Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


Forum locked This topic is locked, you cannot edit posts or make further replies.  [ 1 post ] 
Author Message
PostPosted: Thu Feb 25, 2010 12:33 pm 
Offline
Site Admin

Joined: Sat Mar 08, 2003 1:50 pm
Posts: 4859
Location: California/NYC
Image
FRANÇOIS CLUZET AND EMMANUELLE DEVOS IN IN THE BEGINNING

A petty swindle becomes an economic bonanza and a little news item turns into a great film

In the Beginning/À l'origine is the story of a small time crook who falls into a big con and thereby becomes both a hero to the locals and a mensch in his own eyes. The con and the project are doomed, but both are sweet while they last.

This suspenseful and curiously moving film includes a virtuoso lead performance by François Cluzet, was in competition at Cannes, and received eleven nominations at the French César awards. Director Xavier Giannoli (of The Singer) has again made a picture that's a sensitive study both of in individual and of a region. He also succeeds, like Lucas Belvaux in Rapt, in turning a news story that might seem on the face of it rather trivial into a psychological and philosophical thriller. It makes you think, it keeps you on the edge of your seat, and it shows once again that the French still really know how to make movies.

Paul (Cluzet), who uses the fake name Philippe Miller, is a petty con man who travels all around France Xing off construction projects on his highway map of the country. Taking down names and phone numbers from roadside signs and making deft use of product catalogs, he steals and resells parts and equipment from suppliers by pretending to be a project manager.

Miller hits pay dirt, and ultimately gets in much deeper than he plans, when he comes upon a highway project abandoned two years earlier due to its invading the habitat of a protected beetle. Juggling company logo initials he pretends to be the representative of an invented subcontractor connected to the huge conglomerate originally involved in the shut-down highway segment. He meets the locals and hears about their needs. Sniffing around and making contacts, he gets payoffs from local agency heads and suppliers, assembling a small fortune in cash which he "launders' by ironing it flat to make it look new and erase fingerprints. These folks all stand to gain by the project's renewal, which they think he can make happen. In fact everybody in the region deeply wants it to happen; they've been going through hard times for a good while, and the cancellation of the highway was devastating to the whole region.

Miller meets the eager, energetic Monika (Stéphanie Sokolinski, the singer known as Soko), who works at his motel, and her fresh-faced, sensitive boyfriend Nicolas (Vincent Rottiers). Before long he also meets the local mayor, Stéphane (Emmanuelle Devos, as always bringing something extra and very special to her role). By now rumors have created a mounting energy and hope. Everybody wants to get hired in some aspect of the project. Nicolas has been a bad boy, once dealing drugs and now still delivering them, but he wants to better himself. He becomes Miller's driver and confidant. Having lived a bit on the dark side himself, he's the first to pick up that Miller's staging a con. In the background is the evil Abel (Gérard Depardieu. star of Giannoli's 2006 The Singer, grubby and despicable here), who's bought stolen tools from Miller and knows all about him.

The renewed highway project begins to happen just because Miller hints that it might, or just doesn't say it won't. Everybody wants it so much. Miller gets the suppliers he's conned out of money to start supplying and sets up an office, moves equipment onto the old project. A project boss steps forth, Louis (Brice Fournier). Monika is trained as an accountant and takes on the accounts. There are lots of IOU's, lots of faked stationary. Eventually Miller gets a local bank to issue him checks and advance funds for payments to suppliers that demand immediate payment. The bank wants a piece of the action too. But they will require authentication that Miller can never provide.

Cluzet is energetic but repressed. At first his Miller seems to be imploding. When asked embarrassing questions, he has a dozen ways of deflecting them. If all else fails he just says he has another appointment and runs off. The situation is too tempting for Miller to resist. He knows he's getting in way over his head. But isn't it the nature of the con man to seek bigger and bigger deceptions? Actually nobody loses much here. The inevitable happens as Miller and the mayor are drawn to each other. Both are lonely, and they begin an affair. The highway construction begins. There are celebrations, articles, champagne, speeches, and children do dozens of little paintings celebrating "the Boss," "Mr. Philippe."

The whole thing that terrified Miller begins to delight him. For once he is somebody. "I have wasted a lot of time" is one of his saddest lines to Stéphane, in bed. Of course ultimately Miller is going to go to jail, but he starts desperately trying to get the segment of highway completed before the time limit on payments ends and many bills become due. He has been paying out all the many thousands he accumulated at the outset in salaries to the workers. The money doesn't matter to him any more. He becomes a worker himself, pushing a broom to spread the asphalt in the rain. It's winter and the project is becoming more and more difficult to finish.

In the Beginning is a nail-biter all the way through, and in the end you will react as the local community did to the real con man in this story: some of you will take him for a real S.O.B. Others will believe him to be a pretty nice guy. Environment and action create identity. We are what we do. Here, Miller is what he makes happen. Workers don't always care about the utility of their employment. They don't much care about beetles. (What happens to them is barely mentioned. In fact they were transplanted to a forest.)

Cluzet, an extremely busy and popular French actor most recently seen by American audiences in Guillaume Canet's Tell No One (another hit thriller), is a neutral Frank Capra everyman, an individual who can seem shut down, but with a twinkle in the eye, a grump with a jovial chap hiding inside waiting to be let out. The film gradually lets out that chap, and then, when the big corporation comes in and the police descend, the highway project lit up at night like a film set, Miller is a little man who's strangely triumphant in defeat, waving the battered flag of his fake company.

This is another marvelous French film that transcends genre, turning a crime thriller into celebration of work. Judging by this and Giannoli's The Singer/Quand j'étais chanteur, he has great sensitivity to solitary wanderers and paints rich psychological portraits in a complex social environment. He doesn't know so well how to end things. There is a little uncertainty whether we can take À l'origine as a mood piece about economic desperation (as Up in the Air partly is; but this is Down on the Ground ), a process picture, or a crime thriller. But it achieves success in each genre, because of the energetic world the director creates, the rich moral ambiguity he preserves. The secondary characters are of course a bit schematic, a bit obvious, but with such actors, they never seem that way. Like Laurent Cantet's study of a strike and of class conflict within a family, Human Resources, In the Beginning is about the human need to be doing work.

An official entry at Cannes 2009 as mentioned with 11 César nominations, À l'origine opened in Paris November 11, 2009 to very, very good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.1); more than one calls it "a great film." Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance and screened at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2010.

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


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Forum locked This topic is locked, you cannot edit posts or make further replies.  [ 1 post ] 

All times are UTC - 8 hours


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 144 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group