California Dreamin' (Nesfarsit) (Endless)

I'm really excited about the current generation of young European film-makers. This film is one of a string of films that have given birth to this excitement, although it's incredibly sad that the director of this wonderful Romanian film Cristian Nemescu was killed, aged only 27, in a car accident soon after making this film. In fact, before the opening credits, we are told that this is the film as it was when he died, suggesting that there was perhaps more work to be done. I suspect that for the international market he may have been pressured to shorten it from the 2 and a half hours it currently is. There may be a minute silver lining to the grey cloud there - if he'd lived, perhaps Nemescu would've cut his film and perhaps it would've been harmed. That's lots of perhaps's. IMDB logs the "Nesfarsit" or "Endless" of the title's bracket as meaning "Unfinished", suggesting that "Endless" is perhaps a sloppy translation.

Why this film excited me - both of itself and as part of a greater film-making network - was its treatment of story. It reminded me very much of The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akin's remarkable film from earlier this year. In California Dreamin', Nemescu manages like Akin to consider greater implications of politics and history at one step removed by focussing on characters rather than grand ideas or narratives. It's a small story, concerning American troops on their way to Kosovo stuck in a Romanian village after a station master with a grudge stops their train, but it is shot through with the legacy of World War 2, of American intervention in foreign wars, of modern Europe.

I get the feeling - and it is a feeling, a vague, unresearched feeling - that this current generation of European film-makers, those in their 20s and 30s, are able to look at Europe now and in the past in a way that previous generations cannot. We are far away from the terrors of the 20th century to look at them more clearly (though not far away enough for the recriminations to have stopped) whilst at the same time being integral to the unification of Europe in the 21st century. This generation can uniquely learn from the past and direct the future.

The Red Balloon/White Mane, The Haunting

A few more films seen while I still have no net.

The Red Balloon/White Mane
dir. Albert Lamorisse
1956 & 1953

The Red Balloon was a fantastic short about a boy and his red balloon wandering through Paris. A clear inspiration to those Sony Bravia adverts.



White Mane was a rather overlong piece about a wild horse and his sailor-boy friend in France's 'Wild West', the Camargue.

The Haunting
dir. Robert Wise
1963

Wonderful, classic haunted house story with minimum special effects and maximum imagination.

Dans Paris, Heartbeat Detector, and a rewatch: The Edge of Heaven

I haven't had the net in my current flat so a lack of entries. Also, possibly only coincidentally, a lack of new films. Only 2:

Dans Paris
dir. Christophe Honore
2006

Rather strange, a mixture of a portrait of a depressive and a New Wave film. Didn't really work for me, I was left confused by it. I watched the extras afterwards to try and get a handle on it: there's an interview with a director in which he says after making dark films he wanted to direct a lighter one, which I suppose he did. He talks of the influence of JD Salinger, who writes about similar themes but is always funny. I've read a lot of Salinger and this film is nothing like him!

Honore apparently wrote it for Romain Duris and Louis Garrel specifically, which makes you ponder the idea of lightness, as he cast Duris - a very powerful actor - as the depressed character. Duris is very good, as ever, and his story pulls down the "lightness". Garrel is great too as Duris' carefree younger brother. He says in an interview that Duris is the Brando - an actor "on the floor, with the world on his shoulders" and he, Garrel is the Jean-Pierre Leaud, "coming from the clouds". A nice way of putting it.

Heartbeat Detector
dir. Nicolas Klotz
2007

Quite why this film has received rave reviews is beyond me. It's adapted from a novel and basically can't deal with the ideas that are evident in the novel. The director is neither clever enough nor skilled enough to manage big ideas about language and the Holocaust and so creates a complete mess of a film: no cinematic verve, no idea of pacing, no idea how to tell a story, no idea how to manage ideas, nothing. The only good thing in it is Mathieu Amalric and the presence on the soundtrack of Schubert.