he says, but what has come to him is a scenario in which the glass roof of the space is covered over with red gel, JCBs busily tunnel into the ground, and a large inflatable sphere, 25 metres in diameter, hovers over proceedings. There is something hellish about it."It's got a sense of being an excavation of the interior. I would never have made a model like this 10 years ago. I would never have allowed this kind of apocalyptic moment." The mess and the chaos of it have an imaginative relationship with the recent works he has been making out of gunky, visceral, blood-coloured Vaseline and wax, such as My Red Homeland (2003), 25 tonnes of the stuff in a circular container constantly formed and unformed by a large steel arm. "After years and years of looking for a kind of wholeness in my practice, I find myself over the past couple of years dealing with tragedy and anxiety - with things that are fragmented," he says.The sculpture for which Kapoor is most famed is Marsyas, the trumpet shaped structure, like a flayed skin stretched over a framework, that occupied Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2002. It was seen in some quarters as a triumph of size over substance. "Every idea has its scale," he says. "Marsyas wouldn't be what it is if it were a third of the scale. The pyramids are the size they are because they are. Scale is a tool, a tool of sculpture."While vast, Marsyas will seem small in comparison to Temenos, the first of a five-part installation known as the Tees Valley Giants, which will be the largest public-art initiative ever, the design for which was unveiled in July. Has public art become a clichéd response to the urge to regenerate post-industrial cities? "I think we've gone totally public sculpture mad," he says with vehemence. "I hate public sculpture." So why are you doing it? "It's really a problem, I've got to say it's really a problem. Public sculpture ... oh God, even the phrase makes me feel tired. Why I am engaged in it? Well, I think, as a sculptor, that is something of one's lot. Because scale is a tool of scultpure, and it needs to be worked with."He shows me the model for Temenos, which will be 100 m long. It is a tube of nylon cut from a pair of tights stretched between two rings, one of them propped on a pole - blissfully simple. Temenos is the Greek word for a sanctuary, a place set apart; and Marsyas is also a reference to ancient Greece: he was a man flayed for daring to challenge Apollo to a musical contest. "It is a myth of conceit, the conceit of art," Kapoor laughs. "The conceit of the artist!"Kapoor on KapoorThere had been a long tradition in sculpture that said that materials have to be what they appear to be ? this thing of truth to materials. I couldn't deal with that. Even as a student I didn't know what that meant. It seemed to me that art's all about illusion and the unreal. "Truth to materials" ran, and runs, contrary to everything I want to do. Quickly I realised that when you make an object and place pigment on it, the pigment falls to the ground like a halo around the object. And the implication is that it's like an iceberg: that most of the object is hidden, is invisible.And so I became more and more interested in the invisible object. There was part of it that protruded into the world but the rest was really interesting. If you look at the pigment pieces, nearly everything else I have done is set there, and I keep going back to them. Sometimes I long for that kind of ebullient outpouring. That year I started making them was unbelievable. I didn't know where they were coming from. I didn't think them up, they popped into my head.Anish KapoorArtguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:01:35 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the articleEuropeInterview with Juliette Binoche
Multimedia: Academy award-winning star of The English Patient and Chocolat talks to Geoff Andrew
Published: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:59:21 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the articleSee Also:
