Olivier Assayas
September 18–21, 2003
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Olivier
Assayas brought the liminal crises of adolescence and young adulthood
vividly to life in such
films as Paris Awakens (1991) and Cold Water (1994). Since then,
the French writer-director has grown ever more virtuosic in his stylistic
and thematic experimentation, evidenced by Irma Vep (1996), his love
poem to genre moviemaking; Les Destinées (2000), an epic period
drama about the deaths of a marriage and a Limoges porcelain factory;
and Demonlover (2002), recently released in commercial theaters by
Palm Pictures, about industrial espionage and vampiric possession.
A former editor of
the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Assayas
is one of contemporary cinema’s most impassioned and discerning
critics, bringing fresh perspectives to the masters who have profoundly
influenced him. In his own films he combines the ethical humanism
of Jean Renoir with the romantic sentiment of Frank Borzage; the
formal rigors of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky with the kinetic
electricity of Kenneth Anger; and the interiority of Ingmar Bergman
and Hou Hsiao-hsien with the improvisatory daring of Andy Warhol
and John Cassavetes. Assayas introduces this nine-film exhibition
with a screening of Les Destinées on September 18.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator,
Department of Film and Media. Special thanks to Ryan Werner,
Head of Theatrical Distribution, Palm
Pictures.
.
2000. France. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. With Emmanuelle
Béart, Charles Berling, Isabelle Huppert. This deceptively
classical, supremely elegant adaptation of Jacques Chardonne’s
semi-autobiographical epic novel, set against a turbulent backdrop
of turn-of-the-century French bourgeois complacency devolving into
pre-World-War-II anxiety, traces a Protestant minister’s dying
marriage, his tentative seduction of a young woman, and his noble
attempts to save his family’s troubled Limoges porcelain factory.
Courtesy Wellspring, New York. In French with English subtitles.
180 min.
. 1989. France.
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. With Michel Feller, Clotilde
de Bayser, Nathalie Richard, Gérard Blain. Amour fou among
a quartet of emotionally precarious young professionals: An architect
abandons his girlfriend as she’s about to give birth, pursuing
instead a stage designer obsessed with an actor who is otherwise
involved. Unlike other classic melodramas of impossible love and
violent betrayal, what lies startlingly at the center of this melancholic
ronde is a newborn baby with an absent father. Courtesy Gemini Films,
Paris. In French with English subtitles. 85 min.
. 1993. France.
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. With Judith Godrèche, Sophie Aubry, Bernard
Giraudeau. After the sudden death of her desperately lonely mother,
a young woman ditches her boyfriend and her dead-end job to find
the rich father she never knew. Along the way she meets her half-sister,
with whom she develops a deeply conflicted and yet strangely loving
relationship. Courtesy Pathé, Paris. In French with English
subtitles. 117 min.
. 1997.
France/Taiwan. Directed by Olivier Assayas. Assayas’s longtime
enthusiasm for the work of Taiwanese filmmaker Hou led him to make
this surprisingly exuberant
profile of a director known for his quietly restrained, elliptical
films. As Hou escorts Assayas around his childhood haunts of Taipei
and its environs, he reveals himself to be charmingly wry, politically
and critically engaged, and fond of karaoke. Courtesy First Run/Icarus
Films, New York. 91 min.
. 1998.
Taiwan/Japan. Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Screenplay by Chu Tien-wen.
With Tony Leung Chiu-wai,
Michiko Hada, Michelle Reis. Based on an 1894 novel by Han Ziyun
(translated in the 1930s from its original dialect into standard
Mandarin by Eileen Chang), Hou’s masterpiece is set in a Shanghai
brothel in the British concession, where clients evade Chinese authorities
to pass languorous evenings with lovely young women, the “flowers” of
the film’s title. Hou delineates sumptuous surfaces, claustral
spaces, and veiled social exchanges through tracking shots choreographed
to resemble an opium dream—a stylistic trait for which Olivier
Assayas shares an affinity. Courtesy Wellspring. In Mandarin with
English subtitles. 130 min.
.
1998. France. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. With Mathieu
Almaric, Virginie Ledoyen, Jeanne Balibar. A novelist’s impending
death provokes his close circle of friends to reassess their own
lives. Assayas affirms the exquisite messiness of human relationships
in this Proustian/Tarkovskian study of time’s fluidity, the
interplay between fantasy and memory, and the essential unknowability
of others. Courtesy Zeitgeist Films, New York. In French with English
subtitles. 112 min.
. 1991. France. Written
and directed by Olivier Assayas. With Judith Godrèche, Jean-Pierre
Léaud, Thomas Langmann. Awash in the brooding romanticism
of Nicholas Ray and Frank Borzage, Assayas’s film follows nineteen-year-old
Adrien as he flees the police to find an uncertain sanctuary in Paris
with his estranged, unstable father Clément (played by New
Wave icon Léaud). Adrien’s desire for Clément’s
wild child-bride Louise rekindles the rivalry between father and
son, and leads the tempestuous lovers to a derelict squat and a difficult
fate. Courtesy Pathé. In French with English subtitles. 95
min.
. 1994. France. Written
and directed by Olivier Assayas. With Virginie Ledoyen, László
Szabó. With a soundtrack of generation-defining music that
features Leonard Cohen, Alice Cooper, and Roxy Music, and with career-defining
performances by a feral Ledoyen and an anguished Szabó, Cold
Water is a masterful portrait of adolescence circa 1972. The
director conjures a sense of life teetering on the precipice of
oblivion through spatial compositions that are at once constraining
and expansive, tense camerawork, and a wintry palette of translucent
blues. In French with English subtitles. 92 min.
. 1996. France. Written and directed
by Olivier Assayas. With Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard, Lou
Castel. New Wave ham director Léaud enlists Hong Kong action-movie
star Cheung to salvage his doomed remake of Louis Feuillade’s
silent-era serial Les Vampires. Squeezing into a black latex bondage
suit, Cheung becomes vampish jewel thief Irma Vep and immediately
holds the film crew in thrall. With the antic mayhem of a surrealist
comedy and the knowing charms of René Clair and François
Truffaut, Assayas celebrates a lost era of moviemaking while also
flouting its genre conventions. Courtesy Zeitgeist Films. In French
with English subtitles. 97 min.
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