Enzo Avitable and Jonathan Demme team up for charming music documentary set in Naples
ENZO AVITABILE MUSIC LIFE (Jonathan Demme, 2012)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Opens Friday, October 18
www.enzoavitabilemusiclife.com
About six years ago, Jonathan Demme was driving in his car toward the George Washington Bridge when he heard a song on the radio that changed his life. It was by a Neapolitan musician he had never heard of before, Enzo Avitable. A few years later, producer Davide Azzolini invited Demme to be a special guest at the Naples Film Festival, and Demme agreed to attend, as long as he got to meet Avitable. Not only did Azzolini arrange the meeting, but they all decided to work together as well. The result is the charming documentary Enzo Avitable Music Life, in which Demme captures the always smiling and positive Avitable playing in a beautiful Baroque church with a stellar group of musicians from around the world, showing off his cluttered apartment (along with photos of him with James Brown, Tina Turner, and other superstars he has performed with), and visiting his childhood town of Marianella. As with such previous Demme documentaries as Stop Making Sense, Storefront Hitchcock, and Neil Young Trunk Show, the focus is on the music, as Avitable discusses his classical training and composing methods, pontificates on his love of jazz, and participates in wonderful jam sessions with various combinations that include Cuba’s Eliades Ochoa, Iraq’s Naseer Shamma, Spain’s Gerardo Núñez, Pakistan’s Ashraf Sharif Khan Poonchwala, India’s Trilok Gurtu, Sardinia’s Luigi Lai, Italy’s Zi’ Giannino Del Sorbo and Bruno Canino, Iran’s Hossein Alizadeh, Mauritania’s Daby Touré, and Palestinian singer Amal Murkus. Avitable is seen playing saxophone and unusual stringed instruments and singing lyrics that range from traditional folktales to abstract poetry to overheated sociopolitical commentary, believing in the power of music to make a difference. The scenes in the church have a kind of magic that is reminiscent of Davis Guggenheim’s It Might Get Loud, which documented a historic jam session between Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White. And things get sweetly personal when the ebullient, curly haired Avitable returns to Marianella and meets up with some old friends — and their parents, who remember him well from when he was just a kid. The film is not merely a celebration of Avitable and his music but a tribute to his beloved Napoli as well.
In a 1966 interview with Pierre Daix about Masculin féminin, director Jean-Luc Godard said, “When I made this film, I didn’t have the least idea of what I wanted.” Initially to be based on the Guy de Maupassant short stories “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” the film ended up being a revolutionary examination of the emerging youth culture in France, which Godard identifies as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Godard threw away the script and worked on the fly to make the film, which stars Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a peculiar young man who quickly becomes obsessed with budding pop star Madeleine, played by real-life Yé-yé singer Chantal Goya. (Godard discovered her on a television variety show.) Paul chases Madeleine, getting a job at the same company, going to the movies and nightclubs with her and her friends, and meeting her in cafés, where he wants to talk about the troubles of contemporary society and she just wants to have a good time. “Man’s conscience doesn’t determine his existence. His social being determines his conscience,” Paul proclaims. He continually argues that there is nothing going on even as strange events occur around him to which he is completely oblivious, including a lover’s spat in which a woman guns down a man in broad daylight. (Sounds of rapid-fire bullets can be heard over the intertitles for each of the film’s fifteen faits précis, evoking a sense of impending doom.) Paul has bizarre conversations with his best friend, Robert (Michel Debord), a radical who asks him to help put up anarchist posters. Posing as a journalist, Paul brutally interviews Miss 19 (Elsa Leroy), a young model with a very different view of society and politics. Godard has also included a playful battle of the sexes in the center of it all: Paul wants Madeleine, much to the consternation of Madeleine’s roommate, Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert), who also has designs on her; meanwhile, Robert goes out with another of Madeleine’s friends, the more grounded Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport), who is interested in Paul.
When a pair of disaffected Parisians, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), meet an adorable young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), in English class, they decide to team up and steal a ton of money from a man living in Odile’s aunt’s house. As they meander through the streets of cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s black-and-white Paris, they talk about English and wealth, dance in a cafe while director Jean-Luc Godard breaks in with voice-over narration about their character, run through the Louvre in record time, and pause for a near-moment of pure silence. Godard throws in plenty of commentary on politics, the cinema, and the bourgeoisie in the midst of some genuinely funny scenes. Band of Outsiders is no ordinary heist movie; based on Dolores Hitchens’s novel Fool’s Gold, it is the story of three offbeat individuals who just happen to decide to attempt a robbery while living their strange existence, as if they were outside from the rest of the world. The trio of ne’er-do-wells might remind Jim Jarmusch fans of the main threesome from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), except Godard’s characters are more aggressively persistent. One of Godard’s most accessible films, Band of Outsiders is screening October 18 at the Francesca Beale Theater as part of the expansive Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Jean-Luc Godard — The Spirit of the Forms,” which continues through October 31 with such other Godard works as Les Carabiniers, La Chinoise, Contempt, Film Socialisme, King Lear, Nôtre musique, and many more.
Juliette Binoche gives a gut-wrenching performance as the traumatized title character in Bruno Dumont’s heartbreaking Camille Claudel 1915. The film takes place over the course of several days in 1915, as the sculptor and former mistress of Auguste Rodin awaits a visit from her younger brother, poet, devout Christian, and diplomat Paul Claudel. Camille has been moved to an asylum in Montdevergues, where she prepares her own meals for fear of being poisoned on orders from Rodin, who she believes is still trying to ruin her life and career twenty years after their personal and professional relationships ended. Run by nuns, the asylum is home primarily to deeply disturbed women incapable of taking care of themselves and barely able to speak coherent sentences. Claudel, a loner who was committed by her family shortly after the death of her father, desperately wants to be released and get her life back, but everything seems to be poised against her. Binoche, her pale face appearing to have been chiseled like one of Claudel’s sculptures, plays Camille with a subtle yet stern beauty, giving several long, impassioned speeches that writer-director Dumont (Twentynine Palms, L’humanité) and cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines shoot in single takes, the camera remaining still, Camille framed like a painting. Throughout the film, Camille is seen amid mostly blacks, grays, browns, and whites, a monochromatic color scheme that echoes her work. The film has a cinéma vérité feel, as much of the sparse dialogue is improvised, many of the nuns are nurses at the asylum, and several of the patients are actually committed there, lending a neo-Realist quality to the austere setting. The film, which is “freely adapted from” Paul’s writings and letters, Camille’s letters, and medical records, is not a biopic; instead, it’s a fascinating study of a talented artist and the mental anguish that ultimately overwhelmed her.
