Since opening in 2005, the IFC Center at 323 Sixth Ave., at West Third Street, has become a cinema hub for the city. Harris Dew, director of programming and promotions, talks about the role of IFC in the community and the community’s role in IFC.

How long have you been at IFC?
I’ve been at IFC since the summer of 2005, just about the time it opened. Before that I was at Film Forum doing publicity and repertory programming. And before that I was at MoMA doing PR.

What exactly do you do as director of programming and promotions?
I program films with my boss, which means viewing a lot of films, going to festivals and watching screeners [films submitted by filmmakers]. About half of the films that we show at IFC were picked up at festivals and the other half were chosen from submissions. My boss and I have very different sensibilities, so the two of us can really cover the waterfront together.

How would you categorize the films that make it to the IFC screens?
It’s tough to do that. We’re not just an art house cinema and we don’t just screen documentaries. We’ve got highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the good, the bad and the ugly, but it’s quite a range.

What do you love most about your job?
I love discovering something great and then sharing it with people; it’s a pretty lucky position to be in. And I love working at an institution that is able to serve such a broad audience, not in a “lowest common denominator” sort of way but because we do lots of things in lots of ways. It’s tough to pigeonhole IFC. I love that.

What’s the most disappointing element of your job?
Getting it wrong. Just because you love a film and believe it to be great doesn’t mean other people will agree. I guess I hate not being able to find the right audience for a film. Other than that, I dislike the things that everybody dislikes about their jobs, right? The last-minute things that don’t come through…little things. But at the end of the day, there’s very little that I don’t enjoy.

How does being Downtown shape IFC as a cinema?
Well, it makes us as diverse as Downtown New York is. That’s really it. For one thing, it makes us a filmmaker’s theater. We never lose sight of the fact that screening films isn’t enough. We hold lots of Q&As and filmmakers screenings. We also have some pretty hardcore art house patrons from NYU and other academic institutions, as well as an international crowd.
The great thing is that we have programming to meet the needs of our diverse Downtown audiences. We’ve got Queer/Art/Film, a really fun weekly series in which a member of the New York gay arts community picks out an influential film for screening. We have the New York International Children’s Film Festival, in which we screen films for kids every weekend. We have our Midnight Movies series that attracts a very different crowd. So, yeah, I would say being Downtown shapes IFC tremendously.

Do you think IFC could exist uptown?
Not in the same way. We’re very much a Downtown theater in our sensibility. We take energy from this neighborhood and we give it back. It’s lucky to be on top of the West Fourth Street station because it’s so convenient and folks from uptown can easily access us. I guess if we existed uptown, we’d have a slightly different audience profile, and over the years of screenings you’d probably see a change in what we screened.

So what’s next at IFC?
We just opened a film called Urbanized, by Gary Hustwit; it’s a feature-length documentary about the design of cities that looks at the strategies and issues behind urban design. Gary will be at IFC with lots of city planners and designers for Q&A sessions discussing sustainability, climate change and how to urbanize better.
We also have the DOC NYC festival Nov. 2-10 in collaboration with NYU. It’s our second year and we’ve already expanded significantly. So that should be a pretty exciting festival.
In addition, we’ve just opened a Weekend Retrospective Series featuring the works of Aki Kaurismäki. Every weekend, a different film of his will be screened through Dec. 18. So there’s a lot going on.

And down the road at IFC?
The DOC NYC festival will continue to expand. And we’ll continue our collaborations with filmmakers and organizations in New York. We opened in 2005 and were HD from the beginning. We added two new screens in 2009, so hopefully in the future we’ll add more screens, more space. I want us to be idiosyncratic in the long run. It’s an exciting place to see what’s coming next. One thing’s for sure, you’re not going to get bored. There’ll be something.

PHOTO BY PENNY GRAY

Claire Denis’ African fetish goes wild in White Material, an artsy depiction of a white family (Isabelle Huppert, Christophe Lambert and Nicolas Duvauchelle) who try holding on to their coffee plantation, and colonialist pride, in an unnamed African country when the black natives begin a murderous political revolt.

