Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

25 February 2023

Nino Cerruti and Cinema

Jeremy Irons in “Reversal of Fortune”, 1990. Sovereign Pictures

The union between the world of cinema and Nino Cerruti began in the late 1960s, when Cerruti began creating garments for the Hollywood stars. It was the decade when Hollywood film crews traveled to Rome to shoot on location or at Cinecitta and started to become familiar with the Italian fashion, including Cerruti. Lanificio Fratelli Cerruti, a family woolen business nestled in the town of Biella, in northern Italy, along the Wool Road, the cradle of Italy’s textile industry, was established in 1881 by three brothers. They started to make garments when Nino, the eldest grandson of one of the brothers and who had studied philosophy and had thought of becoming a writer, took over the business after his father’s sudden death in 1950. After initially collaborating with tailors to manufacture the clothes, Nino Cerruti commissioned four short plays, as a means of promotion, and designed the costumes himself. It was his first foray into the world of theater and film. Cerruti’s popularity only flourished in the decades to come. His name appears in the credits of over sixty films, dressing memorable characters from both Hollywood and the French cinema. “Why am I chosen so often?,” the designer contemplated. “I think it’s because I don’t try to substitute my wishes or tastes for those of the actor. I adapt to the needs of the film and I am flattered when a costume designer decides that my work will fit with what they want to achieve.”

Nino Cerruti was a designer who understood and dedicated himself to perfecting a garment and who, in his collections, preserved an aesthetic of elegance, ease of dressing and continuity, constantly evolving yet revolving around the same basic elements. In 1957, he launched his first men’s ready-to-wear collection, called Hitman, revolutionsing fashion with its fluid, relaxed shapes, capturing the changing times and attitudes. His first women’s collection came out in 1968. In film, he infused fiction with his sophisticated style. His designs – although not as readily recognisable as Armani’s on screen (Giorgio Armani is one fashion designer who has gained wide recognition for his contribution to film, appreciated for retaining a strong identity even when working within the confines of costume, attaining a perfect harmony between the Armani aesthetic and film costume appropriation) – look good on screen while being immersed into the narrative. Fashion, the designer believed, is a way of describing the world we live in. It’s something that applies itself to film, too.

“The Jewel of the Nile”, 1985. Twentieth Century Fox

Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner were two of the biggest stars of the 1980s and 1990s. Nino Cerruti dressed them on and off screen, thus consolidating their characters in the cultural consciousness of filmgoers everywhere. Kathleen Turner, who became one of his muses and a close friend, recounts how “Nino contacted me when I was visiting Paris. He was an extraordinarily charming man and impeccably dressed. He showed me his workplace there and the lovely fabrics and styles, his clothes were a huge inspiration for my characters.” The 1985 The Jewel of the Nile (costume design Emma Porteous) is a follow-up to Romancing the Stone, a funny action comedy inspired by Indiana Jones, having Michael Douglas as Jack Colton and Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder reprise their leading roles. They are funny and amazing as a pair, they look good together and they look good in their clothes. The most memorable dress remains the red and black patterned dress that Kathleen wears at the beginning of the film, with deep side skits and no back, but the rest of her wardrobe that Cerruti supplied is so quintessentially travel-inspired (earth toned khakis and jacket, blue-striped white blouse, dusty pink blouse and a very practical knee-length wrap skirt) that deserves all the praise on its own.

Michael Douglas in “Wall Street”, 1987. Twentieth Century Fox

“To create memorable characters, one needs
a perfect silhouette, and Nino was the master.”
Ellen Mirojnick, costume designer

As Oliver Stone himself states in his tremendous book, Chasing the Light, the film Wall Street depicts “misshapen offspring of capitalism run amok”. Oliver Stone, whom his Wall Street co-writer named “a standard of rebelliousness on how to break the rules and get away with it,” is a razor-sharp director who has always made unconventional films that matter. About Wall Street, the real Wall Street, Stone said: “It was another world. The hidden venality and viciousness reminded me of the violent, money-hungry cocaine world of Miami, […] an ego business, even darker and more corrupt than anything I’d seen in Vietnam or Miami.” The personification of darkness and corruption in Wall Street, the film (costume design Ellen Mirojnick), is millionaire Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, a Wall Street shark. Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is a kid broker for a second-rate Wall Street firm, and hungry for more, ready to do anything it takes. Gekko is his idol. And I can’t imagine anyone else in the role of the ruthless, cold man who places the buck above everything else – “The rest is conversation.”

Fashion brands in the 1980s epitomised the aspirational dressing of the decade, the decade of excess par excellence, of greed, and corporate raiders brandishing their pinstripes – “And for God’s sake, buy yourself a decent suit!”, Gekko tells the uninitiated Bud (the names Gekko and Bud were certainly chosen for a reason) after he helps him make his first “decent” chunk of dollars. “Clothes are important for an actor,” related Michael Douglas. “They help his performance and certain materials can completely change your whole attitude. In this film, I wear Cerruti suits, and I wear suspenders. They’re an article of clothing that helps define the role because my character on the insid was so decadent; on the outside, he had to feel like he was clean.”

