{"id":225,"date":"2003-12-14T00:28:44","date_gmt":"2003-12-14T04:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=225"},"modified":"2003-12-14T00:28:44","modified_gmt":"2003-12-14T04:28:44","slug":"comedy-of-innocence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=225","title":{"rendered":"Comedy of Innocence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Raoul Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence<\/em><\/a> is an oddly disturbing film, creepy despite (as well as because of) its great degree of abstraction. In an icily haut-bourgeois<\/em> Parisian home, a 9-year-old boy demands to be taken to the home of a complete stranger, telling his mother (Isabelle Huppert) that this other woman (Jeanne Balibar) is his real<\/em> mother. An odd triangle develops, with the boy as the pivot and seeming instigator of a not-quite-conflict between the two women, equal parts underhanded seduction, implicit menace, and (if this is not an oxymoron, or – on second thought – even if it is) understated hysteria. Although Freudian overtones are suggested (the father is absent, on a business trip, while all this happens), and despite a (somewhat surprisingly for Ruiz) more or less coherent explanation of the mystery by the end, this is a film whose enigmas, and unsettling moods, are not so much psychological as ontological. Ruiz’s long tracking shots, explorations of empty deep space, insistent focusing upon odd details, and occasional defocusings, set against a deliberately over-formal acting style, make everything feel insecure because it is revealed as hollow. But the viewer’s emotional responses are not so much undermined by what I can only call an anti-revelation, as set curiously adrift.
\nI can perhaps explain this better by a few comparisons. When Godard calls attention to the fictionality of his films, he is actually affirming social reality as something that exists outside fictive representations; the result of undermining the film’s “reality-effect” is to reinforce the reality of the film as<\/em> a social practice, and as a construction of images and sounds. But when Ruiz undermines his<\/em> film’s reality-effect, the result is the corrosion, or de-solidification, of any sort of reality, that of the film, and that of the world as well. Again, when Bunuel, for instance, exhibits the hollowness of his bourgeois protagonists, the result is a kind of gleeful liberation into absurdity; Ruiz makes moves which on paper are equally “surreal,” but the effect is one of being sucked into metaphysical quicksand, rather than one of subversion and unconscious release through laughter. Ruiz is neither a Godardian constructivist, nor a Bunuelian surrealist, but (I’m reaching here) a queasily cerebral paradoxicalist, which is something far more unusual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raoul Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence<\/em><\/a> is an oddly disturbing film, creepy despite (as well as because of) its great degree of abstraction. In an icily haut-bourgeois<\/em> Parisian home, a 9-year-old boy demands to be taken to the home of a complete stranger, telling his mother (Isabelle Huppert) that this other woman (Jeanne Balibar) is his real<\/em> mother. An odd triangle develops, with the boy as the pivot and seeming instigator of a not-quite-conflict between the two women, equal parts underhanded seduction, implicit menace, and (if this is not an oxymoron, or – on second thought – even if it is) understated hysteria. Although Freudian overtones are suggested (the father is absent, on a business trip, while all this happens), and despite a (somewhat surprisingly for Ruiz) more or less coherent explanation of the mystery by the end, this is a film whose enigmas, and unsettling moods, are not so much psychological as ontological. Ruiz’s long tracking shots, explorations of empty deep space, insistent focusing upon odd details, and occasional defocusings, set against a deliberately over-formal acting style, make everything feel insecure because it is revealed as hollow. But the viewer’s emotional responses are not so much undermined by what I can only call an anti-revelation, as set curiously adrift.
\nI can perhaps explain this better by a few comparisons. When Godard calls attention to the fictionality of his films, he is actually affirming social reality as something that exists outside fictive representations; the result of undermining the film’s “reality-effect” is to reinforce the reality of the film as<\/em> a social practice, and as a construction of images and sounds. But when Ruiz undermines his<\/em> film’s reality-effect, the result is the corrosion, or de-solidification, of any sort of reality, that of the film, and that of the world as well. Again, when Bunuel, for instance, exhibits the hollowness of his bourgeois protagonists, the result is a kind of gleeful liberation into absurdity; Ruiz makes moves which on paper are equally “surreal,” but the effect is one of being sucked into metaphysical quicksand, rather than one of subversion and unconscious release through laughter. Ruiz is neither a Godardian constructivist, nor a Bunuelian surrealist, but (I’m reaching here) a queasily cerebral paradoxicalist, which is something far more unusual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}