The Confessional

(Le Confessional, Robert Lepage, Canada/France/UK, 1995)

In the years that I have been a practicing film critic, I have noticed a strange reversal of fortune when it comes to a particular form of cinema. I am speaking of so-called Art Cinema, or the Art Film.

Sometime in the 1980s, the words Art Film – especially European Art Film – became, in some quarters, an automatic term of abuse. This signaled a massive reversal because, once upon a time, in the 1950s and ‘60s, to call something an Art Film (or Art Movie, if you really want to mix things up) was basically to praise it, elevating it above the mass of mere commercial product. When I started getting into film as a tender young cinephile in the 1970s, there was still this elevated aura around the great names of art cinema, like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini or Sergei Eisenstein. But this adulation had clearly gone on for a decade or so too long, and a generation – basically, my 1980s generation – rebelled against it.

My generation bucked against what it perceived to be the snobbishness, elitism and comfortable middle-class-ness of the Art Cinema ethos. This was a cinema that its champions pretended had never been corrupted by money, commerce or vulgar spectacle. We still see the echoes of this absurd posturing today in the Australian career of Paul Cox, for instance. But those echoes have become pretty faint. That’s because film culture took a general turn toward another kind of cinema: popular, Hollywood, genre cinema. This was the illegitimate, unofficial, disrespectable, unsung cinema that now had to be sung into critical existence.

It was an aggressive, often exclusive turn on the part of many. Suddenly, the entire film culture scene seemed to do a massive flip-flop. Back in the mid ‘70s, you might have heard a few back-row grumblings at the (Melbourne) Cinémathèque about how Bergman was a rather dour, overrated figure, obsessed with old-fashioned existential questions like the Death of God. But at least you could still get to see his films fairly easily if you wanted to. By the mid ‘80s, hardly anyone dared show these once-sacred Art Films. Even literary types (such as Peter Craven), by that point, appeared to be more into Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman or John Ford than Fellini or Bergman.

I confess: I was, for a while, a loud participant of the anti-Art-Film push in the 1980s. My feelings of hatred towards Art Cinema crystallised around the time that the American adaptation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being appeared in ‘87. This film, directed by the sometimes excellent Philip Kaufman, struck me as a monstrously fake imitation, an ersatz European Art Movie. But I took it, somewhat counterintuitively, as a trustworthy sign of everything that was sick in that whole vast area of artistic cinema.

When I look back upon my anti-Art-Film efforts, I can see that two things were sticking in my craw at the time. The first problem runs as follows. When people snobbishly dismissed popular Hollywood movies, they would invariably refer to them as horribly conventional and formulaic, bound by rules and codes, and much the same from one to the next. Art Films, on the other hand, seemed to have a mystical, magical privilege; they were visionary, made by artists, and no two of them were meant to be alike.

This is, of course, sheer nonsense. In the mid ‘80s, David Bordwell wrote a perceptive and influential scholarly book, Narration in the Fiction Film. In a stirring section of it, Bordwell set out to demonstrate that the so-called Art Film was a genre like any other. It had its formulae, its protocols, its familiar patterns and strategies, as well as – naturally enough – its clichés.

Bordwell’s insight was valuable and, in an important sense, neutral or descriptive. He was pointing out to us that Art Cinema is a type of tradition, one tradition among the many available to filmmakers. But Bordwell’s description was taken by some readers (as I can testify from many conversations with colleagues) as a satirical critique and, more chillingly, a rallying cry – a death blow against the pitiful masquerade of Art Cinema, an exposé of its pretentious posturing.

The second factor that fuelled anti-Art-Film fever of the time was the phenomenal rise, in many countries, of what is known as the Arthouse Cinema network – all those specialist theatres targeting a niche market audience for Art Films. I describe this rise as phenomenal because it not only captured an existing market but veritably created a new one. Also – and this was especially horrifying for me to observe first-hand – the culture of the Arthouse Cinemas immediately and completely won over very many working critics and reviewers. With the result that certain scribes in certain places basically reviewed nothing except Arthouse releases – which is rather like some Australian TV reviewers (Philip Adams is a prime example) who generally review only programs on the ‘quality’ channels ABC and SBS. As if that amounted to the whole of TV … or the only fraction of it worth attending to.

