Revolution in His Head: Public Enemy Number One (Part One and Part Two)

(Vincent Cassel accepts his Best Actor award via video at the Tokyo International Film Festival as a happy reporter gasps.)
 

A disclaimer precedes Public Enemy Number One Part One and Part Two, a film about real-life French bank robber Jacques Mesrine. The message is something along the lines of, "the following film is not an entirely accurate depiction of the man; it is a work of fiction. And what is 'real', anyway?" The films will be released one month apart from each other in cinemas, but having watched them back-to-back at the Tokyo International Film Festival, I grew to detest that little disclaimer.

For a film that goes out of its way to say that it isn't based entirely on real events, Public Enemy certainly tells its tale in slavish detail. Part One begins in the early 1960’s and follows Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) as he makes his entry into the criminal world. A hothead with a taste for brutality, he graduates from acolyte of Gerard Depardieu to big-time player turned criminal on the run, ostensibly hiding out in Montreal yet managing to cause mayhem. Part Two sees Mesrine back in his homeland, pulling off increasingly bold jobs and gradually growing cocky with the celebrity his criminal status brings him.

That the public's fascination with Mesrine remains almost thirty years after his death (established in the film’s first scenes) speaks volumes about this figure. Why, then, is his story told in such pedestrian form? With its swirling camera, rapid editing, swelling musical score, and unrelenting violence, director Jean-François Richet strives for bravura, but Public Enemy ends up derivative of greater gangster films and Hollywood thrillers. The narrative is willfully and tediously repetitive, and I lost count of the number of times Mesrine robs banks, kills someone, gets shot, lands in prison, and breaks out. From time to time, Richet inserts a famous French actor into the film (the mouthwatering supporting cast of Cécile De France, Ludivine Sagnier, Mathieu Amalric, Samuel Le Bihan, and the French-Canadian Roy Dupuis), throwing a bone to the frustrated viewer.

Cassel won Best Actor at the festival, with president of the jury Jon Voight placing his performance in the same breath with "some of the greatest performances of all time". As Mesrine, Cassel competently steers the character from a sharp upstart with mercurial mood swings to a paunchy middle-aged man who belatedly realizes his activities have brought him a sympathetic audience. But when Mesrine attempts to secure his legacy by aligning his actions with political ideologies, the film finds itself out of its depth. No matter how hard he insists that he is a revolutionary who is "exploiting the exploiters", the film only depicts him as a man who robbed, killed, and got killed.

According to this article, Senator Entertainment is toying with the idea of editing the two films into one for its American release. While heavy-duty studio intervention can be frequently disastrous for a film, in this case I can't help sympathizing with the studio. For audiences who have never heard of Mesrine, Public Enemy will leave them unable to comprehend why he was deemed worthy of a biopic. Besides, if this isn't really a true account of Jacques Mesrine's life, why should we have to sit through four hours of it?

It Takes All Kinds

From the garage of a BMW dealership in Tokyo.

The Chrysanthemum Appreciation Club

Walking around the local city hall today, I discovered this modest flower show, comprised solely of chrysanthemums. It was simply four makeshifts tents with flowers, and one more for the organizers to have their tea in. (They'd even brought along their own thermos.) Having moved here relatively recently, I didn't know that the city has been doing this for over thirty years.

An old man was tending to his chrysanthemum, weeding out stray flowers and painstakingly securing each bloom with a straw string. I was amazed to find out that they were all from one plant. It looked like the ultimate "green" Christmas tree, albeit a bit on the short side.

Inhabitants of the nearby old folks' home, many in wheelchairs, had come to see the flowers. One woman was trying to convince the others that there was a cat amidst the bonsai, but the others laughed it off, saying, "You're old; you're seeing things." Look closely, though, and you can see it sleeping behind the tiny tree.

Kicking myself for having forgotten my camera, I made do with my phone camera. Thankfully, I realized afterwards that it was not such a poor substitute.

Tokyo International Film Festival, Final Day: Tulpan Wins the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix

(The award winners of the 21st Tokyo International Film Festival. The director of Tulpan, Sergey Dvortsevoy is in the middle of the front row, flanked by actors Samal Yeslyamova on his left and Askhat Kuchinchirekov on his right.)

While I was busy watching films and not getting around to writing about them, the film festival was gradually winding down. The closing ceremony was held today, and myriad awards handed out. There was the expected oh-why-did-I-not-watch-that (I particularly regretted having missed out on seeing Félicité Wouassi, who won Best Actress for With a Little Help from Myself), the huh-what award (Vincent Cassel took home Best Actor for the flashy but empty biopic Public Enemy Number One Part One and Part Two), and the joy of a film that I had adored being recognized with an award.


That would be Tulpan, the Kazkhastan-set film that received both the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix (and a cash prize of 100,000 dollars) and the Best Director award for Sergey Dvortsevoy (5,000 dollars). Centered around a nomad family living in the steppes, the unlikely crowd-pleaser was a highly naturalistic piece of work that shed light on a culture largely unknown to international audiences.


