Film: The Thorn In The Heart
Release date: 14th February 2011
Certificate: E
Running time: 86 mins
Director: Michel Gondry
Starring: N/a
Genre: Documentary
Studio: Soda
Format: DVD
Country: France
With the eyes of the world focused on Michel Gondry’s upcoming big budget superhero blockbuster The Green Hornet, chances are that many may have missed Gondry’s previous 2009 feature, the ultra-small scale documentary The Thorn In The Heart. The piece, which largely forgoes Gondry’s usual camera trickery, follows a subject very close to the French filmmaker’s own heart, and could well be one of his most personal films to date. For fans, this will be one not to miss.
Gondry focuses his documentary camera on his aunt Suzette, a charismatic matriarchal figure that still continues to hold a powerful place at the head of the family. A school teacher for many years, in the days when teaching was a very different, somewhat nomadic affair, Gondry takes Suzette back to the many schools she has taught at, and arranges meetings with her former colleagues and pupils. Through these interviews, Gondry shows how many lives Suzette has profoundly touched during her career.
One figure not so enamoured with Suzette’s domineering presence in the family is her son and Gondry’s cousin Jean-Yves. Gay, depressive, recovering from a mental breakdown, and now back living with his mother, Jean-Yves is a tragic figure, and a constant source of disappointment to Suzette. As she puts it: “A thorn in her heart…”
What starts out as a fairly simple portrait of Suzette’s life and career slowly hones in on the relationship between her and the tragic figure of her son Jean-Yves; a sensitive, emotionally fractured artist and filmmaker whose life has been sadly without the success of his famous cousin. The way Gondry handles and edits this story keeps us guessing where his own loyalties lie, sometimes implicating Suzette’s domineering personality as a factor in her son’s breakdown, at other times suggesting that the luckless Jean-Yves is entirely the creator of his own bad luck. The relationship is strained, often uncomfortable, and by far the strongest part of the film. It feels as if Gondry stumbled across this story halfway through filming and had to figure out a way to work it in at the edit. It makes for a disjointed film, unsure of it’s true subject, and feels as though were the decision made to focus on this story strand entirely, it may well have produced a far more satisfying result.
There are some lovely technical touches to enjoy. Gondry splices in chunks of Jean-Yves’s old 8-mm home videos to flesh out the backstory, which adds some real colour, and chooses to link different locations with shots of toy trains. There is also a charming sequence in a primary school where Gondry gives the children ‘invisibility cloaks’, which briefly lights up the screen ,and transforms the otherwise largely staid documentary. The soundtrack is sparse, simple, but one of the film’s strongest features, with Gondry using simple recurrent themes to punctuate his story.
The Thorn In The Heart has an inescapable flaw at its core. It is a topic so subjective to its creator that its status as a true documentary is always in question. His editing choices, his approach as an interviewer, and his selection of the footage all seem informed by Gondry as an active participant in the story, and fuelled by his own nostalgia. The result, sadly, is manipulative, sentimental and intensely self-indulgent. Often Gondry – rather than the impassive observer – is essentially poking his family with a stick to get the results he wants, while at other times including scenes which clearly speak to him, but which many viewers will find tedious and uninteresting, and add little to the overall picture. Time and again there is the unavoidable feeling that we are simply being asked to watch cleverly edited amateur home-movies, and wonder if there is a film here at all. There is sometimes the exhilarating feeling of being included in a very private sanctum which would normally be firmly behind closed doors, but the film is frequently unsatisfying and falls short of adding up to a complete picture.
A quiet film that, at a snail’s pace, paints a picture of a complex character and the people she touched – for better or worse - in her extraordinary life. Flawed, indulgent and undisciplined certainly, but The Thorn In The Heart never-the-less remains an intriguing and a deeply personal tribute by a unique filmmaker to a family figure he clearly holds in high regard. LOZ
No comments:
Post a Comment