Psycho. #40
The cinephile who knew too much.
Do you think there’s something sinister about random filmgoers (meaning people who aren’t critics, or part of the industry, or even ardent cinephiles) knowing and caring about a film’s box office, or who the DP on it was, or whether the actor wrote bits of a scene, etc? I guess I’m wondering if there isn’t something a bit weird about looking at films so much like a business, or like products put together by talented collaborators — as opposed to a magical, somewhat mysterious experience. Am I wrong to think that the general public should not come out of a shitty film and even think to say things like “well, it’s a Netflix production” or “well, it’s a remake” or “the film was bad but it’s a good calling card for this actor”?
In 2013, on a whim, I queued in Cannes for a film that I knew almost nothing about — I had seen one still, of a man standing by water in brilliant light, and some people in the queue told me that it would be very gay. That’s all I had to go on: I didn’t know the director, the actors, the story; and what unfolded in front of my eyes was still to this day perhaps the most wonderful screening of my life. All the nudity of the beginning of the film, at this naturist cruising spot, came as a gorgeous surprise; and the astonishing twist, filmed in a staggering unblinking single shot, which tips the movie into a whole other genre, could not have been more shocking to me. Now I have ruined that surprise for you, if you didn’t know that there was one — or, not ruined it necessarily but tempered it, changed the shape of it, because you’ll be expecting it now. For me, everything played out as in a dream, where all experiences seem to be wrapped in a kind of gauze; and I could feel myself adjusting to the novelty of everything, at every turn. That novelty was not just in the themes of the film or in its story, but in Alain Guiraudie’s wholly original tone, which is so weirdly gentle and off-kilter, where an intelligence is keenly felt but not in an insistent or a clever way, and where formal rigour dances a strange tango with an earthy sensuality. My god!
