16 September 2021

Le choix des armes: Yves Montand and the Look of the Gentleman Gangster

Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand in “Le choix des armes”, 1981. France 2, Parafrance Films

 
When Serge (Pierre Forget) escapes from prison with Mickey (Gérard Depardieu), an uncontrollable young thug who doesn’t hesitate to kill two cops on their way out, they take refuge with an old friend of Serge’s, Noël Durieux (Yves Montand). A former gangster, he has retired and now leads a bourgeois life breeding horses on a farm, along with his wife, Nicole (Catherine Deneuve), with whom he shares a deep love and bond – in so few words, in just a few frames and telling looks, the director subtly and artfully builds this connection. Alain Corneau is called a pillar of the French policier film (according to Jean Ollé-Laprune, in Le cinéma policier français), a great cinephile, as curious as a scholar, and while Série noire may be his most appreciated film, I find that there is something special, a distinctive cinematic language, about Le choix des armes.

Partly because of the incredible cast (I have written about Montand and Deneuve in Le sauvage, but this is their most beautiful film and pairing), partly because of the sublime depiction of the generational and class cross, both social (the harmonious and peaceful country burgeouise life and the Parisian suburb slums in a sinister dilapidation) and personal (Montand is part of a gentlemen’s world of mobsters and criminals, living and dying by a certain code of honour, never betraying their own, and dressing the part, echoing Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinematic universe and characters, while Depardieu is a petty killer, a mad dog with no honour, no law, not even his own, to abide by, the crime product of a rotten society), the film is fashioned as a sublime study of human behaviour in a modern social environment, with Phillipe Sarde’s superb musical score and lyrical double bass further amplifying the tragic conflict between these two different worlds.

As quoted in the book Yves Montand: La force du destin, Alain Corneau revealed that
“Le choix des armes was born from my rediscovery of French detective cinema. I wanted to make a bridge between the thriller of the 1950s and that of the 1980s, to create a confrontation between two generations, among cops and thugs, but also by showing new towns and the countryside.”
 

Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand in “Le choix des armes”, 1981. France 2, Parafrance Films

 
After Mickey forces his way into Durieux’s life, the latter eventually decides to take things into his own hands, finding himself thrown back into a world he had managed to stay out of until then. He goes after him. And he dresses up for it. There is no abrupt transformation in looks, as it happened in Melville’s Le cercle rouge, when Montand’s character, Jansen, goes from looking “filthy, unshaven, with a three-day beard, like Faulkner in one of his alcoholic bouts,” as described in the script, having harrowing hallucinations under the influence of alcohol, sweating, disheveled, wearing a dirty shirt and a slouchy coat, to dressing up to the nines – in order to hide reality and regain self-respect. The heist job and the elegant clothes are not just his ticket out of the rout, but as a typical Melville character, he has to conform to mood and ambience rather than narrative and regards “even the shortest distance between two points as an opportunity for display”, as Charles Drazin writes in The Faber Book of French Cinema.

In Choice of Arms, Montand’s costumes don’t signal the same kind of metamorphous transformation. We see him fully and happily immersed in his work and life in the countryside, a gentleman-farmer dressed in plaids, rubber boots and tweed hats, perfectly matching his wife Nicole’s palette of browns, camel coats, oversized knitted sweaters and checkered skirts. A medley of timelessness and aristocratic country elegance (maybe English-inspired, too, given the Durieuxs’ interest in the farm they want to purchase in Cork) naturally carried out by Deneuve and Montand’s great screen presence, their matching clothes aren’t just a thing of practicality, they are a reflection of their special relationship – there’s a perfect union between them, she never judges, never lets him go. And they are the personification of the life they are living. No matter his past, this kind of living suits them both.