Asa (Askhat Kuchinchirekov) is a young man who has just completed the naval service and come to live with his married sister Samal (Samal Yeslyamova) and three children. Asa longs to have his own yurt and flock of sheep, but Ondas, Samal's husband, forbids it until he finds a wife. The only girl in relative proximity is Tulpan (Kazakh for "tulip"), but she rejects him on account that his ears are too big. (Kuchinchirekov he had to get up at 5 every morning to put metal springs behind his ears and make them stick out.)

The film's greatest achievement is the unforced naturalism that fills in the bare bones of the story, creating a rich portrait of nomad life. Shot 500 miles from the nearest town, the isolation, arid land, and winds make the environment truly formidable. Working only with diegetic sound, Dvortsevoy emphasizes its vastness by allowing the viewer to hear sounds such as the wind, or a little girl singing, before panning slowly to catch up with the source.

The cast works wonders, generating the warmth and tenderness of a family without succumbing to easy idealization. The scenes set in the family's yurt are often cacophonous, with the eldest boy reciting news from the radio, the middle girl singing her heart out, and the adorable toddler running amok, but they never descend into madness. So convincing were they all, I initially thought that the director had befriended and filmed a real family. In reality, Kuchinchirekov, now 26 years old, was a student at an arts university in Almaty who was studying to become a director, and Yeslyamova (24) was a stage actress from the north of Kazakhstan who had just graduated from performing school. The three children, however, were siblings from the south of the country, where the film was shot.

While the finished film is seemingly effortless and fluid, both the director and the actors admitted that production was difficult, particularly when working with animals. (The film features animals such as sheep, a goat, and a mother camel and her baby in crucial scenes.) A scene where an amorous goat kisses Asa took a month of said animal getting used to the actor. And try not to feel queasy when Asa and his brother-in-law take turns breathing air into the mouth of a just-born lamb and sucking the caul out. (Kuchinchirekov said simply, "I trusted [Dvortsevoy] with my life and the results are reflected on the screen.") Then there was the aforementioned two-and-a-half year old boy, whom the director said was "just like the animals."

No matter how "real" a film feels, it is, of course, not reality. The heartbreak of this fact was reinforced when Dvortsevoy dedicated his award to Bereke Turganbayev, who played Beke, the oldest brother. A little after the end of production, he had gone fishing with his father and had drowned in the river. He was fourteen years old.

Tokyo International Film Festival, Day Five: Jerzy Skolimowski's Return to Film Form

(Director Jerzy Skolimowski)

Halfway through the press conference for director Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights with Anna, a fellow Polishman journalist declared, "You are an institution in Poland." The journalist lamented that perhaps Japanese audiences were not fully aware of what the poet/director/actor/painter represented for the Polish people. He was right. Of the twenty-plus films he has directed, written, or acted in, only a handful are available in Japan and few can be readily accessed. Fans of Roman Polanski may recognize him as the co-writer of the screenplay for Knife in the Water, but much less is known about his own politically charged works in a career that has spanned four decades.

The journalist would be happy to know, however, that Four Nights has an inextricable link to Japan that may make it particularly meaningful for Japanese audiences. The origins are thus: busy with “other projects”, Skolimowski had forgotten the deadline for his latest screenplay, his first film in seventeen years. Faced with the task of writing it in six days, the director (who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, Ewa Piaskowska) remembered something he read years ago in the Los Angeles Times. It was a tiny article about a man in Japan who snuck into the room of a woman he was in love with, watching her as she slept because he was too shy to approach her in his daily life. 

Change the setting to a small Polish town in winter and this is the basic premise of Four Nights. As I mentioned in a short review of the film last week, Skolimowski deliberately withholds information on his protagonist Leon and Anna, the object of Leon's affection, and the gradual revelations add a layer of dimension to Leon's seemingly questionable acts. Using strategic lighting, macabre images, and ominous music, he makes us suspect the worst about the man, even as our conscience tells us we are perhaps being misled. The director revealed that his manipulative use of mise-en-scène was an experiment to see if he could make the audience feel shame about their initial reactions to Leon.

I can't think of another recent film where cinematography plays such a crucial role in the storytelling, and one can imagine actors having a difficult time within such tightly controlled settings. It turned out that lead actor Artur Steranko did have some trouble, but for a different reason. A chuckling Skolimowski explained that Steranko, an actor from “provincial theatre”, was shaking in his boots during production. It got to the point where he asked the director to remind him of the sequence of his actions because he was too nervous to remember. This has only worked in favor of his performance. With his bulky frame, Leon initially comes off as imposing, but the real fright is viewing the film through the perspective of a thoroughly inscrutable man. Timid and closemouthed, he is a man so lonely and haunted that the conventional methods of human interaction are simply not possible to him.

(The director reveals a bit of eyeball.) 

As uneasy a topic it is to portray sympathetically, Four Nights invites the viewer to look at Leon and see a man beyond the easy generalization of “stalker” or “peeping Tom”. While this reviewer ultimately found Leon's actions inexcusable, it was clear the character struck a particular chord with some viewers. After a screening last week, an old Japanese man walked up to one of the film festival's organizers and exclaimed, "I was floored! I can see a man like that in Japan, but I didn't know there were people like that in Poland too!"