Isabelle Huppert goes native.

As Madame Vial, Huppert wanders through the turmoil like a wraith—pale, freckled, hair flowing through dust and smoke, yet still a bit haughty—Queen of the Nihilists. She’s determined to hold on to her land and business despite the inevitable revolution because—crazily—it’s her last stand, having given up the European life for the adventure and danger of the Dark Continent. But Denis finds darkness in her heroine’s psychological state. That’s what distinguishes White Material as different from imperialist romances like Hollywood’s 1955 Untamed, starring Susan Hayward, or Out of Africa with Meryl Streep. Madame Vial is a post-colonial Joseph Conrad character redefined through Denis’ embrace of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial criticism. She represents European decadence, the flipside of Denis’ typical fetish, which is her fascination with decline.

White Material is titled after the rebels’ tag for the European interloper—reducing them to a non-human element. (“These whites, they scorn us.”) Denis employs a chic masochism that turns this vague story of an uprising into a color-coded fantasy (beige and yellow predominate). A distant view of mountain ridges resembles the form of a nude woman reclining, as if waiting to be ravished. Madame Vial embodies an indolent empire (an idea better explicated when Huppert played Patrice Chereau’s Gabrielle). In a kinky form of reverse ethnic cleansing, Denis slowly details the Vial family’s disintegration: the matriarch’s folly, the husband’s ineffectual panic and the son Manuel’s jungle fever. After he is violated by a couple of child-soldiers, he goes native; he shaves his head and raids the family stockpile, hastening his own death and encouraging the rebels’ self-destruction.

Denis photographs African physiognomy more ardently than any other European director. These faces are not inscrutable—in fact, they’re handsome and quite transparent. They’re the return of the repressed: Beautiful kids carrying spears and machete recall the eroticized boys who pop up throughout Gael Morel’s Apres Lui and the gun-toting ragamuffins in Hype Williams’ Belly. Their impulses are clearly vengeful. Even a lecherous adult verbally assaults Madame Vial: “Extreme blondness brings bad luck. It cries out to be pillaged. Blue eyes are troublesome.”

Post-colonial thinkers like Fanon and Aimé Césaire spoke to the liberation of the Third World, but Denis (collaborating with novelist Marie N’Diaye) drifts into cynical, apolitical reverie. Her muse Isaach De Bankolé, who played the gorgeous young native boy in 1989’s Chocolat, appears here as a tired, wounded counterinsurgent known as “The Boxer.” He’s a new kind of fetish object, suggesting a background of European experience, and now De Bankolé’s nobility resembles a death mask’s. Denis’ elliptical narrative avoids politics. This siege tale ignores the details of colonial life to gloss its chaotic collapse. Her equanimity is tiresome. Instead of scrutinizing conflicting political behaviors in occupied territories—as John Ford classically did in Fort Apache—Denis substitutes the complexity of ethics and duty with Madame Vial’s and the marauding militias’ fetishized madness. A sequence involving mass-suicide followed by bloody mutilations lets Denis indulge her horror-movie kick as she did in Trouble Every Day. No wonder the smart-about-movies crowd who routinely ignore excellent films about the black diaspora experience have heaped praise on White Material. By reducing third-world tragedy to a fashion show of nihilism, it’s Halloween at the art house.
_
White Material
Directed by Claire Denis
At the IFC Center
Runtime: 102 min.

Ask any professional theater critic about the Fringe Fest, and you’re bound to get an eye-roll or a heavy sigh. The sprawling annual theater festival is increasingly a tedious exercise in public masturbation for its performers, most of which isn’t even titillating. The one-person shows are usually pretty dreary, but that’s not to say that shows with casts of two and up are much better. With some of the most reasonably priced tickets in Manhattan (and plenty of press every year), it’s no wonder that theatergoing dilettantes whose only exposure to theater is the Fringe don’t see more shows.

