Discover Top Posts Tagged with #elena lazic

Fées d’hiver. Elena and Manuela Lazic photographed by Christophe Rihet for Be Magazine, February 2013.

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ELLE (Paul Verhoeven, 2016) - translation of Elena Lazic’s original French text, appearing in Les Cahiers du Cinéma n.729, January 2017

Paul Verhoeven proves with Elle that - in case we had forgotten - he can also apply his biting tone (in fact always full of tenderness and humanity) to very ordinary, even tragically commonplace stories. It goes without saying that the film, wrongly described as a ‘rape comedy’ by some, does not make rape a source of humour. We never sadistically laugh at the on-screen depravity in Verhoeven’s films, but rather always nervously. Here, that which is darkly funny is the way in which the unexpectedly serene reaction of the victim - brilliantly played by Isabelle Huppert on Olympic form - destabilises her friends, who consequently fail to express the pain and concern appropriate under such circumstances. The reactions of all those characters are of course unrealistic, their indifference exaggerated - this is a film by Paul Verhoeven, after all. But the fact that the victim’s incapacity (or perhaps her refusal?) to perceive the incident as an attack on her person, is simply accepted - even applauded - by the men in her life, reveals their misogyny in a scathing and original way. The empathy they should have expressed wasn’t based on their respect for her at all, but simply on a convention, on an expectation of society. Elle thus proves to be one of Verhoeven’s most complex and deft films, taking as its starting point an individual case that then brilliantly - and without any vulgar metaphors - comes to relate to society at large. As always with the director, in the horrible absurdity of the situation hides a bitter critique of the inhumanity of people. Here, Verhoeven attacks men in particular because indeed, the “Elle” of the title isn’t an insensitive person: at the end of the film, she finally realises that although play-acting is allowed [in social life and in sex], there comes a moment when one must draw the line. She, and all women, are worthy of love and respect. And no matter how hard we look, Verhoeven has never suggested otherwise.

By Elena Lazic

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E. Elias Merhige’s cult classic makes us look between the frames People who worry about the distinction between the life lived and the life examined need to check out that thing called cinema. Watc…

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New online film magazine: Animus Magazine

Link: https://animusmagazine.com

From their about section:Animus is an online film magazine based in London, UK, and turned towards the future. New issues are published monthly, each featuring six essays guaranteed to cut through the noise and be worth your time, published all at once for you to read at your leisure. On our Patreon, we publish articles reacting to the news and to the conversations animating the film world, as well as interviews and other extras.

Current contributors are: Elena Lazic, Sophie Monks Kaufman, Charles Bramesco, Manuela Lazic, Paul Ridd,

#Animus Magazine #cinema #periodicals #Elena Lazic #Sophie Monks Kaufman #Charles Bramesco #Manuela Lazic #Paul Ridd

Fées d’hiver. Elena and Manuela Lazic photographed by Christophe Rihet for Be Magazine, February 2013.

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How the West was Lost: Revisiting HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016)

Hell or High Water

The simplicity and the over nobility of its political message bothered some on release, yet that is not necessarily the biggest of Hell or High Water's problems. More disappointing is the way in which the film’s argument and its undeniably intelligent structure are so often made too overt, overriding its depth and nuance. What could have worked as interesting subtext in a film centred on fully-fledged characters here becomes the sole focus of the film. Subtext has become text, and in turn the characters are not presented as fully realised people but rather as ciphers, as representatives of ideas; mechanisms at the service of a clever construction.

This phenomenon, already visible in Taylor Sheridan's work on Sicario (2015), seems to be a symptom of the popularity of films that work like clockwork. An intelligent construction has become so fashionable, a mark of 'intelligent' and Oscar-worthy filmmaking, that what was once subtext - that which once worked in tandem to the narrative mechanisms at work in a film - has now been fully brought to the fore. With this will to make movies as outwardly efficient and economical as possible has come a need to jettison subtlety, ambiguity and nuance - the key ingredients needed for an emerging subtext - in favour of overt and demonstrative clarification of theme. This allows (re)viewers to more easily detect the intelligence and sophistication of the director, and yes, to flatter themselves for 'getting' the film.

Sicario

The most troubling aspect of this tendency is not so much the ego-trip of the film's writer, rather, it signals the end of real entertainment. Discovering a film’s subtext, the influence it has on how characters work and how we understand them is one of the biggest pleasures to be enjoyed in film viewing. When all of a film’s elements fit perfectly - that is, when characters are not real people but merely pure products of their circumstances - and all the work is already done by the film itself, there is little fun to be had.

