Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner
JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich
by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she’d like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he’s a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest’s ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It’s all leading to a grim ending, but it’s not that kind of movie.
There’s subtext here if you want to worry it, most of it in a parallel set of courtroom sequences that speak loud to an acceptance of (platonic, in this instance) miscegenation, perhaps, but more topically to the whole gay-rights thing. But it’s better as just a pleasantly-stylized bit of effluvium about accepting differences, not accepting conventional wisdom, and carving out your own path. It has funny moments, touching moments, a plucky heroine, a gesture now and again that reminds that Miyazaki used to do this stuff in his sleep, and enough well-earned chuckles to merit a look. It is, in other words, absolutely fine and entirely likeable. That it’s as lauded as it has been suggests a real paucity of quality animated product for children in a market dominated by aggressively mediocre stuff like Frozen (and frankly awful stuff like Mr. Peabody & Sherman). Where that one has Adele Dazeem’s full-throated Great White Way theatrics, Ernest & Celestine gets by with whimsy and gentle slapstick. A lesson there, I suppose, about being the most eloquent speaker engaged in a diminished conversation.
The same minor hyperbole surrounds Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which recounts how the madman behind films like El Topo and The Holy Mountain once came thisclose to applying his sensibilities to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi pulp classic Dune. I’ve loved Dune since I first read it in junior high. I loved it enough that when I saw David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation, I forced myself to love it, too. I have trouble defending the picture as something other than a cult curiosity now, truth be told, though I’ve tried to mine auteur hallmarks from it when it comes up in the stray conversation or flip reference. It’s the hip thing to do.
The premise of Jodorowsky’s Dune is that, with over 3,000 storyboard drawings completed by legendary French comic artist Mœbius, with character designs and production concepts by a pre-Alien Giger, with Pink Floyd on board, even, to compose the score–with all of these things, the world was deprived at the eleventh hour of one of the great masterpieces of the cinema. I’m an admirer of Jodorowsky’s, of course: indeed, his work–one part Pasolini, two parts Buñuel, all clothed in obscenity and grand pretension–can only really inspire admiration. The documentary’s contention that Jodorowsky’s early films inspired riots could be cribbed from tales from the L’age d’or/Werner Herzog oral history. It’s fun to picture Jodorowsky back then, teamed with Dan O’Bannon doing the special effects after Douglas Trumbull turned the project down, and to imagine Salvador Dali as a paranoid emperor and Orson Welles as the Baron Harkonnen. But a game of what-if is kind of all this is. Attempts to illustrate how the massive Jodorowsky-created storyboard must have made the rounds in Hollywood, infecting things like The Terminator, Flash Gordon, Star Wars, and so on, are, you know, convincing if you want them to be. I wrote a screenplay with my best friend in high school and sent it off blind, and the two of us were convinced that Eraser had ripped off parts of it a few years later.
Anyway, there’s one scene late in the saga that rescues Jodorowsky’s Dune a little: After we get to the part where funding fell through, a still-plucky 84-year-old Jodorowsky spits out his manifesto in defense of cinema as a vital art. He throws down wads of bills and calls them empty; he calls us slaves to studio groupthink; he says that film has a head (“whoowooowoowooosh”) and a heart (“thump thump THUMP!”). In an instant, he reveals how it is that he used to get people to follow him on wild flights of fancy. He’s insane in the best way; I love that he tortured his son with years of martial-arts training and obscure philosophy to get him ready to play Muad’Dib hisownself. It’s a great moment in a movie that seems engineered mainly to lead to it.
— But a game of what-if is kind of all this is. —
Like the discussion regarding “Alien 3″…
…that the studio should’ve stuck with Vincent Ward’s original idea of the shuttle crash-landing on a wooden planet populated by monks.
I’ve also heard that “Fando y Lis” caused riots as it swept like wildfire through Spain.
I really don’t buy it. It’s cute surrealism — very pat and somewhat retrograde, especially for a fringe work from 1968 — that playacts transgression more than it seriously fronts any sense of anger or taboo. Kinda like all of Jodorowsky’s stuff.
