Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

November 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 86

Total Comments: 48

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Emergency Kisses / Les baisers de secours / France / 1989

The fine texture of Garrel’s personal, introspective, melancholic, poetic cinema lies not only in his obsessive circling round the (for him) eternal question of nature of love and the couple, with his own personal history (past relationships, past heroin addiction) thrown into the mix, but in the look and feel of the cinematic image itself.

There’s a great scene in Emergency Kisses where the director’s wife visits the actress her husband has chosen to star in his new film, in order to convince her to turn that role down, as it’s her role, based on her life. Their conversation is in a single take (common to conversations throughout the film) and the camera moves with the speakers, the black-and-white softening and whiting-out as they stand by the window, then regaining its clearer contrasts as they resume their seats at the table. The to-and-fro of conversation, camera movement and image texture are all as one.

The autobiographical quality to Emergency Kisses is a fascinating one, with the film’s director being played by Garrel himself, his wife Jeanne played by his wife of the time (Brigitte Sy), his son by his son (Louis Garrel – Regular Lovers’ star making an appearance as a toddler), his father by his father (Maurice Garrel). But ambiguous too, as each is still performing a role written (co-written with novelist Marc Cholodenko) for this film. The story itself is focused on the dissolution of the couple, with each committing what is seen by the other as an act of betrayal. For the wife, it’s the husband’s choice of another actress to play herself. For the husband, it’s the deliberate act of adultery (staged for the eyes of both husband and son). And it’s the son that brings the couple together again, but with the whole nature of this couple at the end of the film left at a point of uncertain irresolution.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
19 Nov 2006 10:02 PM | Submit Comment

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