Best Contemporary Art Show: Anne Collier

New York-based artist Anne Collier lands this year’s best gallery show, hands down, for her eponymous exhibition this January at Anton Kern. The show was comprised mostly of photography, with books opened to pages with sunsets lining the gallery. There was also a black-and-white photo of an eye, with a frame resembling a tear duct and an image of a paper cutter slicing that eye. The show is a little aggressive in its demand that the gallery-goer contemplates the act of looking, but it’s an attribute we like. Looking at art shouldn’t always be easy.

Best Off-Off-Broadway Show: Now Circa Then

A comedy about historical re-enactors at the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum, Carly Mensch’s two-hander is as close to theatrical perfection as you’re likely to find. The production at Ars Nova sparkled, from Jason Eagan’s direction to Lauren Halpern’s densely detailed set design to the hilarious and poignant performances from Stephen Plunkett and Maureen Sebastian. With even Off-Broadway shows increasingly overblown, what a pleasure it was to sit down and find the focus shifted from high concepts to just telling a great tale.

Best Usher: Jack Donoghue at Theatre Row

He’s there almost every night, taking tickets and directing you to your floor, and if you attend shows at Theatre Row with any frequency, chances are Jack Donoghue will remember you. His friendliness is never more welcome than shortly after being forced to interact with the bored and impatient ushers of Broadway theaters—particularly that nasty one at The Schoenfeld.

Best Indie Movie Theater: IFC Center
323 6th Ave., at W. 3rd St., 212-924-7771

Just over five years into its existence, the IFC Center continues to offer some of the best new art house releases along with an ever-expanding schedule of events. The latest addition to its repertoire is a full-on film festival: DOC NYC, a documentary showcase co-founded by Thom Powers, the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival whose other duties at the IFC Center include its Stranger than Fiction series. Also coming up: The 330-minute Special Roadshow Edition of Olivier Assayas’s terrorist chronicle Carlos and famed director Claude Chabrol’s final film, Inspector Bellamy.

Best Rescue Work: So Help Me God!

Whether Maurine Dallas Watkins’ lost 1920s play So Help Me God! is actually a great play or star Kristen Johnston elevated it to higher heights is beside the point: Few plays last year were as vicious, tart and unrelentingly cynical than The Mint’s production of this show about a bitchy theatrical diva and the up-and-comer who threatens to usurp her. With so many Off-Broadway plays enjoying unnecessary transfers to Broadway, this is the one that got lost in the shuffle. Again.

John Baldessari at the MET.

Best Museum Show: John Baldessari
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., at E. 82nd St., 212-535-7710

This show just opened at The Met last week, but having seen it already at the Tate Modern last year in London, we think this is an easy call. John Baldessari spent a lifetime establishing rules for his own art-making practice, and making art that followed those guidelines. In a time when the criteria for what constitutes good contemporary art seems increasingly vague, this show couldn’t offer a more timely antidote.

Best Venue For Parties: The Hudson Hotel

The era of the great disco dance palaces is long gone. Lately, some of the best parties have taken up residence at the Hudson Hotel. With the sprawling Good Units down in the bowels of the place, a monthly party like Susanne Bartsch’s Bloody Mary can pack in a huge crowd. Upstairs, there are regular weekly parties in the Hudson Library and the Hudson Bar, on the other side of the hotel. The Private Park is in the courtyard of the lobby and the setting for many a private party during the summer, and even better is the rooftop Sky Terrace on the 15th floor, complete with glittering views of the city. The security staff at the Hudson is over-zealous and even thuggish, but then again, a lot of drunks are wandering the hallways looking for a party.

Best Non-Profit Art Initiative: Triple Candie
500 W. 148th St., at Amsterdam Ave., 212-368-3333

Harlem’s Triple Candie offers perhaps the city’s most direct push back to the dominating force of the art market: Not only does the gallery refuse to sell art, it also no longer exhibits work. Owners Shelley Bancroft and Peter Nesbet focus instead on engaging a lower-income-class community typically located outside of fine art circles. A unique and laudable outgrowth of New York’s vibrant non-profit art scene.

