I always watched Man Bites Dog at home (probably always alone), so that might have played in my impressions, but I do find it funny and I guess I just respond well to this kind of very dark humor (I love the bit with the old lady and trying to save bullets and the mess), but Bernie is just too much for me already.
Yes, I meant blunt as un-subtle. I still think Man Bites Dog is a bit more refined in its relationship with violence and the appeal of violence within us than Bernie, which to me feels much more mono-dimensional and superficial as a movie. Not to say Man Bites Dog is a very profound movie (it isn't) but I have the memories of a subtler movie nevertheless.
Albert Dupontel
- colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Re: Albert Dupontel
I like Man Bites Dog as well, being made when the idea of a documentary film crew following a serial killer on his daily rounds was a rather novel idea. It pushed a few of the ideas in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer further (especially the scene of Henry and Otis watching a rampage that they had videotaped back after the fact) by breaking the fourth wall and suggesting complicity of at least the filmmakers if not the viewing audience in the material they decide to cover, and thereby tacitly endorse, years before Funny Games went meta and the Blair Witch Project used shaky cam.
At its worst Man Bites Dog is a succession of standalone scenes calculated to shock with callous murder, but it does feel as if it has a deeper point than just that. Probably the best scene in Man Bites Dog is the one where the two serial killers, each followed by their own film crew meet up and then proceed to try and murder each other, more at the behest of the anxieties about encountering rivals coming from the film crew who are too deeply in the mindset of their subject at that point than anything else, though it does give each of the showboating murderers a chance to play to their strengths for the camera!
At its worst Man Bites Dog is a succession of standalone scenes calculated to shock with callous murder, but it does feel as if it has a deeper point than just that. Probably the best scene in Man Bites Dog is the one where the two serial killers, each followed by their own film crew meet up and then proceed to try and murder each other, more at the behest of the anxieties about encountering rivals coming from the film crew who are too deeply in the mindset of their subject at that point than anything else, though it does give each of the showboating murderers a chance to play to their strengths for the camera!
- domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
Re: Albert Dupontel
In the interest of completeness, I watched Dupontel's first film, the short Désiré (1994), a futuristic satire of, I don't know, birth procedures? In a world where the process is automated, a woman's unseen early birth (complete with baby bungeeing out of the mom's uterus and dangling perilously from the operating table as the umbilical cord is sawed away like a fraying rope in a western-- a very Dupontel visual gag) leaves the clueless medical establishment confused as to how to coax the baby out. Eventually Dupontel regular Nicolas Marié's head honcho directs Éric Elmosnino to fire his shotgun into the woman's belly, since it's not a crime to kill a baby who doesn't want to be born. Like Dupontel's other early features, none of this is funny, and like many other first films, it shows its influences too baldly (Gilliam) without bringing enough else to the table.
- domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
Re: Albert Dupontel
Dupontel's newest film as director, Adieu les cons, opens in France in October and stars Virginie Efira, Dupontel, and Marié. Plot description:
That write-up has me wondering if this is gonna be his Brazil...When 43-year-old hairdresser Suze Trappet finds out that she’s seriously ill, she decides to go looking for a child she was forced to abandon when she was only 15. On her madcap bureaucratic quest she crosses paths with JB, a 50-year-old man in the middle of a burnout, and Mr. Blin, a blind archivist prone to overenthusiasm. The unlikely trio set off on a hilarious and poignant helterskelter journey across the city in search of Suze’s long-lost child.
- therewillbeblus
- Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm
Re: Albert Dupontel
I've only seen domino's top two but they couldn't be more different, though both creative. Le vilain's premise developed into something of supreme intelligence, and Dupontel found a way to make a fairly complex idea, when accounting for everyone's motives paradoxically at odds with their actions, flow with absorbable ease. Even outside of the smart conception, the acting is well-balanced with both leads playing off of one another generously, and non-structuralist gags land hard (the description of the robbery from a third-person over visual snippets, the box mom finds with mean-spirited school report cards - my favorite being
Au revoir là-haut begins as a war tale before morphing into the vibe of a fantasy. I was reminded of Pan's Labyrinth with the visual spectacle and controlled intimate playfulness in escaping into collaborative imagination in what could otherwise be experienced as imprisonment, in a literal sense between Biscayart and the young girl, but also an abstract sense by wiggling for air in the caste systemic stronghold of post-war France. This has a lot of humor too, though the drama beats down on each frame like a sun, but one that can see the possibilities for self-alleviation in the shadows. And that leads me to the common thread between these two films which is an interest in moral flexibility as defined by subjective agency. Dupontel's worldview feels like one of objective moral neutrality but he seems to argue for the empowerment of the will to find opportunities for combating stressors, rather than a position of surrender to the flow of god's universe. It's an interesting approach to go so hard with devotion, yet one that he convincingly sells without chalking it up to a shallow 'life is what you make it' slogan. Dupontel finds humility in a different place than we may expect: In a person's ability to engage in a dialogue between their will and their conscience, which can tame the former and forge identity development without sacrificing the truthful merit in selfish endeavors, a bold and admirable proposal to make on its own.
SpoilerShow
"Will succeed... IN PRISON").
- domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
Re: Albert Dupontel
Trailer-- Certainly looks like a Dupontel film: graphic violence + visually inventive shots + Nicolas Mariedomino harvey wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 2:07 amDupontel's newest film as director, Adieu les cons, opens in France in October and stars Virginie Efira, Dupontel, and Marié. Plot description:
That write-up has me wondering if this is gonna be his Brazil...When 43-year-old hairdresser Suze Trappet finds out that she’s seriously ill, she decides to go looking for a child she was forced to abandon when she was only 15. On her madcap bureaucratic quest she crosses paths with JB, a 50-year-old man in the middle of a burnout, and Mr. Blin, a blind archivist prone to overenthusiasm. The unlikely trio set off on a hilarious and poignant helterskelter journey across the city in search of Suze’s long-lost child.
- NABOB OF NOWHERE
- Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 12:30 pm
- Location: Brandywine River
Re: Albert Dupontel
Dupont is featured this month in Positif
- domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm