VINCENÇ ALTAIÓ IN STORY OF MY DEATH

Hanging out, then dying

In speaking of an earlier film about (ostensibly) the journey of the Magi, Birdsong (Three Kings), which by some odd chance I happen to have watched at New York's showplace of the cinematically arcane, Anthology Film Archives, former Village Voice critic J. Hoberman commented that Catalan oddball filmmaker Albert Serra had chosen to depict Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (in his previous film) as "little more than the knight and his squire hanging out." Well, that is a key to Serra's new one, awarded a grand prize at Locarno: Story of My Death treats Cassanova the same way, basically just mostly hanging out with his two servants, the main one of whom is a round type who himself could play Sancho.

There are films about history in which actors dress up in the clothes of another century and hang out, and this can sometimes perhaps, in a sort of a way, more effectively make us feel we're experiencing another time than a busy, conventionally plotted historical film. This I think is partly what happens in Rossellini's wonderful The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966). Being Louis XIV isn't so much evoked there by Rossellini through his exercise of power as by the way he is served food. He isn't exactly just hanging out. Rossellini does include much specific historical information. However Serra does have a point: just showing Cassanova browsing through some books with his servant or taking a crap may evoke for us -- since he looks and dresses like Cassanova, but is otherwise being so ordinary and normal -- what it was to be Cassanova, better than conventional historical films.

But hanging out can lead to longeurs, and in the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma Jean-Philippe Tessé is by no means expressing a minority opinion when he describes Story of My Death as "two and a half hours of deadly (we insist, deadly) boredom." Hollywood Reporter calls it "dead on arrival." A friend of mine who saw it in the London Film Festival told me watching it made him begin to feel his was experiencing his own death.

In me it induced a trance-like state. My blood pressure seemed to go down. I almost ceased to breathe. Perhaps I was nearly dead myself. At the end of Cassanova's travels, more spoken of than shown, he arrives in the film in the Carpathian mountains, and apparently he runs into Dracula. Note: the name "Cassanova" is mentioned only once toward the end, and that of "Dracula" is mentioned only in the closing credits. When watching the film I thought of him only as "Who is that old man with the pointed head and the beard?"

In the event nice visuals can't be enough, but it should also be noted that Serra has some lovely scenes outdoors in the evening in this film that evoke 17th-century painting, and like everything else here, that go on for quite some time. Why does Cassanova laugh and laugh and laugh while he is relieving himself and at several other times? Perhaps best simply to quote here Neil Young's comment in Hollywood Reporter that in the film we find "the goatish debauchee's jaded decadence offset by a wacky, almost childish sense of humor." Les Inrockuptibles notes (with approval) "There are long scenes of animal sacrifice by firelight, still lives evoking Flemish painting, a play of shadows and this profound black" that constitutes the durable charm and magic, the writer says, of Albert Serra's cinema.

My previous experience of Serra's visual beauties had been distinctly mixed too. His Birdsong consisted largely of distant shots in black and white of small figures moving across a horizon. When seen up close they resembled the Three Stooges. In a his detailed, respectful review J. Hoberman called the black and white "almost gorgeous" (but is it or isn't it? plainly not quite). One must call Story of My Death "almost gorgeous" -- in places. Some use of candlelight and firelight is beautiful, but some night images are just murky. The control Kubrick achieved in Barry Lyndon is missing.

And apart from the salutary effect of just "hanging out" with a famous historical figure, and the occasional visual beauties on view, let's note the flaws Vincent Ostria of L'Humanité (who didn't finish watching) lists: "Lack of historical-geographical relevance. Series of over-composed tableaux without visible continuity; no dramatic progressions. Monopolizing of dialogue by Cannanova. Other characters nonexistent." (All of them are played by non-actors, by the way. Vicenç Altaió, playing Cassanova, who delivers his lines in an easy-going ramble matched by others in the cast, is a poet and cultural curator.)

Serra has a right to do what he does, and there are those who love it. But there are other ways to lower your blood pressure. Aerobics, swimming, yoga, running, tennis, sex. Transcendental meditation.

Story of My Death/Història de la meva mort , 148 mins., the title inspired by Cassanova's memoir Histoire de ma vie, debuted at Locarno where it received the grand prize, and showed at a dozen other festivals including London and Toronto. It opened in cinemas in France 23 October 2013; French critical response was very mixed (Allociné press rating 3.0 with only 11 reviews). Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint series New Directors/New Films which is the film's U.S. premiere, Wed. 26 Mar. 2014 9pm at MoMA and Sat. 29 Mar. 5:30pm at Lincoln Center. Limited US release 21 Nov. 2014.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.