Blogorium Review: Singles

I have a pet theory about Cameron Crowe's Singles, a movie the Cap'n initially avoided in the wave of "90s movies about 20-something existential angst" - a list which includes, but is not limited to, Slacker, Reality Bites, Before Sunrise, Clerks, Empire Records, and, even though it doesn't directly address "Generation X," Dazed and Confused. The theory goes like this: Singles is Crowe's attempt to replicate French cinema from the 1960s, creating a sort of "Grunge New Wave."

Upon first viewing, it's immediately apparent how "not" like other Cameron Crowe films Singles is: Most of his films (before and after Singles) focus on a single character - Lloyd Dobler, William Miller, and, well, Jerry Maguire. Each protagonist navigates their way through life, and generally finds "the one" early in the film. By comparison, the sprawling, interconnected storyline of Singles deviates from Crowe's body of work.

There are, arguably, four main characters in Singles: Linda Powell (Kyra Sedgwick), Steve Dunne (Campbell Scott), Janet Livermore (Bridget Fonda), and Cliff Poncier (Matt Dillon). Their interactions with each other forms the core of the film, and while Crowe begins the film with one character and ends with another, it's easy to see that one could say Singles is, in fact, a film about the travails of two couples. But where does one draw the line with story lines being "less" important.

For example, is Debbie Hunt (Sheila Kelley)'s story less important because it occupies the middle of the film? Debbie's quest for love through video dating happens during a segment while Janet and Cliff and Linda and Steve are on rocky territory, but its resolution seems no less important to Crowe's overall exploration of single life. Is Andy (James LeGros) any less important to Linda's story than Steve is? Does Dr. Jeffrey Jamison (Bill Pullman) factor into the decision Janet makes to break up with Cliff?

How do we factor in the many (many) cameos in Singles: Eric Stoltz (The Mime), Jeremy Piven (Doug Hughley), Tom Skerrit (Mayor Weber) Paul Giamatti (Kissing Man), Xavier McDaniel (Himself), Debi Maza (Brenda), Soundgarden's Chris Cornell (Guy Listening to Cliff's Stereo), Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Eddie Vedder (Cliff's "Citizen Dick" band members), or my personal favorite Tim Burton (Brian, the Dating Video director), identified as "the next Martin ScorSAYZ."

Singles is filled with overlapping story lines, characters who hover in an out of the narrative, and while the Steve and Linda plot adheres closely to the standard "romantic comedy" tropes we're used to, it also retains much of Crowe's layered, relatable, human characters. Even if audiences can see where Singles is going, the film is imbued with heart and never rings a false tone.

But all of these elements still don't meet the "Grunge New Wave" descriptive I suggested at the outset. What does is a number of small, relatively unorthodox - even for 1992 American cinema - storytelling techniques that echo various entries from the French New Wave. To begin with, let's address the way Crowe tells the story of Singles, or rather the way his characters do. Cast members (specifically the "central four") at times speak directly to the camera, as though the audience is a participating observer in the story. It disappears for a while in the movie, but returns near the end when Dillon's Cliff begins tying ancillary stories up, and provides us with insight into the mind of the film's least developed character*. When characters don't directly break the "fourth wall," audiences are privy to non-omniscient voice-over narration, limiting our access to our immediate protagonist. But still, this doesn't point us directly to the French New Wave. Let's push further...

I draw my curious theory from two specific elements of the film, both of which seem to derive from specific Jean-Luc Godard films: dialogue often begins in one scene and continues into another**, reminiscent of Breathless. The more direct reference is based in the way Crowe punctuates Singles - with title cards loosely (or specifically) related to the vignette to follow, which seems to me to be directly lifted from Vivre Sa Vie's "12 Tableaus." Since Crowe directly references Breathless, Truffaut's Jules and Jim and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad in Vanilla Sky, I don't think my instincts are far off.

The "Grunge" element, if not already evident, comes from the film's setting (Seattle in 1992), the soundtrack (featuring Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, and Tad) and featuring a score by Paul Westerberg with additional music by Chris Cornell (including an early version of what would become "Spoonman"). My only impression of Singles prior to seeing the film was "that's the grunge movie," one that seemed to be tapping into the Generation X zeitgeist, and 18 years later, while it's not just a "grunge" movie, it certainly feels like Crowe's take on New Wave cinema through a distinctly American lens.

If you've never seen Singles, or avoided it for reasons similar to mine, I hope this review / critical analysis helps dissuade your misgivings. To this point I'd only ever missed two Cameron Crowe films (the other being Elizabethtown), and in many respects, it's better that I waited so long. A little perspective goes a long way, and if the film holds up on its own, then the experience is that much richer.

* Cliff is nearly a caricature of "grunge" culture for most of the film, and I feel like Crowe makes the right decision in handing the closing exposition to him, paving the way for reconciling with Janet. ** I saw at least two reviews of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World that cited this exact technique as proof that the film was "ground breaking," which even without Breathless and Singles sounded absurd.

French Film Festival Recap (one week later)

Although it would be nice to share all of the cooking (especially the Crepes), the wine, or Kronenbourg beer (death to Budweiserdrome! Long live the new hops!), I think it might just be best to dispense with the surrounding details and focus on the two films we watched: Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs à tire-larigot (or Micmacs in the US).

If you want to quickly explain the French New Wave aesthetic to somebody, the first ten minutes of Breathless is your best bet. Narration indirectly linked to the action, jazz score, cinema verite camera style (documentary-like but then again clearly artificial, a walking contradiction), and no shortage of jump cuts; it's all there. All of the components used to divorce French film from the Pre-WWII "cinema de papa."