Alain Delon in “Mr. Klein”, 1976. Lira Films. Nova Films

Identity as an illusion. Monsieur Klein is an art dealer living on the Left Bank in Paris, on Rue de Bac. Played by Alain Delon, with his good looks, refined clothes, stern haircut and minimal mimic, he looks at ease and undisturbed in his generous apartment, lavishly decorated in rich colours and trimmed with paintings. Dressed in a luxurious striped dressing gown, he remains cool and calculated as he casually makes deals with the Jewish people who are desperate to sell their valuables and cash in so that they can leave the Nazi-occupied country. Alain Delon had already proven how good he could play the completely detached, hardly betraying an emotion, type of character almost ten years earlier, in his sublime portrayal of Pierre Melville’s killer-for-hire Jef Costello, in Le Samouraï. There is something of Jef Costello in Robert Klein. In his sharp suits, double-breasted tailored coats, pristine fedoras, carefully slipped-on leather gloves and calculated mannerisms, there is not much the perfectly groomed and perfectly dressed Mr. Klein leaves to chance in Joseph Losey’s film, Mr.Klein (costume design Colette Baudot).

But what is different with this character, as compared to Pierre Melville’s anti-hero, is that Mr. Klein is fully aware of his appearance and he’s working hard, albeit immoral, to maintain it. He is a man very sure of himself. And yet the biggest difference is that, this time, we slowly get to see inside the armour. We get to see behind the appearance. Losey manages what few other filmmakers have with Delon, balancing out a subtle narcissism with a gloomy fatality. At no moment could that be more visible than in this sequence above, with Mr. Klein dressed in his Nino Cerruti chocolate brown manteau. Amidst confusion, vulnerability and fear, the exterior, including the clothes, remains intact – it all lies in Delon’s great subtleness – and that’s the most unnerving part.

Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman”, 1990. Touchstone Pictures

Richard Gere may have launched the career of another Italian fashion designer a decade earlier, as male escort Julian Kaye dressed in Giorgio Armani deconstructed blazers and fluid silhouettes in American Gigolo (1980), a character walking the thin line between masculinity and narcissism, but he is just as unforgettable as businessman Edward Lewis in sharp-tailored Nino Cerruti suits in Pretty Woman, 1990 (costume design Marilyn Vance). Armani, who entered the fashion industry in 1961 as assistant to Nino Cerruti before starting out on his own in 1970, said: “I was a forty year old man with salt-and-pepper hair who perceived the world around him acutely, and I responded, concretely, to the evident need for new types of clothes by proposing unstructured jackets, made out of loose and fluid fabrics. I have the farsightedness of Nino Cerruti to thank: after hiring me to work for him, he encouraged me to continue my investigations.”

“Gere’s prosperity jumped off the screen in Lewis’s relaxed yet sophisticated suiting,” writes Cindi Cook in the book Nino Cerruti: Fashion Icon, and she is right. Just as Julian Kaye wouldn’t be Julian Kaye without his unstructured jacket, Edward Lewis wouldn’t be Edward Lewis without his impeccable suits – Cerruti was more traditionally classic than Armani, and that is what Armani alluded to in the aforementioned quote, although it was Cerruti who had caused a stir when he produced a collection of interchangeable androgynous clothes in 1967 and the first to deconstruct tailoring and obscure the lines between casual and elegant. The take-away is that both designers understood the mechanism of film costume as film narrative and character depiction.

Jeremy Irons in “Reversal of Fortune”, 1990. Sovereign Pictures

Based on real life events, Reversal of Fortune (costume design Judianna Makovsky) is the story of Claus von Bulow’s two trials on the charge of attempting to murder his wife. Sunny von Bulow fell into an irreversible coma on a January morning and the family and police suspected foul play, with Claus as prime suspect. Jeremy Irons plays Claus von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder‘s film. And who else but Jeremy Irons could allude to all the things he alludes to under that impenetrable façade? Reversal of Fortune is mischievous, funny, tantalising, deceitful and cynical. It makes you aware that, under the appearances (it does play so well with its rich characters dressed the part), there might lie a whole different truth. In his requisite Nino Cerruti tuxedo and silk robes, Jeremy Irons plays with the viewer and succeeds in making the story so much more intricate and intriguing.

