Positive Liberty

So there Constant Viewer was, standing in front of one of those – gulp! – Art Houses looking for an excuse to eat popcorn. But first, a brief digression.

Lewis Black does a comedy routine about candy corn. You know, the little yellow cones with the orange tips (or is it orange with yellow?) that you still see once in a while in candy dishes among the sort of people who have candy dishes in the Halloween through Thanksgiving season. The routine is, essentially, that candy corn tastes like crap, everyone knows candy corn tastes like crap and yet every year we somehow manage to fool ourselves into believing that maybe this year’s candy corn won’t taste like crap until we taste it and, lo and behold, rediscover that it tastes like crap.

Okay, so an even briefer digression would be Lucy convincing Charlie Brown once again to run and try to kick the football.

Both of which lead CV to the real topic: French movies. Now, you understand that people with university degrees in watching movies would never write “French movies.” They’d write “French cinema” or “French films” or even more pretentiously “French film.” But Constant Viewer couldn’t afford to fritter away his undergraduate years in anything so impractical as film studies. No Siree, Bob! He got his degree in philosophy, by golly!

Anyway, here’s the thing about French movies. They suck. They don’t all suck equally badly, but anyone applying a standard industrial suckometer to any French movie will get a positive reading. Moreover, the reasons why they all suck to one degree or another are fairly obvious.

First, nothing really ever happens in 99% of all French movies except a lot of talking and a little sex. Back in, oh, let’s say the 60s and 70s, this didn’t detract from their popularity in the U.S. In fact, Americans went to French movies specifically to see naked breasts and a bit of simulated sexual intercourse, neither of which were available for viewing in Hollywood movies. This was all because of the law back then which basically read: “French speaking naked sex is art; English speaking naked sex is pornography.” (Spanish speaking naked sex was porn, too, since none of those judges took Spanish classes at Harvard and every real porn movie they ever saw at I Felta Thigh came from Mexico.)

These days, though, it’s hard to find even a Disney movie in which there isn’t a bit of bare-breasted rutting by the end of the second or third reel and, besides, Ivy League schools no more bother nowadays with French than they do with Shakespeare or any of the other trappings of civilization.

Anyway, if you’re still with CV here, the point is that the bottom fell out of the French erotic film business so badly that French movies these days don’t even bother with rutting scenes any more, thus leaving even more time for talk. Worse yet, all of this talking is done in, you guessed it, French.

Still, like Charlie Brown being urged on by Lucy or a man with a sweet tooth eying a chafing dish filled with candy corn, there CV was standing in front of the ticket counter weighing his options among movies which very soon no one outside the NYU and UCLA film studies departments would ever hear about again when he opted to go ahead and see Tell No One (Ne le dis a personne). After all, the average of 26 real-life (read: paid) reviewers as calculated over at MetaCritic had given it a score of 81, and CV knows for a fact that some of them didn’t study French at Harvard, so what the hell?

Okay, here’s the review. It sucked.

And the basic reason it sucked was because everyone talked too much. Way too much. Of course, if they hadn’t talked and talked and talked and then talked some more the movie would have been completely meaningless instead of merely being hopelessly convoluted. True, it was based on a Harlan Coben novel which CV can only suppose is hopelessly convoluted, but that’s no excuse.

You want the basic story? Okay, here goes. In Tell No One, a doctor whose wife was apparently murdered eight years ago becomes a suspect again when two bodies are discovered not far from the scene of the wife’s apparent death. Are you picking up on “apparent” here? That’s okay, it isn’t really a spoiler because the doctor then begins getting messages via the Internet (They have the Internet in France? Who knew?) suggesting that his wife is actually still alive and that he must, well, “Tell no one!” Then we learn about a wealthy family whose son abuses poor orphan children (There are poor orphans in France? Who knew?) who come to work at patrician Daddy’s stables – because that’s what orphans need for a better future: experience mucking out stables – where the doctor’s sister works, the sister’s lesbian lawyer partner, a serial murderer whose name in French CV thinks might have been McGuffin, various corrupt or maybe not so corrupt police officials, a street criminal (from les banlieues, of course) with a tattoo of The Godfather logo on one arm, a hemophiliac son and ready access to plasma TV sets, handguns and a Ford SUV, the supposedly dead wife’s parents and, toward the end just to complicate matters further, the doctor’s own, albeit deceased father.

But you see, French filmmakers – I’m talking to you now, and this is important, so please take notes – movies are not books. It will not do to spend the last twenty minutes of a movie of suspense having someone talk you through all the confused and confusing things you saw the first hour and forty minutes as though that makes up for everything. And please don’t throw The Usual Suspects in CV’s face as a counterexample here. France doesn’t have any actors nearly as interesting as Kevin Spacey because if they did those actors would learn English and make movies in Hollywood where the real money is.

Also – you’re still taking notes, right? – movies are not plays. Theater (or Theatre, if you went to one of those Ivy League schools) is all about dialog (or dialogue if, oh, never mind) and that’s why both the English and the French still have excellent theater because, in their respective ways, they speak far better than we loutish Americans do.

Movies, however, are about movement, about action. They are a medium in which the audience primarily perceives visually and not audibly, and this is why “movies” or “motion pictures” are superior to “film” as a way of distinguishing the medium from live theater and literature. And, by the way, that’s not to say that all there is to making a movie is non-stop action, dazzling visual effects, cardboard characters and hackneyed plots. Unless you’re George Lucas, that is.

In fairness to Tell No One, it’s makers actually did spend a few production budget francs, er, euros on a couple of chase scenes and a bit of violence here and there, even including a highway collision. That is to say, this film actually and obviously aspires to being a movie, and that’s a good thing. Its fatal flaw, alas, is that the story it attempts to tell is simply way too complicated to work in a mere two hours without, as already discussed, having to talk its way out of its mare’s nest of plot threads.

CV thinks the many positive reviews were, whether the reviewers knew it or not, really just acknowledgements that writer / director Guillaume Canet and his cast all know what a good motion picture should look like and were really trying to make one. That they came closer by far than the average French film of CV’s experience is, to be sure, praiseworthy. Alas, however, we’re talking movies here, not horseshoes. Close doesn’t count.

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