Les Olympiades, Paris 13e

  As the title suggests, Les Olympiades, Paris 13e is a cultural barometer. To represent contemporary France director Jacques Audiard focuses on a little-known arrondisement known for its spectacular modern architecture — hence the opening sweep — and its young, ascendant middle class population that includes a high concentration of Chinese. Here is melting pot France, for better or worse. Nary an Eiffel, beret or baguette shot here. 

In accord with this fresh take on Paris, both central relationships begin with mistaken identity. Emilie is surprised to find that the Camille responding to her roommate ad is a man. Nora is driven out of her confidence — and law studies — by the spreading lie that she’s video porn star Amber Sweet. 

All three central figures work through different conceptions of their selves, moving through their own mistaken identities. Camille leaves his teaching career, then his doctoral studies, to sustain his real estate career. (On the margin, his obese, stuttering sister aspires to an implausible career as standup comedian.) Nora leaves an affair and real estate career with an uncle for the same double duty with Camille. Ultimately she abandons both for an affair with the woman who plays Amber Sweet, i.e., the persona Nora had been mistakenly assigned. Emilie enjoys a free flat but drifts through jobs and affairs before settling back into her opening relationship.

The film’s elegant black-and-white composition is briefly interrupted by Amber Sweet’s colour video. That is, the more realistic palette is given to the unreal supercharge of eroticism. In all three relationships a genuine emotional connection is impeded by the sexual liberty of the times. Camille and Emilie, Camille and his teaching replacement, Camille and Nora, all slip into a sexual relationship that fails to connect them. The sex precludes mutual understanding.

Hence the double happy ending, which is dependent upon the traditional subordination of sex. The Camille-Emilie relationship starts to work when they are living separately but have reconnected and freely discuss each other’s lives (and sex lives). Nora and “Amber” start by Nora buying the video porn star’s time to chat online. It advances to unpaid personal facetime conversation, where “Amber” joins Nora in the real-name world. This relationship culminates in the traditional Paris park personal meeting. So the film that originally feels libertine concludes in (relatively) conventional romances.

The film is as reactionary in its politics as in its sexual morality. The dominant black and white makes the Camille-Emilie and Camille-Nora sex scenes seem rebelliously frank. But the black-and-white mix does not hold up. Emilie is not white but Asian. Her ultimate union with Camille unites two outsiders, not a mix with the mainstream. So too the other couple’s lesbian union. The happy ending reasserts the conventional racial border. For all the architectural advance of this particular area France here remains a black vs white order.  

 

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

  Like his later Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy ripples with emotional insights centered on a feminine sensibility. The film presents three Hamaguchi short stories about lost love and the yearning to recapture a past. The boyish women at the center of the two framing stories anticipate the Drive film’s mute and driver.

Again an intimacy develops in a close car. “Magic or Something Less Assuring” grows out of two women’s increasingly intimate conversation in a taxi. The beautiful Tsugami confides in the boyish Meiko her new ardor for a stranger, Kazuaki. Realizing Kazuaki is her own ex-lover, Meiko confronts him in his office at night, whether to win him back or to torment him. The episode has two endings, providing alternative responses by Meiko. The “Magic” refers to Tsugami’s experience with the man; the “something less assuring” to Meiko’s ambiguous intervention.    

Initially Meiko is a model performing in a fashion shoot. At the end she shoots a photo of an urban construction scene, machines reaching above the foliage. That movement suggests the character’s tension over her own agency.     

In “Door Wide Open” a woebegone elderly writer/professor Segawa is visited by a beautiful ex-student, the married mother, Nao. Her young lover coerces her into luring Sagawa into “a honey trap” to avenge the professor’s thwarting of the young man’s career. 

The title echoes the professor’s care to avoid a compromising situation. In the event, however, the professor is seduced by his own words when the woman reads to him an erotic passage from his Akatagawa Prize fiction. (The allusion is to the celebrated Ryunusuke Akatagawa, two of whose short stories Kurosawa turned into the classic Rashomon.)

The seduction attempt backfires when the woman is herself deeply moved by the professor’s succumbing to her voice. They restrict their romance to agreeing to share the recording of the passage, with a mutual promise of a remote erotic connection through it.

