Hors Satan

Hors Satan

Directed by Bruno Dumont

France, 2011

Cornerhouse, 8 January 2013

Picturesque and perplexing, that’s the sun and moon of it.

The film bewilders, and even has the nerve to make you wait for the privilege, but there is no denying its resplendent beauty.  The French countryside shimmers with mysterious colour.  These quiet moments, virtual interludes since little much seems to happen, sparked a regret that I’d not yet got around to reading Children of Clay, and in particular those chapters recounting the thought of Pierre Roux, the fellow with the theory of the excremental sun.  It might have helped here, an obtuse theology serving to elucidate an obtuse film.  Or then again, it might have not.  We human creatures are all ambulant suns, Roux wrote.  That’s one of his insights.

To read Queneau again would anyway be a good thing, I decided by the close of the film.  But it would be best to turn to Pierrot Mon Ami before Children of Clay; it’s shorter.

Gainsbourg

Gainsbourg
(Vie héroïque)
Directed by Joann Sfar
France, 2010
Cornerhouse, 1 August 2010

Still from Gainsbourg

Close to perfection: a film that engages the heart, the intellect and the senses.

This film presents the life of Serge Gainsbourg as an eventful tragedy: sad and bad things happen but there’s always a diversion, a new game in town, and our hero moves on.

The presence of Boris Vian (Philippe Katerine) in the film was surprising; I was unaware that Gainsbourg and the eminent ‘pataphysician were friends.  It caused me to wonder, also, whether Gainsbourg and Georges Perec, another young writer who’d taken inspiration and encouragement from Queneau, had ever met.  Apparently, they never did.  Jane Birkin did meet Perec in a London restaurant, though, and she told the author of Life: A User’s Manual that he reminded her of a character in a comic book she’d read as a child.  This film was adapted by Joann Sfar from his own comic about the singer.

Eric Elmosnino gives an outstanding performance in the lead role and he certainly looks the part, of that there’s no doubt.  A little bit more on the intersection where Jewish and French identity meet and cohere would have been welcome (Perec wrote W, a memoir of a Nazi-infested childhood not unlike Gainsbourg’s own) but there’s a terrific version of the French national anthem, which shows what a strange, curious and problematic beast it is.  There is enough food for the mind here, and Bardot too.  (Or rather a fair facsimile in the delectable form of Laetitia Casta.)