Film - Think

Renoir’s charmingly early film La Chienne begins with a puppet show. Three puppets take the stage in a Parisian sidewalk show to explain what we are about to see on the screen.

The first puppet says: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present a serious social drama proving that vice is always punished.”

The second puppet disagrees and says: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present a comedy of manners with a moral.”

The third puppet strenuously disagrees, pushing the first two puppets aside and exclaiming: “Ladies and gentlemen, pay no attention to them. The play that follows is neither comedy nor drama. It has no moral whatsoever… and proves nothing at all. The characters are neither heroes nor villains, but plain people like you and me. The three main characters are HE, SHE, and THE OTHER GUY, as usual.”

Seeing as La Chienne is one of my favorite films of that era, the recent Cannes Festival prize-winner Reconstruction immediately leapt off the screen to me at this year’s screening of it at the Chicago International Film Festival. Renoir seems intent to address the audience with the notion that film is not literature on the one hand or theater on the other. And neither does it occupy a middle ground between the two. Rather film is a construct in which stories and experiences take shape in such a way that it needs to establish its own conventions. And in some cases, as in La Chienne, drawing our attention to this fact only enhances our experience of a film. Reconstruction opens on an empty street, seen only by us and a narrator. Right on the narrator’s cue a man magically appears who makes his way across the street as right on cue more and more people begin to simply pop up on the screen. And right before us is constructed the scene of a busy street corner, the first scene of the film. As this introduction closes, the narrator reminds us: “Remember, it is a film. It is all a construction.” If the director had stopped here, then Reconstruction wouldn’t have been much more than a delightful rehearsal of Renoir’s theme in La Chienne. But the narrator goes on: “Remember, it is a film. It is all a construction... But it still hurts.”

The story is very simple. Alex meets Aimee while on a date with his serious girlfriend Simone. Though she is married, she seems ready for romance. Alex stays with her for the night only to return to his normal life the next day inexplicably unknown to Simone, his close friends, and his neighbors. They simply do not seem to know who he is. So he turns to Aimee and they decide to run away together. As we discover this parallel world of Alex with Aimee we begin to wonder which romance is real, and which relationship is simply a fantasy. As soon as he turns from the world of one girlfriend to the world of another the other simply seems to vanish. The only constants are Alex always on the verge of love and the alluring lips of Aimee/Simone (both compellingly played by the same actor). The difficult performances behind Alex, Aimee, and Simone are haunting, and fit the mood of the film perfectly. Reconstruction is a blend of repeating elements captured both in 35 mm and digital video. It is difficult to describe, and any adequate description would probably have to resort to the vocabulary reserved for experimental filmmakers. Boe uses animated sequences that occur over a map of Copenhagen to progress the storyline, and a barrage of innovative editing techniques to keep us in the moment he is trying to capture. In between its repeated frames of dialogue between Alex and Aimee occur seductive experimental montages that layer black and white footage over streaks of images in primary colors. In one recurring image, a man hurtles face forward towards the bottom of the screen, arms and legs flapping as the screen flickers. The drama of this image seems to open up the unspoken intent of Alex’s decisions throughout the film, in some way unfolding what seems to be desire and revealing the desperation inside of it. These and other sequences stack color and sound onto each other, reconstructing that seductive image or romantic glance, halting in time the sense of what lies at the heart of the love story or adulterous daydream. Though these themes are hard to articulate, they are easy to visualize. Boe shows us that the dream itself is not far removed from the filmed image because they both manipulate the same data. Random bits of experience (a woman’s smile, the tussled sheets of a hotel room bed, the steam of an early shower, cigarette smoke in a bar-room tryst) are tooled together in constructions that mimic actual perception but bring with them the trace of the architect. Film, just like fantasy, enables the viewer to be both the lover and the loved.

This experimental love story comes to a head through a visible parable that occurs towards the end of the film. Aimee tells Alex to walk to the train station ahead of her. If he turns around to see if she is there she will leave. If he doesn’t, then she may very well be there behind him when he arrives at the station. What we discover at this point in the film is that whether she is there or not doesn’t really matter, for the point of the story behind Reconstruction is in its telling. In line with Renoir’s approach to film as a construct of experience, Boe connects the way we experience love with the agility of film to express things we cannot articulate. The form of the narrative in Reconstruction is the form in which love occurs in life. It is a series of elements that we make stories out of, elements that we enshrine in our memories with all the abstraction of a digitally manipulated image. His characters Alex, Aimee, and Simone are nothing more than Resnais’ characters A, X, and M in Last Year at Marienbad. They are constructs that stand in for us all in the drama of a few important abstractions.