I get the impression he’s the sort of artist who *wants* to be outre — which is not at all the sort of artist who *is* outre. He seems to want to be a genuine madman like Makavejev or Zulawski, but instead cloaks himself in a dubious personal legend and dedicates himself to counterfeiting old Bunuel.
Put another way, Jodorowsky’s the sort of artist who would make something as insane and funny as “The Holy Mountain,” then cap it off with one of the most pretentious, condescending ‘meta-endings’ in the history of cinema. An ending that firmly proceeds from the assumption that you are very, very dumb, and that Jodorowsky is practically the next fuckin’ messiah.
He wasn’t the right person to do “Dune.” At all. Neither was Lynch. Indeed, it feels almost interchangeable whether it were Lynch or Jodorowsky. “Dune” as an 80’s adaptation is an enjoyable, unrepeatable, but vapid work of untethered creativity and capital. An artifact of a strange period when conspicuous consumption was applied even to idiosyncratic pop-art. Ultimately it’s an $80M museum piece about nothing for no one, a genuinely post-modern investiture of material, talent and culture into a zero-sum product that no one really wanted. Whether it was superficially informed by Lynch’s or by Jodorowsky’s druthers is, I think, irrelevant.
I know it’s a boring solution, but — Ridley Scott. Right? He was the ideal choice. A version of “Dune” that’s at the midpoint between “Blade Runner” and “Legend.” Still a big hoary 80’s product, but self-aware and self-transcendent. That might’ve been something. I’m tempted to name Ken Russell too, but he’d probably have done the same thing as Lynch or Jodorowsky: turned it into a personal, astronomically expensive playpen for his own neuroses. Nah, it had to be Scott. Circa 1984, pre-pompous Ridley Scott.
[Speaking of missed opportunities — David Cronenberg’s version of “Total Recall.” Gimme a doco on *that*]
My reaction to “Fando y Lis”: What part DIDN’T cause the riot? There was something in there to make everyone want to beat up the filmmaker. What did it for me was the prolonged torment of a child whose acting, if that’s what it was, looked all too real.
Ha! Fair enough. I did kinda want to beat him up, too, though I don’t remember the kid. I do remember it opening up with a woman eating a flower, and each bite made a big “CRUNCH CRUNCH” Foley sound. And I rolled my eyes and thought, “oh boy,” then proceeded to repeat those exact words to myself for the next 90 minutes.
But I figure you gotta go after the institutions to earn the riot, right? The big stink over “L’age d’or” was the de Sade allusion at the end… right? Or was it all that sexy toe sucking? Then again, what *really* was the issue with “Un Chien Andalou?” Its… irreverence…? The jokey intertitles? Eyeball violence…?
Sure, Jodorowsky attacks Catholicism and conquistadors and all that, but… starting in 1968, not 1929. Now, I’m just a deeply and perpetually flabbergasted young man with no direct experience here, but surely, by 1968, a few flip flicks of the teeth to the Pope did not buy you an all-out riot…?
I know I’m being insouciant, but these reports of rioting always sound like such silly myth-making to me. I’ve only ever found one citation, from a Rosenbaum compendium no less, that “Fando y Lis” actually caused riots. Even with the most famous example, “Le sacre du printemps,” research suggests that its Parisian audience rioted because they hated it aesthetically, not because it shocked them. After all, these were the same folk otherwise getting off on Rimbaud and Pierre Louys — it was the dissonance, not the content, that enraged them.
On the flip-side, I’ve always wondered why folks *didn’t* riot after “Lisztomania.” In all seriousness, it has one of the most lucidly, outrageously offensive endings imaginable. It’s irreverent, and Dada, and nonsensical, and openly contemptuous to both structure and mores; all the qualities that seem to send audiences into a destructive tizzy. And, of course, it offers the image of Hitler as Frankenstein’s monster, wielding an electric-guitar-machine-gun, leading a fascist army of young girls in Supergirl outfits, and mowing down wailing Hasidic Jews as they flail about in comical sped-motion. I guess the Brits are just too cordial for a good riot?