Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 6:59 pm 
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SANDRINE VEYSSET: COUNTDOWN/IL SERA UNE FOIS (2007)

An original film and its deceased inspiration

Sandrine Veysset's Countdown/Il sera une fois is like a meandering philosophical short story. It begins on a cold, isolated section of the French coastline. A boy, Pierrot, (Alphonse Emery) is counting down to zero wherever he goes, and when he first appears on screen he's at 12,000-something. A big sad teddy-bear of a man with long gray hair and a long beard (Michael Lonsdale) is following him. It's young PIerrot as an old man. The boy has a young girlfriend named Elise (Lucie Régnier). His mother Nadine (Dominique Reymond) is always ill and listens obsessively to a Rachmaninoff piano concerto. His father Henri (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) is always out at his mysterious club. They live in a big old house at the top of a cliff over the water. A frustrated cripple and his wife are the girl's parents. The cripple is raising a pig for slaughter. These are the elements that Veysset's new film provides us with, but its essence is the boy's transformation. After the old Pierrot confronts the young Pierrot, the boy is revived. He stops counting backward and begins counting forward. He kisses Elise and flirts with her mother. He isn't going to have regrets; he's going to live. Old Lonsdale, now 76, is still a strong presence and Alphonse Emery is a precocious talent. The two look remarkably like one another. Countdown is a little hard to get a grip on, but its vision and its atmosphere are fresh and original.

The making of this highly personal mood piece and meditation on life and aging and death was interrupted by the suicide of Humbert Balsan, who had been producer and inspiration for Veysset's previous films and also the producer of this one. After faltering a while, Veysset was able to finish with the assistance of producer François Cohen-Séat. Countdown is dedicated to Balsan's memory.

Shown at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, March 2007, along with a documentary about Humbert Balsan's life, this is an example of the sort of original, independent film Balsan championed in his remarkable career as a producer of not only French but Middle Eastern and African filmmakers.


ANNE ANDREU: HUMBERT BALSAN: REBEL PRODUCER/HUMBERT BLSAN/PRODUCTEUR REBELLE (2006)

The legacy of Humbert Balsan

Countdown/Il sera une fois was shown in the FSLC Rendez-Vous series together with Anne Andreu’s hour-long documentary about Veysset's producer, Humbert Balsan: Rebel Producer/Humbert Balsan: producteur rebelle. As this documentary shows, Humbert Balsan was an remarkable French figure in the world of independent film who was especially encouraging to Third World and Middle Eastern filmmakers, as well as French ones. In particular he worked with the leading Egyptian director Yousef Chanine and produced Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention/Yadon ilaheyya, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2002 and various other awards. Born into an extremely wealthy industrialist family with a father who had spent three years in the Matthausen concentration camp and written a book about it, Balsan was educated privately with his siblings in privileged surroundings and became an accomplished equestrian. This led to his being cast as Gawain in Robert Bresson's Lancelot of the Lake at the age of 19. Shortly thereafter he was an assistant to Bresson for Le diable, probablement.

It was largely this close encounter early in his life with the charismatic and dedicated Bresson , the documentary narration says, that inspired Balsan to resist family pressures to study in Switzerland and go into business, and instead to devote his life to film. He starred in a picture about WWI, Michel Mitrani's Un balcon en forêt (1979), but proved not to be very much in demand as an actor (though in fact he appears in 27 films), so he turned to other aspects of the industry. He made a documentary about French keyboard luminary Nadia Boulanger, then gradually moved to producing and in particular to encouraging independent films. He produced 66 of them, 17 by Arab directors. (IMDb now lists his as producer of 68.)

Balsan spend nine months in Egypt at one time and professed to be very much at home there. One scene shows him frequenting Feshawi's famous Cairo café. Among various notable figures Michel Piccoli, who starred in a film about Napoleon shot in Cairo, speaks at length about the charismatic and elegant producer, and so does Carole Bouquet., the star, and Brigitte Roüann, the director, of Housewarming/Travaux, on sait quant ca commence..., which was being completed at the time of Balsan's death. Always working on the edge with too little budget, Balsan endured tremendous stress always with outward panache and charm. His family motto was "Jamais battu," never beaten. He "had painful secrets," Piccoli says, but he "always hid his despair." Finally he gave way to these inner pressures and hanged himself. A fascinating and touching portrait of someone who to the world of French cinema was clearly one of the great ones.

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


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