Kent Jones sobre Garrel e o resto

“Idiotic . . . naïve . . . looks like a perfume commercial.” These were among the comments I heard about Philippe Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn, whose press screening offered a muted variation of the now-legendary Brown Bunny incident of 2003. This didn’t surprise me. Frontier of Dawn was as out of place in Cannes as a factory-sealed Polaroid Swinger on display in a Mac store.

Of the above charges, the one that sticks is “naïve.” Garrel has always been a naïve artist, but is this a defect? Film culture breeds sophistication. What’s the latest? Who’s advanced the furthest? And who needs another black-and-white Garrel movie about his relationship with Nico? That Frontier of Dawn is Garrel’s first film after Regular Lovers, which is, among other things, a Garrel film for people who don’t know or don’t like other Garrel films, only made matters worse.

The director’s son Louis (“He can’t act . . . all he knows how to do is pout”) plays a photographer named François who has been hired to photograph a young actress named Carole (Laura Smet). They fall in love, he balks at her emotional volatility and finds a convenient excuse to ditch her. She is committed to a mental institution, and not much later she does herself in. One year later, François embarks on a new relationship with Eve (Clémentine Poidatz), less unhinged and far wealthier. The promise of stability is undone by a dark apparition: the face of Carole in the mirror, calling François to join her in oblivion. At this point in the screening, everything was funny.

Nicole Brenez once wrote that while she had little use for Garrel’s color films, she found that in his black-and-white work the patient, level gaze of the camera on intimate human affairs rendered the action “instantly allegorical.” Perhaps “elemental” is a better word. Garrel has always given us cinematic life lessons based on his own experience, made with a simplicity unavailable to most filmmakers—this is his “naïveté.” François’s friend evokes the potential “terror” of bourgeois happiness in one of Garrel’s typically pointed dialogue exchanges, and it’s a laugh riot in the press screening. Why? Because such questions are old hat and better left to 40th-anniversary celebrations of May ’68? Because Garrel lacks the sophistication to couch them within a more “believable” framework? This “stupid” movie, which made almost everything around it look either overwrought or calculating, prompts a question. If we can tolerate naïveté in music, dance, poetry, and opera, why do we scoff at it on a movie screen?

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Kent Jones perfeito a analisar a arte de Phillipe Garrel e consequentemente a diagnosticar os problemas de algum (muito...) cinema contemporâneo.

Como é possível o filho de Garrel, O cineasta, meter-se naqueles produtos lastimosos, pomposos e, finalmente medíocres, e consequentemente expor-se desta maneira nos filmes do Pai?