JEALOUSY: FATE OF A MAN

BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE Indian EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, India, JURY MEMBER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India

44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India

The specialist master Philippe Garrel is a leader of serious and sociological cinema where issues are raised for debates. His new film JEALOUSY, shown at IFFI, Goa, India 2013, highlights the exhilaration of love, the exaltation of art—funny pillars of the modern French psyche it is claimed. "Jealousy" is a cruel, ironic palimpsest that informs of Paris onto passions of past decades—and does so with a pat black-and-white palette by the seventy-nine-year-old cinematographer Willy Kurant ,the early highlight of whose remarkable career was the romantically threadbare, black-and-white Paris in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film "Masculine Feminine". The theme marked by clinical interpretation, puts on emphasis of choices that contemporary life renders all the more misunderstood psychic turmoil revealing the city's topical losses, as well as its gains. Interestingly Garrel plays Louis, a struggling actor with a role in a start-up stage production that he enjoys but that barely pays. He leaves his girlfriend, the pale office worker Clothilde, in a primal scene that Charlotte, their young daughter, sees through a keyhole. In a plain twist the film shows Louis's new lover is another actress, the impulsive and frogged voiced Claudia . The director films the early days of their new romance with a thrilling, manic vigor; one long tracking shot of a mercurial simplicity, showing Louis and Claudia striding through the street as the busy backdrop seems to sweep past them and captures a secret moment of paradise that tends never to end. The tight framing of that shot also filters out the rest of the world, which, nonetheless, quickly impinges on their idyll. The new couple live in a cramped garret in a raw corner of town. Despite leaving Charlotte's mother, Louis continues to see his daughter often and happily, even pinch-babysitting in Clothilde's apartment when she comes home late from work—but he hardly contributes to her upkeep, since he himself is barely getting by. Garrel told me that, in 1968, it was possible to survive in Paris on three or four francs a day. In "Regular Lovers," he suggested the emotional toll of the self-inflicted bohemian poverty of that era, and in "Jealousy" he returns to the subject with an even more blunt and bitter self-deprecation. A strange thing happens in the movie: the action seems to spiral downward, to settle toward a sodden stasis. As I watched the film, I sensed that the drama was losing energy; it turned out that the characters were losing energy, that the lack of money became a lack of energy. "You don't love someone in a void," Claudia says, but that's exactly what the couple have created around them—and, especially, what Louis imposes on her. In one painfully telling scene, Claudia arrives home and happily tells Louis that she has been offered a part-time job as a clerk in an archive. Louis tells her that she shouldn't abandon her acting career so soon, even though she hasn't been cast in a role in six years. He sees her choice as one between money and art; she longs for a more comfortable apartment and a less constrained daily life, but it is, above all, a dynamic principle that she lacks—the daily round of interactions and discussions, of busy-ness that arises in business. And, after following a downward slope in the movie's first half, Claudia rises again in the second as, despite Louis's injunction, she finds a way to reconnect with life. In short "Jealousy" is a story of generations. Olga Milshtein, who plays Charlotte, is an extraordinarily poised and dialectical child actor, and her scenes with Louis are filmed with a great grace of tenderness. We are given to understand Charlotte's father is an artist and the child is as conservative as any—dependent on order and stability, and aspiring to the normative and unified family that she lost—and, paradoxically. Garrel is a filmmaker of generations. It narrates about a 30 year old man's tragic life being betrayed by his present lover who means a lot to him. His earlier has left him and in his trial to face life with a chin high up. As a theatre actor the protagonist struggles hard his entire life to stand up to cruel situation and being frustrated tries a suicide. It fails him and he continues to change his pattern of life to a better scape of living. But is it a dream or a reality to be realized with gusto. Garrel's desire to spruce up the actor's life by giving the benefit of doubt stays. But the film end in a hospital with his sister by the cator's side. Thus the film is nothing but a fate of a man, an actor that stands smothered by social circumstance. A good film and won crowds at IFFI, Goa, India.

"I love secrets"

-Claudia

I was semi-interested in seeing this film, i had herd a couple of things about it but really i knew very little about the movie. I remember it premiering at Venice where it didn't make much of a splash and it continued throughout Europe in many more festivals and it's now been released in the U.S. The picture is directed by a highly regarded French director whose work was basically unknown to me so i thought i would give this film a chance and who knows maybe i would be surprised.

Jealousy is Directed by Philippe Garrel and it stars Louis Garrel, Anna Mouglalis, Emanuela Ponzano and Arthur Igual. "A 30-year-old man lives with a woman in a small, furnished rental. He has a daughter by another woman - a woman he abandoned. A theatre actor and very poor, he is madly in love with this other woman. She was once a rising star, but all offers of work have dried up. The man does everything he can to get her a role, but nothing works out. The woman cheats on him. And then she leaves him. The man tries to kill himself, but fails. His sister visits him in hospital. She's all he has left - his sister and the theatre."

I went into the this picture without much of an expectation, i had heard that this was not the directors best work but i was still hopeful that this would be a pleasant experience, but unfortunately i can not say that. This was a little bit of a painful watch to say the truth, the movie does have it's moments but overall this picture did very little for me.

I mean i should also remind that this film has a mere run-time over 72 minutes, this is a very quick little run but unfortunately it does not feel that way. I was pretty much bored the whole way through and this felt like a long, tiresome watch. The plot is pretty simple and so are it's characters and to say the truth that's one of the problems. The film doesn't really have much of a plot, the picture is composed by episodes that have the same characters and are all within a context but they don't come together as fluently as they should, narrative wise there's a sense that the film is stuck on the same page.

I thought the story was presented in a too episodically but i think the characters themselves are not exactly exciting either. We know very little about these people, we understand little of the motivations and they never manage to pop out of the screen. They feel vague and unmemorable and i never cared for them.

I will say that the the cinematography is pretty good, it's done by legend Willy Kurant. The tone of the black and white are quite beautiful and it does capture the depressing mood of the characters. The highlights of the film are the scenes where Louis is with his daughter, those are the only joyful moments in the whole movie, where the acting and the characters fells genuine and for once i found myself attached to the screen in any way.

Jealousy addresses it's theme and plot with a surprisingly lack of melodrama which is good, but only to an extent since there is a sense of lack of emotion, the acting feels rigid, the story itself is very bleak, slow and joyless. I cared little for what i saw, i for the most part was bored, i could barely make through the 70 minutes.

Rating:C-

I can understand a viewer having a meh reaction to this but I like it sort of. Not totally sure why. The b-&-w photography is nice, and unusual these days. The main actors are interesting (most are actors). Special mention to Mouglalis who is a sort of younger black-haired Cate Blanchett type, i.e., neurotic but can't take your eyes off her. The film does have a Godardy New Wavey thing going on but very low-key so you can ignore that if you want to. In fact this is not a film that forces much of anything down your throat. It doesn't beg to be liked. It's not cryptic. It's pretty much what you get is what you see. Youngish urbanites in Paris, doing OK except when they aren't.