But going after Mickey, getting the job done, requires a different kind of clothes. The look is part of a certain world, a gentleman-crook’s world, and this couldn’t be more evident than in the scene when Durieux meets with his old gang in the garage, him wearing a black suit, black knitted tie, white shirt and tweed coat, his former partner wearing a black coat, fedora and white scarf. The ubiquitous impeccably dressed criminals but who somehow lack the vanity of Melville’s characters (who are frequently shown checking their reflections and adjusting their clothes). Dressing this certain way is not a vain ritual, it’s not just a declaration of allegiance to the Hollywood gangster, nor an affirmation to the iconography of the cinematic figure of the gangster dandy. I believe Alain Corneau succeeded to go beyond that image and he made the character of Noël Durieux entirely his. There is one element there that made me wonder. Montand keeps his tweed cap. He doesn’t swap it for the dressy felt hat that appears on his partner. In his portrayal of Durieux, Corneau does not make excessive use of the iconography of the genre, as Melville did. Instead, he goes by the unwritten rule of his criminals’ “good old methods”, the expression commissioner Bonnardot (Michel Galabru), who has known Durieux from the old days, uses when he explains his methods (resembling them to those of those whom he chases) to the zealous young policeman Sarlat (Gérard Lanvin), eager to try out his new methods. Dressing well is a matter of respect, not a way of showing off, Corneau’s character seems to say.
 

Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand in “Le choix des armes”, 1981. France 2, Parafrance Films

 
If I could choose a film for this fall, this would be it: the story, the setting, the mood, the cars, the horses, the weather, the costumes and Catherine Deneuve as the image of the most beautiful fall fashion campaign, the music. And the sound of the cars driving away on the farm’s gravel alleys, the sad sound of summer, even a part of life, closing in.
 

Yves Montand in “Le choix des armes”, 1981. France 2, Parafrance Films

 

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Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume | | Comments Off on Le choix des armes: Yves Montand and the Look of the Gentleman Gangster
11 September 2021

Read Instead…in Print


 
A photo of a good book about cinema. 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.

Read Instead…in Print 01: Peter Weir: Interviews, edited by John C. Tibbetts. A director’s own words about his/her work are much more revealing than a critic’s, especially didactic critics who believe a film must conform to a traditional genre or another and to their own view on life, society and people. And Peter Weir is the kind of filmmaker who will not conform, as his approach is always about “the precious desperation of the art, the madness, the willingness to experiment”.
 
 

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5 September 2021

September Newsletter: On Memories of A Good Year and the Film of the Fall


 

Photos: Classiq Journal

 
 
I first watched A Good Year when it first came out, 15 years ago. Then I forgot everything about it. And then one day this summer I found the dvd in our family country house and watched it again. And watching it became a deeply personal experience for me. First, because Ridley Scott took me back to my childhood. Not to the actual place of my childhood, but to something much deeper than that. To the atmosphere and everything I felt spending my summers in the countryside. To the total freedom and tranquility. To the sound of nature and of summer mornings. To the breeze felt through the always open windows. To the smell of vineyards and wooden wine barrels. To sipping our home-made wine with adults’ approval. To leisurely enjoying each and every one of those different shades of light that a long summer day offers you. To a tennis court that was far from perfect but that was perfect for us children. And to this: “It was the safest place in the world.” How could I not perceive all of that the first time I watched the film? (And I can’t help wondering why the film poster depicts the protagonists’ embrace when the film is memorable for so many other things.) Maybe because you live films differently at different stages of your life. Maybe because for the first time since childhood I am experiencing that kind of freedom again. Maybe because I finally get it, as Max does, that living a different kind of life can also be a choice, not a necessity – “Those summers saved my life.”

 
 

Image to the right: English poster for “Le choix des armes”, 1981, directed by Alain Corneau

 
 
Viewing

Le choix des armes (Choice of Arms), 1981

If I could choose a film for this fall, this would be it: the story, the setting, the cars, the horses, the weather, the costumes, the music. And the sound of the cars driving away on the farm’s gravel alleys, the sad sound of summer, even a part of life, closing in – somehow, for me, the arrival of autumn has always resembled the beginning of a new year much more than the first of January.

