Regulars will know that I am not a lover of art house cinema. (I have been meaning to slag off the execrable Volver here since I saw endured it a few weeks back.) But yesterday evening I watched a grim, documentary-style Belgian film and enjoyed it. Hilariously, the plot, such as it is, centres almost entirely on waffles and beer. If you’ve seen Rosetta you’ll know that I am not exaggerating for comic effect. It’s almost as if the Pythons had been asked to write a parody of worthy Belgian cinema—though they might have been tempted to give every member of the cast a comedy Poirot ‘tache.
There’s not much to it, but it’s beautifully performed, affecting, and unpretentious. (If you watch the additional material on the DVD you’ll discover that the brothers who directed the movie and won the Palme D’Or at Cannes for it are pretentious.) The lead actress female actor also picked up the acting award and she deserved it for coping with the Dardennes’ claustrophobically tight framing of her every move. It takes talent to express raw emotion unselfconsciously while a socialist realist with Art Garfunkel hair holds a cine lens inches from your face.
Yes, I laughed at things that weren’t meant to be funny, but it’s a Belgian film full of waffles. The cast always seemed to be stuffing their faces with waffles. There’s waffle fraud. There’s even an illicit waffle iron. By the end of it, not only had I learned for the first time the French for “waffle”, but I really rather fancied eating some waffles, with syrup perhaps, and a bottle of Belgian beer—regular, not extra-strength. I had chocolate instead.
You’ve forgotten about the giant waffle. I can see it now, cartwheeling down the motorway towards the caravan park, decimating all bad knitwear in its path….Vic
Before drawing the audience’s attention to the giant waffle, one must concede that, in the best tradition of such imagery, this starchy embodiment of crushing alienation was implied by the actions of the protagonists rather than depicted openly on screen. It is a mark of the creators’ mastery of their art that this generated a menace and tension that would have been dissipated by the actual appearance of the tasty, but terrifyingly oversized, snack itself.
Essentially, the pouring of hundreds of eggs and tens of kilos of flour into a rotating stainless steel vat was a prelude to and warning about rather than a realisation of la gaufre gigantesque. We were witness to the rolling thunderclouds rather than the flash of lightning, the behind-the-scenes documentary rather than the Broadway musical, the letting-stand-for-two-minutes rather than the freshly rehydrated chicken-and-mushroom Pot Noodle.
I know this sounds absurd, but I remember watching that film a few years ago. And the thing is, I remember a caravan, I remember the shaky cameras. But I don’t recall a single waffle. Were you watching the director’s cut? Perhaps the waffles were only inserted for the DVD release…
Did you perhaps have a traumatic waffle-related experience as a child?
Do you count films like Oldboy, Run Lola Run, Cinema Paradiso or Downfall as “arthouse”? If you’ve not seen them, I recommend them.
And I say this as someone who likes films like The Quiet Man and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Why are you referring to Volver as art house? Does a film with subtitles automatically count as art house? (Warhol is art house – no subtitles) It has a beginning, middle and end. It draws, as most of Almodovar’s films do, on the Hollywood melodramas of the 40s and 50s. Of all directors Almodovar seems the most in touch with the history of a certain type of accessible Hollywood film (him and De Niro).
At a time when female actors of a certain age are complaining of a lack of roles, his are top heavy with them. One of the joys of Volver, for me, was the fantastic female characters.
Execrable? Really?
(yes, you hit a nerve!)
I haven’t got time to do this properly right now, but briefly: It was dense with clichés: dramatic and visual. (And they couldn’t even get the visual clichés right: clutches of Mediterranean women in mourning and fields of wind generators are a gift to a half-way decent photographer.) It was deeply patronising about provincial life. It was poorly paced, unevenly acted—I can’t deny some excellent performances of the terrible script—and I really couldn’t give a toss about any of the characters, mainly because they were characters, not people. It was sexist, ageist, sentimental, and dull. (Of course being sexist and ageist aren’t artistic failings, but if you have nothing of interest to say about the human condition and what little you do have to say is unpersuasive then you might at least be ideologically polite.) Worst of all, given the comedy potential of the farcical premise, it was deeply, deeply unfunny. Even the hordes of Guardian readers surrounding me quickly gave up trying to laugh at the sub-Benny Hill slapstick—ooh, cleavage!—shortly after it began. It stank in a way a big budget Hollywood picture would never have been allowed to: a script so flimsy and incoherent would never have been made or it would have been morphed by some bean-counter into a supernatural comedy and at least then we would have been distracted from its witlessness by special effects or cinematographic competence or the sense that some of the people involved in its making hadn’t just left film school—mother of God, the washing-the-knife-in-the-sink-overhead! It was like somebody proudly reading a poem to you that begins: “Red: / Colour of death. / Colour of life…” . But of course it was made by Almodóvar, so it must have been a masterpiece. Peter Bradshaw*, the emperor wasn’t naked; he was breakdancing in the town square, flayed to his skeleton. Sadly, even in this state, he wasn’t thin enough to hide behind Penélope Cruz’s breasts.
*[I should point out that, as usual, I didn’t read the Bradshaw review until after seeing the film and that I loudly expressed my derision at the very shot that Bradshaw gets so excited about immediately after I saw it.]
At the risk of descending to Almodóvarian literalness, I’d say that a film that I saw at a place that describes itself in its advertising as an “arthouse cinema” probably qualifies as art house cinema.
Oh come on – films that are box office successes in their own country, when they get a release here (with subtitles), then automatically they are art house. It makes no sense. Almodovar is not art house, he’s mainstream. Cinema Paradiso is art house? Of course it’s not. It’s such a patronising label – I think that is what was bugging me.
Anyway, I’ve got it out of my system now – ta for that.
I already watch the movie Volver and the truth I like much
[…] I was recently surprised to learn a lot from the Criterion Edition(!) of Armageddon and even more surprised to find myself recognizing my own photographic traits in the approaches taken by the film’s director Michael Bay. When I saw the film at the cinema I remember thinking it was bad—and I am anything but an art house movie snob. One of the first questions on the commentary track is: “Why is there a Criterion Edition of Armageddon?” In the Criterion essay by one of Bay’s former tutor’s, Jeanine Basinger, she describes how she immediately admired his still photography: The first time I saw Michael Bay, he was a polite eighteen-year-old who stopped by my office at Wesleyan University to tell me he wanted to major in Film Studies. He also asked me if I would like to see his still photographs. As a teacher, I believe there is only one answer to that question: “Of course.” (It’s my job.) Over the years, I’ve seen a great deal of material from freshmen—short stories, novels, plays, ceramics, paintings, sculptures, prints, fashion designs, videos, computer art, movies in 8mm and 16mm, even recipe collections—but I have yet to see anything like Bay’s high school photos. They were astonishing—revealing an amazing eye for composition, an instinct for capturing movement, and an inherent understanding of implied narrative. […]
[…] When I was in Belgium last week, I was surprised to discover that it was just like the movies: […]