Original title: The sisters brothers · Jacques Audiard · France · 2018 · Script: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain · Performers: Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal…
Original title: Peterloo · Mike Leigh · UK · 2018 · Script: Mike Leigh · Performers: Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, David Bamber…
We have already drawn attention once in this space to the surprising evolution that the genre of western in recent decades. A genre that, although it has lost its podium within popular culture, enjoys a very healthy state of health, field of experimentation in which directors of all aesthetic origins (from classics like Clint Eastwood to indie film glories like Jim Jarmusch or the Cohen brothers) They have found the necessary clay to carry out proposals that are each more original. This is one, In recent times, the curious particularity of the contribution to such a genuinely American fictional model (as a narrative and from a historical point of view) of directors from Europe. It was the case, For example, by the Scotsman John Maclean and the unclassifiable Slow west, or now with the incorporation of the Frenchman Jacques Audiard and his latest work: The sisters brothers. Directors who, besides, They are not satisfied with using the elements of the genre to build aesthetically attractive fictions., but, each one in their own way, they dare to enter (and question) the very root of what was once known as “the conquest of the west”, forging of that country that is the United States, with all the political burden that this entails.
Audiard's film joins a series of works that cement a recent but long exercise of demystification that, from cinematographic fiction, is being carried out around this process of territorial expansion that would end up uniting the two coasts of North America. Aesthetic demystification, on the one hand, and dramatic on the other. In the first case, and emulating works like those of the aforementioned Jim Jarmusch, the west of Audiard is a dirty and depraved space, seasoned from muddy cities, built following the trail marked on the map by the push of the so-called gold rush. It is particularly notable, In this aspect, the way in which the film's production team, under the direction of the director, He builds this image that serves as a background and counterpoint to the drama of the characters.. It is not something that is specified by any line of dialogue nor does it necessarily influence the course of the action.. It is the background noise that accompanies a story much more complex than it appears at first glance.. A detail here, another one there, The film energizes its discourse between the first and second terms of images that speak for themselves., perhaps one of the greatest and most interesting achievements of this production. Although he is not the only one.
The world that Audiard has designed is a lawless world where only one commandment reigns.: the one who dictates the greed of the strongest. And so, in practice, translates into an unseemly use of violence. A violence that here appears strongly stark, brutal, and not only for the very fact of the many violent acts that we will see, but because of the way in which it is used. At the beginning of the movie, we are witnessing a disturbing event. Our two main characters, two gunmen in the pay of a sinister man they call “Commodore”, They surround a lonely house located on a wide plain in the middle of the night. The darkness is broken by the sparkling collapse of the bursts of fire emitted by the guns.. When the robbers enter the house, They kill the inhabitants who are still alive without any consideration or the slightest attention to the fact that behind these deaths there are human beings. From there and practically until the end of the tape, We are going to attend a real carnage that, clearing the comedic patina that covers the film, If it impacts us as viewers it will be precisely because of that., for cruelty executed with the most absolute indifference. Violence as an expression of the dehumanization of a man who has lost any trace of morality, delivered to an equally perverse order. And this is where the sound work becomes truly remarkable.. It is difficult to understand how this proposal can make real sense outside of the movie theater.. In the hands of Audiard, Violence is not just the blood that runs everywhere, It is the devastating click of the hammer of the pistols, the deafening roar, heavy, because it has real volume, of each shot, the fall of bodies against the ground.
But, in the middle of this river of blood and greed, surge, Audiard and his co-writer tell us, Thomas Bidegain, the dream of utopia, the need to build another different world, a place on the sidelines, a refuge where brotherhood among men is possible. Y, for a moment, It seems that the brothers Charlie and Eli Sisters are going to achieve it thanks to the friendship of the man they are chasing on behalf of the Commodore. Because that's what this movie is about, First, of the possibility of friendship, of the need for that camaraderie that appears in moments of crisis, of the feelings that arise when, for a moment, we leave aside the foolishness to which the world that we ourselves have built pushes us and in which we participate almost of our own free will, as if there was no other alternative. It is here that the film sheds its skin as a more or less period story and shows its true cards to speak to us., men of the contemporary world, immersed in violence similar to that generated and suffered by Charlie and Eli. Our violence is not as dirty as that of the old west, but somehow it's just as depraved. Is there hope?, ask Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain. The answer is not simple. Utopia may be a dream that is still far away, a perhaps impossible illusion, but with a little luck we can get something that comes close to it. We will leave these last lines of text to honor the exquisite work of Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie (Lost river), as well as the soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat, who offers a very personal and evocative score that is rarely seen in contemporary cinema.. a delight.