Serge (Pierre Forget) escapes from prison with Mickey (Gérard Depardieu), an irritable young thug who doesn’t hesitate to kill two cops in their escape. After escaping an ambush, the two men take refuge with an old friend of Serge’s, Noël Durieux (Yves Montand). A former gangster, he has retired and now leads a bourgeois life breeding horses on a farm, along with his wife, Nicole (Catherine Deneuve), with whom he shares a deep love and bond – in so few words, in just a few frames and telling looks, the director subtly and artfully builds this connection. Alain Corneau is called a pillar of the French policier film (according to Jean Ollé-Laprune, in Le cinéma policier français), a great cinephile, as curious as a scholar, and while Série noire may be his most appreciated film, I find that there is something special, a distinctive cinematic language, about Le choix des armes. Because of the incredible cast (I have written about Montand and Deneuve in Le sauvage, but this is their most beautiful film and pairing), because of the sublime depiction of the generational and class cross, both social (the harmonious and peaceful country burgeouise life and the Parisian suburb slums in a sinister dilapidation) and personal (Montand is part of a gentlemen’s world of mobsters and thugs, living and dying by a certain code of honour, never betraying their own, and dressing the part, echoing Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinematic universe and characters, while Depardieu is a petty killer, a mad dog with no honour, no law, not even his own, to abide by, the crime product of a rotten society), making the film a sublime study of behaviour in a modern social environment. And because it has one of the best musical scores, Phillipe Sarde’s, whose lyrical double bass amplifies the tragic conflict between these two different worlds.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 1974

I love how different this film is from Martin Scorsese’s other films. The story of a woman, Alice (Ellen Burstyn), who takes the road and her life in her own hands. This is one of those great American road movies of the 1970s, bringing together elements such as the great outdoors, rock ‘n’ roll and characters who thrive in a new found freedom, and I am surprised why it is not considered as such. Everything happens so naturally and realistically on screen, in the story and between the actors, and Scorsese’s strong feel for characters is best felt both in Alice and in the depiction of the two contrasting male individualities, played by Harvey Keitel and Kris Kristoffersen.

The Report, 1977

This was Abbas Kiarostami’s first film. His films emerged from the simplest of things, from the smallest of moments. He didn’t make up extraordinary stories and extraordinary worlds in his movies, but he looked for ordinary lives in exceptional moments, which also happens in The Report, where a tax collector is accused of taking bribe and he also has to deal with problems at home. In the simplicity of the people and in the simplicity of the dialogue, there is a deep understanding of life that would permeate all Kiarostami’s films.

The Truffle Hunters, 2021

Deep in the forests of Piedmont, Italy, a handful of men, seventy or eighty years old, hunt for the rare and expensive white Alba truffle. Desired by the wealthiest patrons in the world, the truffle remains a pungent but rarified mystery. To date, it has resisted all of modern science’s efforts at cultivation. And to find it, the only souls on Earth who know how to dig it up are a tiny circle of canines and their silver-haired human companions – the Italian elders with walking sticks and devilish senses of humor, who only scour for the truffle at night so as not to leave any clues for others. They refuse to give in to the fortune hunters who try to convince them to tell them their secrets. Being out at night in search of truffles just for the joy of it, or the profound affection they have for their dogs, has the greatest worth to them. These people have learned to find something much more important than truffles, they have found the true worth of life.

The Year of Living Dangerously, 1982

As I have written recently in the journal, it’s the sense of place that singles this film out for me. Peter Weir makes you inhabit a different world, not only through settings, but through characters, too, characters built together with the actors, because he wanted them different than those in the novel the film is inspired from.
 
 

 
 
Reading

Craig Mod’s Kissa by Kissa, at its third edition, is coming out at the end of the month. Limited to 1,000 copies, hand-bound, book by book, by Mochizuki Bindery in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, with a cover illustration drawn by Luis Mendo and silkscreened into the cloth, it is a book “about walking 1,000+km of the countryside of Japan along the ancient Nakasendō highway, the culture of toast (toast!), and mid-twentieth century Japanese cafés called kissaten.” “You can think of it like a film. At a leisurely pace, Kissa by Kissa takes about ninety minutes to read. It’s designed to reward multiple readings and be a book you return to over time.”

I am a life-long admirer of French crime films and of French cinema in general, but recently I have found a new passion for French books about film. Le cinéma policier français is one such book. 100 films, 100 filmmakers. Each film is briefly narrated, analyzed and illustrated, and accompanied by shooting anecdotes or excerpts from dialogues, just enough to capture your interest and make you want to watch the film, not just read about it. What I appreciate the most is that between the classics and well established movies, you discover tempting rarities and great films that had somehow escaped me, as it happened with Alain Corneau’s Le choix des armes.

