Compass or Impasse?

Art house cinema would seem to be stuck in a rut. Just as the mainstream founders in a glut of superhero movies, so we seem on the festival circuit to be lost in an endless series of what I would term ‘intimiste’ cinema. In this a single character, invariably female, and often a young female, is caught in a world from which there seems no escape. Here are just a few recent titles: Sweat, Murina, Titane, Rien à foutre, Sweetheart, The Lost Daughter, Small Body, Lingui, Last Night in Soho, Happening, Shiva Baby, Black Bear, Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, Honey Cigar, Herself, Ema, L’enfant d’en haut, Make Up, The Souvenir Part 2.

Nearly all of these deal with serious ethical issues, such as maternity or sexual awakening, the idea of women finding their voice, and a few are directed by women. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, these are the sorts of subject directors like Agnès Jaoui have been handling in a more light-hearted fashion for some time. Last Night in Soho sticks out in this list, of course, but I have included it because it also approaches feminist ideas in a generic way.

But there is something else at work here, and that is the approach to storytelling, at its most extreme a sacrificing of story to character. That’s not new: look at the films of Ingmar Bergman. It is the uniqueness of viewpoint which is the issue, and this may be connected with the feminist agenda, meaning that character risks becoming a political cipher. Whether, as in Sweat or The Lost Daughter, we follow her everywhere, peering as it were over her shoulder, or whether, as in Lingui, the mise-en-scène is more traditional, the fact remains that we are following this character around without reprieve. At worst we understand her ennui/dilemma/yearning, but not how anyone around her feels.

We can see the roots of this ‘subjective’ tendency in the cinema of Ken Loach, and more recently the Dardenne brothers. However, their cinema was still essentially narrative driven. A few of the above-quoted films work well as narratives: Lingui, Shiva Baby, Small Body; but many are sharings in the problematic lives of their protagonists, wherein the reliance on a handheld camera brings with it a further handicap: shot length. The inability to cut when a shot has made its point is problematic and endemic to this increasingly common genre of production.

So are we back to the old montage vs. mise en scène dichotomy: Eisenstein or Bazin? Great directors, like Hitchcock, Kubrick, have known when to cut and when to track. Kieslowski, in his own feminist narratives (Véronique, Bleu, Rouge) combined both techniques, the highly personalised close shot and the externalised track or pan. But if you limit yourself to one camera…

Part of the problem is that there are just too many films being made now, and too cheaply. There are triumphs here: Sweat succeeds because it does have a story focus of sufficient ethical magnitude; Shiva Baby is funny and sad. Too often, though, we are passive observers of uncomfortable or intractable predicaments, whose inconclusiveness asks us to make our own judgements when we lack the compass to do so.

This is not the only way (and heaven forbid everyone should make films the same way). Christian Petzold, Atom Egoyan, François Ozon all make films about female protagonists in extremis using traditional storytelling techniques. Paul Verhoeven does so more problematically. But they are fewer in number.

Which is why it was with jubilation that I saw Ina Weisse’s 2019 production yesterday, presumably delayed by Covid: The Audition (qv.) Here was Nina Hoss, torn between her love for her husband and her attraction towards another musician, a man who represents her desire to return to the platform when her conscience tells her she is not up to it; her frustrated muse causes her to drive both her son and her pupil beyond their limits of endurance, etc. There is complexity here worthy of Bergman, certainly, no lack of story or ethics. Hoss is on screen all the time. Weisse could have followed her around with a handheld camera but opts for a fixed camera: clarity, poise, nothing escapes us; the classical purity of the new-New German Cinema. Hallelujah!