Hudson Hotel

Best Comedy Series: Lasers In The Jungle

Producers Carol Hartsell and Sean Crespo and host Dan Wilbur have certainly outdone themselves with Lasers in the Jungle, their weekly comedy series on Thursday nights at Luca Lounge. Where else can you see SNL’s John Mulaney try out new material, Community’s Donald Glover do a last-minute drop-in set or The Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac do 15 minutes of comedy in an audience member’s lap? All for free, no less.

Best NYC-Based Film Festival: New York Film Festival

After last year’s firestorm of criticism for offering up an insular program only accessible to diehard cinephiles, NYFF bounced back in style with a healthy blend of high profile premieres (The Social Network, The Tempest, Hereafter) and small-scale discoveries from the festival circuit. It’s still Lincoln Center, which means the prestige factor remains firmly in place with the latest offerings from Jean Luc-Godard and Abbas Kiarostami, but they now share the stage with the likes of Clint Eastwood and Jesse Eisenberg—a healthy cinematic diversity that should help sustain an image for the festival that’s aiming to feel both literate and contemporary.

After Claude Chabrol’s death Sept. 12, 2010, the French New Wave continues to pass into history even though the best films by Nouvelle Vague directors—Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and others—stay amazingly vital. Chabrol’s final film, Inspector Bellamy, is a good example: Chabrol re-imagines the detective genre in the course of practicing it. Gérard Depardieu plays Inspector Bellamy, whose domestic life with his affectionate wife Françoise (Marie Bunel) is interrupted by a client (Jacques Gamblin) seeking help in a murder case and by Bellamy’s half-brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), whose unexpected arrival brings unsettling family demands.

It took a year for Bellamy to open in the U.S. following its premiere in Europe, probably because New Wave movies are no longer hot commercial properties. The nonchalant, almost spontaneous way Bellamy’s life complicates his profession (and vice-versa) challenges the simplistic narratives of current Euro imports. In Bellamy, Chabrol and Depardieu both audaciously reveal their personal approach to the world as opposed to the way films like Carlos, Mesrine and A Prophet—as well as American grindhouse product like Let Me In and The Town—simply concentrate on generic sensationalism.

As the New Wave masters age and their innovations become unfashionable, modern audiences lose connection with the New Wave thrill of rethinking life through the codes of movie narrative. Bellamy’s client’s calls for help have an existential sense that the conscientious inspector cannot avoid. Bellamy sees himself in the client—and in his attraction to the women he meets during his investigation. The film isn’t simply about a case, but about the moral questions of social life, law, marriage, family, sex and privilege.

“Do you think mankind is improving?” Bellamy asks his despairing alcoholic brother. “Did her sexual hunger frighten you?” Bellamy probes his client about a femme fatale. Both questions and answers—posed in Chabrol’s signature style of casual observation—raise the film’s moral inquiry. Bellamy is suffused with humane concern that startlingly enlarges the solid, coherent crime-and-justice plot (co-written by Odile Barski who also co-wrote Techine’s The Girl on the Train). That’s vital art. That’s also Chabrol’s real purpose. Scenes of domestic harmony or friction, flashbacks of criminal activity and human duplicity, have a depth and precision that suggests Chabrol’s masterly summing-up of what he knows about cinema and about human nature. Bellamy’s rivalry with Jacques goes back to the remarkable sibling tension of Chabrol’s 1958 debut Le Beau Serge—Cornillac’s haunted performance even evokes Gerard Blain in that film. Genre is Chabrol’s Maguffin. The New Wave’s favorite icon, Alfred Hitchcock, explained “Maguffin” as: “The thing the hero cares about but the audience doesn’t,” which could also define the difference between profound cinema and trivial, escapist cinema—the stuff Hollywood traditionally emphasizes versus what matters in viewers’ lives. In Bellamy’s various dealings, Chabrol conveys a lyrical sense of the world. (The film is dedicated to “The Two Georges,” saluting the crime novelist Georges Simenon and musician Georges Brassens, whose classic songs articulate several characters’ points of view and even inspire a trial lawyer’s whimsical summation.) All the film’s dramatic tensions get distilled in exchanges that could be either literary apercus or song cues: “You have to forgive the weak. Why? Because they’re weak, that’s how it is,” and “He thought the world was a mess. He was right. Right doesn’t make you happy. No, it’s the opposite.”

