MIFF Session 11: PLAYLIST

Sophie, an aspiring graphic novellist, in that worrying corridor between twenty-five and thirty, feels life is speeding away from her. She's pregnant to the chef at the cafe where she works but he reminds her that it isn't love, now or then. She quits waiting at the cafe and gets a shit kicker job at a comics publisher with a boss who describes himself as an arsehole at her job interview (and puts his present colleagues through a densely awkward moment in the process). Sophie goes from guy to guy, endures the humiliating opinions of artists who look at her work and it all goes on with a stunning decade-spanning jukebox sourced score until the credits end very coolly with the sound of a stylus clicking at the end of the runout groove of an LP. I dislike this film and think it's generational. Don't get too happy about that because it's complicated, not just a cheap shot at my ageing self.

As this film is so happily derivative I have no compunction in pointing out at least two films from the past two and a hair decades that it plunders. When I say plunders I don't mean Playlist openly quotes any film before it but that it sucks up the style and all important indulgence for narcissistic central characters that the worst of cinema can get away with. They've done it so why can't this? Well, to some it probably does. I'm too old for it in that sense.

Then again, I'm also too old for it in that I can recall seeing the kind of nouvelle vague pieces from a generation and a half before mine when I was a young adult undergrad and revelled in the whimsy, the blasting youthful arrogance, and the wit of the filmmakers. The bright things' antics and opinions of Masculin/Feminin thrilled me as had Daniel in 400 Blows. There was a wealth of it and I wondered that it could ever be topped. Partly, this is because as I saw the vintage youth on screen they still felt older and the things they said and did rang with sincerity that suggested future wisdom. But then I was the right age for Ferris Bueller and I hate him, too. 

So I wondered that I wasn't quite hating this film as much as I hated the charmless sociopaths at the heart of Rushmore and Frances Ha because it was not only in black and white but in French. Was I giving it a couple of sous because of the old times of watching older times even if it didn't go as far as any character snoking a thick tarry Gauloise? I started becoming aware of this the more I watched Sophie make stupid decisions in a world that indulged her. No adverse result of her egocentric idiocy seems to matter and so none of it can teach her a thing. 

The two films I mentioned at the start of the last paragraph suffer from the same thing, an inflammation of the self-importance gland. Rushmore's Max terrifies me for what even his thinly presented redemption cannot assuage: that he will again rise as a danger to everyone around him, only stealthier and more woodenly destructive. Frances will always be an abusive friend (a kind of cool New York Belle Gibson). Sophie will always be Sophie but I do get the sense she will eventually find a place, even if she must be forced into it (her friends are much better humans and I would rather see a film about them). But if you really want your snappy young quirk to work you must do it like Harold and Maude:  you must be "much possessed by death" and see "the skull beneath the skin". All Sophie seems to see when she looks at the world is a gigantic mirror. And you know what: Maude could get away with her antics and pontifications because she went to one of the worst places in history as a girl and can only love the life left to her and Harold, having finally met his Maude, will never fake another suicide to get attention.

Argh! Anyway, this example of current French cinema for the young consumer is not for me. Thinking of everything I just wrote, I can't blame it for wanting to be the next Frances Ha. Being irritating worked for that and might even be the new ironic. But don't listen to me, I saw Star Wars when I was bang in the middle of its demographic and found it embarrassing. A friend of my vintage overhead me saying something like that and shot back, "why, because it wasn't Breathless?" "No," I said, "because it wanted me to think it was cute." So, why don't I shut up and go and watch a Gaspar Noe movie? Because I wanted this one to be better.