Peter Coyote in “Bitter Moon”, 1992. Columbia Pictures

One of Cerruti’s most cherished relationships in Hollywood was that with Peter Coyote. The actor had just turned 50 and was at a turning point in his life, coming out of a divorce and years of heroine addiction. He had been cast in a new movie by Roman Polanski, Bitter Moon (costume design Jackie Budin), and he met Nino Cerruti at the filmmaker’s house in Paris before starting working on the film. They became fast friends. Cerruti would afterwords ask Coyote to model in his shows, “and at the end of them, he would say: ‘Take what you like!’ To this day, I have eight Nino Cerruti suits and they are perfect. I’ve never lost a button,” Peter Coyote confessed, as stated in the book Nino Cerruti: Fashion Icon.

The framework for the film, a bleak view on relationships, a tale of twisted love and fatal encounters, is a lengthy flashback revealed gradually and intercut with events taking place in the present on a boat. In the book Roman Polanski: A Retrospective, the writer James Greenberg recounts how, after an intense scene during filming, Peter Coyote lifted himself out of the chair to which his character was confined, and, dressed in “a rumpled white linen suit, the spaces between his teeth blackened, grime under his nails, he says with a demonic grin: “You won’t see this on the Disney Channel. Roman’s going all the way.” Polanski stated that he wasn’t making it to shock. “Maybe I had a little bit of this desire when I was young… I don’t have any of those needs now, and even when I was beginning, the main thing for me was to tell the story, and if the story required violent images or nudity, I would use them for telling it.” So Roman is going all the way. So does Peter Coyote’s Oscar. The actor recounted how “Oscar begins in a kind of royal purple. He is spoiled as a young prince at the film’s beginning and his costume for seduction and pleasure is his purple suit. There is such an intimate relationship between clothes and character…” From there on, just as Polanski’s dark humour gets murkier, there is only downfall for Oscar, right to the rumpled linen suit and blackened teeth.

Christian Bale in “American Psycho”, 2000. Lions Gate Film

One of the most memorable lines in American Psycho is at the dry cleaner’s, when Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman blasts away: “One, you don’t bleach a Cerruti! Out of the question!” More than thirty years on, Patrick Bateman’s world – the greed, the soulless, remote, expensive apartment filled with nonsensical gadgets and empty art – rings truer than ever. The clothes however are very much a part of the times. The story is set in the 1980s. The ties are wide, the lapels are wide, too, the shoulders are expanded, the trousers have pleats. Staying true to the book character (Bateman wears Cerruti, too, in Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial book), costume designer Isis Mussenden worked with Nino Cerruti to recreate authentic suits from the period, even though Christian Bale doesn’t wear Nino Cerruti exclusively. Cerruti had already dressed a somewhat similar character, Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. But Gekko was a killer just when doing business. No Wall Street bad guy could top Christian Bale’s breakthrough role as a serial-killer-banker wearing a Cerruti suit. But, of course, there is a cautionary tale here: Bateman is a narcissist fueled by greed. He is obsessed with the image, with the brand. He is only concerned with looking important. The clothes do make the character in American Psycho. Too bad the character doesn’t realise that, in the case of a Cerruti suit, it is the substance that he pays for. It would drive him even madder.

Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo in “Borsalino”, 1970. Adel Productions

“When it comes to a film, we rarely talk about the costume designer,” Jacques Deray would comment. “And yet his work is an integral part of the work and contributes to its success: it is he who brings the characters to life, creates the difference according to the personality and the sensitivity of the actors. The psychology of the role must be found in the way of dressing, in the will to appear or just to stick to the reality of an era”. In the 1975 Borsalino (costume design Jacques Fonteray), the most talked about costume pieces were François Capella and Roch Siffredi’s hats, most of the times Borsalino, the dressy felt hats created by the legendary Italian manufacturer in 1857 in northern Italy. Borsalino was the first luxury brand to lend its name to the title of a film, and the movie, its two leading stars and the brand all enjoyed wide success.

One of the said stars was Alain Delon (Siffredi). The other was Jean-Paul Belmondo (Capella), or “Bebel” for the French, the icon of the French New Wave. Deray’s is a thoroughly stylised cinematic world and the look of the characters fits right in. There is in fact a clear delineation between Siffredi and Capella. While the first one has a more classic, crisp look, usually sporting a clean-cut suit, Capella is more playful with his looks – more colourful clothes, favouring separates to suits and scarves instead of foulards, and a more flamboyant silhouette, reflecting a more exuberant, lively and jovial character. That’s the character that Cerruti dressed in a striped three-piece suit.

“Nino Cerruti is a man of culture and distinction.
When he dressed you for a film, you can count on him
for suggestions, details, precise and accurate advice that
will help you as an actor to perceive your character more minutely.”
Philip Noiret

Don Johnson in “Miami Vice”, 1980s. Michael Mann Productions

The fashion of the 80s was about excess, but it was just as much about attitude and about the individual. Responsible for one of the defining menswear looks of the decade was one of the most popular TV shows of the 1980s: Miami Vice. And the one responsible for the protagonist Don Johnson’s unconventional pairing of blousy blazers, with rolled-up sleeves, pleated trousers, pastel t-shirts and athletic shoes was not Giorgio Armani, but Nino Cerruti. Don Johnson’s Sonny, his somewhat grittier, double-breasted-suit-clad partner Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas, the show had something, something cool. That appeal, that spark, that sensuality, that liberating feeling, that real and fearless self expression. That’s what’s so desperately missing today. From fashion, from the individual.

