Film: Vigo – A Passion For Life
Release date: 19th April 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 105 mins
Director: Julien Temple
Starring: Romane Bohringer, James Frain, Diana Quick, Jim Carter, William Scott-Masson
Genre: Biography/Drama
Studio: Park Circus
Format: DVD
Country: France/UK/Japan
This is an English-Language release.
Most know director Julien Temple for his music documentaries but in this 1999 film he gives us a larger-than-life drama chronicling the life of classical French film director Jean Vigo.
We begin in a sanatorium where, while being treated for Tuberculosis, Jean Vigo meets the love of his life, Lydu Lozinska. After convincing her to leave the asylum, the two enjoy a passionate affair which culminates in marriage.
Meanwhile, Jean is uncovering the secrets of his past. It transpires that his father, who he believed committed suicide while in jail, was actually murdered by the state. As Jean’s film career beings to take off, he is held back by his father’s reputation as an anarchist and traitor.
As news of his lineage spreads, his films become marred by censorship and state control. As he fights for his creative rights, his health takes a turn for the worse and soon Jean is fighting for his life...
Vigo - A Passion For Life is classic melodrama. The central performances from James Frain, as Jean Vigo, and Romane Bohringer, as his long suffering wife, consist on bellowing passionate proclamations around gothic sanatoriums, darkened hallways and barely lit poor houses. Director Julien Temple highlights this further by exhibiting a strange expressionism. Flashes of unnatural colour, bizarre close-ups and disorientating angles appear all too infrequently, but, when they do, they elevate the film above its formulaic narrative structure. Despite this, Vigo - A Passion For Life just feels too familiar.
This is biographical filmmaking by-the-numbers: The tortured genius who has to battle an indifferent world; the wife that is loved and then ignored; the kindly producer who sticks by our ‘genius’ despite his radical ideals. The storytelling becomes so clichéd that as soon as a scene begins you can guess exactly where it is heading. Boredom very quickly sets in.
There is also a strange assumption on the part of the filmmakers that its audience knows who Jean Vigo is. Anyone entering without any prior knowledge is left in the dark about his achievements. Many of the major plot-points remain ambiguous and emotionally un-effecting unless you have seen Jean Vigo’s work, which, considering Vigo was an independent French filmmaker from the ‘30s, is unlikely. It is never explained why A Propos De Nice caused audiences to riot, or why Zero De Conduite was banned - we are simply told that they were. This has another unfortunate effect on the film.
As an audience, we are given no evidence that Vigo was a genius, or even that his works were any good. This renders the main character’s dedication to his art as selfish, his outbursts tantrums, rather than the actions of a man pushed to the edge. Vigo does still manage to entertain, and this is mainly to do with Julien Temple.
Temple’s direction mostly involves letting the action unfold, but just occasionally, as has previously been stated, a flash of overt visuality unfolds. For example, near the end, Vigo begins to imagine ‘Death’ as a top-hat wearing man, playing his accordion. In one dream-sequence, Jean and his wife tie up Death with lines of celluloid. At the end of the movie, after both are dead, we see them dancing, as ghostly apparitions upon a barge. Through an interesting use of symbolism, Temple suggests that cinema is a way to fight against the logical order of things; even the inevitability of death. But by this point it is too late. We are asked to mourn for self-important characters that have spent the majority of the film predictably moving from plot point A to plot point B.
An entertaining melodrama hampered by its use of recurring cliché. Julien Temple’s direction shows an understanding of cinematic conventions that far outweighs the quality of a dull, by-the-numbers script. AC
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