Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986)

Set almost entirely within the premises of a shopping centre, the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's musical Golden Eighties follows the romantic entanglements of various mall staff as they attempt to juggle their professional and private lives.  Recently restored in 4K by Belgium's Cinematek, Akerman's film sees the director and Delphine Seyrig reunite more than a decade on from their collaboration on the incredible, shattering Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  Whereas Seyrig commanded the screen for virtually all of Jeanne Dielman's three-plus hours, Golden Eighties features an ensemble cast in which she, playing another character named Jeanne, is joined by Myriam Boyer, Belgian pop icon Lio, Fanny Cottençon, Pascale Salkin and Charles Denner, among others.

The plot revolves around Boyer's Sylvie, a coffee shop proprietor longing for her boyfriend who is away seeking his fortune in Québec, and Eli (played by Boyer's real-life husband John Berry), an American former GI who, by chance, reconnects with clothing boutique owner Jeanne, a Jewish woman he looked after following her liberation from the death camps of WW2.  In a setup not unlike that of Alain Resnais' Muriel, in which Seyrig's Hélène receives a visit from an old flame looking to rekindle their past romance, Eli would like to restart his relationship with Jeanne, which ended with her sudden departure.  But Jeanne now has a husband (Denner) and son (Nicolas Tronc), the latter of whom has his own romantic problems as he can't choose between the flighty Lili (Cottençon) and the devoted Mado (Lio).

Golden Eighties is a most atypical film from Akerman, who is best known for her formally rigorous works, and it is easy—and reductive—to view it as her riff on the musical films of Jacques Demy (one of which, Peau d'âne, starred a customarily radiant Seyrig).  Certainly, its songs, pastel colour scheme and theme of idealised love (which eventually yields to more pragmatic needs) are a good fit for a Demy musical, yet there's a Resnaisian wistfulness present here, and Jeanne's past trauma means that the holocaust, not for the first or last time in Akerman's work, comes under consideration (the director's mother survived Auschwitz).  It says much about Akerman's skill that this weighty element can be added in such a way that the resulting film contains not so much as a hint of tonal uncertainty.

It is not inapt to suggest that Golden Eighties is a fine entry point for those unfamiliar with Akerman's oeuvre, and it is certainly the most accessible of her films; as such, it has sometimes been dismissed as one of the director's lesser efforts.  But anyone rejecting any project involving Akerman and Seyrig should do so at their peril, and indeed this film has much more depth than its frothy, cheerful veneer might suggest.  Perhaps the most striking aspect of Golden Eighties is that it was set and made in the middle of the decade of its weirdly prescient title—the film, especially in this restored version, has the look and feel of a fairly recent 80s parody—so the styles and fashions of the era are presented more or less as they were.  Akerman, it seems, was acutely tuned in to the moment she was living in.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022)

With films such as Danton's Death, On Call and We, Alice Diop has carved out a formidable reputation as a documentary filmmaker, and with Saint Omer she takes her first step into narrative cinema.  Yet to call Saint Omer a work of fiction is something of a stretch, as the film reconstructs the trial of Fabienne Kabou, who in November 2013 left her baby daughter to drown on a beach in northern France.  Intrigued by the case, and with an eye on making a film about the proceedings, Diop herself attended Kabou's 2016 trial, with the experience leading to a feature that is a very different work from the essay film one might have expected from the director.  Alice Diop's presence at the actual court sessions further blurs the boundary between verity and fabrication, and as a result Saint Omer occupies an unusual space, one that's somewhere between Diop's previous work and a more orthodox ripped-from-the-headlines drama.

Saint Omer opens with novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) presenting a lecture on Marguerite Duras, in which an excerpt of Alain Resnais' Duras-scripted Hiroshima Mon Amour is used to help illustrate the point being made; Hiroshima was the feature debut of Resnais, who—like Diop—moved into fiction film after many years of directing documentaries.  Explicitly referencing Resnais' immense work is a bold stroke by Diop, one that could easily backfire if the audience's attention is distracted by the clip of a film widely regarded as a classic of 20th-century cinema (even if it is slightly inferior to its immediate successors Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel).  But to its credit, Saint Omer survives this risky move and proceeds to follow Rama as she travels to the town of the title to observe the infanticide trial; the writer—who has already identified strong parallels between the case and Euripides' play Medea—plans to use what she witnesses in the court as the basis for a novel.  Rama is clearly a stand-in for Diop, and for the purposes of the film the accused, played by Guslagie Malanga, goes by the name of Laurence Coly.    

The extremely intelligent, well-educated Coly does not deny leaving her 15-month-old baby to the mercy of a rising tide in wintry Berck-sur-Mer, but she stops short of accepting full responsibility for the crime, instead insisting that witchcraft was the driving force behind the murder.  As the judge (Valérie Dréville, terrific) examines the defendant, Coly responds in a calm, measured tone, but there's something about the delivery of her answers that makes her seem less than credible; are those in the court—and by extension the audience—really expected to believe that this highly articulate academic is convinced that she was placed under a curse?  As the trial progresses, Rama becomes acquainted with Coly's mother Odile (Salimata Kamate), a patient, kind woman, albeit one who appears resigned as far as her daughter's fate is concerned.  In one almost surreal scene, Odile, in a display akin to that of a proud parent, visits a newsagents to purchase a copy of each paper covering the trial

While Rama may have made the connection between Coly and Medea, the young novelist is clearly rattled by some similarities between herself and the woman in the dock: both are black women made pregnant by white men—although Rama's caring, devoted partner Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery) stands in stark contrast to Coly's weaselly ex-lover Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), whose testimony appears designed to achieve little beyond extricating the baby's father from this tragic case.  All of this is presented in a manner that recalls another film centring on a real-life trial in northern France: Bruno Dumont's Joan of Arc.  As with Dumont's film, Saint Omer features a series of long, static takes that will test the patience of many a viewer, but once you tune into the film's highly unusual rhythm it becomes a haunting, hypnotic spectacle.  It takes a good while for the full effect of Saint Omer to sink in, and I suspect that this daring, exacting film will reward multiple viewings.

