FOR THE LOVE OF ART: Day for Night and The House That Jack Built
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Today, in the Cinemasophy column — a declaration of love for cinema and for art as a whole, a self-reflection by two great 20th-century auteurs. One of the pillars of the French «New Wave», François Truffaut, turned his thirteenth film, Day for Night, into an absolute homage to that very «daddy’s» cinema (and thus unnatural, old-school) which he had fought against in his youth as a film critic, writing the almost insolent article «A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema» (1954). In Day for Night, he mourns films made «the way they used to be made». Lars von Trier, in his brilliant provocation The House That Jack Built, melts down his own utter bleakness into a work of genius. The House That Jack Built is a conversation between the author and himself. And with whom else should an artist speak — where else can one find an equal to oneself?
DAY FOR NIGHT (LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE, FRANCE, ITALY, 1973)
Director: François Truffaut
Starring: Jacqueline Bisset, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Valentina Cortese
A
pretentious melodrama about the fatal love of a father-in-law for his young English daughter-in-law (Bisset), filmed on the French Riviera by a melancholic and kind director named Ferrand (Truffaut), is one of the greatest films ever made about cinema. Unlike Sunset Boulevard (1950) by Billy Wilder, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) by Vincente Minnelli, Ed Wood (1994) by Tim Burton, or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) by Quentin Tarantino, it is neither a tragedy, nor a production drama, nor a tender valentine, but a comedy of situations and even a self-parody. It is no coincidence that the author — François Truffaut — chose to play one of the key roles himself. His sentimental director, Ferrand, is a model of documentary authenticity amid this absurdly melancholic vaudeville.
Truffaut pours onto the screen his own recognizable authorial universe: the dreams of his character, in which as a child he steals photographs of stills from Citizen Kane from a cinema display case in the dark of night, are Truffaut’s own dreams, embodied in his thunderous debut The 400 Blows (1959), which became a true symbol of the French «New Wave»; in the awkwardly behaved actor Alphonse, it is easy to recognize Jean-Pierre Léaud — the director’s on-screen avatar, his alter ego. Discovered by Truffaut when he was literally just a boy at the dawn of his directing career, Léaud went on to appear in almost all of the director’s films, as if never aging. In the lines heard on screen («I could leave a man for a film, but never a film for a man»), one can detect the director’s own hints and postulates, for his life was wholly and entirely devoted to cinema alone. Both Truffaut and his character Ferrand embody the very essence of the director’s profession — to be not only a demiurge, but also something of a doctor for those strange creatures we all know as «actors».
Through the haze of artificiality and grimacing, of pathetic wailing and foolish antics in the midst of filming, he alone is capable of seeing in them not «cattle» (in Alfred Hitchcock’s definition), but people — so vividly alive and yet so unnaturally strange. And what place does naturalness have here? As time has shown, it only harms cinema — a fabricated, inauthentic world existing somewhere beyond reality. For everything «natural», shot without artificial lighting, with non-professional actors, ultimately vanished — whether the French «New Wave» or Italian neorealism. Because art recoils from merely reflecting life, from simply stating facts. It seeks to refract through image, to hyperbolize, to render life unnatural. Even the very title — Day for Night — is a romantic deception, a synonym for fiction: a technical term denoting a shooting technique that allows night scenes to be filmed in broad daylight. Only the film stock does not lie, capturing through invention the invisible truth of life.
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (DENMARK, SWEDEN, FRANCE, GERMANY, 2018)
Director: Lars von Trier
Starring: Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Bruno Ganz, Jeremy Davies
An outrageous statement disguised as a tasteless black comedy about a serial killer with the soul of an artist, in which all the devices of a great master — shock, suspense, provocation — operate at full force. The House That Jack Built restored Lars von Trier’s Cannes standing after eight years of exile, into which he had fallen because of scandalous jokes about the Nazis. In this film, there is no more of Trier’s trademark radicalism than, say, in Antichrist (from which, along with fragments of Melancholia, the author graciously winks at us) or Nymphomaniac. It would seem one could have grown accustomed by now. But no. A good hundred spectators walked out of the Cannes premiere — fleeing in squeamish, prudish indignation. All the others, having watched it through to the end, rewarded the chief humanitarian misanthrope of our time with a full fifteen-minute standing ovation.
«The House» (to watch it is like receiving a burn) is the story of a lyrical serial killer (Matt Dillon), an engineer-architect by profession and an artist by calling. And every artist, according to Trier, is, as a rule, a maniac; art itself is the perfect murder. Jack practices his engineering in the provincial backwoods of the American Midwest. In the agony of a terrible inner crisis, he demolishes the only house he has built with his own hands by the lake, and once he has cooled toward it, he switches to that very «other» form of art. Actor Matt Dillon, who since his youth has specialized in portraying unhinged psychopaths of every stripe, surpasses himself here. They say that before him, two dozen Hollywood actors turned down the role of Jack after reading the script. The star of Rumble Fish, as Trier himself joked in Cannes, agreed to play Jack only «because he doesn’t know how to read».
The madness Dillon transmits on screen is paid for by a long, mechanical immersion into the role: to better feel his character, he wandered his apartment at night with a huge kitchen knife. He plays not a real serial killer, but rather a set of familiar cinematic stereotypes: a bespectacled sociopath in a coat with a red minivan that, as Uma Thurman remarks, resembles both a hearse and a kidnapping van. It all begins with Thurman — with her irrepressible curiosity and talkativeness. Begins for us; for her, it ends. Two and a half hours of screen time are divided into «chapters-incidents», in which Jack will exquisitely murder his victims, arrange elaborate installations from their corpses, and meanwhile discourse on the secrets of winemaking, architecture, German dive bombers Junkers JU 87, classical European art, and Nazi atrocities, finding much in common among them.
Reaching Hitler’s paintings, Trier seems to clarify the fatal joke about the Nazis that cost him his 2011 exile from Cannes. Jack also has an off-screen interlocutor named Verge (Virgil), an elderly guide to a well-known destination, who by the finale will assume the appearance of the German actor Bruno Ganz, the star of the cult film Wings of Desire (1987). The House That Jack Built is yet another meticulously calculated assault on the complacency of the modern world, inhabited by vegetarians with the habits of butchers — a slap in the face to public taste. While the audience, prudishly indignant, bites at the director for artistic extremism, Trier himself laughs at humanity with his trademark poisonous, sarcastic laughter, shocking with the refinement of murder and the helplessness of the victims. He chiefly mocks women (though men, children, and even ducklings are not spared), portraying them as excessively talkative, shallow, and insensitive victims of a sensitive and self-reflective serial killer.
Trier speaks more radically than any Catherine Deneuve about the paranoia into which the «righteous» struggle for women’s rights (and not only women’s rights) has turned. It is no coincidence that one of the film’s ideas amounts to this: only by cultivating a serial killer within yourself can you ignore the serial crimes committed by society itself under the cover of the most humanitarian ideals. In Trier’s sights is a contemporary world torn apart by dehumanization. Why a maniac? Simply because. Trier’s favorite hero is always a cripple, a pervert, or, as here, a maniac. For self-satisfied health, in Trier’s view, is primitive, aggressive, and a sign of a certain defectiveness — an irreparable one. Trier hates psychological health; he hates people for whom everything is fine. Healthy characters in Trier are at best unpleasant, at worst repulsive. And therefore the victims of Jack’s crimes — kind, foolish, complacent, greedy, indifferent people (no one is looking for Jack because no one around truly cares) — inspire no pity at all.
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