Movies
2005: "Not My Blood!"
Three Dancing
Slaves (a.k.a. Le Clan)
Review
by John Demetry
Part III: To BrotherLove
Gael Morel:
Full-Speed Auteur
"Hiphop is about tolerance!" Stephane
Rideau announces in Gael Morel's 1996 Full Speed. In
that film - still
daring - Morel gauges individual's struggle to define
masculinity - while maintaining
ethics and hope in a multiculti, ambisexual (political!) world -
through pop culture. Contrary to critical response (repeated in reviews
of Morel's new Three Dancing Slaves), Morel does not borrow the good
will attached to the Morel-starring Andre Techine-directed Wild Reeds
(a masterpiece in contention for best film of the 1990s). Morel
casts
his Wild Reeds co-stars Rideau and Elodie Bouchez in Full Speed as
contemporary pop icons - whose significance Wild Reeds defined.
Recontextualizing that iconography within a delirious gay-erotic
mise-en-scene (the film opens with a fellatio-frisson blood-brothers
ritual), Morel brings hiphop's full-speed license - and promise of
tolerance - to the big screen. Through Bouchez's uncanny sympathy and
Rideau's buffed and shirtless (with Brando's eyes) sensitivity in Full
Speed, Morel identifies a male delicacy often unaddressed in social
customs and pop culture: Rideau bleeds to death.
Part
2: Christophe: . . . from winter to spring. . .
No wonder Morel stages Rideau's
"resurrection" as Christophe in Part 2 of Three Dancing Slaves as
ritual ceremony. Morel structures the 90-minute narrative of Three
Dancing Slaves (a.k.a. Le Clan) in three parts. Each section is titled
after one of the three brothers who constitute the focus of the film,
as well as identifying the appropriate season of the story's year. This
second chapter is titled: "Christophe: . . . from winter to spring. .
." While Part 1 is distinguished by the absence of Christophe (and the
brothers' late mother), his return from jail in Part 2 is announced by
a torch entering the frame. The brothers' gang of muscular male friends
celebrates the return of their leader (middle-brother Marc - played by
Nicholas Cazale - asks Christophe to assist him in an act of vengeance
as if he were addressing The Godfather). The clan drink and dance
around a campfire (typifying the intensity of the - HOT!!! -
rock-n-cock montages of male behavior), highlighted by the camaraderie
of Christophe and Hicham (Salim Kechoiuche), the brothers' friend of
Northern African decent.
Revelry punctuates revealing
interactions, gauging the self-consciousness - the loss of innocence -
signaled by the return of Christophe. Hicham, sensing the shyness of
youngest brother Olivier (Thomas Dumerchez), follows him when he steals
away from the group and tenderly sticks his fingers in Olivier's throat
to help him vomit. Hicham answers Marc's concerns that Christophe has
changed: "We all change." Marc counters: "You can't understand. It's a
brother thing." Morel's curving camera move attests to the sensual and
racial dynamic. Morel defines the "brothers" by the style of their
movement: Christophe/Rideau walks tall, his movements proud and
deliberate (even when his temper strikes); Marc/Cazale darts in
over-emphatic, self-consciously sexy flashes; Olivier/Dumerchez treads
lightly - somewhat gawkily with his long arms - emanating an inviting
warmth; outsider Hicham/Kechoiuche dances gracefully, seductively
(firing the most swoonderful wink in movie history).
Morel begins a shot of a bonfire
revelation with a tight framing of Olivier cuddled up under the arm of
Christophe who says, "It's good to have my little pink canary back." As
the camera pulls back to reveal Marc and other buddies sitting with
them, Marc cautions Christophe: "Don't say that too loud." The camera
closes back in to frame the three brothers as Marc, whose affinity for
horses (or rodeo?) is established in Part 1, relates the story of
Christophe's (sexually provocative) childhood nickname: "Horseface." It
originates at his traumatic birth: "He didn't want to come out." Marc's
analysis of the effects on the shape of Christophe's head - elongated
like a horse's - of the horseshoe-shaped forceps provides entrance to
the film. Morel evinces a sculptural attention (as in this shot's
lighting by fireside and moving camera) to physiognomy - difference and
desire (the narrative and characterizations seem developed from the
actors' bodies, a sculpture defined by the stone). The shot ends with
youngest brother Olivier pining - "This is like a dream" - as
Christophe ("Horseface") nibbles at his little pink canary's ear.
