Ne Te Retourne Pas - The Trial of Marina de Van by Nikolaï Galitzine, June 3rd, 2009.
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Ne Te Retourne Pas - The Trial of Marina de Van
for translation into french go to http://www.yozone.fr/spip.php?article7559
“If I made films for the critics, or for someone else, I’d probably be living in some small Hollywood studio apartment.” – Jerry Bruckheimer
We open the curtains of reality in a restaurant. The diners are an average group of middle class white people. The place is a metropolis very near here. It is lunchtime and the waiters are hurrying to and forth between tables, taking orders and delivering plates.
To our left is a famous writer eating with his agent. Next to him, an executive from a bank taking a lunch meeting with his managing director. All about there is the hubub of animated conversation. The wheels of industry and life are moving with verve and decorum.
Into this scène of relative normality, a naked woman walks through the doors and sits at a table alone. She is in her late thirties with pale skin and raven haïr that flows over her shoulders. Bright blue eyes shine from her face with the innocence of a child. The room goes silent for a moment, people avert their eyes, some snigger with disgust at such an act of madness, a few of the men’s gazes linger a little too long on her breasts or her lips and it takes a minute or two before the waiter is advised by his manager to remove the offending personage.
This woman is Marina de Van and the room that she has walked into is the hall of Modern Cinema.
From the very beginning, Marina was unable to inhabit the clothing of contemporary grammar passed down to cinéastes from Eisenstein to Bruckheimer. She stumbled into the consciousness with a very disturbing short film - Bien Sous Tout Rapport – fresh from Femis. It was a statement of truth as she saw it, a visceral and disturbing insight behind the veil of contemporary society. She directed herself as a girl who is graphically taught sex by her own family. It was a disturbing testament to middle class hypocrisy and a very personal reflection from her mind.
She continued to explore the darker aspects of her life with films such as Retention and Psy-Show, not to shock but to ask for help from a public who seemed to hold an answer. For her, cinema has been a way to expose her cancer to daylight and allow it to find expression.
The difference between Marina and other directors, is the nature of her autobiographical quest. She is not afraid to excoriate herself in front of or behind the camera, knowing that this naivety will cause embarrassment and derision. For her it is a necessity.
Dans Ma Peau was her first foray into the general public eye, where she was instantly compared with David Cronenberg and other Genre directors. The fact that there was blood, a staple convention of that oeuvre, classed her immediately in a camp with those whose main goal was to terrorise the audience or play with the very tried and tested themes of social terror. In fact, the terror that audiences felt in watching Dans Ma Peau was that Marina was shining a light into the darkest recesses of their minds. It was asking them to examine themselves, or at the very least her, in every gory detail.
As social animals, we look to others to find acceptance. Each day, glossy magazines write about the troubled lives of actors and stars. We all hope to be happy, to live a charmed life with smiling children and comfortable beds to go home to. Yet we are reassured that even the greatest have the same mortality and issues as us but there is a socially acceptable limit to this mass identification. There is terror in our hearts at how easily the flesh can be torn from us. The media relish the stories of airplane crashes and murder. Marina took the most taboo of routes in Dans Ma Peau and gave us the logical and emotional road towards pulling at our own skin and asking why it was so fragile. The journey we took with her was a terrible one. A painful ordeal where the art of cinema was used to full effect in order to inhabit her universe and emotions.
She asked us for assistance, knowing that only cinema critics and friends would give her hope. Maybe a chance encounter with a stranger who had seen the film might elucidate an answer to her problem that she held towards her own body ? Whatever the case, it was only part of a life long journey. The next part has proven to be much more complex.
With ‘Ne Te Retourne Pas.’ Marina has removed what was left of the conventional skin of filmmaking and has been allowed to bare her soul for all to see. Films of this style are rarely allowed to be made. In a stream of consciousness, where the characters literally dissolve between each other, she has blurred the boundaries of thematic structure and character development. This time her target is much more obscure. It is a portrayal of inner confusion, asking the viewer to take a very personal journey with her to demand one of the most difficult questions : who is she and what is she doing here?
In many ways, Ne Te Retourne Pas is multiple stories and multiple films pulled together through the device of a central ephemeral character. The fact that this character is portrayed by more than one person defies the conventions that we have grown to accept.
We begin the film set in Paris with Jeanne (Sophie Marceau) as a professional writer who’s life seems deeply unfulfilled. Her work and her husband seem at odds with her desires. Here we are given a starting point, that is almost a perfect segway from the character of Esther (played by Marina herself) in her last film Dans Ma Peau. Even down to the scar on her leg there are links to the past, but soon the footholds of plot are taken away and we are pulled into a strange and almost familiar territory of altered perception.
