Late August, Early September (Olivier Assayas, 1998)

 

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Virginie Ledoyen, François Cluzet, Jeanne Balibar, Alex Descas, Arsinée Khanjian, Mia Hansen-Løve, Nathalie Richard, Eric Elmosnino. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Denis Lenoir. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Luc Barnier. 

Late August, Early September is what you might call a “mood title” as opposed to a “content title.” It’s like the ones Yasujiro Ozu gave his films, such as Late Spring (1949) or Early Summer (1951), not so much about the time of the year as about the feelings those seasons or months evoke. Assayas’s film is about men and women who have reached that point in middle age at which it seems there’s no turning back, no starting a new path in life, but instead they must go on into their later years on the track where they’ve found themselves. The central character of the film is Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric), a writer/editor who at the start of the film is selling the apartment where he has lived with his girlfriend, Jenny (Jeanne Balibar). They have broken up fairly amicably and Gabriel has now started a relationship with another woman, Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), who is a little more impulsive and unsettled than Jenny. Gabriel is friends with Adrien (François Cluzet), a modestly successful novelist who is fretting about how modest that success has been. Adrien, too, has an ex, Lucie (Arsinée Khanjian), but he has now taken up with a 15-year-old girl, Véra (Mia Hansen-Løve), a relationship he has kept secret from his friends. Adrien is also suffering from an unnamed disease. The film explores the relationships among these characters, who talk and smoke and make love the way people in French films do – to the point where those of us who aren’t French may get a little impatient for the film to get on with a plot. But it’s so nicely acted by some very attractive performers that it didn’t wear me down, even though when it ended I wondered a little what point it was striving to make. 

At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2018)

Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Niels Arestrup. Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière, Julian Schnabel, Louise Kugelberg. Cineatography: Benoît Delhomme. Production design: Stéphane Cressend. Film editing: Louise Kugelberg, Julian Schnabel. Music: Tatiana Lisovskaya. 

Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate is less a dramatic biopic than a series of conversations about art and madness centered on the figure of Vincent van Gogh. Willem Dafoe got yet another well-deserved Oscar nomination for playing van Gogh as a man who walks the line between genius and psychosis. Schnabel's contribution to this familiar story is to introduce a recent theory that van Gogh's death was not a suicide but instead a mishap, the result of a random gunshot when the artist was being harassed by a couple of young hoodlums. Van Gogh, in this theory, claimed he shot himself perhaps to protect the perpetrators but also as a kind of acknowledgement that he had reached a terminal point in his life. But what matters most in the film is art, explored in conversations between Vincent and his brother, Theo (Rupert Friend), his fellow artist Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), and near the end of the film with a priest, played by Mads Mikkelsen. It's an often fascinating film in its re-creation of 19th-century Paris, Arles, and Auvers-sur-Oise, and its deft matching of scenery and people with the corresponding places and faces familiar to us from van Gogh's paintings. To my mind, cinematographer Benoît Delhomme overuses the hand-held camera to the point of inducing a kind of nausea, but perhaps the intent was to suggest the instability that van Gogh tried to turn into fixity by painting it.

Ismael's Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017)

Ismael's Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017)

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Louis Garrel, Alba Rohrwacher, Lászlo Szabó, Hippolyte Girardot, Jacques Nolot, Catherine Mouchet, Samir Guesmi. Screenplay: Arnaud Desplechin, Julie Peyr, Léa Mysius. Cinematography: Irina Lubtchansky. Production design: Toma Baqueni. Film editing: Laurence Briaud. Music: Grégoire Hetzel, Mike Kourtzer.

Even people who know Arnaud Despechin's films better than I do seem to agree that Ismael's Ghosts is something of a mess, a series of scenes and incidents that are sometimes brilliant in themselves -- such as the tantrum that the elderly film director Henri Bloom (Lászlo Szabó) throws while boarding a flight to Israel, where he's to receive an award -- but don't cohere enough to make thematic or emotional sense. Just the fact that we have characters named Bloom and Dedalus should be enough to clue us in that we're dealing with a literary imagination as well as a cinematic one: There's also the reappearance of a woman though to be dead whose name is Carlotta, an allusion to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). As we sort out the various relationships -- who's married or related to whom -- we also have to figure out what one segment has to do with another -- why, for example, do we sometimes seem to be in the middle of a spy thriller and the next we're examining the love life of a filmmaker? Eventually, we realize that some scenes are from the film Ismaël Vuillard is directing, but what that film has to do with his domestic and creative troubles is another matter. Nevertheless, it's entertaining enough to watch actors like Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard, and Charlotte Gainsbourg do their thing, so if in the end you don't particularly feel compelled to piece it all together, there's still been some well-spent time.

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud, Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni, Laurent Capelluto, Émile Berling, Thomas Obled, Clément Obled, François Bertin, Samir Guesmi, Azize Kabouche. Screenplay: Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuelle Bourdieu. Cinematography: Eric Gautier. Production design: Daniel Bevan. Film editing: Laurence Briaud. Music: Grégoire Hetzel, Mike Kourtzer.

A Christmas Tale is not exactly brimful of seasonal cheer, but it warrants watching at any holiday in which families gather to both celebrate and bicker. The Vuillard clan is somewhat dysfunctional, but they're also French, which means that they smoke, drink, and talk a little too much, and have idiosyncratic ways of showing that they love one another. The matriarch, Junon (who would ever have thought Catherine Deneuve would be cast as matriarch?), has cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant. The task of searching for a donor falls to the patriarch, Abel (and who would have ever thought of bringing together the goddess-like Deneuve and the froglike Jean-Paul Roussillon?), since Junon decides at this moment to leave everything to fate. And since this crisis is coming to a head at Christmastime, it means gathering the family for more than just celebrating a holiday. There are three living children -- the first-born died of cancer as a child -- and they don't entirely get along. Elizabeth, the oldest, has banished the middle child, Henri, from her life. The youngest, Ivan, naturally has to exhibit divided loyalties when the other two get together. Elizabeth and Ivan bring along their spouses and children; Henri, unmarried, brings his latest girlfriend, Faunia, who, being Jewish, has her own slightly distant take on the Christmas festivities. Elizabeth's teenage son, Paul, has recently had a nervous breakdown. He also turns out to be a match for Junon's transplant, as does the black sheep Henri, which sets up even more grounds for dissension, especially given the tension between Henri and Elizabeth. And so, out of all this stew of tensions, director Arnaud Desplechin puts together a fascinating portrait of what it means to be a family. He mingles a variety of filmmaking techniques with a whole range of literary, cinematic, and even musical allusions to give us a multifaceted view of the Vuillards, their past, present, and perhaps future. On second thought, maybe it's best not to watch this anytime near one of your own potentially volatile family gatherings -- it cuts a little too close to home.