The piano-to-guitar-charge music
score synchs with the film's thrilling symbolic flights (teasing out
the source of tender emotionalism and culturally-specific vitality).
Morel revels in the film's working-class, male-dominated milieu. He
hones in on an unrecognized - frustrated - spiritual vibrancy. Doing
so, Morel develops a challenging and ecstatic form of cinematic visual
representation and movie narrative. Perhaps no "mainstream" filmmaker
has scrutinized social (economic, racial, national) circumstances - and
consequent rituals - in thrall to the dynamics of male behavior with
such idiosyncratic narrative, visual, and symbolic daring since John
Ford (Hollywood's Visconti). (Though, note, the visceral compositions,
editing, and narrative of Morel do not equal the supremely perfected
technique of Ford and Visconti.) Basking in the erotic effrontery Ford
could not (quite) risk - that's what makes Three Dancing Slaves new -
Morel still shares Ford's outsider melancholia and hope.
Melancholia and hope - the twin
towers of desire - constitute the (sensuously) palpable emotions
evinced by Morel's most disputed/dismissed image. After the party
celebrating Christophe's return, Morel presents an image of the three
brothers - nude - asleep together in bed. The shot is not a tableau.
Morel's camera glides along their intertwined bodies. He begins with
Marc/Cazale's penis, then seeks out Christophe/Rideau in the center of
the embrace. Continuing the single sensuous movement, Morel runs the
camera down the body of Olivier/Demerchez, following his foot off the
bed to reveal the Father (played by Bruno Lochet) facing his sons. The
camera climbs to his half-open eyes (with long, light eye-lashes barely
touching). The explicit eroticism of the shot - the transcendence of
taboo - encapsulates the deepest needs signified by the brothers'
relationship. It's all there, all felt in the physical manifestation of
spiritual desire: the mystery of familial bonds, the loss of the mother
in the family, the hope attached to Christophe's return, the lack of a
father figure to imaginatively reconstruct this broken family of men;
the fallen innocence and consequent shame, the possibility of
experience and transformation. The shot is instigated by the
affectionate touch of Hicham - the outsider - to Christophe's arm in
the previous shot, as they preside over the water-play of their gang.
The desire symbolized by the film's family dynamic is the
source of the social phenomenon it
lyrically scrutinizes. Morel resolves the shot - and dramatizes the
hope - by cutting from the Father to a graphic match of Olivier - also
framed in side-view - as he begins to shave. His brothers bust through
the door, teasing the "little pink canary" for growing up and dousing
him with shaving cream (they make jokes about ejaculation). As a new
erotic zenith in film history, Three Dancing Slaves makes the move from
brother love to BrotherLove. To visualize the beginning of this
process, Morel presents Hicham and Olivier practicing the Brazillian
slave dance - capoeira - in sensitive harmony, a beauty heightened by
the on-high composition representing the p.o.v. of Marc. In response to
the spectacle, Marc looks up to the sky and his nose bleeds - and he
swoons.
"I have a secret," Marc confesses to
older-brother Christophe, as they search for Olivier who runs away
after his older brothers fight (a sign of the failure of Christophe's
return to heal the family's ruptures). Marc relays the story of his
last goodbye to their mother: "I told her softly, 'Mum, we love you.'"
And in telling of her anguish, he reveals his own (Morel isolates his
voice by removing the sound of rushing water). After she suddenly awoke
from her coma in response to Marc's admission: "She grabbed my arm. She
held me so tight. It was as if she wanted to speak. She couldn't
because she was choking. She went like this. . ." Cazele lets loose the
pain of drug-abusing, macho-posing, narcissistic Marc - his facial
features are
the most exquisitely feminine of the
three - in imitation of the mother's moans: recognizing in his mother's
stifled expression his own unexpressed anxiety. He exits the frame in
impotent anger at the pain exposed, the sound of the water rushing back
into the soundtrack, and re-enters to beat his fists against the
car
and fall into his brother's arms. Although sustaining a strict
narrative structure, Morel presents each moment as emotional, erotic
aria - these faces, these bodies sing! Some critics mistake this for
porn - eroticism unfettered by conventional plot (or hegemonic
sexuality). If so, it's porn by way of William-Faulkner social insight
and aesthetic ecstacy; in other words: NOT PORN. (As critic Armond
White notes: Morel's character in Wild Reeds writes a paper on Absalom,
Absalom!).