(Pragmatically, as I was to discover when dabbling in a little TV crit myself, it’s those upmarket channels that tend to most enthusiastically send out preview VHS tapes to reviewers – whereas the commercial channels frequently don’t bother with this at all. Their reasoning is valid: why should they? They already have a dependable, captive audience, and don’t need the often sniffy, bad press of high-minded TV reviewers.)

Today in 1996, the terms Art Film and Arthouse Film are used interchangeably – and both can be wielded as automatic terms of abuse. But let’s tread carefully here. I have had, and continue to have, my problems with the Arthouses – especially with the distributors and exhibitors who run them. The selection of what goes into these cinemas seems to be getting narrower with each passing year. The niche market expands in terms of the number of audience numbers, while the range of films showcased inside it shrinks. For a while there, it seemed that all you could get to see at an arthouse cinema was either a grungey independent American movie (like Clerks, 1994), a comfortably gritty and whimsical British film (like Feast of July, 1995), or a kinky Pedro Almodóvar comedy. So much was missing – and remains missing – from this arthouse portfolio of what is deemed marketable.

However, let’s be clear: Art Film and Arthouse product are not the same thing. Art Cinema is an enormous artistic tradition; Arthouse Cinema is the narrow selection of films that are actually purchased to fill designated-quality theatres. Jean-Luc Godard’s works since the mid ‘80s are most definitely Art Films, for instance, but you won’t see them released in any Australian Arthouse cinema. Those of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami or the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien are major art films, but you’ll only catch them, if you’re alert, on SBS TV.

In short: the anti-Art-Film fever, which we are still living through in ‘96, has gone way too far. These days, it functions as a badge of hipness to be able to instantly sneer at a film by saying, “oh it’s such an art film” or, more simply, “it’s so arty”, or to mumble something about the mysterious “curse of arthouse cinema” – as if this really means or tells us anything except about the spectator’s reflex prejudice. I am alarmed at how often I hear these comments casually spoken around the traps. You hear it said of just about anything that exhibits the slightest Art Film trait.

A movie is mocked, for instance, if it’s about filmmaking, or has a film-within-the-film device. It’s mocked if it has the classic Art Film narrative structure of a meandering journey without a clear destination or resolution. It’s mocked if it has soliloquies in which character speak of the traumas of personal or political history. It’s mocked if its images and sounds are especially enhanced in the manner of a ripe Krzysztof Kieślowski film, thus branded as aestheticisation – another meaningless term of abuse. It’s mocked if it’s about the problems of communication or alienation, or attempts to bear witness to the ‘changing soul of [insert country/region]’.

As you can imagine, the number of great filmmakers tarred with the dreaded Art Film brush has been multiplying at a terrifying rate. Anti-Art Film crusaders cast back to Bergman and Antonioni, they tear through Wim Wenders and Alain Tanner, and they arrive blasting at Tarkovsky and Kieślowski. And the Art Film is no longer contained (as in Pauline Kael’s polemical days) as a specifically (Central or Eastern) European disease. Where, once upon a time, the go-to journalistic joke always referenced some “obscure Polish film about cows in a field”, now, in the film pages of The Sydney Morning Herald as elsewhere, it is Asian Art Cinema – such as the Taiwanese masterpieces of Tsai Ming-liang or Hou – that garners reflex abuse. That’s not only stupid; it’s racist, too.

Although, as I’ve admitted, I too once carried the flag against Art Cinema, a switch clicked in my head some years back. How can any serious film lover actually be against something as large and important as the Art Cinema tradition of the whole world? Any tradition that can give us, to mention only a few films of the past decade, Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), Theo Angelopoulos’ Landscape in the Mist (1988) or Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991) – that is an incontestably great tradition which has to be acknowledged, and more than that, loved, nurtured and internalised. It’s not elitist or middle-class to bear that witness and admit that truth. I’m not advocating another grand-slam reversal, some turning of the cultural tables like “let’s go back to Art Films and forget all this dirty, popular cinema stuff”. No way: I know that I need both kinds of cinema to survive, and I suspect that most of us true film lovers do. 

