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NO
REST FOR THE BRAVE
4?/10
Pas de
repos pour les braves : France (Fr/Austria) 2003 : Alain GUIRAUDIE
: 107 mins
One aspect
of experimental cinema that most people forget is that the vast majority
of experiments - in art as in science - are almost total failures. Such
negative outcomes can be as informative for the people carrying out the
experiment as their successes, of course, but it often isn’t a good idea
to inflict the misfires on the wider world. No Rest for the Brave is
a case in point.
An experiment
in non-linear, dreamlike narrative, it takes place in what looks like
a humdrum corner of present-day rural France, but is in fact a fanciful
terrain of an individual or collective subconscious: the settlements have
cute names like Glasgaud, Buenauzeres, Riaux de Janerrot. There are developments
which, in another context, might be capable of being organised into something
approaching a conventional plot – but this clearly isn’t what Guiraudie
has in mind at all.
Igor (Thomas
Blanchard) and Basile (Thomas Suire) talk in a café about a dream Basile
has just had, in which he encountered an enigmatic, seemingly omnipotent
figure named Faftao-Laoupo. The result of this dream is that Basile now
thinks that, if he goes to sleep again, he will never wake up. A while
later, Igor goes to Basile’s village to pay a visit, but his friend is
nowhere to be seen. Shortly after, Igor learns that there’s been a massacre
in the same village, and the clues point to Basile as the culprit. He
meets a local journalist (Laurent Soffiati), but before they can carry
out any investigation, they’re shot (dead?) by a rifle-toting Basile.
At this point the film undergoes a radical storytelling convolution similar
to the famous volte-face in David Lynch’s Mulholland
Dr. Basile, now known as Hector, gets involved in a gangland war
that pits ruthless crooks against the semi-heroic figure of Johnny Got
– who looks awfully like the journalist apparently killed earlier on.
Further weirdness ensues.
Guiraudie’s
hour-long earlier works, though much praised (especially Ce vieux reve
qui bouge), were deemed commercially unreleasable because of their
unconventional length. No Rest For the Brave is equally unlikely
to obtain arthouse distribution, because it seems deliberately intended
to infuriate all but the most indulgent highbrow cineaste. As Lynch has
shown on more than one occasion, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with
non-linear narrative as such – but in Guiraudie’s hands it becomes something
of an instrument of slow torture: the soporific pacing means that, just
as the characters seem to drift in and out of a dream-state, many in the
audience will be following suit.
There are
a couple of memorable moments: in a crowded bar, two characters’ attempts
to converse are stymied by their fellow patrons’ hubbub – until a request
to “keep the noise down!” has a hilariously instantaneous and drastic
effect. And some welcome energy is provided by the appearance of a bald
punk guitarist, but he runs out of the movie almost as soon as he’s run
in.
On the whole,
however, No Rest for the Brave offers a Gallic brand of whimsically
stilted, pretentious surrealism last seen on the festival circuit in Jean-Charles
Fitoussi’s The Days I Don’t
Exist – which also proved too esoteric for wider distribution.
But while both pictures move at an escargot pace, at least Fitoussi
came up with a brilliant core conceit to keep his audience at least moderately
engaged and stimulated. There’s much less food for thought on offer here
– multiple viewings might well yield all kinds of profundities, but the
film is simply too hard going to make even a single sitting very tempting.
18th
November, 2003
(seen 30th October : National Film Theatre, London – London
Film Festival)
click
here for a full list of films covered at the 2003 London Film Festival
by Neil
Young
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