MORE STORIES

Dressed to fit the monochromatic look and distressed reality of a 1955 noir:
Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart

“The process is the same. You build the character!”:
Interview with costume designer Deborah L. Scott

The Armani aesthetic and film costume appropriation:
Sam Shepard in Voyager

Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume | | Comments Off

16 February 2023

Read Instead…in Print

“Film is the only art, apart from music, that can exist in time.”

Read instead…in print #20

Satyajit Ray Miscellany: On Life, Cinema, People & Much More brings to light more than seventy essays on film making, screenplay writing, rare autobiographical pieces, photographs and manuscripts, from one of cinema’s true auteurs and one of the world’s greatest creatives – Satyajit Ray also wrote and illustrated stories for Sandesh, the defunct children’s magazine that his grandfather had founded and which Ray revived in 1961. Satyajit Ray started out in advertising and, in 1953, began working on his first film, Pather Panchali, shooting largely on Saturdays and Sundays. Only after the film’s release, in 1955, and its success, did he quit his job and dedicated himself entirely to filmmaking. Filmmaking was a deeply personal affair for Satyajit Ray. His vision of making a film was drastically different than that of other filmmakers’ and he made all his films according to his own mind and skill. He wrote his own dialogue (scored his films and often designed their publicity materials as well), but his films rose above the words, as he believed a film should be conveyed in images as much as possible. Satyajit Ray’s films are like that, striking this incredible balance between sound and image and containing moments of purely visual significance. He was a director who did filmmaking as he understood it, appreciating the medium and experimenting with elements that are only specific to film. These unique ideas of film-making are expressed in these essays, which is why they are invaluable.

“The fact is that a children’s film which has all the qualities of
simplicity, spontaneity and universality is perhaps the hardest
kind of film to make. This is not surprising, since literature too
shows the same kind of dearth. It is indeed a rare gift to be able to
tell with the heart of a child while creating with the mind of an adult.”

Read instead… in print is about a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.

MORE STORIES

Read instead…in print #14: Cassavetes on Cassavetes

Real emotion and visual power: Interview with film poster designer Matt Needle

Read instead…in print #11: Picture, by Lillian Ross

Posted by classiq in Books, Film, Read instead...in print | | Comments Off

9 February 2023

February Newsletter: Gone to Timbuktu, Yamamoto and The ‘59 Sound

Left: Photo © Aiayu 2023 Vol.1 | Right: Photo © Classiq Journal

”To me, it reminded me of my grandmother and a time
where simpler things were valued more. Friendships, relationships,
and that kind of thing. There weren’t so many distractions. You didn’t
have so many goals. Now, a kid grows up, and he could be anything.
That’s great, but it’s also very daunting.”

Brian Fallon, The Gaslight Anthem

Photos: Classiq Journal

Viewing

Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)
Wim Wenders

This “diary film” as Wenders called it, investigates the similarities of his craft, filmmaking, and that of the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto – I say fashion designer, although I should say dressmaker, because that’s how Yamamoto calls himself and I say Japanese to refer to his nationality, although he doesn’t like his clothes to be referred as such, saying that his clothes have no nationality, but confessing that, when he came to Paris, he realised, or he was pushed to realise, that he was a Japanese.

When he was contacted by the Centre George’s Pompidou in Paris to make a documentary about a fashion designer, Wenders, who had no real interest in the industry of fashion, knew exactly who he wanted to make it about: Yohji Yamamoto. And it all started with a shirt and a jacket. “My first encounter with Yohji Yamamoto was in a way an experience of identity. I had bought a shirt and a jacket. You know the feeling. You put on new clothes, you look at yourself in the mirror and you are content, excited about your new skin, but with this shirt and this jacket, it was different. From the beginning they were new and old at the same time. In the mirror I saw me, of course, only better. More me than before. And I had the strangest sensation. I was wearing, yes, I have no other words for it, I was wearing the shirt itself and the jacket itself. And in them, I was myself.”

Wenders shot the film mainly on his own as a one-man team. He also narrates it. During the shooting, which stretched over the course of a year, Yamamoto and Wenders became friends. Wim Wenders is a great documentary director and here he interestingly links cinema with clothes, cities, mobility and motion. But at the center of it all stands Yohji Yamamoto. He talks slowly, he takes long pauses when he speaks, and he makes you ponder on his words. No word is in vain. The abundance of less – this is a phrase that best describes the wealth of lessons he teaches the viewer by using so few words. This is a man who has a strong set of values and a strong sense of his worth, without any trace of pretentiousness. Watching him at work in his studio in Tokyo, or among photography books of decades past (Sartre’s colour coat from a Bresson photo, James Dean, women in working uniforms) for inspiration, and in Paris for his presentations, Wenders frames the portrait of a dressmaker, an auteur amidst a gigantic industry – “I could understand how Yohji’s tender and delicate language could survive in each of his creations,” concluded Wenders. It’s humbling and liberating.