Of that same, of utopias, It also covers the latest production by British director Mike Leigh, The Peterloo tragedy. And almost at a similar time, just on another continent.
We are now in old England, the year 1819, shortly after the events of the Battle of Waterloo in which Napoleon Bonaparte would be defeated by the troops commanded by the Duke of Wellington. After the return from the front, The English parliament decides to reward the work of the distinguished military man with a scandalous sum of money. While, The common people suffer from hunger due to the rise in bread prices as a result of the tariffs on foreign wheat imposed by the government to favor local landowners.. We are already in the first steps of the industrial revolution and Manchester is a very important manufacturing center. But, despite technical advances, Factory workers barely earn enough to feed their families.. In the middle of all this, a strong reformist protest movement spreads among the popular classes. Your goal: achieve universal suffrage and, with the, the assignment of local representatives to defend their interests and needs in the capital of the kingdom. Obviously, the movement is not very popular among the powerful classes, who are preparing to repress a major protest concentration.
Leigh has constructed a story that, like in Jacques Audiard's western, He also wants to speak to the present. Leigh himself has acknowledged in several interviews that his film is inscribed within the context that his country is experiencing due to the colossal earthquake that Brexit has caused.. For the director of Secrets and lies, The British popular classes would currently find themselves in the same situation of subjection in which they found themselves in that only apparently remote past.. Above, a dominant caste that enjoys the benefits of its privileges directing the future of the country in a very capricious and interested way. Below, a working class that suffers the consequences of all this in the form of unemployment and poverty. But it's here, precisely, where it seems the director is wrong, by trying to speak to this present in terms of that past.
Leaving aside this time the impeccable workmanship and staging to which the director has accustomed us to magnificently treated pieces like his previous film, Turner, The problem Leigh falls into this time is, precisely, in that somewhat Manichean portrait of the class struggle that tries to expose. If what Leigh intended was to produce a pamphlet that, like the harangues to which his characters constantly indulge, will encourage the spirit of commitment and solidarity of the audience, pamphlet has been left and, in that aspect, nothing to object. However, for depending on which viewers and depending on what moment, this may be insufficient, when not a little boring. Leigh offers us here a portrait that, at times, rose to apple caricature, without more nuances than the exhibition of flat characters without edges. The wealthy classes, the bad ones. The poor, clear as glass.
And it is strange that a director usually as subtle as Leigh has fallen into this schematism. Except for some fragments in some parts of the script in which certain contradictions are outlined, The Peterloo tragedy It turns out to be a story without dramatic ups and downs.. To compensate, Leigh indulges in a very clever strategy. Most of the story revolves around the organization and difficulties that the characters go through to prepare for the big event.. The tension before the materialization of the expected maintains the interest of the spectator who, in that sense, Stay attentive to your seat in the almost three hours of footage that this film has. There is no more argument here than this. The rest are fragments of the lives of individual characters that serve, on the one hand, to link the different discourses that the plot contains and, on the other, try to catch an audience that must feel identified with individuals with whom, bridging the distance, share interests and difficulties. But the simplicity (simplicity) and the excessive fragmentation of the characters' interventions make it difficult for us to feel identified., linked to that intimacy necessary for, when conflict breaks out, we feel it as our own. It's not that we don't regret what happens, It's just that we can't empathize with it.. An outstanding case is that of the supposed protagonist of the film and the common thread of the events.. At the beginning of the tape, a young soldier, Joseph, returns to his parents' house. He has survived the war and now he will have to survive the misery that his country offers him as “compensation” for the services rendered on the battlefield.. The problem is that, after these first bars of the film, Leigh completely forgets about her decoy and when she tries to pick it up at the end of the show, we have practically forgotten about him.
But what I think Leigh forgets in this case is that the present to which he addresses is much more complex than the past that serves as a symbolic reflection.. As we said at the beginning, the working class (is delimited where it is delimited) suffer, somehow, the same conflicts as then, but the context has changed. In the case of Brexit, a good part of them have sided with their supposed oppressors. How has this happened? That's the question. On the other hand, Leigh's attempts to try to extol the supposed virtues of journalism as a guarantor of public freedoms and a scourge of oppressors today have many dark corners that would well deserve a more rigorous and insightful analysis than what the film offers us.. No, these are no longer those times, should be said. GERARDO LEON
