Synopsis
Pierre and Manon are poor. They make documentaries with nothing and they live by doing odd jobs. Pierre meets a young intern, Elisabeth, and she becomes his mistress. But Pierre will not leave Manon for Elisabeth; he wants to keep both.
In the Shadow of Women
2015 ‘L'Ombre des femmes’ Directed by Philippe Garrel
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Alternative Title
À Sombra das Mulheres
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the words "it's a public screening" have never resounded with such impossible sadness.
the french may not have invented the love triangle, but they certainly shaped its angles... or something cute and stupid like that that i would use in a print blurb about this movie. anyway, Garrel needs only a brief 68 minutes to nail how these things usually go, and he's particularly spot on re: how male entitlement bleeds into casual cruelty. potent, endlessly re-watchable stuff. cuts deeper, sharper, and closer to the heart than JEALOUSY.
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TIFF 2015 film #3
Reason for pick – according to my wife, for something ‘light and fluffy’ as the first film of a 3 film day’
All was going well, sitting there in the cozy Lightbox 2 theatre, waiting for a frothy little French film to start a long film watching day that would later follow with two weightier films. As the TIFF programmer mounted the stage, waxing poetic about the cinema about to be presented to us, he used the phrase ‘director Philippe Garrel’s tribute to the classic French New Wave’ …. Uh oh.
I have very sharply defined tastes when it comes to the mixed bundle of styles that is attributed to that genre. I’ve loved everything I’ve…
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Lena Paugan's gaze. The way that as usual Garrel's B&W cinematography imbue every movement with symbolic charge. All those stolen glances and gestures that suggest all of life is a bit of a Garrel film minus the suicide. Some has described this as Garrel's Woody Allen-type comedy but the film is less a comedy than it applies a sense of humor about his lead wounded ego and overall boorishness that moves Garrel closer to Hong's territory. His previous film was called Jealousy, but Merhar's casting (and he is wonderful as usual) makes it easier to connect this to Akerman's La Captive.
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[7]
Strangely light, almost his version of a Woody Allen comedy. Although a filmmaker who has been as thoroughly committed to emotional anguish and amour fou as Garrel is not just going to abandon those elements unproblematically, and so there's an unnerving undercurrent at work here, almost a blankness that functions like a mirror of the viewer's own sexual politics.
Pierre (Stanislas Merhar) is a glum, depressive documentary filmmaker living off his wife Manon (Clotilde Courau) and her family's money. They work together, and things are fine until Pierre strays, having an affair with Elizabeth (Lena Paugam), a young intern at a film archive. This all comes out when Elizabeth discovers by chance that Clotilde, no doubt feeling Pierre's coldness,…
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"The film doesn’t turn on the revelations of such scandals, but the way they use them to abuse each other, and particularly how Garrel shifts the emphasis of the mise-en-scene from mostly horizontal planes to vertical ones, creating striking and uneven frames, which can only be resolved with a push toward the center. In The Shadow of Women has been described as a comedy, perhaps because its ending is more or less on a happy resolution, but part of the fascination of Garrel’s minuscule running times is that his films could continue on for hours, to see the constant flows up and down. He never works in universals; only specifics."
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The mistress, the cheater, his wife, and her lover.
In 75 dense minutes Garrel maps the mythos (and the hyper-specific realities) of infidelity. Our leads all form one archetypal piece of the triangle even as they emerge as highly individualized persons: each gesture arises from their unique psychological predicament and a half century of Garrel movies that have come before.
In that way, among many others, it's a classically middle-aged movie. Garrel looks backwards and forwards simultaneously. And so, the post-68 dead end of Regular Lovers gets swapped out for something more tempered, even optimistic. Echoing Journey to Italy, our lovers are reunited in the space of religious ritual. But Garrel quickly ditches Rossellini's spiritual trappings to suggest that this couple's ultimate bond is their commitment to an unfashionable artistic life. Love as a kind of shared work.
The last bohemians.
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I experienced 4D technology for the first time on 1/16/16. I can confirm that it does indeed work.
Undoubtedly a theater experience I will never get. A man, all the way in the corner of the front row, lit up a cigarette halfway into the film. People went and complained, and the man was kicked out of the theater. After the man had been kicked out, the theater reeked of the smell of cigarettes. Of all of the films playing in theaters right now, this was easily the most suiting film to light up during, as cigarettes are prominently featured throughout In the Shadow of Women. Every time a character would light up in the film, I would just take a deep breathe and I would immediately smell the scent of that rich nicotine in the air. In conclusion, 4D technology does work, but sadly movie theaters have to hire people to make this technology work.
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Merhar is as perfect obnoxious as an European Hong lead should be. Very Garrelian in that it is minimal approach hides a movie that is all about the destructive possessive power of exchange looks.
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Manon and Pierre have been in a relationship for a long time now. They both make documentary films together. Manon does the technical aspects of it and Pierre rest. Manon supports Pierre to the fullest even Pierre hasn't made any big or known documentary.
Their relationship currently at a stage of like mid life crisis. Pierre mostly just lies back and never wants to go out or anything. But one day Pierre meets Elisabeth with whom he starts an affair. While Pierre is in male ego and blames being a man for the affair and not regretting it, one day he finds out Manon too is also having an affair and this starts and series of fight, jealousy and they…
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