At the Taormina Film Festival, the masterly lesson of Arnaud Desplechin: cinema, laughter and tears

John

By John

“This film lesson will be politically incorrect!” Thus the artistic director of the Taormina Film Festival Mark Muller he introduced Arnaud Desplechin’s cinema lessonguest of the event, waiting to present today at the Palacongressi, for the “Focus Mediterraneo” section, «Filmlovers!», the English version of «Spectateurs», his latest film already presented at Cannes.
An unorthodox cinephile, whose filmography between reality and imagination contains interesting references to Truffaut, Hitchcock, Bergman. «The only author capable of walking the tightrope between comedy and melodrama – Müller underlined – without ever falling on the side of melodrama, pushing comedy to the point of touching on the tragic, but always managing to bring it back towards comedy. Who better than him could explore the different ways of making comedy?». And it is precisely by eluding the classic pleasantries between guest and moderator that Desplechin makes a premise: «When Marco called me I told him he had chosen the wrong person, because as a movie spectator I love to cry. But for him and for my partner, who finds me funny, I accepted the challenge, even though my cinema is strongly melodramatic».
Yet, in his lesson, that love for cinema that emerges powerfully in his «Spectateurs» was all there, together with a deep capacity for analysis and critical narration of many milestones of the seventh art. It starts from the memory of a masterclass experienced as a spectator, with the great Orson Welles, during his years of training at the prestigious Parisian film school La Fémis. «When Welles asked which of us wanted to make films, I and a friend who was next to me were the only ones who didn’t raise our hands. But when he asked who wanted to put on a show, only we raised our hands, demonstrating that we did not consider the show something to be ashamed of.” An anecdote that is in itself a lesson on the right attitude of those who approach the complexity of the art of entertainment.

Then Desplechin begins to range between genres and eras, milestones and recent titles, with screenings of cult scenes from works that belong to the history of auteur cinema. He begins in grand style with icons Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and the 1927 silent film, «Putting Pants on Philip», with the double entendre gag of Hardy’s Scottish kilt, passing through an absolute cult like «Ninotchka» by Lubitsch and the iconic scene of Greta Garbo’s laughter. «Lubitsch pushed comedy to the maximum of elegance and ambiguity – he said – . It was the first time Garbo laughed and in Hollywood we have always wondered if a woman could be beautiful and funny at the same time. Putting these two peculiarities together was something completely new».
Drama and irony in the typically Jewish Hasidic dance scene in “The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob” by Gérard Oury – with Louis De Funes in the role of an anti-Semitic businessman forced to pretend to be a Jew – and in the dialogue with the birds of Totò in Pasolini’s masterpiece “Uccellacci e Uccellini”. “In that film I find the contrast between high and low, divine and earthly very funny,” Desplechin emphasized. “This scene is extremely poetic and entertaining, it disturbs and shocks me. And it is very difficult to make people laugh with subtitles in the language of sparrows.”
Sublime combination of tears and laughter in another Italian title, «Palombella rossa» by Nanni Moretti, in the scene of the final water polo match played throughout the film. Triviality and fear in the obscene off-screen story by Joanna Gleason, Woody Allen’s sister in his «Crimes and Misdemeanors».
In the excursus among the most successful titles of the big screen, also a classic contemporary Hollywood comedy, «Funny People» by Judd Apatow, with Adam Sandler. The last frame of Desplechin’s cinema lesson, the tragicomic scene of the psychiatrists in «The Kings and the Queen» by the same director, who closed with a simple «I have nothing to comment here». Really not very formal, but politically correct.