Film is born

Philippe Garrel at the HFA

All the American press complained that it was an extremely "off" year at Cannes last month. I wasn't there (I've never been there), but couldn't the hidden issue be that the wrong filmmakers with the wrong films were the big winners?

The envelope, please! The 1997 Palme d'Or, the Cannes grand prize, is shared between . . . The Eel, by Shohei Imamura, and The Taste of Cherries, by Abbas Kiarostami.

Who are they? Non-English-speaking filmmakers whose distinguished careers are known chiefly by specialists.

And what are the films about? The Eel concerns the rehabilitation of a Japanese prisoner who stabbed his wife to death. The Taste of Cherries is about an Iranian man contemplating suicide.

These challenging, uncompromised works are, according to common wisdom, essentially undistributable in the USA. And a Cannes without a Miramax/Sony Classics/October Films/Fine Line/Fox Spotlight bidding war for the prizewinners is, for most US journalists, no Cannes at all.

But a festival that honors Imamura and Kiarostami sounds splendid to me. Cannes 1997 makes clear what I keep rediscovering at the film festivals I do attend: most of the best pictures made in the world never get American distribution. Whose fault? Critics blame gutless distributors for refusing to take risks. Distributors point to increasingly conservative arthouse audiences, who hate subtitles, films from strange countries, and unhappy and/or political stories.

A sobering case study: Emir Kusterica's Underground, the 1995 Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, has brought in a grand total of $60,000 in revenues in North America. Here's a skillful, important fiction film about the war in Yugoslavia, with a Gypsy-music soundtrack played in discos across Europe, and its total take in the US and Canada is less than a Harvard MBA's first-year salary.

If Underground can't make it in America, or this year's two Cannes winners, what chance for the films of French cinéaste Philippe Garrel? I've been hearing about his movies for many years, how wonderful they are. But there's never been distribution for any part of his pessimistic oeuvre, even the many collaborations with his drug-ridden girlfriend, the post-Velvet Underground Nico.

Boston filmmaker John Gianvito has seen lots of these movies, and he's the most messianic Garrel fan in North America. For years each August he would coax a carload of Bostonians to the Montreal World Film Festival for the newest, only-in-French, Garrel feature. The 300-mile drive was worth it to make converts to his favorite living filmmaker.

But now there's an opening. A subtitled Garrel film has become available at last, through Noon Pictures, a small New York distributor. Gianvito, currently guest curator at the Harvard Film Archive, has booked The Birth of Love (1993) June 13 through 17. It's the first Garrel movie to play Boston, and the first I've managed to see. I'm thrilled to report that Gianvito's enthusiasm is justified.

Within a few shots of The Birth of Love, it's obvious that here is a master filmmaker at work -- the emotions are Cassavetes-like, the shooting is Bressonian bare and perfect. The painful, poignant story is stripped-down, tragicomic Chekhov. Each character loves someone who doesn't love him or her back. The person who works doesn't care about it. The person who is idle thinks that Art will be a salvation. ("I'm going to start writing." "About what?" "I don't know. Any great book is built on nothing but itself.")

One protagonist has a wife who's screwing around. The other protagonist is screwing around on his wife. Neither is even vaguely happy. Everyone is getting uglier, fatter, more sluggish by the day, and those who bother to think about it are sure they live at the most hapless moment of human history.

Instead of Chekhov's dying bourgeois, Garrel's people are middle-aged remnants from the barricades of '68. Nothing since has worked. "Each time something happens, it's for the worst," one morbid character complains. "That's why you shouldn't stir up the future. You'd have to be a madman."

Garrel's two male leads are, appropriately, worn-out one-time stars of '60s European cinema. France's always-infantile Jean-Pierre Léaud, of the Truffaut-Godard movies, is now a haggard man with dark cavities beneath his weak beady eyes. Italy's Lou Castel, a malevolent epileptic in Marco Bellocchio's 1966 Fist in His Pocket, is a stringy-haired, passively moving, chubby man. They're both great in The Birth of Love, coming alive as Garrel's sad-sack (and sad in the sack) protagonists.

Garrel's less-well-known actresses are great also. They play women who are tired, bitter, distressed by life -- and they have to wash the dishes and mind the kids. Everything's hopeless and yet, Chekhov again, somehow everyone endures . . . until, the title, love is born.

Black and white cinematography is by the legendary Raoul Coutard, who shot Breathless, The 400 Blows, and other French New Wave classics. And there's a wonderfully plaintive piano soundtrack by John Cale.