I am well aware that Hollywood star stories reveal as much as they hide. I must also add that I don’t like tell-all memoirs. I take biographies and autobiographies as a feature film loosely based on biographical facts, which affords the reader the freedom to enjoy the story and its protagonist without constantly questioning the accuracy of the facts. That being said, I do pick the memoirs I read, and after Christopher Willoughby fondly spoke in our conversation about how impressed his father, photographer Bob Willoughby, was with the friendship between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, the book Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story of Their Intimate Friendship, recently released, has caught my attention. Precisely because it could tell the story of a friendship.

The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer, published in the US in August and coming out next year in Europe, might be the best book on Roger and I am looking forward to it.
 
 
Listening

The Big Picture magazine has its own podcast! A film is a sum of many moving parts, that move us in just as many ways. Founder Gabriel Solomons and editor Thomas Puhr, with whom I have had the pleasure to be collaborating for years on the magazine, invite us on “an episodic journey to deconstruct the inner workings of movies; the props, architecture, fashion, design – seeing how these unique filmic elements combine to cast their magical spell over us. A podcast for all of us who have fallen in love with film, and are curious to know why.” Gabriel and Tom are talking about Poltergeist on the first episode.
 
 
Exploring

The quarterly publication Sirene Journal, an Italian magazine that is available both in Italian and English. “The ocean outside. The ocean inside.” A magazine made and written by and for those truly passionate, in love with the sea and completely dedicated to a way of existing, that only matters to them and where they find the meaning of life. “Sirene is water, Sirene is paper”. The paper is made from algae, to make use of excess algae blooms from lagoons at risk. For every half kilo of fresh algae, a kilo of wood is saved.
 
 

 
 
The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s all three newsletters: Roden, Ridgeline, and Huh. Wes Del Val’s book-ish interviews. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Here’s the Thing, with Alec Baldwin. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Sophy Robert’s The Art of Travel. Monocle and Sirene magazines, in print.
 
 

“The story of Soichi Sakamoto and his swimmers tastes like
an American dream, or a Japanese fable and carries the scent
of water as only happens in Hawaii. Enclosed in the pages of a
small children’s book, but worth reading by anybody for whom
swimming equals dreaming.”
Alberto Coretti, Sakamoto’s Three-Year Swim Club, Sirene no. 12

 
 

 

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Film, Newsletter | | Comments Off on September Newsletter: On Memories of A Good Year and the Film of the Fall
27 August 2021

This Summer We’re Channelling: Sigourney Weaver in The Year of Living Dangerously

Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver in The Year of Living Dangerously, 1982. Wayang Productions/MGM

 
There are few things I appreciate about a film more than its sense of place. That’s what Peter Weir achieved in The Year of Living Dangerously. The mood and the recreation of the Indonesian locale are so extraordinary (he used Manila and the Philippines as a stand-in for Djakarta and Indonesia) that they give you the feeling of living in that place in those times. A humid tropical world, bathed in sweat and a light that “drops off into darkness” (as cinematographer Russell Boyd described it in an interview with John C. Tibet’s from 2012), poverty and the hopelessness of its people. About the play of light, something Peter Weir was very specific about, Boyd further commented that “there was always a bit of dust in the air, so there was always a slight mustiness to the light, as well.”

It’s the mid 1960s, under the Sukarno regime, a time of simmering tension and political upheaval and of treacherous relations between the Indonesian people and the expat community. Mel Gibson is Guy Hamilton, a young, “ambitious but naïve” foreign correspondent, a radio reporter from Australia, who has just arrived in Djakarta, in search of scoops about Sukarno’s restless Indonesia and collapsing regime. Billy Kwant (astonishingly played by a woman, Linda Hunt, something I wasn’t even aware of until I saw the credits at the end) is an exotic little man and a photographer who teaches Hamilton the ropes of the city, and maybe becoming something more than that in the process – “Could you be the unmet friend?,” Billy asks. About casting a woman in the role of a man, the director said in an interview included in the book Peter Weir Interviews, edited by John C. Tibbetts: “I couldn’t find the right actor for the male part! I had to find the actor or risk delaying, even cancelling the film… It was like Cinderella’s slipper, every kind of short actor tried to make it work without success. What made it work? Was it the female sensibility inside the body of a man? Was it the deception itself, the mystery of it?” Billy is in fact the key character and the key element in the story that contributes to establishing that mood and sense of place more than any shot of an actual place. He is often shown at his typewriter, his voiceover echoing film noir narration but functioning as an element for a story that is clearly of another place and time. “I’m master in the darkroom, stirring my prints in the magic developing bath. I shuffle like cards the lives that I deal with. Their faces stare out at me. People who will become other people. People who will become old, betray their dreams, become ghosts.” These manipulative impulses are also metaphorically employed throughout the film through the repeated appearance of the Indonesian wayang kulit puppets, which Kwant himself uses at one point for a shadow-play for Hamilton.

