Nocturne Indien

The Alliance Francaise consistently brings me nice surprises. A few weeks ago, it screened a gorgeous print of Nocturne Indien, an elusive and stirringly beautiful film little seen outside France. Helmed by Alain Corneau, whose more popular work Tous Les Matins du Monde was screened earlier last month at the AF, Nocturne Indien is even more mysterious and unfathomable than its already dense and strange successor.

Much of the film is built around a self-reflexive wisp of a plot that alternately disappears, bends and refracts through the exotic Indian landscape that our European protagonist finds himself lost in. We follow him as he arrives in the tatters of Bombay city, following the trail of a friend that leads him deeper into the rural heart of India. The plot comes alive when he meets an array of colorful characters along the way, yet when our attention is turned onto the premise, we become unsure if he is only following shadows, if his friend even existed in the first place, if his friend was not actually his own shadow.

The film forgoes plot and character to become what critics lazily call 'tone poem' or 'mood piece' – it leads us into circles and more concentric circles, doubling onto itself and beginning again where one left off (as all good mysteries should be, I think). The protagonist himself is mysterious – he is a Portuguese man who speaks perfect English, played by a French actor complete with French accent – and is never allowed to reveal much about himself. And with the help of Schubert's sensual String Quartet in C Major, the loose script is all the better for the director to jig over his preoccupations and weave its textures like shades of smooth exotic carpets.

But Nocturne Indien is not a film that bears much logical scrutiny. It is a dream, a fantasy of an ancient spiritual India by a European director (to call it exoticized is right, but rather meaningless). Even though it was shot entirely on location, it never felt like it had reached India's shores, just as its plot begins from a concrete point and slowly disintegrates into a lushly illustrated illusion. Quoting Fernando Pessoa and Herman Hesse, it is apparent who the film identifies with – the dreamers: Pessoa, who yearned his life away, traveling the world in fantasies and thoughts but never stepping foot on the concrete soil of reality; Hesse, who was physically in Europe when he wrote his metaphorical masterpiece of (Western-inflected) Buddhism, Siddhartha.

The film exists in short bursts of wordless cinematic grace, hardly describable in logically formed sentences. After all, cinema helps us find the words we've always wanted to say but couldn't. There is a miraculous scene in which the camera first wanders around India as the protagonist imagines it in his mind, showing the empty places without people. Then, moments later, as the protagonist wonders through these places, we see the exact same shots this time with the protagonist in frame. The scenery is now given a purpose, bound to character and plot, wrenched from our imagination as it has with the protagonist, for whom the places have now 'died,' seeing it in concrete reality. There's always such a minute sense of disappointment when we see in real life all the things we have previously imagined, as if reality took away something that's preciously ours– our images, our imagination.

Like the elaborate tracking shots of empty hallways in Ozu's Early Summer, the camera in Nocturne Indien acts as if with its own spirituality – with the ability to travel beyond the characters, beyond our physical reality, to show us images from a phantom land; the camera seems to represent something transcendental (time?) that exists outside of us. It brings us that phantom land on a big white screen (because we become like that protagonist, finally visiting the places that were once the images in our imagination – bringing about the death of the images), but yet, because of the wonderful paradox that is cinema, it allows us to see a reality without physically stepping foot into it. Seeing reality as if in a dream, we are able to reclaim the images as ours, cradling and nursing them as our new shared images, our common illusion (and the images, dwelling in our minds like spirits mixed in a heady cocktail, obtain rebirth). And the miraculous thing about it is, reality or not, they end up being part of our memories anyway, shared with strangers in the same room whose lives connect and share in that same moment.

But a film like Nocturne Indien can never bear to complete itself (and let itself die). The ending doesn't make sense at all except in a logic of its own, and Jean-Hugues Anglade's expression at the end makes it one of the most enigmatic and unforgettable endings in all of cinema, reminiscent of Greta Garbo's face in the famous ending of Queen Christina. And a film that ends without punctuation (not even ellipses) is like Kafka's greatest novels – they never die, sullied by a point, message or even an idea. Like a thought, half-formed, on the tip of the tongue waiting to be uttered – the stage where everything, even love, is at its most bewitching, innocent and perfect.

The most romantic film ever made

Louis Malle's Les Amants is the most romantic film ever made. Screw subjectivity and critical judgment. I've just come off fresh from seeing it, and, in the spirit of the film, I'll let my excitement wash over me instead of letting it die down to see it coolly. Seeing it gave me one of those precious moments, moments where you gasp and go oh-my-god, disbelieving your eyes that cinema could go to places like this, and make you feel things you never felt were possible in fiction.

