"Olivier Assayas"

The mono­graph edited by Kent Jones is out now. You can get it dir­ectly from the pub­lish­er, the Austrian Film Museum, or via Amazon, or at finer book stores every­where, I would hope. 

The book is really beau­ti­ful: the lay­out is ter­rif­ic, the illus­tra­tions fant­ast­ic, well-chosen; it’s truly a won­der­ful pack­age. I’m proud and honored to be a part of it, and par­tic­u­larly chuffed that Kent asked me to write on Olivier’s first fea­ture film, Désordre, an essen­tial movie for any­one whose life has been at least par­tially con­sumed by rock and roll. 

Here is a pas­sage from my essay on the film, which I titled “Black Boxes:”

Artistic geni­us is hard to sim­u­late in cinema, as is actu­al artist­ic pro­cess. I once knew a paint­er who told me that she didn’t much care for fic­tion­al films about visu­al artists and that every movie about a paint­er she’d ever seen, with the excep­tion of Scorsese’s Life Lessons in New York Stories, got the actu­al act of paint­ing com­pletely wrong. As far as music is con­cerned, it’s not for noth­ing that Clint Eastwood largely stuck to Charlie Parker’s own sax­o­phone solos for his fic­tion­al biop­ic of the musi­cian, Bird. It is no fault of Robert De Niro that he doesn’t quite con­vince as even a jour­ney­man sax play­er in Scorsese’s New York, New York, where­as his coun­ter­point Liza Minnelli is exactly right play­ing a sing­er of the pre­cise dimen­sions and tal­ent of…Liza Minnelli. We do not hear enough of Yvan and Henri’s band to come to any musically-based con­clu­sion about them (their sole song is the inven­tion of an actu­al combo called Les Avions). It is pretty clear that Yvan does have a post-punk cha­risma but a style that’s about four or five years out of date by London or New York stand­ards (albeit cutting-edge for the Continent). We learn that the band does have some major-label interest, and Assayas is pretty cas­u­ally accur­ate about how the tendrils of cor­por­ate rock reached down via seedy man­agers and indie record stores to scoop up tal­ent; the view­er nev­er gets into the cor­ridors of real power the high win­dows and the prestige and the money are all tan­tal­iz­ing rumors, like those of the after­life. (Even in Assayas’ 2004 Clean, whose prot­ag­on­ist is the one-time man­ager and now wid­ow of an over­dosed rock­er, the “industry” is seen from some­thing of a remove, in this case an inver­ted Eden from which its prot­ag­on­ist has been expelled.)

But back to the act that, it would seem, throws everything into dis­order: it’s sig­ni­fic­ant that the view­er is nev­er made privy to the actu­al logic behind it. Yeah, it’s clear in a sense; if you’re in a band, you need gear, and steal­ing gear is kind of a rock and roll, and par­tic­u­larly punk and/or post punk tra­di­tion; Sex Pistols gui­tar­ist Steve Jones more than once joc­u­larly bragged about how his own setup fell off a truck after a Faces or Roxy Music show. But these aren’t such street kids, all that needy; Assayas makes a point, not very long after the botched rob­bery, of depict­ing an exchange between the band’s key­board­ist Gabriel (Simon de La Brosse) and his fath­er (Phillip Laudenbach). Gabriel’s tried to steal some cash from dad, much in the style of Patrick in Truffaut’s Les Quatre-cent coups, and here it’s kind of pathet­ic rather than shocking/cute because Gabriel’s a young adult; in any case, Gabriel’s dad finds him out, and barely tak­ing a break in his toi­lette, gives him a little talk­ing to, imper­i­ously offer­ing to write the kid a check as he strips down to enter his bath. 

You see that I do that thing that some American cinephiles give oth­er American cinephiles a hard time about: using the original-language title of a film. Well, fuck it. The book is in fact an inter­na­tion­al pub­lic­a­tion after all so American cinephile anti-“pretention” rules don’t apply. (Sorry, does that sound too Wellsian?)

As a com­pan­ion piece to the mono­graph, the Film Museum is also pub­lish­ing an English trans­la­tion of Assayas’ sui gen­er­is A Post-May Adolescence. Watch this space for word on any upcom­ing read­ings or whatnots.