This story can not be pinned down to a specific genre, nor it should, because it’s the characters that are center stage, telling their own stories, characters – especially Billy (despite Guy’s psychological shift down the plot), very much part of the street life and culture of the city and immersed in the problems of the country – shaped by events and surroundings. And even if it involves a romance (Hamilton falls in love with Jill Bryant, a British Embassy attaché played by Sigourney Weaver), it doesn’t turn into a melodrama. This is a land where hazard governs even the lives of those in love.
 

Sigourney Weaver in The Year of Living Dangerously, 1982. Wayang Productions/MGM

 
“This is her spirit, like a wavering flame, which only needs air to burn high,” is how Billy Kwant describes Jill, of whom he keeps a file in his bungalow, just as he does of Hamilton, one of those cards he shuffles, one of the lives he deals with. But they are friends, too, and he is also the one who throws Hamilton and Jill in together. For the character of Jill, Peter Weir recounted in an interview with Susan Mathews from 1985 that: “I made some quite major changes from the character in the novel” (the film was adapted from a novel by Christopher Koch) – “I didn’t see the Jill of the novel, I didn’t like her. And so I worked with Sigourney Weaver on constructing a woman that we found interesting – a combination of strength and femininity.” She is. Unconventional and independent (a character that Sigourney carries out so naturally and beautifully), and the right reason for Guy Hamilton to give up the opportunity of the biggest story of his career when he joins her on the plane, because that’s the only way he can reclaim his humanity – there is a special smile Mel Gibson has when he goes through the gate to the plane, and when I watched the film and that moment came, I thought that it could not have been any other way, that it captured the essence of their story (you know how one of those moments occur in a film, when you think, yes, that’s it, that’s the film?) and of him “rejoining himself”. Then I read the interview with the director and found out that that smile was what he was looking for in the scene: “One of my favourite moments in the film is the mid-shot of Mel as he crosses the tarmac. We did several takes and I think the only thing I asked him to do was to smile. […] And he did that thing of tipping his head back…and to me the film was over.”

It’s in Billy’s bungalow where we see Jill wear a two-piece outfit (it resembles a dress at first look) in a deep shade of blue (the overall colour palette in that scene playing out so beautifully on the backdrop of black and white photography and paper clippings hung on the wall, file cabinets and desk covered in a realistically atmospheric mess) that appropriately reflects the intensity of her feelings for Hamilton. I am surprised Billy Kwant doesn’t use ink instead of his typewriter for writing down his reports about the lives and loves of those he deals with. It would have the same colour as Jill’s costume.
 
 

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Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume, This summer we’re channelling | | Comments Off on This Summer We’re Channelling: Sigourney Weaver in The Year of Living Dangerously
17 August 2021

This Summer We’re Channelling: Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975. British Empire Films Australia

 

The story begins on the music of Gheorghe Zamfir. I could recognise his pan flute anywhere. And I couldn’t imagine Picnic at Hanging Rock without his music. And it truly is incredible how the music works so well, given that it was not composed specifically for the film, and how appropriating this music to the film, to a completely different context, connotes something so poetical and mysterious – it’s the uniqueness of Gheorghe Zamfir’s music that does that. Accompanying the voice-over opening, “What we see or what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream”, it is the transfixing music, as if humming from another dimension, that sets the tone for and will contribute tremendously to the magical and otherworldly experience of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. It is the story of a fictional mystery that took place in central Victoria at the turn of the twentieth century. During a school outing in the Australian countryside at Hanging Rock, three schoolgirls (including the pivotal character Miranda) and a chaperone from an all-female college go missing leaving behind no clues. Just one of the girls, Irma, is found, but she does not remember anything of what has occurred.

