The Crying Game

 

On Sunday night, while the rest of the nation where I live was looking at the first football match involving Les Bleus, I realized that Arté was showing Secret and Lies by Mike Leigh. 
I know this movie by heart: Leigh (my readers are well aware of this) is one of my favourite directors of all time and I consider Secrets and lies an absolute masterpiece.
I immediately wrote something on my Facebook page suggesting my French friends who were not interested in the World Cup to watch the movie, but I didn’t expect I would have watched it myself all over again for the 10th time. And I was even more surprised when, looking at my favourite scene, I started to cry… well, it would be more accurate to write I started sobbing.
Is this happening to you too? I mean: am I the only one who is capable of crying over and over again at a certain scene of a certain movie, no matter how many times I watched it?
Some movies touch a particular part of our soul, I guess, and there is nothing we could do about it. Usually people are ashamed to admit they cry in cinemas, but I am not. I proudly confess to weep very often watching a movie, and I decided to publicly confess Zazie's TOP 5 MOST EMOTIONAL MOVIES:

5 - My life without me by Isabel Coixet (2003)
I really love Isabel Coixet’s cinema and I think My life without me is an underestimated great movie of cinema history. Ann, a 23 years old wife and mother living in Vancouver, finds out to have an inoperable cancer. She decides not to tell her husband, her two young daughters and her mother, and she prefers to prepare them to the life “without her”. Of course, the subject would break anybody’s heart, but Coixet never takes advantage of its tearful potential. The film is simple, candid and full of life, and Sarah Polley is amazing in the role of Ann. It it almost impossible, though, not to weep every now and then. 
I personally did it - non stop - for the last 45 minutes of the movie.

4 – Au revoir les Enfants by Louis Malle (1987)
Based on a real story that happened to Louis Malle when he was a young boy under the German occupation, this movie builds up, scene after scene, a degree of emotion difficult to handle. On the last scene, when the Gestapo embarks some students and the priest and you hear him saying: “Au revoir, les enfants!”, I defy any single human being not to burst into tears like a little baby. The most heart-breaking quote of cinema history.


3 - Secrets and Lies by Mike Leigh (1996)
I have cried at every Leigh’s film, but this wins hands down.
I guess I cry so much watching this movie partly because Leigh has a special way of showing people in their most fragile and human conditions, and partly because the actors play so amazingly well that I am shaken by their immense talent. In this scene, one of the most beautiful, compelling and moving of Leigh’s cinema (and of cinema tout court), Brenda Blethyn is able to pass from incredulity to bewilderment, from hilarity to desperation in a way that it’s simply impossible to forget. If you don’t cry watching her, your heart is made of stone, believe me:

2 - Breaking the Waves by Lars Von Trier (1996) 

This film is present in almost all my TOP 5 movies of no matter what category, and I guess you have to get used to it, because it was one of those films having an incredible impact on my life. As I already had the chance to write in this blog: the death of Bess McNeil is one of the saddest moments I have to endure at cinema. Until today, it is just impossible for me not to drop a tear if I hear the first notes of Life on Mars by David Bowie.

1 - Everyone’s Waiting - Final Episode of Six Feet Under by Alan Ball (2005)
I know, this is not a movie I saw in a cinema. This is not even a movie, but I can’t deny that my most epic desperate moment in front of a screen was the final scene of the final episode of Six Feet Under. Friends who watched it before me had warned me about it but nothing could have prepared me for this emotional turmoil. We are talking about a series of almost 10 years ago, so I don’t think it will be a spoiler for anybody if I write that Alan Ball showed us the death of every single character in the story. Not a real surprise, since the main theme of this series actually is death, but after 5 seasons I was so attached to the Fisher family, that I started to cry at the first death and I stopped many hours after the last one. I cried so much that next day, arriving at the office, all my colleagues asked what tragedy had occurred to me.
On the side cover of Six feet Under's box set (having the shape of a grave, ça va sans dire!) you can read these words: Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.
They were clearly underestimating my tears.

Leigh Moments

I admire many contemporary filmmakers, but there is one who’s always been special to me.

