The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses by Mick LaSalle (review)

Reviews 205 for “efficient” filmmaking), spectators settle into their seats in an elegant Parisian theater waiting for a classical piano concert to begin. Among them, an older couple (Georges and Anne) are seated comfortably together; on their bus ride home after the show, the same comfortable intimacy is evident. When they arrive home, they notice the lock on their apartment door has been broken off (an enigmatic allusion to the film’s first scene?), but they express little concern as they proceed inside and carry on with the evening’s rituals, as if to suggest that at this point in their lives, nothing can shake them up. And then, the very next morning, in the middle of breakfast, Anne’s expression goes blank; she remains completely unresponsive to Georges’s exhortations for some minutes before “coming to” with no recollection of the event. A few scenes later, Georges is telling his daughter (played by Isabelle Huppert) that Anne had a small stroke, which in itself should not have been catastrophic, but a botched surgery left her paralyzed on one side of her body. Delivered home in a wheelchair, the proud Anne makes her husband promise to never send her back to a hospital again. She also insists that Georges not treat her like a handicapée, and both she and Georges force all conversation with concerned family members and visiting friends and neighbors away from the subject of Anne’s health. After a second attack, however, Anne loses her capacity for speech, and now she is incontinent and bedridden. Haneke’s camera painfully tracks Anne’s humiliating regression to a state of infantile dependency as Georges struggles to change her diapers and spoon puréed vegetables into her halfparalyzed mouth.At one point, Georges locks her bedroom door in a pathetic attempt to prevent his daughter from checking in on her mother:“Rien de tout cela ne mérite d’être montré,”he tells her,as he both apologizes for and justifies his behavior.Contrary to Georges, and probably to many of us, what we would prefer to hide about certain aspects of being human is what Haneke continues to deem worth being shown. Amour is hard to watch, but infinitely worth it. Union College (NY) Michelle Chilcoat LaSalle, Mick. The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8047-6854-2. Pp. 248. $24.95. France and America have a long history of using the other’s culture to critically scrutinize some facet of their own. LaSalle’s slender volume falls into this tradition. At issue here is women in cinema. The author, noted critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and regularly involved in international film festivals, is a knowledgeable and experienced observer of both American and French cinema. His dissatisfaction with both Hollywood and independent American film has several causes. First, American movies are dominated by our apparently ingrained cultural tendency to see the world in moral (right versus wrong) terms. Second, our motion pictures have increasingly evolved towards a predominance of “guy things”—male directors, male stars, malecentric stories featuring action and violence. Third, distribution of foreign films here (with their mind-expanding views of life as others live it) is quite random. Rarely does the American market offer more than a handful of the numerous intelligent, insightful films about real-life experience that are being produced in other countries—in France, for instance. LaSalle argues that the compelling stories regularly showcased in the small-sized films so typical of French cinema originate largely from the presence within its industry of a strong cadre of talented, influential women both in front of and behind the camera. This contrasts sharply with the American situation in which there is a paucity of both female directors and talented actresses. LaSalle’s succinct introduction will likely be provocative to anyone who has not considered these issues. In chatty prose and utilizing personal observations from interviews conducted for this book, the critic reviews the careers and exceptional performances of a substantial number of the contemporary French actresses he credits with creating a (cinematic) view of life that appreciates “emotional truth, personal...