Director Showcase: Erick Zonca
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Julia (2008)
I already reviewed Julia quite a long time ago, but my review of it (as emphatic as my praise may have been) was rather short. The fact is, it has come to be one of my favourite movies in recent years not least because its darkly comic tragic elements. Tilda Swinton gives an unsurprisingly (for her) incredible performance in the leading role as the alcoholic with addiction-fuelled sociopathic tendencies and a habit of using her looks to get ahead. Realising that her looks are not going to last forever, she becomes desperate for a get-rich-quick opportunity and it comes in the form of a similarly desperate Alcoholics Anonymous member who proposes plans to kidnap her own son away from his wealthy grandfather. What could go wrong?
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Answer? Everything! There's a masochistic delight in watching Julia's plans go awry in more and more horrendous ways. Julia is clearly out of depth with the whole scheme, but her desperation makes her both determined and disorganised. Generally her success seems to rely mostly on luck.
My uncle found himself unable to stay in the room while watching this. It's not that he didn't think it was a good film, but he found it painful to watch Julia make her mistakes. As a big fan of black comedies myself, I found myself laughing out loud at those parts. Emotions are liable to run high when watching and coping methods are going to vary.
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Julia is a masterpiece. Well filmed, brilliantly acted with well-formed characters and a top script. The (relatively) low RT score seems to be partially due to reviewers who thought the unconscionable acts of the protagonist counted against the movie (um... why?) and partially due to reviewers who disliked the ending. The ending can be enough to ruin a movie, however here it's not a bad ending, but it's a deeply ambiguous ending. Perhaps a little too ambiguous to some. I can now see a few reviewers criticising the movie for providing too little insight into Julia's character, but I can only presume they had their eyes closed for the whole runtime.
In case you didn't work it out yet. I give this an:
A+
So what else has Erick Zonca directed?
Well Julia comes after a pretty long gap. He co-wrote a movie released in 2000 called "Le Secret", but back in 1998 and 1999 he directed his only two other full-length films: "Le Petit Voleur" (The Little Thief) and "La Vie Rêvée Des Anges" (The Dreamlife Of Angels).
Le Petit Voleur (The Little Thief) (1999)
While not unusually short (1 hour 40 minutes), Le Petit Voleur is a very simple story. The film begins with our little protagonist, Esse, quitting his job in a bakery and deciding that he's given up on being a wage slave. Instead he is going to be a criminal and make a life for himself that way. He argues unconvincingly with a female friend at the bakery that people like her are fools to continue working for pathetic wages and he's finally free of this system. So begins this skinny kid's life of crime.
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The interesting thing is that it quickly becomes apparent that a life of crime involves the exact same nonsense that our protagonist wanted to escape from in the first place. He has to be trained in new skills, so he starts learning to box (and it becomes clear at the outset that he's going to need to start with the basics). As he's working his way in to being accepted on burglary jobs, he finds himself being given extra tasks by the boss. He's expected to look after an old lady relative of the boss and this is partly a test of trustworthiness since he is expressly told not to take anything from her. He later advances to watching over prostitutes, with him and friend actually finding themselves envying the wages received by the prostitutes by comparison to their own meagre earnings.
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Still, his boss is actually sort of sweet. This isn't one of those films where everything is just miserable and grim. The characters are real people and Esse isn't a kind-hearted innocent figure like Oliver being led into crime by the Artful Dodger. The only thing our Esse has in common with Oliver is his naivety, but he's still the self-serving prick we saw at the beginning of the film. His boss, Oeil, is keen on teaching him how to box and, when our protagonist is bugged by feelings for his boss's girlfriend, Oeil simply teases him about it in a very light-hearted way.
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Of course, this kind of relationship feels out of place and inevitably Oeil is setting himself up to appear like a stepping stone to his much more powerful brother Tony. When Esse appears to get noticed by Tony, he thinks his ship has really come in. But Esse is still small-time and he's about to discover that working for tough guy crime lords is not all its cracked up to be.
Esse is played by Nicolas Duvauchelle who apparently was originally spotted for the role in a boxing club. There's something almost "Billy Elliot"-esque about the way he builds his enthusiasm for boxing when training for his career in violent crime.