Audiences will have issue with the lack of adherence to common cinematic grammar. Although it is now deeply ingrained into our subconscious, we know through copious ingestion of media where the camera « should be » and how the scenes « should be » cut. In every scène, the camera never leaves the side of Jeanne. It seems scared to look elsewhere in case the character will be lonely without it. There is very little interest in creating faux drama or camera angles for the sake of it. Jeanne is given the security of longer lenses when in company, which the male protagonist, Teo (Andrea Di Stephano) is not allowed. For her, the men of the film are left in archetypal limbo, barely sympathetic and on the periphery of her experience. This is more of a personal internal issue with which she is at war. One that a husband or mate will find confusing or frustrating. It is these internal private conflicts that can deeply affect a marriage. The partner will look to themselves for blame, when confronted with their spouse’s anxiety.
Jeanne begins to lose her grip on reality. What has led her to this point is vague. It could be the stress of motherhood or the pressures of her job, but in actuality it is a period of Marina’s life played out by actors, and something that we the viewer will never know.
First objects, and then the protagonist herself start to transform and shift. Marina is asking the audience if they have ever had a similar feeling of disorientation brought on by stress to which, initially, one might agree. The first sense of a change is the position of the kitchen table which sparks a family row. An event so innocuous, that it breeds a paranoia reminding one of George Cukor’s classic psychodrama Gaslight. But soon the changes become more corporeal and Jeanne notices to her horror that her face and body are metamorphosing into someone she does not know. We see that it is not the simplistic narrative of a thriller but something much more bizarre.
What could have played out like the recent film Cache by Michael Haneke starts to take on more horrific overtones. The audience is steered in one direction and then another, but never given enough satisfaction to categorize the story they are observing. This is the nature of honest film making.
Cinema has grown up with customs and laws like every art form. Every once in a while a person comes along and rewrites the rules. Eisenstein introduced juxtaposition of imagery to induce story through the Kuleshov effect. Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou radically destroyed the linear narrative that was being employed in emerging Hollywood and Godard cut through the narrative structures with Week End and 2 or Three Things I know About Her ushering in the infamous New Wave of French Cinema.
Christopher Vogler’s famous condensation of Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces was the epitome of what was to become the blueprint for modern cinema today. The construction of stories became based solely on universal truths which could cover every person regardless of race or nationality; But these truths are on the whole vacuous and superficial. The plot lines and characters skate across the surface of our existence, drawn in wholly two dimensional form. To steer away from this template has been realised to be financially dangerous for investors because people do not want to explore their subconscious.
In Ne Te Retorne Pas, Marina has been able to subvert multiple genres in the cause of her naïve and fragile quest for self enlightenment. This raw honesty that she has provided us with, is very difficult to accept on initial face value. Her nakedness of enquiry into the psyche of her own mind can feel embarrassing and touching at the same time. She seems to have grabbed at the straws of convention and genre in order to speak to us in our language, and what comes out are words and images that we did not expect. She talks of many well known themes, from doppelgangers to shape shifters, but will not put them in their original context. To be allowed to languish in the safety of such vessels as The Twilight Zone where we are expecting the unexpected is a luxury that we are no afforded.
The box office has dictated this artform from the beginning and only the very clever or very lucky have been able to push through a script that deviates from the Campbell premise. A tried and tested technique by producers has been to attach a star to a script that needs championing.
‘Need’ is the key word. Producers are the knights of the industry who choose which projects should be fought for with the financiers who wish to see a return on their investment. They choose the weapons of combat that must satisfy the director and the investor. In most cases, these are the actors.
After many years in development, Ne Te Retourne Pas has arrived with two of the strongest tools of cinematic war, Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci. Both, in their own right, are very beautiful and very talented. But that is not enough on it’s own. They were very carefully chosen to represent one woman whose complexity and sensitivity was to be exposed in a script that visualised her different subconscious personalities. By looking at them together in recent photos, one wonders if a true amalgamation of Sophie and Monica might actually create Marina herself. On screen, they have submitted their egos to a test not usually asked of by an actor – to play the same person. The beauty of this is that we are able to follow the personality and accept the change of cast as a representation of our real protagonist’s multiple facets.
Once Sophie Marceau has undergone her change into the second aspect of Jeanne (Monica Bellucci), we are left empty and confused. A new chapter in the life of this character opens and we are whisked off to Italy to try to find answers. Again the logic and aesthetic spectacle are eschewed for a continued enquiry of the camera into the plight of the character and not the landscape. This new character is very lost, unsure whether to use her sexuality or her honesty to discover who she is. All the foundations of her life that until now we have hope to cling to, like islands in the subconscious, start to meld and mutate. From her husband (Andrea Di Stephano/Thierry Neuvic) to her mother (Brigitte Catillon/Sylvie Granotier) to the language; nothing is concrete. Marina has managed to involve us in a wave of disorientation and giddiness reminiscent of an acid trip. Each time we think that we are safe, the rules of the game change, and we are pushed further and further out to sea.