The climactic moments of Part 2 fully
convey the disappointed hope the brothers experience in Christophe's
return: Christophe's capitulation, Marc's self-mutilation, Olivier's
solitariness. Morel symbolizes this schism through an ameliorating
homage. Through the composition of a car's rear-view mirror, Morel
references the key image of desire and difference from the
era's defining work: Steven
Spielberg's A.I. - Artificial Intelligence. Morel utilizes Rideau's
significance to simultaneously engender hope and to make particularly
painful the social containment - prison, work, male roles - of his
special sensitivity (still on view as he attends to the wounds of Marc
- shot as from the p.o.v. of a mirror - after they fight). Christophe -
"Prison taught me control" - gives up the ways of his wild youth only
to succumb to work-place desensitizing. Morel dramatizes his
deliberations: on lunch break, in his car after a humbling shot of the
landscape, and as he opportunistically volunteers for a promotion at a
meat factory. There, Morel cuts the decision with a shot of his
passed-over senior colleague's salt-worn hand ("It's like he doesn't
have hands anymore," as cynically explained/misinterpreted by the
co-worker ironically nicknamed "The Professor"). The body suffers for
displaced feeling. That's the nature of exploitation (note that the
meat factory uniforms - white - leave bodies indistinguishable). Morel
uses symbols of contemporary resonance - the man's salt-bloodied hands,
Rideau's significance, the mother/son moan, the reflection from A.I.,
the taboo-transcending mise-en-scene - to locate and liberate the
spectator's own (exploited)
spiritual essence.
Welcome to
Movies 2005!
Part 1: Marc:
Early in the week, summer. . .
"I want Christophe here with things
like they were before," Olivier prays in his bedroom before the shrine
devoted to the memory of his mother (centered by an urn carrying her
ashes). He is overheard by Marc, who acts as the focus of Part 1,
titled: "Marc: Early in the week, summer. . ." Olivier remains here on
the fringes - his difference defined when he helps his
father on a horse farm, left out of
the work by the other boys. Meanwhile, Marc gallivants with his
weight-lifting, wrestling, beer-drinking, circle-jerk buddies.
Olivier's overheard
confession dramatizes the brothers'
distance and their entwined fates - just as does Olivier's letter to
Christophe in jail - "Everyday is the same. . . same boring routine" -
read on the soundtrack while Marc meanders through the house (Marlon
Brando in Apocalypse Now and "precious bodily fluids" in Dr.
Strangelove embroidered in the abstract soundscape). Thus defining the
desire at the heart of the social vision of Three Dancing Slaves, Morel
gauges the degree to which it fails to be addressed in the explosively
erotic treatment of the film's male cast. Three Dancing Slaves is like
a dream. Morel's visionary proposition on social possibility hinges on
his visualization of untapped, misdirected male sensitivity. He
transforms it into spectacle.
Marc and Olivier, themselves, attempt
this radical transformation by performing a ritual. "She wanted us to
scatter her ashes . . . the sea between France and Algeria. Islam
doesn't allow cremation. That made her happy. She said she was a rebel
until the end," Marc says of their mother as Morel's camera scans the
river into which they will scatter her ashes. Morel shoots the sequence
with momentous power: shifting the focus from the white caps of the
nighttime water to the urn above it, following the sweep of the hand
releasing the ashes. Then he tilts the camera from a view of that water
(rushing to the sea) to an overhead shot of the brothers sitting on the
bridge, where Marc instructs: "This will be our secret" (the secret he
will later confess to Christophe). Later that night, in guilt over
their secret, Olivier has a nightmare and reflexively reaches out his
arm to Marc.
The desire signified by that
unconscious gesture permeates Three Dancing Slaves. Marc, after taking
ecstacy, asks his pet dog: "You're not a dog. What are you inside?"