Buried within the Optimum Releasing of the Louis Malle box set, but it emerges the most deafeningly romantic, even when compared to the already celestial ending of the more famous Elevator to the Gallows. Its blissed out view on happiness makes it impossible to attach any critical adjectives to it; it requires us to suspend all thinking faculties and just go with that one powerful emotion.

It's amazing how it turns what could've looked like a cover of a chick romance novel into something this beautiful. Henri Decae, who almost single-handedly created the first images of the New Wave, literally sets the screen aglow in ecstasy, painting the two lovers in a heavenly light in that pivotal centerpiece, which is one of the greatest moments of cinema, bar none. Even Jean Vigo's L'Atalante holds nothing on this. (There will be spoilers from hereon, and I would urge you to stop reading this paragraph if you've not seen the film. The joy of discovery in this film is so much more than any other film I've experienced, that I'm wholly convinced that one should experience this as fresh as a virgin.) Stripped of their daily pretenses and graces, the two lovers traverse a God-made Eden, becoming simply Man and Woman and reuniting again, several millenia after the First Man and First Woman were expulsed from paradise. When Jeanne Moreau takes Jean-Marc Bory's hand and asks him 'Is this the land you created for me to lose myself in?', the gaze is sealed and the viewer can do nothing but share in their passion. The two lovers become such eminent symbols of love, sex, and happiness that it's hard to imagine anything more sensual and erotic than this, especially when compared to the fully colored and fully exposed sex symbols of today. They belong to an era removed from any other, not the era that the film was made in, but a black-and-white, pristine era that exists only in cinema, one in which true love still exists without the moorings of reality.

And the decided lack of moorings in this film is what makes it so bewitching. Whether it's the fleeting white horse or the eyes of the beautiful beautiful Jeanne Moreau, the film doesn't look back, but indulges fully in the moment, that moment of sensuousness. It is so fitting that the film should be called Les Amants, because anything else would be pretension - the lovers become the lovers of any era, any millenium, by their love alone they have been elevated to the great lovers that have long passed. They transcend being, nature, rules and become one - spirits entwined - with a world that is beyond the tangible, such that any rational reasoning will not be understanding. It's a magical world, a fantasy world, a world that is as unreal as we want it to be real. And this world, the film proposes, can only be reached through a temporary moment of love, un-selfish, immaterial, illogical, and unquestioning love. And when you're able to give yourself in, together with the film, it suddenly becomes so clear and not that unreal anymore.

At the risk of sounding like a nut, I just wanted to recommend this film to everyone who thought that this century has made us cynical. Cinema, which began and evolved with this century, has rarely stepped out of its time so gloriously that it becomes a monument, a structure of those classical (and probably impossible) days. It is the single most ravishingly beautiful moment in the history of cinema.

A Bresson Weekend

Had a nice Bresson weekend. Started with L'Argent, which I saw dog-tired but which kept me up through it and hours after. The feeling is like witnessing a nice human being get his brains splayed out by a pick-ax, and then it takes awhile after to clean up the mess of brain matter from your clothes. Proponents for Bresson-as-spiritualist/transcendentalist should do well to see the extremely cynical and nihilistic ending - there is nothing pure or beautiful in this film, it's a whole pessimistic view of the gruesome world in all its evil, making this essay suddenly seem very persuasive.

Then I saw one of the perennial faves Au Hasard Balthazar, and it soon became one of mine too. Then I can see what the spiritualists are going on about. Bresson definitely never shies away from cruelty, but suffering and the loss of innocence are portrayed with such sanctity and nobility that it is all too easy to see him as a hardcore Calvinist. The moments of fragile beauty found constantly suppressed under the reign of materialistic evil, albeit fleeting, are made all the more stunning because of its brevity, Bresson's commitment to realism. And if you don't know what I'm saying, I don't know too - it's so hard to put any Bresson picture in words.

The funny thing about Bresson, to me, is not only his enigma and the absolute impossibility to define (and fully understand) him, but why the pictures of his that I love occupy less space in my mind than the pictures that I don't. I don't hate any of his pictures, but those that I don't love perplex me and badger my mind because of that. L'Argent, for example, forces me to go back again and again to its brutality. Maybe it's his deep-seated nihilism that I'm really attracted to, except I often get distracted by his colorful bursts of transcendence.

I'm gonna revisit Pickpocket soon, for what reason I don't know, since I didn't understand it either. It's a little hard to come down from the Bresson 'perch' after standing up there for awhile, he makes everything else look indulgent and talky. Why was he canonized anyway? I don't think anybody could ever come up with a sastifactory answer (21st century criticism, especially, 'dictactes' that we have to be lucid and recognize all his contradictory aspects), so I'll just join the cult of him like some newborn baby.