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ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Lars von
Trier interviewed by STEFAN GRISSEMANN
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Philippe Garrel is, for sure,
an anomaly. A self-described artisan, he has managed
to carve out a personal space for himself in spite
of the French film industry's protracted Night
of the Long Knives against its aesthetic rebels.
Acknowledged at home as the most important filmmaker
of the post-Nouvelle Vague generation, his reputation
is steadily growing overseas due, in large part,
to a passionate and ever-growing coterie of people
interested in his work.
Garrel's latest, Regular Lovers, is a sublimely
beautiful black-and-white 35mm epic shot by master
cinematographer William Lubtchansky. Much has been
made of the film's relationship, or anti-relationship,
with Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
Indeed, both films star Garrel's son Louis, and,
yes, there is a moment in Regular Lovers
that makes explicit reference to Bertolucci. But
whatever Garrel's intentions, this nearly three-hour
film is about May '68 in the same way that Melville's
Moby-Dick is about a whale. Regular
Lovers is an affectionate, dreamlike elegy
to youthful idealism laid waste. Simultaneously
underserved by their ambitions and overnourished
in their pleasures, the protagonists in Garrel's
film—a poet (Garrel), an aspiring sculptor (Clotilde
Hesme) working in a foundry, and an opium addict
(Julien Lucas) whose inheritance allows him to create
a "kingdom without laws" for himself and his friends—find
themselves in the existential quandary of having
to live after the revolution when the clarion call
of '68 is silenced by the "terrible roar of nothingness."
Distressingly, not a single one of Garrel's films
has U.S. distribution, and given the tepid attitude
of distributors and filmgoers alike toward films
that are neither straight popcorn nor straight bullshit,
it might be some time before Regular Lovers
is seen on our shores. Some small hope: a recent
retrospective of Garrel's work curated by Jake Perlin
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinematek drew
large and enthusiastic audiences, and the Cinémathèque
Française is actively restoring and preserving
the director's early works, such as The Inner
Scar (72), which screened this year in a new
digital restoration at MoMA. It's hard to imagine
a filmmaker more deserving of major reconsideration
by serious students and enthusiasts of film art.
So, let's all be reasonable and demand the impossible:
Garrel now!
Sales Agent: maiafilms@maiafilms.com
© 2006 by Michael Chaiken
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