Claude Chabrol’s Inspector Lavardin movies

A small town in rural France. Quiet, charming, sheltering a respectable middle class that hides big secrets and mysterious deaths. In Poulet au vinaigre (Cop au vin), 1986, Claude Chabrol peels off provincial life right to its rotten core with the help of laconic Detective Inspector Lavardin. Therein lies the appeal of Chabrol’s first policier film. Jean Poiret proved so compelling as the detective that he reprised the role in the sequel that would be named after his character the following year. It’s thrilling to have him back in Inspector Lavardin. Trademark trench coat, tranchant humour and immeasurable charm intact, Lavardin has to investigate another murder in a Breton coastal town and he resorts to his usual reproachful, unorthodox methods to elucidate it. Lavardin brings something new to the universe of Chabrol, giving a comical treatment to one of Chabrol’s favourite themes, the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie that Chabrol so virulently and often attacked in his films. “I detest the bourgeoisie, but I am one of them. That’s why I revenge myself on them, I want to make them feel sick, sick at heart,” Chabrol confessed.

Piper, 2016
Alan Barillo

The short film is a space for infinite freedom, as filmmaker Nicolas Bianco-Levrin said in our interview. For a while now, I have experienced more joy in watching short films than I have in watching all these new feature films that have stopped being creative and free-willing. Alan Barillo’s Piper is a new favourite in our home. Life is very simple once you overcome your fears and become self-sufficient. This short film about a little sandpiper offers an invaluable life lesson in just 6 minutes, with no words, and it does it with an incredible sense of humour, too. And it made both my son and me happy when we watched it.

Far from the Tree, 2021
Natalie Nourigat

Far from the Tree is another short that takes place in the animal world. Isn’t it interesting how easily viewers of all ages relate to animal characters? Another one of my interviewees, children’s book author and illustrator Marianne Dubuc had a straightforward and logical explanation for it: it is easier to have more readers identify with a cat than with a human being who looks different from you. “The freedom of interpretation that is so important to me can be helped with animal characters, since they give a broader answer to culture, identity, etc,” she said. Returning to Far from the Tree, we are again served a life experience that is however different in approach. Darker, allowing difficult questions about the real world, and, yes, about the dangers of life, be answered sensitively.

Left: Photo © Aiayu 2022 Vol. 1 | Right: Photo © Classiq Journal

Reading

Finishing off Satyajit Ray’s On Life, Cinema, People, & Much More, which I will soon include in my Read instead…in print series, making a reading list of every book Sophy Roberts and her guests talk about in her new and so very, very, very good podcast (more about it below, in the Exploring section of this newsletter), and this:

Fifteen years ago, a fledgling punk rock band out of New Jersey, The Gaslight Anthem, migrated to Los Angeles to begin work on their second album. This is the oral history of the making of their masterpiece: The ‘59 Sound. It is one of the best stories about recording a musical album. It’s about so many things, not just about making music and making it in the industry of music without the anxious intention of becoming a rock star. I am of the opinion that you don’t have to explain the music, the films, the art that you like. I loved this album the moment I heard it, years after its release. I loved it because I loved it, how it sounded, the lyrics, the lead singer’s voice. Period. I didn’t need to know anything about its making, the inspiration behind it. But I do believe that listening to it I had the feeling that this music defined the ones who sang it without letting others define them (all music should be that, yes, but it isn’t), but was also music that mattered to other people. You kind of sensed all that. “I’m not trying to invent something here. I’m trying to carry on a tradition of songwriting.” – Brian Fallon (lead singer)

That being said, reading about how all the creative forces behind it came together to make this album, is simply a fine piece of storytelling.

Brian Fallon: The first thing you see is that Flogging Molly has a gold record. How does Flogging Molly have a gold record? Flogging Molly’s not on the radio. Flogging Molly’s not on MTV. Flogging Molly’s not a band where you could go to the mall and ask 20 kids, and they’d know who they are. We thought that was awesome. I’m not the sort of person who longs to be a rock star and hear Wembley Stadium cheering my name. I just want to make music that makes people feel good, and I’d love it if I could pay my bills off it too, while never losing that balance. Walking into SideOne, we saw that the balance was possible for the first time.

Alex Rosamilia (guitar): [It] caught that thing that bands in the punk genre are kind of looking for, that sense of urgency mixed with a sense of nostalgia. I don’t think we were intending for it to do what it did. More than us made it what it was. I’ve always wanted to write something that mattered to other people. I never thought I’d actually do it.

