Bingeing on Rohmer

Review: Éric Rohmer’s Comédies et Proverbes Cycle

• LA FEMME DE L’AVIATEUR
• LE BEAU MARIAGE
• PAULINE À LA PLAGE
• LES NUITS DE LA PLEINE LUNE
• LE RAYON VERT
• L’AMI DE MON AMIE

Le Rayon Vert

It looked like MUBI was going to remove this cycle from its library so I spent the week bingeing on it. It brought me right back to the 1980’s when I haunted the IFI in Dublin to watch Rohmer, Lelouche, Truffault and countless other French directors good enough to make Hollywood blush.

You either get Rohmer or you don’t. His films are wordy (worthy?), uneventful and very often the characters are annoying. But it’s all so human and frail, it brings out the romantic in me. So I’ve just had a terrific week.

The films in this cycle are each based on a proverb, possibly invented for the film. The most notable among them, in my view, were Le Rayon Vert and La Femme de l’Aviateur, both featuring a depressed and sulky Marie Rivière. In the former, the actors were encouraged to improvise their texts and the result is simply transcendent. Perhaps my favourite scene of all came from an actress in a minor role when Lena (pictured) gives Delphine a masterclass (in at least four languages) on how to chat up two lads. Mesmerizing!!

Great German Humour

Book: The End of a Mission by Heinrich Böll

Film: Toni Erdmann by Maren Ade

Do you subscribe to the stereotypical view that Germans are humourless? Well you’re wrong!! Try out these two works for intelligent and nuanced world views.

I’ve long been a big fan of Böll’s writing; his Group Portrait with Lady ranking high in my ten best books ever. The End of a Mission is a lesser work, but a fine treat nonetheless. A small-town trial concerning an act which might be described as a mere prank is blown up into a political farce so that he can poke fun at the kind of nonsense endemic in totalitarian regimes. Journalists are distracted into covering a less-embarrassing child murderer case and an out-of-town politician has his spy on hand to keep the case under review and nip any possible scandal in the bud. You, the reader, will immediately see that the charges are of no importance. The pomposity of all the officials is handled with a deft irony by Böll which makes for no belly laughs but wry amusement and the sense of reading the work of a massive intellect.

In the film, Toni Erdmann is the pseudonym (or alter-ego?) of the main protagonist, a retired, divorced music teacher. A clown at heart, he is clearly sad that his business-consultant daughter takes life too seriously; she is working her way up the corporate ladder and selling her soul in the process. He follows her to Bucharest where she has a very important client and succeeds in inserting himself into a number of her encounters with the client, embarrassing her but eventually, I think, breaking through to change her outlook. The film is a very satirical take on the business of consulting and, from my own experience, an accurate one. The comedy is played with great seriousness to amazing effect.

Double Iranian

Film Review: 3 Faces by Jafar Panahi
Book review: The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah who writes in Dutch, his adopted tongue

Last Sunday, while my house sank to the bottom of the marsh which is Brittany, I went to see the latest film by one of Iran’s best modern directors.  Like his other work, it was a social commentary on living in Iran today and told with what I would consider great affection for the people and the country.  I’m amazed he has so much trouble with the authorities there.  His criticisms are not strident or vicious and what country expects to be shown only in a positive light. Altogether a lovely piece of work.

Seeing it put me in mind of a book I haven’t mentioned at our meetings so I dug out a review I wrote of it some time back.

Kader Abdolah is a pen-name, constructed from the names of two of the author’s friends murdered in the troubles surrounding the Islamic Revolution in Iran.  This is my second experience of his writing, the first being Cunéiforme (My Father’s Notebook) and I predict he will come to be recognised as a great and subtle writer.  Right now his books are slow to appear in English.

This is a book by an exile who loves the country he fled.  He writes with a light touch, spanning decades and giving us a view of the country during both the Shah’s reign and the Khomeini years from the point of view of the peaceful head of a household who is repeatedly drawn by family members into confrontation with the authorities.  The disgraceful conduct of America in supporting the Shah’s regime and in supporting Saddam Hussein’s savage chemical war gets a restrained and honest airing in the book.

It’s so easy to dismiss Iran, based on the country as reported to us in the evening news.  Read this book for an entirely new perspective on a dignified and cultivated people living under consecutive intolerable regimes.

This in turn reminds me of Frankenstein in Baghdad, which I mentioned on WhatsApp last week, which doesn’t come close to matching these two gems.