Shape shifting is a common theme in folklore across the world. It is seen as a curse or a punishment. Here the device is used with shamanic qualities, taking us through the hypnotic spiral of a woman’s involuntary exploration for truth. The crisis of middle age throw up many questions as to the validity and direction of one’s life. To see it visually represented, is uncomfortable and at times jarring. We live in a world where men are not allowed to cry and women must be their beautiful, elegant competitors. Internal crisis is only allowed behind closed doors. We know it happens to everyone, but we are not allowed to speak about it. Thousands of years ago, many tribes from around the world would use drugs like Peyote or Ayahuasca to travel to the spirit world in search of answers to their troubles. Rather than literally represent a shamanic ceremony as in Jan Kounen’s Blueberry, Marina has used the darkened room of the cinema to take us with her on one of these quests. She employs all the latest digital techniques to confuse and intoxicate but with the gentle hand of a naïve craftsman performing an age old ritual.
The use of special effects in the film is very intriguing. When most people attempt to glorify the moment of transformation, Marina has taken an impartial and more tender approach. She is asking us to feel the anguish of Jeanne as she metamorphoses from Sophie Marceau to Monica Bellucci. The design of the effects are not overstated which would lead to criticism. The intermediate stage of transmutation defies the age old laws of aesthetic beauty by conjoining Monica and Sophie down the central line of symmetry. This act of heresy, to two icons of cinema, can be taken as a travesty by many, but can also be seen as an intentional riposte to the modern hunger for perfection. Like in a Roman amphitheatre, the crowds will bay for blood and spectacle, and if their lust is not satiated, then they will call hue and cry. This film opened on the same weekend as Terminator : Salvation – an extravaganza of spectacle. In a film like that, the audiences are asked to take a clear side, as in a football match, and cheer on their heroes wrapped in a computer generated shell, all the way to the winning line. Ne Te Retourne Pas has no clear winning line and no clear spectacle. The ending, which many might find sentimental and lacking in digital frippery, seems only the end of an eternal cycle ordained to begin again. Jeanne or Marina must continue her transmutation but this time hopefully, these aspects of her character have been exposed to the daylight and have found a peace with each other. A very human concern.
Ne Te Retourne Pas is not a random act of cinema. Especially coming from Marina. In 1998, she made a short film – Alias – which now seems like a dry run for the real thing. In itself, it is a gem of confined film making. Without special effects or stars, she runs through the story of a girl whose family do not even notice that she has been usurped by an older more haggard woman who has stolen her identity. With dialogue that was actually taken from Marina’s personal life, she recreated the feeling of alienation and angst that many teenagers encounter when confronted with the polite society of their parent. The fact that she chose to focus on adolescent anguish allowed the adult viewer an excuse to view it from a distance, with only the hazy memory of childhood to give one comfort. Now that she has returned to the same story, but this time directed at herself and us as adults, we have no respite. As adults, we are supposed to be tough and impregnable. We have developed an armour with which to survive in this very cruel society. To allow one behind the mask is reserved for the intimates in our life. Many of the visual hooks from Alias are repeated, from the photos on the mirror, to lack of extensive interest in the transformed character by the other players. This time they are transposed to a larger stage and allowed the freedom of time to explore the feelings of alienation.
In the last act of the film, Jeanne (Monica Bellucci) escapes to the relative safety of what seems to be the house of her mother, at least in form. Here she regresses into a young girl Rosa Maria (Vittoria Meneganti) whom we have seen appear at various points before. This final shift comes as a relief, something that is unexpected even in this most fluid of stories. We are allowed to regress to the bosom of the mother and run from the chaos of the adult world only to be destroyed by a horrific car accident. For Marina, she refuses to give us any respite whatsoever.
For a slight moment we are allowed the convention of post traumatic stress to impose a logic on what we have experienced. This is quickly dispelled as Rosa Maria enacts her predestined move into becoming the original Jeanne (Sophie Marceau), without special effects or celebration.
The full circle has been completed, the melding of characters reaching a resolution that one can only wonder happened to the director herself.
In modern narrative parlance, she uses the device of Retconning or Retroactive Continuity to continually revise what we have witnessed as a way of eliminating the need for logic and to delve into the constantly shifting memories and emotions of her existence. Even with the addition of a fourth female, the young mother of dead Jeanne (Miriam Muller) which creates a confusion to the outcome, these secondary characters lend a logical delirium to the audience’s final experience. For Marina, it seems that it is the film as a complete object to be taken away is more important than the dissection of individual elements. Sadly we have only films today like Lynch’s Inland Empire that take risks such as this, to make superficial comparisons. It is rare that a film will attempt to sail in such uncharted waters and we should be very lucky that as an audience, there are people brave enough to be so naïve.
Marina de Van is destined to wander from place to place carrying her nakedness as a burden. One can only hope for cinema audiences, that one day she will be joined by others who will be allowed to shed the security of the well worn devices of scenography and sit next to her, unafraid to be as honest: the last crime of the artist and the first directive.
Nikolaï Galitzine, June 3rd, 2009.