Bruce Springsteen: It had all the markings of a classic. Every song was great. There wasn’t any weak spots on the record. It was fresh and rich and newly discovered. A lot of spirit, a lot of soul. Those things have a tendency to last. The record is as fresh as it ever was.

Fallon: [The amp was] the material version of what it meant to me. The intangible thing of “The ’59 Sound,” it didn’t mean anything about the ’50s. I didn’t imagine people banging on jukeboxes and Fonzie and all that. I’m not interested in any of that. To me, it reminded me of my grandmother and a time where simpler things were valued more. Friendships, relationships, and that kind of thing. There weren’t so many distractions. You didn’t have so many goals. Now, a kid grows up, and he could be anything. That’s great, but it’s also very daunting. Because which one of the anythings do you be?

Dicky Barrett (frontman, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones/backup vocals): I think if I was a 20-year-old or an 18-year-old guy and that record came out, that would be my The Clash, London Calling. That would be the important record of my life.

Listening

The album: The ‘59 Sound, The Gaslight Anthem

Making

In 2005, Danish design and Bolivian skilled hand-knitting were combined to create the knitwear label Aiayu, which means “Soul” in the language of Bolivia’s indigenous Aymare people. Combining typical Scandinavian style (simple, relaxed and timeless), llama wool from La Paz and traditional Bolivian knitting patterns in natural colours, founder Maria Høgh Heilmann created a brand rooted in a love for nature’s best materials and unwavering respect for traditional craftsmanship and local manufacturers. Beautiful clothes that come with a story, ready to become part of your own story.

Exploring

You don’t just listen to Sophy Roberts’ new podcast, Gone to Timbuktu, you explore it, you live it, and spread the word about it.

“There are two Timbuktus. One is the administrative centre of the Sixth Region of the Republic of Mali… And then there is the Timbuktu of the mind — a mythical city in a Never-Never Land, an antipodean mirage, a symbol for the back of beyond or a flat joke. ‘He has gone to Timbuktu,’ they say, meaning ‘He is out of his mind’.”

— Bruce Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness

In her podcast, Gone to Timbuktu, author and journalist Sophy Roberts explores the art of travel, and the space between these two Timbuktus, with writers, poets, photographers and filmmakers. I have listened to the first episode, with Anthony Sattin, the author of Nomads: The Wanderers who Shaped Our World, and all I can say is that it is such a wondrous conversation, transporting me to a different world while harking back in my fundamental way of life. Sophy and Anthony (“Humans are not wired to live in four walls!”), you are brilliant, and this podcast is indispensable!

I have read Sophy’s book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia, and many of her travel articles, but one of my favourite pieces of her writing is something she wrote for photographer Bill Phelps. I interviewed Bill a couple of years ago and when he kindly sent me a New Year’s card and a photograph booklet, he also included this note that Sophy, whom he had more than once collaborated with, wrote about his work. Here is a part of it: “‘In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like these when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously: our feeble hearts could not stand more.’ These are the words of one of the great European travel writers of the 20th century, Nicolas Bouvier – words which I have pinned to my wall next to a Bill Phelps photograph. I wish I owned more. Bill’s images carry such intimacy and sincerity, you wonder how he manages to experience so many more transcendent moments than the rest of us. Then you encounter him in the field, as I have done in numerous collaborations, and you realise it’s because Bill is a photographer with more than a questioning eye: he strips the fat off the soul in images that speak to his profound capacity for empathy. His approach is as immersive and fluid as the water he loves. He sees light with the intuition and depth of an Old Master.” That’s the kind of amazing writer that Sophy Roberts is. And now I have her words pinned down on my own wall next to the Bill Phelps photo booklet.

To have now the opportunity to listen to Sophy and her no less incredible guests is a privilege for everyone who still gives a damn about culture, education and the art of travel, and has the courage to explore those two Timbuktus.

Bonus: For each episode, there is a listing of the authors and books discussed, which can be ordered from an independent bookshop.

Yohji Yamamoto filmed by Wim Wenders for “Notebook on Cities and Clothes”, 1989. Centre Pompidou

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. The Adventure Podcast: Terra Incognita. Sirene magazine.

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3 February 2023

Closer: Marie Trintignant in Claude Chabrol’s “Betty”

Marie Trintignant in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

When we see Betty in the opening scene entering a shady bar, her disheveled face, the void in her look, the bags under her eyes show us a woman at a very low point in her life, yet her white Chanel-style deux-pièce immediately hints at the good life. We already ask ourselves who she is and what’s happened to her. She chain-smokes and binge-drinks and when she is picked up by someone pretending to be a doctor, he drives her to Versailles, to a bar called Le Trou (The Hole), another dingy place frequented by all sorts of strange characters. She keeps on smoking and drinking, deliriously harking back to the moment that brought her to this state – Chabrol doesn’t let in on very much, he doesn’t give us the whole picture, just Betty’s face in close-up and snippets of dialogue, on the recurring music of Jonasz, and then cutting from a beautiful, made-up face in the flashback to the wreck it’s become of it in the bar – the clothes however are the same. Marie Trintignant’s face becomes one incredible character. Eventually, a glamorous middle-aged woman, Laure (an Yves Saint Laurent-clad Stéphane Audran), steps in to save her from the doctor, who turns out to be a junky. Unable to bear the painful memories anymore, Betty passes out and Laure takes her to her suite in a luxurious hotel. When Betty wakes up, Laure offers her accommodation for as long as she needs it, taking her under her wing. In fragmentary flashbacks, Laure and the viewers slowly get to know who she is.

