directed by Claire Denis (1994)
I got this one from the library. It had a bunch of superlative blurbs on the DVD cover, so I grabbed it, thinking hmmm...Claire Denis, that director rings a bell. It started off with a woman on a multi-lane highway driving towards a city. I thought I saw Montreal on one of the overhead signs, so I figured, ok this is a Quebecois film, but then you see her car's Cyrillic license plate and it's Paris she's heading towards. (The sign actually said Montreiul.) The woman is smoking, listening to a jury rigged tape deck. She's so beautiful in her beat up car, all glamorous and carefree with a cigarette dangling down from her lips, then quick cut, you see two guys and a bulldog tooling by in the next lane in a slack jawed reaction shot.
Ok, I'm gonna stop with the rundown of what all happens in the movie, just in case you actually want to see it for yourself. It's pretty good, and I was interested in what was going to happen all the way through until the end. In fact, it could have kept going and I would still be into the characters and wanting to know how their stories unfolded. It's very much an ensemble piece with a bunch of folk tangentially connected by circumstance. It's sort of a murder mystery, but it's not done in the conventional way of a thriller. In fact it's just laid out for you about half way through, oh that killer? Here ya go, this is the killer, and you thought they was just folks. Well they are, but they is a killer too!!! Cue Psycho violin skree skree skree. That's one point of the flick I'm guessing. Psycho killers are all around us and they don't look any different. Selfishness and cold callousness can be measured on a spectrum, and we've all got some healthy self interest. We're all at least part time narcissists.
SPOILERS
The only problem I have with the movie, is it has some very bad guys in it and it's kinda shitty that one of the bad guys is also a marginalised minority. He's a queer, cross dressing black dude, who is also a GRANNY KILLER!! I feel like his trans/queer otherness was being used as a sensationalistic backdrop to make sense of his killer role.
I dunno, maybe it's just me. Because there were other bad folk, his boyfriend was a killer too, but he was less developed, besides, he was queer too.
Mostly the film seemed to be about the privilege of France born folk versus the struggle of immigrants. It posed questions of morality around privilege and exploitation, without ever really giving any answers, more look at this unfairness here. Except that Daiga, the Lithuanian girl who frames the flick, (it starts and ends on her trip to and from Paris), she's sort of the hero, and she's selfish. And that's presented as normal. I guess it is normal. Human beings are kind of assholes.
Another theme seemed to be alienation. Are immigrants more alienated? Are richer people more alienated than poor folk? Are queer folk more alienated? The more alienated you are - does that mean you're more likely to commit crimes? Is that a specious line of questioning?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions, but I'm thinking thoughts like this, because of this movie, and that's pretty right on IMO.
I liked the music too. I guess Jean-Louis Murat is a big deal singer in France, and I can see why. He's got a smooth easy listening sound, and he's easy on the eyes too.
Also, the murders in the film are based on real crimes. Thierry Paulin killed at least 20 grannies in late 80's Paris. He died in jail within a year of his arrest due to AIDS related complications and was never convicted of the crimes he stood accused of, and confessed to BTW.
And sadly, Yekaterina Golubeva, the actress who played the Lithuanian beauty Daiga, committed suicide this past summer. She was 44.
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