His name is Mike Leigh, he is British, he is 68 years old, and I simply adore him (as a matter of fact, I already wrote about him in my post: http://leblogdezazie.blogspot.com/2011/01/cinema-of-mike-leigh.html). On Sunday afternoon, Leigh held a Master Class at the Forum des Images, one of the many events related to the retrospective London calling/Londres au cinéma and, useless to say, your Zazie was there! 

The conversation, a dialogue between the director and French journalist Pascal Mérigeau, was inspiring, rich and absolutely exciting. Leigh talked extensively about his very particular method of working with actors, which I believe is quite unique in the cinema world. Leigh starts rehearsal with the actors he has chosen for a movie many months in advance (sometimes even six!) before the shooting and then the shooting itself is super quick, from one to three weeks maximum. Actors don’t know much about the plot, and the strictly necessary about their own role. They’re put together with other actors and they start working on a sketch Leigh gives them and they improvise on that. Basically, they do so over and over again, on different sketches, in order to become, day by day, little by little, their “character”. Leigh told an incredible story about his movie Vera Drake, the tale of a woman practicing illegal abortions in the London of 1950: during the rehearsal, a group of actors was playing a family gathered to celebrate the daughter’s engagement, and another group of actors, playing policemen, suddenly broke into the room. None of them knew what was going on. The effect was quite incredible, Leigh reckoned. We actually witnessed it few minutes before, when we saw this same scene on the screen: the surprise, the tension, the drama of that moment was absolutely amazing. The result of Leigh’s method is that the performance of each actor is simply ASTONISHING. It is not by chance that many of his actors have been rewarded: David Thewlis for Naked (1993) at the Cannes Film Festival (and Leigh for Best Director), Imelda Staunton for Vera Drake (2004) at the Venice Film Festival (and the movie received a Golden Lion) and Brenda Blethyn for Leigh’s masterpiece Secrets and Lies (1996) at the Cannes Film Festival (and the movie won the Palme d’Or), for which she also received a Golden Globe and she was nominated for an Oscar (why she didn’t get it, it is still a mystery to me). The scene where she talked for the first time to the daughter she abandoned as a child, with the two women seated side by side in front of the camera and filmed by Leigh in this way, represents for me one of the highlights of the entire cinema history. I challenge you to find another scene having the same emotional impact. 

 Leigh explained that what he is interested in is the reproduction of reality as he perceives it, and for this he needs actors willing to forget completely about themselves, therefore not narcissist, but humble, patient and (possibly) having a good sense of humour. The journalists asked him if in his career he was sometimes wrong in choosing his cast. Apparently, he was very lucky and only in few occasions he was obliged to relegate actors in very small roles, and even more rarely to cancel their participation to a picture. Leigh also discussed about the essential contribution of his collaborators, like his cinematographer Dick Pope (with whom he worked for his entire career), who helps him a great deal to find the right “tone” for a movie: dark and gloomy for Naked, bright and carefree for Happy-go-Lucky or even a mix of both styles for the representation of the four seasons in his last movie, Another Year.
The cinema of Mike Leigh, thanks to all these elements, has the capacity of capturing THE moment, a slice of real life sometimes even too cruel to look at, but always incredibly truthful, human and compassionate. You can feel at any moment how much Leigh loves his characters: he is never judging them, even the bad or the unbearable ones, he is always trying to understand and love them for what they are. 

 After the lecture, some fans stopped Leigh asking for autographs. He was really kind to everybody, even to an evidently disturbed young man (an Italian, I’m afraid to say so) who started making a list of all the great British film directors of cinema history. Leigh listened to him quite carefully, and then he said: Yes, right, but David Lynch is not British, my dear. The man kept going, switching to the awful situation of Italian cinema (!!!), telling him that nowadays we don’t have the great filmmakers we used to have. Leigh, once again, very calmly, looked at him and said: Maybe it is so, except for Ermanno Olmi. I wanted to kiss him! But I curbed my enthusiasm and I simply thanked him for his cinema.

When the journalist, at the end of their conversation, asked him to give a piece of advice to the young filmmakers present in the audience, Leigh turned his witty look into the crowd and in a very loud voice announced: Never compromise! 

He surely never did.