But a misdirected email ends the professor’s career and the woman’s marriage. A chance meeting at the end suggests her avenging reunion with the young lover who initiated her visit. However carefully we leave our doors open, our impulses may still rule. 

In “Once Again” two women passing on an escalator mistake each other for intriguing characters from their high school past. Despite their errors they find a spark in each other. Each assumes the role the other hoped to meet, enabling their respective reconciliations and forming a close emotional bond in the process. 

All three stories show women negotiating their compelling drives through conventional strictures. They confirm Hamaguchi’s mastery of nuance in character revelation.       

 

Let It Be Morning

As in his The Band’s Visit, Israeli director Eran Kolirin uses a small incident to dramatize the Jewish-Arab tension in Israel. The present focus is entirely upon the Palestine community, as a small Christian Arab Israeli village suffers a brief military enclosure. No reasons are given for the Israelis’ defensive/offensive restrictive posture.

Hero Sami has returned to his family for his young brother’s wedding. The army’s restriction costs him his important job at a Jerusalem computer company — and keeps him from his enchanting Jewish mistress there. His brother’s unease in his own new marriage echoes Sami’s wife’s sensitivity to Sami’s detachment.  

Sami’s father has an Old School conviction that the Palestinians should massively rebel against the Israeli outpost. They would incur a few deaths but would prevail. He also tries to protect the illegal workers -- the daffawi, illegals from the West Bank -- he has building a house for Sami there. 

When one citizen tries to drive through their blockade the Israelis shoot down his car. The driver returns, bandaged, at the end for the funeral of the Palestinian cabbie who was killed by the panicking young Israeli guard.

The local council is a corrupt gang that bullies the citizens and seems to be serving the Israelis by trying to weed out the undocumented workers. The thug leader torments the cabbie about his betraying wife and has the cabbie’s cab burned when he fails to repay the loan he bought it with. Following the threat just to seize the cab this arson casts a pall of irrational self-destruction upon the community.

In dramatizing the Palestinians’ plight the film presents only one Jew, that young guard who is a sad case of soldier. In the early crossing scene the other Israeli soldiers are polite, efficient. But the young man -- an example of the sentimental Left --  twice absently  leaves his gun loose for seizing and is prone to sleep while on watch. Yet his sympathy for Sami, his older brother’s schoolmate, allows him some privilege — which only frustrates Sami more.   

The gang leader also shows a soft spot for Sami, which may — or may not — be due to their sexual experimentation as kids. After his wife reveals her knowledge of his infidelity Sami revives his marriage, perhaps resigning himself to staying with his father and wife and abandoning his Jerusalem liberty.

After this dark night of the community soul the film ends ambiguously on the eponymous -- and Genesis -- morning. The newspaper delivery man connotes the reopening of the road. After the cabbie’s funeral the whole community marches to the border to find the Israeli guards gone.  

And here is the ambiguity. Does the community’s march mean they are finally moved to collectively resist the Israeli restrictions or are they acceding to their control?

The answer may lie in the frame provided by the opening and closing scenes, with their antithetical bird’s eye views. The film opens with a tracking shot through the wedding reception from behind white vertical bars. This turns out to be the perspective of the white pigeons who are supposed to fly off at the end of the ceremony. 

But they don’t. They don’t want to leave their cage. Even when shaken out they refuse to fly. In a later scene Sami’s wife and son try to teach the pigeons to fly but they refuse. The boy and one by one his parents throw stones at the cat attacking one and at the birds who refuse to escape. 

In the high angle (aka bird’s eye view) closing shot we see the townspeople staring at the newly opened gate, but not moving. If they had decided to move en masse it's too late. Like the cabbie's wife showing her feelings at his funeral, too late. Like the birds, the villagers prefer the discomfort and frustration of being caged over the opportunity — and danger — of escape.  

The open end allows space for the viewer’s political choice. What would these Palestinians' flying free be? Resuming the century-long attack against the Jews or abandoning the "resistance" to enjoy the opportunities of collaborating with the Jews, as represented by Sami's lost job and his "amazing" Jewish mistress?