THE TORONTO VAULT VOL. 1: CARRE BLANC (A GOOD FILM HIDDEN UNDERNEATH A HUGE MESS)

Beneath the Argos, Money Balls, Descendants and other big/buzzworthy movies that play at the Toronto International Film Festival are smaller films that may never get any kind of real distribution. And if they do, its for a short run in a few small theaters in random parts of the world. This new series is designed to shed light on some of those small films that I've seen at TIFF in the last two years...

Here's something I was disappointed by (although didn’t completely dislike) but its been stuck in my head for almost two years. Carre Blanc is one of those small French films that probably didn’t even get much play in its own country which obviously means it won’t make it to the states. This was one of the reasons I made it a priority to see it at TIFF in 2011 (naturally there's a lot of big films that play at Toronto but at a festival like TIFF it’s a good idea to take advantage of checking out stuff you may never get a chance to see again). In the few reviews I was able to find on Carre Blanc before Toronto, I saw Tarkovsky's name pop up a few times. I could see how one would make that comparison without putting much thought in to it. There's even a scene lifted directly from Solaris in Carre Blanc (the highway scene)...

Carre Blanc (2011)                                                                           Solaris (1972)

But a Tarkovsky comparison is pushing it. Carre Blanc lacked soul. Tarkovsky's work is full of soul & spiritualism. The only comparison Carre Blanc deserves when put next to Tarkovsky's work is imagery. My main issue with Carre Blanc, a sci-fi dark dramedy about a suicidal married couple ("Philippe" & "Marie") who have to hide their emotions in an odd futuristic dystopian society, was that there was actually a pretty good movie hidden somewhere underneath all the "big brother"/Kafka-esque atmosphere that's been done a million times already (there's also a subplot about cannibalism which was clearly a metaphor for fast & processed food consumption). There's not a whole lot to work with when it comes to this film. It’s not even 80 minutes long, there isn’t a lot of dialogue and most of the scenes seemed forced & random in an effort to try and be "different". This is a case of too much style and not enough content (much like Park Chan Wok's latest; Stoker, which we may get in to at a later date). But there's this almost unexplainable reason why it deserves a write-up longer than a small blurb. Carre Blanc had a few things I love when it comes to film: cold atmosphere, dreary (yet strangely beautiful) weather and an emphasis on bold & solid colors (reminiscent of Kubrick's work). I'm also a fan of cold, droning, electronic music (Brian Eno, Boards Of Canada, Sigour Ros, Jan Jelinek, etc) and Carre Blanc's score is full of nothing but that kind of music. This is  also a very architectural film (once again for those that don’t know, that's what I studied in school). The buildings & designs in Carre Blanc are pretty sleek & rhythmic. Its almost as if Le Corbousier came back to life and worked on the set design...

Architecture & Design in Carre Blanc...

Selected architecture of Le Corbusier...

The Carpenter Center (Cambridge, Ma)

Unite D'Habitation (Berlin)

Unite D'Habitation (Interior)

Le Corbusier Sketch - "A City Of Towers"

Bottom line - this film was beautiful to look at but after a while even that started to wear off and I wanted more. There was some nice haunting voice-over narration and a few interesting scenes (a waiter being kicked to death by a group of businessmen for spilling a drink on one of them while people pass by and go about their business as if nothing is happening) but I still found myself checking my watch more than once (which is bad because, like I said; Carre Blanc isn't even 80 minutes long!). There weren’t any real memorable performances and I found it hard to even care about the characters. Everything just felt so...empty, bordering on pointlessness. What is the point of all this? What is Carre Blanc telling us that Michael Haneke didn’t already perfectly convey in his first three films (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video & 71 Fragments)? After about 40 minutes in to Carre Blanc I found myself thinking; "why don’t I just watch Michael Haneke's early stuff instead of this. He did a much better job at getting across that cold, urbanized, depressed, working ourselves to an early grave "thing" much better. Carre Blanc is trapped somewhere between the flaws of Vinterberg's It’s All About Love and Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 yet it has the BEAUTY of both films as well.

Sami Bouajila (who plays "Philippe", the main character) is a great actor and his character's story is actually pretty interesting - At a young age he watched his mother jump to her death. Before committing suicide she left him with a list of strange guidelines to live his life by in order to survive in this cold futuristic world. He grows up to work for some big nameless corporation where his job is apparently to put the employees through a series of strange tests to keep them sharp & on point. He lives with his depressed wife ("Marie") who is on the verge of cracking up. And although it isn’t outright said, its clearly implied that they lost their child at some point in their marriage. There just wasn’t enough time for the audience to latch on to Philippe & Marie. I don’t mean to keep getting on the length of this film but that's also what kinda hurt it big time. It shoulda been longer in my opinion. On the drive up to Toronto in 2011 Chris Funderberg (the pink smoke) made an interesting statement along the lines of how movies should be either just under 80 minutes or over 3 hours. There's some serious validity to that and this film is a good example. Carre Blanc dealt with way too many issues (depression, suicide, globalization, parenting, the loss of a child, the future, marital problems, processed food, etc) and crossed to many genres (dark comedy, dramedy & science fiction) to only be a 70-something minute long film.
As you can tell from this write-up it’s a very visual/image heavy film and if you're in to architecture & design you'll probably appreciate this a little more than the average person but at the end of the day it needed more substance, a bit more dialogue & some cohesiveness.