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Towards the end of the film there's a bit of practical effects work that really shocked me. It's the sort of violence that is seen casually used several times in Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises", but here the camera lingers on it and I wondered how it could possibly be fake. No music, no deep stirring emotion, no camera tricks to elicit disgust, just plain simple filming of something as if it was real (yet knowing that it couldn't be). I guess that's the best description I can give without spoilers, but you can tell I was impressed.
There's some shocking elements in the movie, naturally, but in the end this is a simple drama about realistic characters. Zonca always makes characters the heart of his movies. Still, the film is pretty simplistic in its style and I think that holds it back from being considered one of the greats. It's a beautiful little film. But it's still obvious that "Le Petit Voleur" is also only a small project for Zonca, albeit one lovingly crafted and heartfelt.
A- (Very nearly excellent)
La Vie Rêvée Des Anges (The Dreamlife of Angels) (1998)
Once again we see Zonca's keen eye for characterisation. However, out of all the characters, by far the most endearing is the main protagonist, Isa, played by Élodie Bouchez. It's not obvious from the start that things will work out this way though. In the opening scenes she's selling self-made cards to strangers and she's trying a rather laboured pitch to encourage someone to buy. He's not really terribly impressed, but he recognises that she's keen to work and offers her a job in his factory when she (falsely) suggests that she has experience with a sowing machine.
Naturally lies don't work out very well for her, but we come to realise that she's actually a pretty kind-hearted soul. Still, in these early scenes where she apeears to break into a closed pancake shop, light a gas cannister to keep her warm in the night and sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag, it's easy to think that she's probably rather untrustworthy. Our opinion of this character changes a great deal in quite a short time and our affection for her character grows a great deal. Below is the image of her found on the DVD box:
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With a mark in one eyebrow where a piercing presumably used to be and her short ruffled hair, she's far from glamorous. However, she has a very down-to-earth charm and we come to realise she's a deeply caring person. While it seemed possible at the start that she could be manipulative, we come to realise that, if anything, she might be a little too naive. In any case, this image of her biting her fingering her lower lip with a huge smile across her face is an image which, having seen the movie, really captures their great sense of fun and warm-heartedness.
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Now since then Elodie has grown her hair longer and become a great deal more glamorous (image above on the left), but even with short hair at the time she was capable of looking more glamorous (image above on the right). The fact is that Isa simply isn't a glamorous character. She's used to living rough, she's got a punk look to her and she's simply more interested in people than appearances.
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At the factory Isa meets up with Marie (image above), played by Natacha Régnier, who comes off as the more (by comparison) glamorous figure. She's the more obviously attractive of the two. Unlike Isa, Marie is not living on the streets. She is looking after a flat and Isa persuades Marie to let her stay in the flat with her. The two of them go around having fun and quickly form a very strong friendship. Isa's confidence with people is a big inspiration to Marie and the two of them decide to see how much fun they can have with the two of them being pretty much skint.
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Marie is slightly better off than Isa, but their predicament is basically the same. The world of work has not been kind to either of them and they are basically stuck in dead-end jobs. Both of them each find a particular individual who they become obsessed with and both of them are critical of the other girl's obsession. Their interests take them in different directions, but what will this mean for their friendship?
This film is a very interesting pairing with "Le Petit Voleur" because in both cases the film asks what alternatives there are to factory type work. In "Le Petit Voleur" the work is in a bakery, but it's basically a factory for mass producing bread. He's not going to make much of a career in that job beyond perhaps becoming a line manager. In "The Dreamlife Of Angels" the work is much more obviously exploitative, being picked off the street to do sewing or being hired for a few hours to give out leaflets while on rollerskates. Marie, in particular, is looking for any way out she can get. Isa, on the other hand, is just happy to have a friend she can rely on and the flat to go home to. Essentially both of them find solace in their connections with others, but this ends up being expressed in different ways.
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In a poorer director's hands this could have ended up just seeming like a film where one thing happens after another. However, Zonca's fantastic ability to help the audience empathise with the characters brings this film to new heights. I found myself caring a great deal about the plight of both these characters and was always caught up no matter what happened. I higly recommend this film.
