Frontier of Dawn

If you’ve already seen every French film from the ’60’s, and wish an unknown Godard classic would be rediscovered, you could do worse than the films of Philippe Garrel. Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn was nominated for a Palm d’Or last year, and finally had its US premiere last month. Ran across this preview at traileraddict, and my first reaction was “oh no! wtf is up with the Voice-over of Doom and Piano of Gloom?” It’s like a parody of an art-house trailer from 40 years ago. Then I found this explanation at Greencine:

“…disarmingly beautiful faces and bodies intimately fill the frame in largely drawn-out takes, with relatively minimal movement as if they were closer to the character’s still photography than the motion picture kind. The score seems misplaced from classic suspense or horror, all violins and pianos striking sharp, stark, blatantly foreshadowing notes. Perhaps those who heckled the film at Cannes last year dismissed this all as pretentious navel gazing, but it’s a bold approach to attempt conveying the ache of absolute love.”

yeah, I’m ready to buy into that, as well as this attitude:

“…such an expressionist conceit feels appropriately sinister, frightening, and unashamedly absurd as the effects of romantic loneliness can be. If love is a fatalistic monster that can devour our souls, why do we rarely try defending ourselves from it?”

The director’s son, Louis Garrel, stars alongside Laura Smet and Clementine Poidatz, so there’s no shortage of lovely things to gaze at when you get bored with navels. Especially with cinematography this luscious, lit with an effect Jonathan Rosenbaum says “is so beautifully modulated in its high-contrast palette of tones that black and white become almost a kind of color.”