Marie Trintignant in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

Chabrol has a strong stamp of individuality on his films. Hitchcockian and thriller impulses, shrewd humour, bourgeois mores… these are cinematic phrases that Chabrol prefers and which we encounter here as well. But through the character of Betty, closely inspired by Georges Simenon’s novel by the same name, and making the viewer see her story through her own eyes, the filmmaker throws the audience into the unknown.

We get to know that Betty married into wealth only to find out she was trapped in a world of domesticity by her handsome husband and his domineering mother. And as soon as she becomes pregnant with the couple’s first child, she is no longer seen for what she is, but just as the bearer, and then the mother, of her husband’s children. As a pregnant woman, she is advised by her family to stay in bed, and her mother-in-law and husband are always right there to watch over her. Even the role of mother is in name only, because the children are exclusively taken care of by the nanny: they are nursed, fed and only brought in to their parents for a good-night’s kiss. In the bourgeoisie world, the role of wife and mother is stifling. In fact, Betty had worn Guy (Yves Lambrecht), her husband, about her unruly nature, about the kind of libertine life she’s led, when he proposed to her. “You don’t understand,… that life, I enjoyed it,” she had told him. He said he understood and that they would start a new life together. She agreed to marry him, at first believing it could work, but soon realising she got trapped in an existence she had already felt she wasn’t cut out for and there was nothing she could do to change anything.

There are several shots that are incredible in establishing how disabled the bourgeoise role of a mother is: one is when Betty looks from her remote dinner table seat through the kitchen door where the children have their meal at the children’s table. Some of them are crying, yet no other adult seems to be aware of or bothered by that. Another moment is when the nanny brings the girls to the living room where Betty, Guy and his mother are, and when the older girl expresses to her mother her wish to stay a little longer with her parents, the mother-in-law steps in saying they should never give in to the children’s demands. Any close or prolonged contact between Betty and her children is forbidden. This realisation is so striking for Betty, that she becomes impassive to everything happening around her and takes refuge in drinking and carrying on affairs. It’s a return of sorts to her old life.

When she is caught in flagrante by her husband and mother-in-law, she is forced to sign a contract stating that she abandons her children and disappears from their lives. That is the moment that provokes her downfall, her inner turmoil reaching the highest depth, the moment before we meet her.

Betty, 1992. Directed by Claude Chabrol. CED Productions, Canal+

“I remember two long conversations with George Simenon that went on into the night,” Claude Chabrol recalled in the production notes that appeared during the theatrical release of Betty. “For Simenon, it was not our intelligence that proved the superiority of the ‘human animal’ (he loved this term). At this time – this was in the sixties – he was more fascinated with man’s survival instinct, a topic which greatly inspired him. It was during this time that he wrote Betty.” Betty’s thoughts turn from animal to social (when she marries and takes on the role of mother and wife), to moral and human (when she has remorses for sacrificing her daughters), then to animal again (when she resurfaces in the end), Chabrol explained in a commentary on the film. Betty gets away with her true nature. She is untamed. Her husband and her mother-in-law try to tame her, but they don’t succeed. Chabrol doesn’t try, he lets her be. Is she the victim of what Laure calls the “dead weight of society” or a monstrous and unworthy wife and mother? Chabrol doesn’t answer. Instead, he masterfully, through the very precise succession of the story, makes the viewer look a little closer and forbearing, through her own eyes, at Betty. And he does everything in his power to save her, even if it is at the expense of another woman.

Stéphane Audran and Marie Trintignant in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

Stéphane Audran’s Laure is the one who lets Betty live. She is a former nurse, as she tells Betty, who, after being married to a doctor for twenty years, until his death, left her home in Lyon and retired to Versailles, where she lives in a grandiose hotel suite and frequents Le Trou, whose owner is her younger lover, Mario (Jean-François Garreaud). Laure dresses in Yves Saint Laurent, and I think her wardrobe could be well described by the words Marie Colmant and Gérard Lefort used in Libération, in 1991, for Saint Laurent’s latest collection: “There is not an ounce of bluff or showoff, not a line that doesn’t fall exactly where you least expect it, not a colour that is not a perfect red or faultless cobalt. In short, it’s cool, controlled, imperial.” She is still the tall, cool, stunning Stéphane Audran, with imperious looks and detached manner that dominated the earlier films of Chabrol, from Les Biches and La femme infidèle, to Le boucher and Juste avant la nuit (often dressed in Karl Lagerfeld or YSL).