It turns out Bellamy was a summing-up for Chabrol after all. Moviemaking this rich is passing from our culture.
_
Inspector Bellamy
Directed by Claude Chabrol
At the IFC Center
Runtime: 110 min.

Politics don’t matter to directors David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Assayas, whose Carlos, a lavish, gracefully-paced depiction of the terrorist Ilich “Carlos” Ramirez is strangely apolitical, even amoral. It’s part of the new affectless style—derived from hipster cool and leftist guilt that condemns the capitalist West for its culpability in colonialism and any advantage resulting from imperialist history. “Carlos” is the tag claimed by a South American killer trained in Moscow who pretends to want a social revolution on behalf of exploited workers, and exploits the Palestinian cause against Israeli Zionists. Played by Edgar Ramirez as a sexy sociopathic careerist, he is shown for his daring ability to insert himself into rebel organizations, kill OPEC delegates, cross borders, shoot police point-blank and seduce women. (“Treat weapons gently, tenderly. Weapons are an extension of my body.”)

Edgar Ramirez plays sexy sociopathic careerist Carlos the Jackal.

Overall, Carlos is an elegantly made, yet unarousing history—taking the theme of Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 thriller Day of the Jackal and Steven Spielberg’s Munich and making those productions seem bourgeois by following Carlos indifferently, without so much as a moment of shock even when he massacres cops in front of his own bourgie, guitar-strumming allies. His outrages are meant to be viewed dispassionately. This isn’t a new concept of biopic, just something less satisfying because Assayas—like Fincher in Zodiac and Soderberg in Che—is a Flatliner. He creates cinema by extracting emotion, morality and political commitment.

The key to Flatliner cinema comes with an opening epigraph: “Despite a great deal of historical and journalistic research there remain controversial gray areas in Carlos’ life. This film must therefore be viewed as a work of fiction tracing two decades in the career of a notorious terrorist. His relations with other characters have been fictionalized as well.”

Reducing political terrorism to “gray areas” shows that its truth—and horror—are of little interest to Assayas and his brethren. It smacks too much of middle-class conventionality, calling for patriotic devotion and possible jingoism—those unhip cinematic codes, which, it should be pointed out, Munich movingly transcended.

Flatliners promote social detachment that, in turn, seems nihilistic, like the irresolvable crimes in Zodiac and the numbing chaos of Che. Yet Assayas’ fluid technique—radiantly photographed by Yorick Le Saux and Denis Lenoir—makes it chic and far superior to the mess of Mesrine. This is what romantic 1960s radicalism has come down to in the new millennium: long, drawn-out “process” and “drift” (as a highbrow art magazine praised Zodiac). Although Carlos is full of murder, treachery and sociopathy (the Venezuelan-born serial killer proclaims himself “the armed wing of Arab revolution”), this is a fleet-footed, light-hearted epic—an aesthetic alternative to the Old School movie epic that is referenced when Carlos invokes Lawrence of Arabia to a classroom of African rebels. Its series of haphazard, sometimes inept, massacres is Assayas’ extended exercise in dark whimsy, a terrorist carnival that sucks the political marrow out of the historical epic genre—his real Irma Vep.

Besides Ramirez’s striking performance, Carlos’ most distinctive aspect is Assayas’ perverse decision to score the 1970s-set story with anachronistic pop music from British and American post-punk bands of the 1980s. This helps distance the story’s political and moral significance by emphasizing the fun of post-punk rhythms and political affectation. If Wire’s “Ahead” didn’t have such stirring rhythms fit for exhilarating cinema, this gimmick would seem decadent and appalling—particularly for how it distracts from historical gravity, such as a clip of Yasir Arafat’s stunning UN speech: “I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let branch fall from my hand.” Does its inclusion mean Assayas’ endorsement or merely a period marker for a film too cool to announce such things?

As Flatliner cinema, Carlos lacks the psychological insight on terrorist activity that distinguished Marco Bellocchio’s Red Brigade tragedy Good Morning Night or Haile Gerima’s trans-European political sojourn Teza. Assayas’ divertissement preferences the genre’s superficial attractions—highlighting Carlos’ evolving physique over a sense of global menace. (Before his capture, Carlos was denounced as “a historical curiosity, a communist windbag who is of no use to Arab leaders anymore.”) His con-artist allure makes for the film’s best scene when he seduces German feminist Magdalena Kopp (crafty Nora von Waldstatten) to join his gang: “Are you ready to submit to it unconditionally?” he asks just before she blows him. Yet even his vanity is observed with Fincherian apathy.

Carlos gives hipsters Munich minus the moral conviction and dramatic cogency that hipsters fashionably distrust. It’s being presented in two versions: 330 minutes and 165 minutes, one as emotionally flat as the other.

_
Carlos
Directed by Olivier Assayas
At IFC Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinemas
Runtime: 165 min.

Almost a hundred years ago, short story paragon O. Henry wrote “The Gift of the Magi,” a poignant and penetrating love story that was as much a religious allegory as a penetrating commentary on industrial age values. Spike Jonze’s new short film “I’m Here” joins that tradition. Its romance between robots quirkily defines the era. (It screens Sept. 23 at IFC Center and will be available as part of a multi-format DVD/CD/book project from McSweeney’s titled There Are Many of Us.)

Sheldon is what hipsters used to call “a square,” his boxlike head resembles an early-model computer hard-drive tower, while hipster Francesca is sleek and biomorphic. Considering their species, the couple’s mutual attraction is (perfectly) spiritual. Their progression—from interest, flirtation, on to intimacy, then sacrifice—charts the romance of marginals. It gets to the heart of human relations as most hipster cinema is afraid to do. That is its power and charm.

Literally alienated by technology, these robots overwhelm their design and reach each other’s souls—an avant-garde fulfillment of Chris Cunningham’s “All Is Full of Love” music video and Jonze’s “Triumph of a Heart” music video (both are Björk songs, and she is this film’s art-pixie patron saint). The robots have British accents (voiced by Andrew Garfield and Sienna Guillory), which avoids the American smugness of 500 Days of Summer and helps convey estrangement and a sense of anomie in Los Angeles. This cleverly portrays the alienation from feeling that has become a curse on modern film culture. The problem hiding behind fashionable nihilism is the digital age’s immature fear of emotion and sentiment. Jonze’s breakthrough should prove as timeless as O. Henry’s classic tale.

Jonze and Sonny Gerasimowicz, the designer of the robot, convey Sheldon and Francesca’s eyes and mouth gestures via old-fashioned animation that resembles drawn-on doodles or graffiti, signatures of personal expression and feeling. These faces recall the oversized stuffed animals of Where the Wild Things Are (also designed by Gerasimowicz), which also came to mind during Zack Snyder’s amazing Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole. It’s perfect pop synchronicity.

As in 300, Snyder’s bold, animated artistry portrays a trenchant sense of character: good, evil, heroism and cowardice are beautifully abstracted. The Owl faces—large, flat with wide jewel-like green, blue, gold or black eyes—relay as much meaning and thought as watching human faces.

