My Own Private Lavant

Too much of a good thing. I thought I'd round out my Denis Lavant festival (see previous post) with a viewing of Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge. I want to like it. I admire the excess. If you're going to reinvent melodrama, I'd rather it be this than Todd Haynes: not Haynes' careful, pained dialog ("it must be terrible to be a black man"--that's Tisa's friend Naima's summary of the dialog in Far From Heaven), not the exacting 1950s palette; not the ironic re-stagings. Carax is blood and fire and gratuitous narrative acts. --And I like the ending, which rewrites L'Atalante. (Or, I like that I'm able to congratulate myself for noticing its relation to L'Atalante. Cineaste that I am. The ending itself is actually another gratuitous narrative act.)

Lavant's kineticism is put through its paces in Lovers on the Bridge: he's given a cast and a crutch; he hobbles and clambers and runs peg-leggedly; he drinks and shivers and passes out; he breathes fire, he does handstands; but the film is oddly inert for all Lavant's motion.

(Speaking of melodrama: I'm also watching Fassbinder lately. Fassbinder's melodrama is much better than Haynes's. Especially if you count the marriage films, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Effi Briest, the Station Master's Wife.--My other favorite actor of late is Fassbinder himself, in his segment of the omnibus film Germany in Autumn.)

I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts

Last night my friend Tisa and I watched Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang. Its star, the beautiful-ugly Denis Lavant, is a kinetic genius. About half an hour into the film, he runs/dances down a dark street to David Bowie's "Modern Love," going from a hunched-over lurching to an off-kilter boxing to running to handspringing. At one point, he grasps his trousers near the front pockets and yanks them up so that his socks show, all the while bizarrely skip-running with ever increasing speed. Part of the thrill comes from the stasis of the preceding scene, part from its irruptive unreality. Mainly it's the way Lavant moves, his odd "phrasing" of the strides: there's a hesitation, a taut point, a second of hang time where you wouldn't expect it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8e5g_wXJf1I

(I know, this is getting to be a habit of mine, the largely uncritical post about a male actor. I suppose I should be commenting on something of great import, or at least writing criticism of Carax. The actual news--Schwarzenegger, Iraq, Syria, the suicide of Carolyn Heilbrun--none of that do I care to comment about. Except to say this about Schwarzenegger, after Hegel's comment on Napoleon: "I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts.")

Continuing the Denis Lavant festival, today I rented Claire Denis's "Beau Travail" again, for what must be the fourth time. At the end, in an epilogue, Denis Lavant stands still in a dark disco, alone, and then bursts into moments of speed to the sound of Corona's "Rhythm of the Night." His dancing is jolie-laide; it's not the beauty or precision of execution that matter. It's the abruptness of his shifts from stillness to motion, and his careless, flailing grace.