Don Juan First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Serge Bozon’s follow-up to Madame Hyde (2017), Don Juan, seems to continue that film’s revisionist update of a classic tale, while also returning in some fashion to the unorthodox musical genre that La France (2007) so brilliantly embodied. Here, the connection is much more narratively explicit: Laurent (Tahar Rahim), an actor who has been left at the altar by his fellow actor Julie (Virginie Efira), begins to see her face in nearly every woman he meets, before she comes back into his life, acting alongside him in a staging of one of the plays that explores the emponymous character. From this simple set-up, Bozon instigates a dizzying swirl of scenes and techniques, constantly shifting to fit his screenplay co-written with his partner and fellow filmmaker Axelle Ropert. Initially, it appears as if the film will continue entirely in the absence of Julie: while he waits, Laurent begins interacting with a number of women in turn, each played by Efira in a succession of delightfully absurd wigs and costumes, where the line between his recognition of them as Julie or as a stranger is deliberately hazy. Contrary to the expectations engendered by the title (Laurent isn’t revealed to be an actor until after this first day), his attempts are uneven, fumbling, and often violently rebuffed, utilizing Efira’s fieriness and the hollowed-out obsession in Rahim’s eyes to great effect. But once Don Juan begins focusing on the play, it becomes much more circumspect while still retaining its galvanizing capacity for surprise. A tight orbit is drawn between disparate characters: the director, the untested actress initially cast in the role that Julie will come to play, a wise old man (Alain Chamfort) who lives in the same hotel as Laurent. These scenes could act well in isolation, each reflecting another part of Laurent’s headspace and his willingness or unwillingness to pair off with people. A drama teacher, also played by Efira, gives a reading of the play that applies precisely to the film at large: neither Don Juan or the women he seduces are especially interesting in isolation, and so things cannot be viewed separately, or the viewer should not be forced to take one side or the other. This quality runs throughout Don Juan, nowhere more apparent than when Julie reappears and the two fall back in love. The pas de deux between her and Laurent is literalized by a number of dance poses that they float into during this section of the film, and the director’s decision to stage the play with an open background that leads into the outdoors gives the impression of “reality” bleeding into the play, the two becoming inseparably intertwined just as Laurent and Julie have become, or at least have appeared to. Despite the use of sung musical moments at crucial junctures, Don Juan is almost a kind of deconstruction of the viewer’s expectations of a musical. Almost all the songs are solos, and yet Bozon has his actors stand almost totally still while his camera is mostly static, an oddly discomforting feeling heightened by the actors’ singing abilities. The three singing actors (Rahim, Efira, and Chamfort) can all hold a note, with Efira perhaps being the strongest, but Rahim, while not bad, does appear to be hesitant at most times, with his songs forming the majority of the film. His strongest musical moments, apart from a duet with Efira, might be the opening, where he moves in time to a piece of music, which is hilariously interrupted many times by a buzzing phone; and a scene at a wedding where people dance exaggeratedly around him. The musical qualities of Don Juan might come through most forcefully in the strength of Bozon’s direction. Working on digital for the first time and without his usual cinematographer and sister Céline Bozon (the film was shot by Sébastien Buchmann), Bozon frequently shoots his actors just off the center of the frame, creating an angular feeling to many of his shots emphasized by the precise cutting that sharply shifts perspective and location within a scene. The colors are rich and bright here. Where the pastel colors of Madame Hyde served that film’s uncanniness well, the directness of Don Juan demands a bold approach that doesn’t sacrifice intricacy. In the confidence of his direction and the elusive turns of the narrative, Bozon supplies this in spades.

A New Old Play First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Without getting too far into Bresson’s dissection of the irreconcilable differences between the artistic media of film and theater, there has been a longstanding interest, and thus conundrum, in how to depict the staging of a theatrical production on film. From Busby Berkeley backstage musicals to The Golden Coach to Rivette’s masterpieces to Vanya on 42nd Street to of course Drive My Car, films about theater are typically just as much about the communal nature of the endeavor, the relationships that are formed in the intimate times of living and working together. And then, there are those films, like The Travelling Players and Platform, who use theater and performance as a means to convey and explore the grand sweep of history, as the relatively static nature of performance and style is met by larger social and government forces over decades. Qiu Jiongjiong’s feature debut, A New Old Play, fits in very much with this lineage of acting-troupe-epics, running just under three hours and spanning the 1920s to the 1980s in the Sichuan Province. Unlike its predecessors, however, it totally focuses on a single actor clown, Qiufu, based on Qiu’s own grandfather. It also explicitly takes a retrospective look: the film begins with two demons arriving to bring him to hell, and the rest of the film threads this long journey alongside a chronological retelling of his ascent to stardom in the New-New Troupe and Opera School (at age seven) and how he, his family, and his collaborators weathered World War II, the Chinese Civil War, and the upheaval that the Chinese Communist Party introduced into an already fraught environment. In a sharp break from the documentaries that have made up Qiu’s work to date, A New Old Play instead opts for an approach that emphasizes artificiality and stylization of these spaces of the past and supernatural. Seemingly every scene takes place on a set, each crafted to maximize what feels like a hand-crafted quality to the film, where the distressed and flat quality permeates the backdrops of man-made structures and landscapes alike. A golden statue is embodied by living flesh, ocean currents by billowing fabric, and brick walls look like plywood painstakingly painted to suggest the mortar without fully defining it. All of these might strike one as budgetary necessities, but the effect here is far from, say, the nightmarish distortions of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or the opposite approach of reflection of present onto past in Platform. Instead, this abstraction suggests an archetypal base to build on, a physical closeness of space and a continuity between the “real world” and the purposeful unreality of theater, literalized in a shot that tracks right as bricks are rolled on-stage from a daytime view of distant mountains, then off-stage into the painted night sky and distant city. And while Qiu is free to mix-up his style, throwing in oblique angles and handheld when necessary, much of the film is shot in single-direction tracking shots and tableaus teeming with people, where the distinctiveness of the faces meld into a tapestry of expressions and reactions, all similar but none totally alike. That quality serves the film well: Qiufu is certainly the main character, set apart by this supernatural intervention and his obdurate commitment to craft even as his fellow cast and crew fall away due to the ravages of time, while also being instantly recognizable thanks to his ever-present large ears and red nose and beanie. But this is as much a portrait of community, leaving plenty of time to consider how people contend with the weight of change and history, each interaction another building block in a conception of history that is resolutely intimate and aggregative. Even the intertitles that help clarify when the next decade has passed for those very unfamiliar with Chinese history — as someone of Chinese descent, the careful but never overstated intertwining of history into the narrative moved me — convey these changes in more poetic terms. All this while, Qiufu is on his way to the afterlife, where he will have to drink a soup of forgetfulness to enter, or otherwise wander as a ghost among the living. This voyage into the unknown carries the same genial tone as A New Old Play, of a resigned acceptance of the inevitable that carries with it a whole world of mystery and discovery. The film closes with Qiu himself appearing in front of the camera, one of the most fitting cameos in ages, as he implicitly puts himself in the lineage of these performers and artists who have contributed to a rich Chinese folk tradition. On the strength of A New Old Play, such a gesture is more than earned.