Snyder’s animal fantasy (from a book series by Australian novelist Kathryn Lasky) is a children’s moral tale about two owl brothers—Soren and Kludd (voiced by Jim Sturgess and Ryan Kwanten)—divided by ambition and curiosity, who join the Guardian owls’ battle against the evil aggressive Pure Ones. Instead of facile political parallels, Snyder (like Jonze) cuts to the emotional core. Both directors use animated fantasy to achieve abstract clarity.

Working with the animation production team that did Happy Feet, Snyder achieves visual marvels: from Bierstadt landscapes to Turner skyscapes, this is grave, majestic filmmaking, far from the slapstick of Ice Age or the cynical schmaltz of Wall-E. Snyder employs 3-D ideally, to give the owls solidity and buoyancy. Lovely touches like Soren’s flying lesson show his feathery wings flapping but also flipping the pages of an ancient text; the image ingeniously measures physical against intellectual effort.
_

I’m Here
Directed by Spike Jonze
At IFC Center, Sept. 24
Runtime: 29 min.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole
Directed by Zack Snyder
Runtime: 90 min.

Lola Creton is up to her wifely necking duty.

Breillat interweaves several narratives: the predicament of two pubescent girls who are expelled from a convent when their father dies; a flashback to their childhood sibling rivalry—especially when the youngest sister frightens the eldest by reading Perrault’s Bluebeard; and the Bluebeard legend itself, in which young Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) marries the fearsome aristocrat Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), who has a reputation for killing his wives.

As visualized through Breillat’s imagination, these stories intersect to create an experience different from fairytale wonderment. Breillat generates intellectual tumult by opposing period stories with contemporary awareness (close to the way Jacques Demy evoked a realistic Middle Ages in his folkloric films Donkey Skin and The Pied Piper). This allows her to revisit favorite themes: sexual development (as in A Very Young Girl); sexual mythology (as in Romance); the anger and self-loathing of sisterhood (as in Fat Girl); the literal construction and personal interpretation of fiction (as in Sex Is Comedy); plus the fear and desire that define sexual compulsion (as in Anatomy of Hell).

Breillat’s approach distinguishes her as a provocative filmmaker—not always satisfactory but always genuine. You can measure contemporary moral consciousness by her fearless analysis of sexual narrative, whether dealing in personal fantasy or commercial pornography. (Breillat cleverly “transgressed” the latter by eliciting a genuine emotional characterization from European porn star Rocco Siffredi in Anatomy of Hell). In Bluebeard there are elements of both. Breillat explores the contradictions within erotic and social drives. Marie-Catherine’s greed, lust and curiosity go beyond ideas of innocence but Breillat is uninterested in the notion of simple victimization. The urge toward degradation—even oblivion—is part of the fascination she finds in the appeal of fairytales and the allure of sex.

For the cinema-savvy, Breillat’s film may also recall the opening sequence of Brian DePalma’s 1976 Carrie, where menstrual blood evokes shame and vengeance. Breillat dares what most male directors of female fear and desire have resisted: Jean Cocteau sublimated eroticism in his classic 1946 film of Beauty and the Beast and Neil Jordan brought wit and splendor to A Company of Wolves, his 1984 film of Angela Carter’s postmodern literary deconstruction of fairytales. The scene where Marie-Catherine and Bluebeard both gnaw on a leg of animal flesh bluntly depicts the animalistic nature of men and women—appetites that join and separate each other.

Breillat’s tough-mindedness shows in her candid sexual inquiry. Dispensing with fairytale charm, she offers adult skepticism instead: Thomas’ imposing physical brutishness when Bluebeard disrobes and Marie-Catherine’s mind games with him that parallel the tension among the book-reading siblings. It all goes to turning the tragic inevitability of Perrault’s fable into a satire of human folly. Several great tableaux in Bluebeard (shot with surreal clarity by Vilko Filac) approach romanticism and then wind up chillingly realistic; they prove Breillat’s concern with the imaginary and with sexual and political mythology that dominates female experience.

–
Bluebeard
Directed by Catherine Breillat
At IFC Center
Running Time: 80 min.