Confronting that mystery reveals the nature of Morel's ecstatic
approach, just as Marc's query leads him to a particular intimacy with
his dog (they take a bath together). That intimacy bears
emotionally on the section's climax:
an act of euthanasia connected to his torment over his mother, it
reveals Marc's sense of existential impotence. "What are you inside?"
Morel challenges the movie spectator in his presentation of male
behavior in Three Dancing Slaves: working out at the gym, wrestling,
drinking beer on the waterfront, an excursion to Zora's! It is the
question Olivier encounters as he watches Hicham practice capoeira:
isolating the essence of both those who desire and those desired.
Hicham stands unclothed with penis cupped in hand as he watches Marc
have sex with - and then get rebuffed - by Zora (Kheireddine Defdaf), a
boy in girl's lingerie. Then, Hicham propositions Zora by allowing Zora
to remove the restrictive panties, revealing Zora's penis. As Hicham
lowers himself on top of Zora, Morel's camera closes in on a boy
watching.
"What are you inside?" that's the
challenge issued by every significant work of Movies 2005. Morel's
approach to that essential query ranks among the most challenging, the
most
aesthetically advanced - and surely
the most pleasurable.
Part 3: Olivier: A
weekend in early autumn. . .
Morel's cinema taps into - exalts! -
a shared sensual memory of male interaction. Through the cinematic
isolation of that phenomenon, Morel radically identifies a wild space
for personal re-invention and for social/political re-imagining.
"Reaching out" (pace Kate Bush) so far beyond the confines of
conventional identity politics, Morel's revelation can only be
recognized as the definition of "spiritual."
"This is not a love letter": so
begins Hicham's narration in Part 3 (titled: "Olivier: A weekend in
early autumn. . ."). The Faulkner-like device of the not-a-love-letter
narration verifies Morel's genius. Establishing the film's point of
view as that of outsider Hicham, Morel distinguishes the points of
"difference" that map out the three brothers' (and the spectator's)
"wild
space." Consequently, every moment in
Part 3 makes intensely palpable Hicham and Olivier's transformations:
1) the sensual memory of male interaction, 2) the extension of that
shared experience into romantic/sexual love, 3) the expansion of that
love - and consequent heartbreak - into each character's distinct
identity, suggesting new social possibility.
"Want me to shave your ass?" Hicham
proposes to Olivier as a form of foreplay. This come-on makes
particular - yet recognizable - the intimacy shared by Olivier and
Hicham - literalizing Morel's blood-brothers trope. This, in contrast
to the isolated narcissism of Marc, whose father catches him trimming
his pubes in front of a mirror (also linked to the head-shaving that
opens the film, Olivier's shaving as sign of maturity, and Olivier
walking in on Christophe - now distanced - shaving after receiving a
promotion). In another dramatization of their intimacy Hicham and
Olivier flirtatiously name the body parts they would eat if they were
ever stranded. In doing so, they (playfully, erotically) recognize
physical attraction and intimacy as spiritual sustenance. In the
narration, Hicham expresses his longing for Olivier: "Nothing lasts
except for the memory of your face." Through that longing - specified
in the "memory of your face" - is bourne Olivier and Hicham's separate
paths of compassion. Evincing that compassion: Olivier's sacrifice to
take care of Marc; Hicham's understanding of the three brothers and new
understanding of the racially stratified gay community into which he
ventures. Asked to identify Olivier in a photograph, Hicham reveals in
the letter his response: "I told him, 'My brother.'" Narrated with
Hicham's expression of longing, the shot of Hicham and Olivier engaged
in capoeira synchs with the look of encouragement Olivier offers Marc
during his physiotherapy (a brotherly extension of Christophe's
girlfriend's expression of sympathy in one of the film's many primal
dining-table exchanges). Through romantic heartbreak, Hicham and
Olivier persevere through and share an essential - primal - heartbreak,
experiencing its rebirth as compassion.
Concluding his letter, Hicham bridges
the gap, from desire to sexual intimacy to compassion to imaginative
engagement: "I know you inside out. I know you and your brothers. I can
tell your tale." It is the essence of heartbreak. Hicham tells the tale
of anyone reading this (Love) "Letter From New York."
Pictures:
from the top:
all from LE CLAN aka Three Dancing Slaves aka Brüderliebe
(Pro-Fun Media)
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