A counterexample to Hell or High Water is James Mangold's Cop Land (1997), a film with similar scale, laconic tone and tragic overtones. That film also works like a well-oiled machine, finding all the narrative beats of the classical western across its runtime. Yet unlike Hell or High Water, it remains surprising and thrilling throughout. This is partly due to the fact that the film is largely indebted to the Western. In a bared landscape where the basics of civilisation and humanity are constantly questioned and under threat, every look, every object, and every action takes on an overt meaning. This obviousness, this inescapability, is inherently tragic.

Cop Land

In George Stevens’ 1953 film Shane - which Cop Land heavily references - and in countless other Westerns, there is no escaping the overt significance of a gun. In another genre set in more civilised society, one can find valuable reasons to justify its existence and use. But in the wild landscape of the Western, a gun is just a weapon meant to kill. The same tragic overtness is at work in Cop Land. When sheriff Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone) visits his ex-girlfriend at her house, a picture of her husband on a shelf is a painfully overt sign that she has moved on. Similarly throughout the film, Heflin is confronted with tragically obvious evidence that his police friends are corrupt.

In Hell or High Water, facts are also presented in a painfully matter-of-fact way. Boards that read "IN DEBT?" on the side of the road brutally highlight the economic desperation in Texas. A man on the peripheries of the film is seen escaping a fire with his horses, indicating the vast isolation of the space. However, this powerfully blunt presentation isn't so much aimed at the characters, as it is in Cop Land and Shane, but rather it is aimed at us, the viewers. It is in this respect that the film falls into the demonstrative trap already found in Sicario and before it Andrew Dominik's crushingly didactic neo-Western Killing Them Softly (2012).

Shane

Of course the harsh context presented in the film does influence brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster). The men are so desperate they decide to rob banks, and to a certain extent, the bluntness of this presentation works to explain why they go to such extremes. Yet unlike the lead characters of Shane and Cop Land, the Howard brothers never actually try to overthrow this tragic situation. Their actions are perfectly in line with the economic crisis. The intensely matter-of-fact presentation does not go against the grain of these characters as it does for those in Cop Land and Shane.

In both Mangold and Stevens' films, the horror and injustice of the criminals seen grows more and more obvious and thus increasingly violent. This escalation fits with the lead characters' unrest, characters who ultimately decide to change their situation. In Cop Land, Heflin stops turning a blind eye to the corruption of his police friends when he becomes aware of just how violent they can get. Likewise in Shane, the ex-gunfighter abandons his excuse for passivity and for owning a gun when the outlaws become more and more ruthless - the film features one of the most shocking deaths in all Westerns. In a deadly showdown, he annihilates his enemies before leaving the town and declaring "there aren't any more guns in the valley."

In Hell or High Water such brutal overtness has no effect on the two lead characters and thus feels gratuitous. When Tanner breaks the rules and kills someone during a botched bank robbery, Toby does not react in any particular way. The plan stays on, and they move on to the next bank.

Hell or High Water

Only Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) is affected by the increase in overt horror and violence. When his partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) is swiftly, bluntly killed by Tanner, Hamilton takes the matter into his own hands and decides to put an end to it all himself - just as Shane and Heflin did before him. Hamilton is the only character that feels like a real person in the film precisely because he is not simply a vessel enacting the film’s thesis about the tragic, inescapable cycle of economic misery in Texas.

The obviousness of that message actually makes sense in the context of this character, because this overtness has an effect on him and he goes against it. Indeed, the increasing violence of the bank robberies - culminating with the murder of his colleague - are direct results of the economic misery of Texas. Thus in killing Tanner, Hamilton revolts against this miserable situation and attempts to overthrow it.

Hell or High Water

One could argue that the bank robbers are the true rebels, but they do not overthrow the system: they turn it in their favour. At the end of the film, Toby recovers the family ranch by paying off the debt owed to the Texas Midlands Bank with the money he and his brother stole from various branches of the same bank.

After Hamilton’s revolt, it is a shame that the ending sees him return to being a powerless vessel in Taylor Sheridan’s hands. Hamilton lets Toby go with the money he stole for no other reason than to let the film enforce an artificial sense of tragedy much less powerful than the stand for dignity and human values that both Cop Land and Shane execute so well. In a final scene so 'written' it hurts, an actual sense of disappointment is felt as Hamilton disappears into the narrative cogs of David Mackenzie's film as swiftly as he managed to transcend them.

By Elena Lazic.