Darren Arnold

Images: Wild Bunch

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)

Charlotte Wells' Aftersun will enjoy its Dutch premiere as part of this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, which runs from today until 5 February.  This feature debut is a strong, assured piece of filmmaking, one that owes much to the two central performances by Paul Mescal and newcomer Frankie Corio; both are terrific as a father and daughter on a Mediterranean holiday, but it is their chemistry together that provides the film with much of its emotional ballast.  While Mescal's Calum and Corio's Sophie share a very close bond, a great deal of Aftersun's pathos comes from the space between these two, and the film provides a painful reminder that no matter how well someone knows another person, there is always a limit to that knowledge; as Charles Baudelaire put it in "The Eyes of the Poor": "So hard is it to understand one another, dearest, and so incommunicable is thought".  Eighty years on from Baudelaire's poem, T.S. Eliot weighed in with his own perceptive take on the same subject in his play The Cocktail Party, whose mysterious Unidentified Guest stated, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them".   

It is Eliot's words that carry much more bite as far as Wells' exquisitely crafted film is concerned, as the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) uses camcorder memories to attempt to better understand Calum, a loving, devoted father, yet one who always seemed rather distracted.  It says much about Mescal's Oscar-nominated performance that he somehow manages to make Calum simultaneously absent and present, although the 11-year-old Sophie apparently fails to notice her dad's generally well-masked darker moments—which is probably exactly as he would have wanted it.  As the older Sophie combs through the 1990s video recordings of a holiday the pair spent at a Turkish resort, the images serve as cues for her extensive memories of the trip; thankfully, the vast majority of Aftersun does not consist of grainy camcorder footage, but rather snippets of old film are used to both frame the story and provide us with the occasional reminder that most of what we are watching occurred a full two decades ago.  

Sadly, one suspects that Sophie's scrutiny of these videotapes has reached the point where the clips may be in danger of losing their emotional significance.  Her forensic study of these movies makes it seem as if she's not only using them to trigger memories but is also looking for clues, and there is a chance that anything Sophie ascribes meaning to may simply be a result of hindsight; as Susan Sontag pointed out when analysing what is arguably the greatest of all cinematic meditations on memory—Alain Resnais' Muriel—it is quite possible that these images can't be decrypted, as they don't say any more than they say.  The good-natured Sophie's recollections of that summer paint a picture of a largely happy time, one when she enjoyed spending some precious moments with her dad, who by that stage had left his native Scotland—where Sophie remained with her mum—for London.  Calum did appear to be on very good terms with his ex, as evidenced by a phone call he made during the holiday; indeed, it's hard to imagine Calum being at war with anyone—except, perhaps, himself.

The youthful Calum—who is frequently mistaken for Sophie's older brother—mostly comes across as a pleasant, sensitive man, and if the young Sophie failed to pick up on his more introspective moments, it may have been because she had her own distraction in the form of a boy she'd befriended in the resort's amusement arcade; even without this development, there is no reason why Sophie should have spotted the flickers of self-doubt that occasionally broke through Calum's cheerful exterior.  It is quite telling that Sophie revisits both the memories and video footage when she reaches the same age her father was during the holiday; does she think that in getting to this point—at which Sophie is also a parent—she will have a better chance of seeing the world as he saw it?  Aftersun instils a rising anxiety in the viewer—not quite Uncut Gems-level stuff, but it nevertheless carries a persistent sense of foreboding.  Not that this should be the main takeaway from Charlotte Wells' hauntingly ambiguous film, which expertly depicts the aching gap that lies between children and their parents.     

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI / Sarah Makharine

Looking for Muriel

The late Alain Resnais (pictured above, courtesy of Eureka Video) was a true giant of cinema, and his 1963 film Muriel, or The Time of Return is a longstanding favourite of mine.  While Resnais made several films widely considered to be classics (including Last Year at Marienbad, Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour), I have an unshakeable belief that the shattering Muriel remains his crowning achievement.  For some time, I had wanted to write a detailed study on this extraordinary film, and in early 2020—just before COVID cast its long shadow over the world—I started work on Looking for Muriel, which has just been published simultaneously in hardback and paperback by BearManor Media.  I thoroughly enjoyed both working with the team at BearManor and exploring the many diverse areas surrounding Muriel, and I hope this comes across in the writing.

I'm very grateful to each and every person who buys my books, so should you choose to order Looking for Muriel: A Journey Through and Around the Alain Resnais Film, please know that your purchase is greatly appreciated.  The book is available directly from the publisher, as well as from a number of retailers, including Walmart, Amazon and Google, the last two of which are linked to at the very bottom of the page (to find these buttons, be sure to use the desktop version of the site and scroll all the way down).  If you'd like to check if the book is available from your country's Amazon, simply visit that particular store and plug the following number into the search box:

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