Much remains unsaid in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and it is this blurred sensuality and disquieting and provocative feeling of hidden truths that remain unlocked that give the film its tremendous and lasting power. But if we turn our attention to the costumes, created by Judith Dorsman, they reveal much more than the facts and the dialogue. Film costumes are never clothes, and costumes are not synonymous with fashion. They have the purpose of character development within the narrative, employing elements that make references to the psychology and motivations of the characters. It’s a shame that today the production companies and the marketing teams put such an importance on using brand name designers for the costumes, focusing on the relation between costumes and consumer behaviours rather than on costumes as a foundational element of a film.

In Picnic, so much attention is placed on the girls’ appearance when they get ready for the outing. It’s all about the idealisation of femininity. “What we see and what we seem”. Everyone is watching, looking at each other, helping each other dress in innocent complicity and conceal every bit of flesh with long sleeves and gloves (which, under the headmistress Miss Appleyard’s firm instructions, are to come off only after the carriage taking them to the picnic has passed through the nearby town and they have escaped the townspeople’s watchful glares). They are all dressed in pristine white, but not in identical dresses, each one carrying some kind of trait of the character wearing it. But it is the dressing-up itself – the girls read Valentine’s messages aloud (it all happens on Valentine’s Day, which in Australia falls in the harsh summer), they wash their faces with rose water, they lace each other into corsets, signaling both confinement and liberation – that gives way to something much more significant. It’s like a rite of passage into maturity, into womanhood.
 

Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975. British Empire Films Australia

 
There is a dark-edged innocence to these Victorian times broderie anglaise dresses. Clothes become symbols of innocence, repressed sexuality, desire, time for change, everything played out on the verge of the supernatural. Miranda’s belt, for example, stands out even for an untrained viewer’s eye. It has a butterfly-shaped buckle, a symbol of a beautiful and brief life, as Anne-Louise Lambert, who played Miranda, explained in an interview for the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. “Miranda’s favourite flower, the daisy, symbolises purity, joy and innocence,” as described in a presentation of the aforementioned Archive. The recurring daisy motif appears on her machine-made cotton lace trim on her dress’s neck and sleeves. The restrained use of lace, frail, translucent and ethereal like a butterfly wings, and “the dress’s lightness and movement in relation to the actress’s body create an image of transitory beauty.” It was so light and airy, Lambert remembered, “it was like being naked”.

The girls are wearing black stockings and black pointed boots to their white dresses. When the three girls leave the group in their attempt to further explore the Rock, they take off their stockings and boots and wrap them around their waists. There is something freeing and mystical about their look walking like that, wrapped in the afternoon dizzying sunlight. After Irma is found, it is whispered that she was no longer wearing her corset. Then, when she comes to say goodbye to the other girls, because in the aftermath of what has happened she will not return to the college the following year, she is dressed in vibrant scarlet, in stark contrast to the virginal white blouses that the others are still wearing.

As she is heading for the Hanging Rock, Miranda looks back to wave goodbye to the French teacher, and the latter remarks: “Now I know that Miranda is a Botticelli angel,” her eyes hovering over her art history book, thus identifying her with an imaginary, idealised vision of beauty and becoming the film’s essence. “Miranda is not as much a character but a quality, an essence, an idea,” Anne-Louise Lambert referred to her character, “and that quality and essence talk about something otherworldly”. We do not wish Miranda to be explained, just as we do not wish the film, and what happened to the girls, to be explained. The film has endured by not answering our questions, and Miranda remains somewhere out there, this eternal youth to be dreamed about, by not being found. Gheorghe Zamfir’s haunting Miranda’s theme, “Doina: Sus pe Culmea Dealului”, takes us on this journey into the mystic, seducing us into this Neverland only accessible to those who truly believe, touching the depths of our human existence and of the mystery of life. As stated by director Peter Weir, according to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, the music’s pagan qualities tapped into the great unknown of the country at the time the story was set and provided a contrast to other themes in the film, such as European notions and concepts of time, culture, cultivation and civilisation.

 

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Posted by classiq in Film costume, This summer we’re channelling | | Comments Off on This Summer We’re Channelling: Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic at Hanging Rock