Word: goretta
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...REALLY 'Not So Bad as All That.' The English title of Claude Goretta's latest film, that is. And the character of the thieving Pierre. And maybe bourgeois life in general. With the idea that "an individual is always more complex than he appears," Goretta adapted a quaint newspaper clipping about a furniture maker who starts robbing banks, post offices, and train stations because he can't afford to pay his employees (devoted to wood, he's being beaten in the market by the manufacturers of plastics) into a film that is more complex than its unostentatious style would indicate...
...same principles which organize the themes of the film (the unreliability of appearances, the danger of predetermined values, anticipation turned on its head) also structure the arrangement of shots. Goretta falsifies not only our narrative expectations, but our aesthetic ones as well...
Passion does exist, however. It lies nervously beneath the surface of Pierre's every glance and gesture, waiting to burst into violent action, though it rarely does. Goretta is more interested in the checks on animality, in the resonances that emanate from Pierre's life of thieving, than in the robberies themselves. Only when playing with his baby in a wild, almost frighteningly erotic state, do Pierre's instincts seem untamed. Only when he talks of wood do we realize the strength of their potential power...
Film lives and preserves and Goretta is consciously paying tribute to it. Through allusions to Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (Pierre's wife tells him "sometimes I think you're crazy") and to Chabrol ("are you frightened? Do you think I'll strangle you?") Goretta places himself in the tradition of modern French, not Swiss, filmmakers. He is certainly more subtle and less pretentious than Alain Tanner, though as yet he has not been as widely received in this country. Perhaps sufficient interest will be stirred by this film to prompt more screenings of his first two features...
...Goretta's manipulation of shots is very sophisticated, relying most heavily on foreshortening and surprising juxtaposition. The single partially telling image followed by the truly telling one, is one of Goretta's favorite ways of playing games with our illusions and expectations. Thus Goretta can give us the essentials of action in a scene that is pared down to two single shots. A procession of people in black pass by and we think Pierre's father has died. In the next shot he sits quietly in his wheelchair. Pierre's wife is always riding her bicycle backwards. Only...