But whereas in those films she used to be the unconventional burgeoise woman, the kind that men committed adultery or murder for, in Betty she is a lost soul, too, a woman who dedicated herself entirely to her husband and who has never found out who she is. Betty and Laure share their stories as they keep the hard liquor coming, but what Laure doesn’t realise is that Betty, by recalling and confessing in Laure her descent, she starts to build up the strength to resurface again. And what Laure doesn’t also realise is that she will be the final piece in the puzzle that will enable the undomesticated bourgeoisie young woman to be free.

Yves Lambrecht and Marie Trintignant in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

Throughout the film, we often see Betty dressed in white (Gilles and Papy were the costumers for Marie Trintignant’s character). Sometimes it’s black and white, as if a reaffirmation of high-class elegance and status, but somehow the white always stands out. It’s white when we meet her, a philandering soul on the streets of Paris, it’s white when Guy proposes to her and she warns him about her tue nature and former life, it’s white when we see her with her daughters, warned not to give in and tend to them (that’s nanny’s business), and it’s white again when she leaves with Laure’s lover. It’s always white, but somehow different. Because there’s a striking contrast between her constraining two-piece suit, the only clothes we see her in in the present (everything else is in flashback) and the only clothes Laure sees her in, and the feminine, girly, flowing white dress she puts on when she leaves the hotel with Mario. She doesn’t wear that dress because it is a triumph of love over despair, but because it is a reaffirmation of the survival of her animal instinct. She hasn’t changed, she has just found a way to be what she wants to be.

Laure is wearing black when she sees Betty and Mario leave together from behind the curtains of her glamorous hotel room. “I love black because it affirms, designs, and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke,” said Yves Saint Laurent. Dressed in black and just through body language – the stone look in her eyes from behind the curtains, discretely pulling the curtain – Laure pens the closure even before the film ends.

Betty, 1992. Directed by Claude Chabrol. CED Productions, Canal+

“In many of Simenon’s novels, the central mystery, and the one that is never completely resolved, is the human spirit,” Chabrol concluded. “This is consistent with his creation of Betty, the character and the novel: a human being to be explored, yet whose secrets could not be fully known or understood.”

Immediately after Betty and Mario leave, Laure checks out of her hotel. We soon thereafter find out that she has suddenly died at her home in Lyon at the age of 49. The end credits roll on the background of a Betty wearing black, taking dead fish out of the aquarium in Mario’s bar. And now we remember the first moment Laure and Betty met in the bar, Laure pulling a chair to sit at Betty’s table, with her back at the aquarium, lending her a helping hand. Every time they were in the bar, there was a view of the aquarium. And we also remember the moment Betty recounted to Laure about Thérèse, a girl from her childhood that Betty looked up to. Thérèse was a little older and sexually initiated and Betty wanted to grow up faster and be just like her. “She was always in black, she only wore a black dress,” Betty had told Laure. We hear Chabrol’s own words narrate: “Laure had died because Betty had to survive. It was one or the other… And Betty had won.” Jonasz’s Je voulais te dire que je t’attends starts to play again as we are still trying to unfold the secrets of the human spirit.

Marie Trintignant and Jean-François Garreaud in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

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31 January 2023

Read Instead… in Print

“It takes a magnificent filmmaker to thoroughly corrupt an audience.”

Read instead…in print #19

Quentin Tarantino didn’t go to film school. But he went to the movies. He has been going to the movies from a very early age – “Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie’s not going to hurt you,” his mother said when Quentin asked her how came that she took him with her to see movies other parent weren’t allowing their children see. And now he has finally written a book about some of the films he grew up with. Movies from the 70s, the greatest film decade the American cinema has ever had. But these are not all movies you usually find on look-alike listings, but movies Tarantino was drawn to and appreciates from various reasons; they are his personal choices. Watching movies is a deeply personal experience. In this fake, politically correct, meritricious medium that cinema and society are struggling in at the moment, Tarantino has the guts (just like he does with his movies) to inspire to think by ourselves and watch every movie with an open mind and with our own eyes, to let ourselves be surprised, to look a little closer.

In Cinema Speculation, he observes, reflects, wonders, speculates. It is asking the questions, rather than answering them. Tarantino loves to talk about movies, characters, specifics, different scenes the way only a true film passionate does. Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker in complete control of his art, yet when he writes about his favourite films, he does it without the pretentiousness of the deep knowledge he masters. He gets the reader interested in the film somehow, without following a certain line. He carries you away, he expands your vision, he makes it fun and exciting. It’s a breath of fresh air, … vital, I might even add.

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