In 1996, it’s not much of an advantage for a movie – at least in Australia – if it looks, sounds, moves or talks anything like a so-called typical Art and/or Arthouse film. Some ambitious, intriguing works are suffering, sometimes dying a rapid box-office death, because of this anti-Art-Film reflux. Take, for instance, the Canadian film The Confessional. It’s the debut feature of Robert Lepage, a theatrical wunderkind who is, let’s say, the Barrie Kosky of Canada. The Confessional is not a great film by any standard, but it’s serious, interesting and felicitious all way through. By that I mean that every single scene has some captivating touch in it: an actor’s gesture; a particular use of colour, decor or architecture; a striking camera angle.

It reminded me often of another Canadian piece, Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994). Both are in that peculiarly modern mode which could be called the mystery-thriller art film – more mystery than thriller, more mood than action; with a slow, drugged, subterranean rhythm. The Confessional is about enigmas of the past: family enigmas, skeletons in the closet, as in Exotica. Like in Egoyan, there is an underground/outlaw sex element – a seedy club, where Lepage draws out a comparison between the confessional booth in a Catholic church and the cubicles reserved for lap dancing and other perverse practices between consenting adults.

Here’s the plot. Lothaire Bluteau (who was Jésus of Montréal in 1989, and is rather lifeless here) plays Pierre Lamontagne, a dreary, sexless guy who returns home to Quebec upon the death of his father. He seeks out his adopted brother, Marc (Patrick Goyette), in the local gay steam baths. Together, they start working though the murky secrets of their shared past.

This past involves the accusation that Marc’s mother (Suzanne Clément) was impregnated by a dashing local Catholic priest (Normand Daneau) back in 1952. And this is the hinge that allows Lepage to introduce a whole other layer which is … yes, a film being made within the film! Except this time it’s a real, historic film, I Confess, which was indeed shot by Alfred Hitchcock in Quebec. That movie (not among Hitchcock’s best, alas) is also about a Catholic priest (Montgomery Clift), as well as secrets, complicities and accusations. So Lepage gets his money's worth from intercutting footage from the original with his own scenes – some shot in the exact same locations across an expanse of 33 years.

The Confessional reminded me of a contemporaneous Australian film, Margot Nash’s Vacant Possession (1995). In both, there is a return home, the burning memory of a family trauma that needs to be healed, and a troubled, thoughtful reflection on national identity (Canadian or Australian) as lived by the fairly rootless citizens of the modern world. I suspect that Vacant Possession was received unkindly by some people because of its Art Film properties: the theme of the personal mixed with the political, for instance, or its dreamy interweaving of past and present in the same space of a deserted house – something which Nash does with more panache than Lepage.

Some aspects of The Confessional troubled me. For starters, the scenes of Hitchcock (Ron Burrage) and his sultry, blonde assistant (Kristin Scott Thomas) verge on superfluity – a potentially good idea taken nowhere. More deeply, like many Art Films, Lepage invests in a structural conceit (and I don’t intend that term to be necessarily derogatory – all forms are conceits of one kind or another): everything happening on every level falls into symmetrical, mirroring patterns. The result is not as half as deadening as the elaborated hyper-conceits of most Peter Greenaway films, but it does carry a whiff of rigor mortis. The obsessively contrived rhymes and echoes tend to inflect all the characters with the same morbid, melancholic destiny. And the plot’s harping on myriad dysfunctions of familial and sexual identity strikes an unexpectedly conservative note.

More troubling still is the overdetermined emotional effect of all this mirror-patterning. Suicide, for instance, is an important motif in this film, pictured in the repeated image of blood filling a bath, as a dying or dead body floats in the red water. Lepage contrives three different ways of giving us an image like this. The contrivance and the repetition have a forced, emotionally untrue quality – with the effect of plastering a death-drive over all the characters, whatever their individual natures or possible destinies.

That forced, icy quality of solemnity did at moments bring back to me what I once grew to hate in Art Films: a tendency towards archness and preciousness, bottoming out sometimes in a total lack of humour or irony. Mercifully, The Confessional is not at all humourless or unengaging. It stays with you, it lingers, it has a touchingly earnest quality. And earnestness can bring its own, special intensity.

MORE Lepage: The Polygraph

© Adrian Martin July 1996