A+ (Excellent)
Julia (2008)
I already reviewed Julia quite a long time ago, but my review of it (as emphatic as my praise may have been) was rather short. The fact is, it has come to be one of my favourite movies in recent years not least because its darkly comic tragic elements. Tilda Swinton gives an unsurprisingly (for her) incredible performance in the leading role as the alcoholic with addiction-fuelled sociopathic tendencies and a habit of using her looks to get ahead. Realising that her looks are not going to last forever, she becomes desperate for a get-rich-quick opportunity and it comes in the form of a similarly desperate Alcoholics Anonymous member who proposes plans to kidnap her own son away from his wealthy grandfather. What could go wrong?
Answer? Everything! There's a masochistic delight in watching Julia's plans go awry in more and more horrendous ways. Julia is clearly out of depth with the whole scheme, but her desperation makes her both determined and disorganised. Generally her success seems to rely mostly on luck.
My uncle found himself unable to stay in the room while watching this. It's not that he didn't think it was a good film, but he found it painful to watch Julia make her mistakes. As a big fan of black comedies myself, I found myself laughing out loud at those parts. Emotions are liable to run high when watching and coping methods are going to vary.
Julia is a masterpiece. Well filmed, brilliantly acted with well-formed characters and a top script. The (relatively) low RT score seems to be partially due to reviewers who thought the unconscionable acts of the protagonist counted against the movie (um... why?) and partially due to reviewers who disliked the ending. The ending can be enough to ruin a movie, however here it's not a bad ending, but it's a deeply ambiguous ending. Perhaps a little too ambiguous to some. I can now see a few reviewers criticising the movie for providing too little insight into Julia's character, but I can only presume they had their eyes closed for the whole runtime.
In case you didn't work it out yet. I give this an:
A+
So what else has Erick Zonca directed?
Well Julia comes after a pretty long gap. He co-wrote a movie released in 2000 called "Le Secret", but back in 1998 and 1999 he directed his only two other full-length films: "Le Petit Voleur" (The Little Thief) and "La Vie Rêvée Des Anges" (The Dreamlife Of Angels).
Le Petit Voleur (The Little Thief) (1999)
While not unusually short (1 hour 40 minutes), Le Petit Voleur is a very simple story. The film begins with our little protagonist, Esse, quitting his job in a bakery and deciding that he's given up on being a wage slave. Instead he is going to be a criminal and make a life for himself that way. He argues unconvincingly with a female friend at the bakery that people like her are fools to continue working for pathetic wages and he's finally free of this system. So begins this skinny kid's life of crime.
The interesting thing is that it quickly becomes apparent that a life of crime involves the exact same nonsense that our protagonist wanted to escape from in the first place. He has to be trained in new skills, so he starts learning to box (and it becomes clear at the outset that he's going to need to start with the basics). As he's working his way in to being accepted on burglary jobs, he finds himself being given extra tasks by the boss. He's expected to look after an old lady relative of the boss and this is partly a test of trustworthiness since he is expressly told not to take anything from her. He later advances to watching over prostitutes, with him and friend actually finding themselves envying the wages received by the prostitutes by comparison to their own meagre earnings.
Still, his boss is actually sort of sweet. This isn't one of those films where everything is just miserable and grim. The characters are real people and Esse isn't a kind-hearted innocent figure like Oliver being led into crime by the Artful Dodger. The only thing our Esse has in common with Oliver is his naivety, but he's still the self-serving prick we saw at the beginning of the film. His boss, Oeil, is keen on teaching him how to box and, when our protagonist is bugged by feelings for his boss's girlfriend, Oeil simply teases him about it in a very light-hearted way.
Of course, this kind of relationship feels out of place and inevitably Oeil is setting himself up to appear like a stepping stone to his much more powerful brother Tony. When Esse appears to get noticed by Tony, he thinks his ship has really come in. But Esse is still small-time and he's about to discover that working for tough guy crime lords is not all its cracked up to be.
Esse is played by Nicolas Duvauchelle who apparently was originally spotted for the role in a boxing club. There's something almost "Billy Elliot"-esque about the way he builds his enthusiasm for boxing when training for his career in violent crime.