Why is Desplechin worshipped by the gatekeepers of contemporary film culture? The answer is annoyingly

Mathieu Almaric stars in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale.

apparent in A Christmas Tale, where Desplechin glamorizes a haute-bourgeois French family, serving up domestic banalities with more than a soupçon of intellectual loftiness. The Vuillard clan discusses medicine, religion, psychosis, racism, sex, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare and, in one extended scene, works a long algebra equation on several chalkboards. It takes place at a baronial house with a large garden. It’s just bigger and better-appointed than American movies telling similar home-for-the-holiday tales.

This is not to deny Desplechin’s filmmaking efforts. He’s all about le cinema; mixing devices such as puppet-show silhouettes, rear-projections, iris-framed compositions, graphics super-imposed over dissolves and photo-montages—even including a musical-medley soundtrack from classical to jazz. This movie drowns in high-tone, pseudo-avant-garde fanciness. But if you can see past it—and that’s the challenge for naïve filmgoers—the attenuated stories and flashes of nihilism, like Faunia’s deadly advice, are pretty empty.

At first, Desplechin’s fussily contrived history of the Vuillards resembles a fairy tale: Princessy Junon (the ever-imperious Catherine Deneuve) marries the frog-like Abel (rotund, wide-eyed Jean-Paul Roussillon). Desplechin tracks the death of the Vuillard’s sickly first child (via the above-described narrative tricks which recall Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie but without the capricious sense of fun). Then comes the quick, disheartened addition of three more children whom Desplechin introduces as adults: the dishonest banker Henri, playwright Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), and family mascot Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) whose life is charmed. All smart, good-looking and articulate, yet the Vuillards yet seem cursed—by the specters of death (when Junon is diagnosed as needing a bone marrow transplant) and by Desplechin’s pomposity. Instead of dramatizing a straight-forward, stressful reunion, Desplechin orbits around the relationships film-school-style: characters read letters addressing the audience or offer interior monologues, highlighting overwrought discord and overabundant magnanimity. This makes the movie long, but not profound.

Exceedingly art-conscious, Desplechin does tireless visual experimentation. He rejects conventional narrative economy, yet he also lacks grandeur. Today’s film geeks misperceive his specious “innovations” as an advance over the 1960s New Wave. Fact is, Desplechin has resurrected the old Tradition of Quality, updating exactly the sort of dry, bourgeois sex dramas the New Wave repudiated. When Faunia depresses Henri, or Junon teases him with motherly disdain, or Ivan gallantly permits his wife (Chiara Mastroianni) to requite her affair with his cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto), the radical acts only superficially address modern anxiety. At heart it’s all mawkish.

A Christmas Tale isn’t repugnant, just regressive. The modern family film has moved beyond this Gallic update of I Remember Mama. (Desplechin peddles the class and intellectual superiority of European art-movie chic that Woody Allen envied in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander and attempted to rip-off in Hannah and Her Sisters). My own hopes sank from the opening scene of Père Vuillard tending his first child’s grave in a vast cemetery. It couldn’t match that astonishing cemetery sequence in Patrice Chereau’s domestic-social masterpiece Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train where an extended family illustrated the problems of the modern world. More recently, Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone specifically addressed the impact of social change on contemporary American family habit. (Bezucha used a Christmastime TV broadcast of Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis to measure the depths of modern nostalgia; Desplechin’s TV clips of The Ten Commandments, Funny Face and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are a mere conceit.)

Already this year, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, André Téchiné’s The Witnesses and Marcos Siega’s Chaos Theory offered more aesthetically adventurous insights into complicated family relations. By the time Desplechin finally works past Faunia’s hip cynicism—emphasizing the creature comforts of typically French progressives—it’s as if he’s been looking at Eugene O’Neill’s conflicted family dramas from the idiot’s end of a telescope.
–
A Christmas Tale
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin, at IFC Center, Running Time: 150 min.
–