The story is almost incidental: Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a car thief roaming around France, trying to get away from his existential angst. When he kills a police officer in panic (in a scene reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard), Michel hurries off to Paris in an attempt to collect money owed to him and sneak off to Italy. A car thief is no great problem, but Poiccard is now a murderer, and a cop killer at that.

While he's waiting (and waiting... and waiting) for someone, anyone, to pay up, Michel tries to talk Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American living in Paris, to run away to Italy with him. They had a brief affair sometime before the film begins, and he seems more infatuated than she does. Patricia, who sometimes is speaking French and sometimes English, works for the New York Herald Tribune's Paris office and has aspirations to be a reporter, a dream parodied during a press interview with Parvulesco (Jean-Pierre Melville), who is only interested in talking about women and his opinion on love (or is, it seems, only asked about that).

To tell you much more would give away the entire movie, since much of Breathless is Godard and Raoul Cotard using hand-held cameras and natural light to follow Michel and Patricia around Paris while he waits and she makes up her mind about him. The juxtaposition of naturalistic filming with deliberately artificial editing (the jump cuts are most noticeable during conversations, where the audio plays out in real time but the images jump forward and backward in time) isn't easy for audiences unaccustomed to its unrestrained use (we at least have the benefit of the ensuing 50 years' worth of variations on the style. Imagine what it must have been like with only The 400 Blows and Hiroshima, Mon Amour to prepare you for the nouvelle vague). The combination of the two may actually be more daunting to audiences than Godard's deliberately formal "12 Tableau"s of Vivre sa Vie, but the result is a rewarding one.

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We tried something very different for Micmacs, which I suppose still doesn't have a wide release here in the states; I've always held to a theory that the only problem with subtitles for those who don't speak the native language in foreign films is that audiences are forced to choose between following the mise en scene or trying to understand what the actors are saying. Splitting the difference necessarily means leaving something out, and accordingly the experience is never quite what it could be. This is the sort of problem to which there is only one good answer (learn every language fluently), but for the lazy or those short of time, I do not propose to tell you how to best approach this.

On the other hand, when we realized that the Micmacs we'd be watching had no subtitles, there was a choice to be made: stop watching the newest Jean-Pierre Jeunet film (and the first since 2004's A Very Long Engagement), or soldier on with my proposed experiment. I wanted to see if, lacking the necessary linguistic skills, we could follow the film purely on what was presented in images. Luckily for the Cap'n, my friends decided the experiment would be a fun one (it didn't hurt that Doctor Tom provided some spot-translation for us when necessary).

Fortune smiled upon us, as Jeunet is an extraordinarily visual director, and tends to orient his mise en scene and action like a silent director (fans of Amelie, Delicatessen, or The City of Lost Children will already be well aware of this). Micmacs is his magnum opus on this subject, as the film is a love letter to the artifice of film, right down to the opening credits that are designed to mirror the Golden Age of Hollywood's title cards (in black and white and English). Without the benefit of understanding what the characters were saying, much of the film is still perfectly easy to follow, even in dialogue heavy moments like the very end.

The story could be easily (and cheaply) summed up as a cross between The Little Rascals, Freaks, and Ocean's Eleven. Bazil (Danny Boon)'s father was killed by a landmine when he was a child (manufactured by one weapons company) when he was a child. As an adult working in a video store, Bazil is struck in the head by a bullet (from a rival weapons manufacturer) during a freak accident. (Here, having some of the translation may have come in handy, as while trying to settle in to the "no subtitles" mode, we failed to notice that the doctors decide not to remove the bullet).

Left with no job, nowhere to live, and no means to support himself, Bazil resorts to becoming a street performer, until he's adopted by Placard (Jean-Pierre Marielle) who takes him to live with other outcasts in a dwelling halfway between modified junk and steampunk architecture. Not having a stable footing on the names (we essentially learned the characters by behavior), I'm going to simply link to the IMDB page so that you can work things out for yourself when you've seen the film. Because the "this film is like" should give you some idea what the story is, I'll say no more other than Bazil discovers that the weapons manufacturers happen to be across the street from one another.

The experience was more interesting for us, particularly because Jeunet made a film that gleefully plays with the image. Having a character that hallucinates allows Jeunet to insert touches like video cameras that swivel like cartoon characters or animated thought bubbles when Bazil gets very dizzy. The most inspired gag occurs when Bazil discovers that the source of his life's miseries are directly opposite each other. The camera tilts down slowly on his face as the orchestral score swirls, only to reveal a full orchestra playing on the stairway behind Bazil. He has his epiphany, shakes the delusion from his head, and the orchestra "pops" out of existence.

I cannot say definitively how Micmacs will play with all of the nuance of dialogue intact, but as an experience in following the language of cinema, it was an enjoyable experience. I don't sense many of you would be foolish enough to try this yourselves (as there's really no point to it unless you just wanted to try), but I would recommend the film and intend to watch it myself when there's a chance to see it and understand what's being said (Doctor Tom indicated there's a heavy anti-American military industrial complex tinge to the weapons manufacturer subplot). It's quite enjoyable, and whimsical much the way that Amelie was, although the characters may be a bit broader. Still, if you're a fan of Jeneut, Micmacs will be well worth the six year wait.

All in all, French Film Friday was well worth it. I'd like to have a few more of them while I'm here in the Apartment that Dripped Blood, so keep your eyes peeled.