Towards the end of the film there's a bit of practical effects work that really shocked me. It's the sort of violence that is seen casually used several times in Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises", but here the camera lingers on it and I wondered how it could possibly be fake. No music, no deep stirring emotion, no camera tricks to elicit disgust, just plain simple filming of something as if it was real (yet knowing that it couldn't be). I guess that's the best description I can give without spoilers, but you can tell I was impressed.
There's some shocking elements in the movie, naturally, but in the end this is a simple drama about realistic characters. Zonca always makes characters the heart of his movies. Still, the film is pretty simplistic in its style and I think that holds it back from being considered one of the greats. It's a beautiful little film. But it's still obvious that "Le Petit Voleur" is also only a small project for Zonca, albeit one lovingly crafted and heartfelt.
A- (Very nearly excellent)
La Vie Rêvée Des Anges (The Dreamlife of Angels) (1998)
Once again we see Zonca's keen eye for characterisation. However, out of all the characters, by far the most endearing is the main protagonist, Isa, played by Élodie Bouchez. It's not obvious from the start that things will work out this way though. In the opening scenes she's selling self-made cards to strangers and she's trying a rather laboured pitch to encourage someone to buy. He's not really terribly impressed, but he recognises that she's keen to work and offers her a job in his factory when she (falsely) suggests that she has experience with a sowing machine.
Naturally lies don't work out very well for her, but we come to realise that she's actually a pretty kind-hearted soul. Still, in these early scenes where she apeears to break into a closed pancake shop, light a gas cannister to keep her warm in the night and sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag, it's easy to think that she's probably rather untrustworthy. Our opinion of this character changes a great deal in quite a short time and our affection for her character grows a great deal. Below is the image of her found on the DVD box:
With a mark in one eyebrow where a piercing presumably used to be and her short ruffled hair, she's far from glamorous. However, she has a very down-to-earth charm and we come to realise she's a deeply caring person. While it seemed possible at the start that she could be manipulative, we come to realise that, if anything, she might be a little too naive. In any case, this image of her biting her fingering her lower lip with a huge smile across her face is an image which, having seen the movie, really captures their great sense of fun and warm-heartedness.
Now since then Elodie has grown her hair longer and become a great deal more glamorous (image above on the left), but even with short hair at the time she was capable of looking more glamorous (image above on the right). The fact is that Isa simply isn't a glamorous character. She's used to living rough, she's got a punk look to her and she's simply more interested in people than appearances.
At the factory Isa meets up with Marie (image above), played by Natacha Régnier, who comes off as the more (by comparison) glamorous figure. She's the more obviously attractive of the two. Unlike Isa, Marie is not living on the streets. She is looking after a flat and Isa persuades Marie to let her stay in the flat with her. The two of them go around having fun and quickly form a very strong friendship. Isa's confidence with people is a big inspiration to Marie and the two of them decide to see how much fun they can have with the two of them being pretty much skint.
Marie is slightly better off than Isa, but their predicament is basically the same. The world of work has not been kind to either of them and they are basically stuck in dead-end jobs. Both of them each find a particular individual who they become obsessed with and both of them are critical of the other girl's obsession. Their interests take them in different directions, but what will this mean for their friendship?
This film is a very interesting pairing with "Le Petit Voleur" because in both cases the film asks what alternatives there are to factory type work. In "Le Petit Voleur" the work is in a bakery, but it's basically a factory for mass producing bread. He's not going to make much of a career in that job beyond perhaps becoming a line manager. In "The Dreamlife Of Angels" the work is much more obviously exploitative, being picked off the street to do sewing or being hired for a few hours to give out leaflets while on rollerskates. Marie, in particular, is looking for any way out she can get. Isa, on the other hand, is just happy to have a friend she can rely on and the flat to go home to. Essentially both of them find solace in their connections with others, but this ends up being expressed in different ways.
In a poorer director's hands this could have ended up just seeming like a film where one thing happens after another. However, Zonca's fantastic ability to help the audience empathise with the characters brings this film to new heights. I found myself caring a great deal about the plight of both these characters and was always caught up no matter what happened. I higly recommend this film.
A+ (Excellent)