Max Mon Amour
This week we are showing Nagisa Oshima’s *Max, Mon Amour *(1986) on *Thursday 4/2, *at 7pm.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors are at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10.
The From Below is Going Ape for April! Or as it shall now be known, Ape-ril! For four weeks, we’ll be exploring the gossamer thin boundary that separates humans from our simian siblings in the evolutionary tree. While the presence of primates and monkeys on-screen often carries more than a whiff of stunt-casting and sideshow hucksterism (and the potential animal rights questions therein), there are many movies that use anthropoid actors to raise worthwhile quandaries into the porous nature of consciousness and humanity.
First stop: Chimpanzees in the world of French bourgeois mores in Nagisa Oshima’s Max, Mon Amour (1986)!
There’s that famous selective attention test, in which the participants are asked to track the amount of basketball passes performed by a filmed group of actors, all while in the background a gorilla (or, rather, a person in a gorilla suit) passes through the action, usually without being noticed. It’s maybe a bit Psych 101, sure—Stefan introduced it to their third graders earlier this school year to much bemusement—but it serves as a nice little metaphor for Max, Mon Amour. Not that you won’t notice the chimp in this picture—you definitely will!—but conceptually, as Oshima and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, the prolific collaborator of Luis Buñuel, plop the hirsute ape into a more conventional set-up for French chamber drama, with the affairs and deception and comedy of manners one expects from that milieu. In doing so, they test the limits of dramatic convention, seeing how far a movie can go to incorporate a chimpanzee as a ordinary dramatic actor, as Charlotte Rampling’s tryst to get back at her philandering husband, while having the actors around the ape work to normalize and make invisible his genetic difference. It’s a surrealist masterstroke fitting of Buñuel himself.
As for Oshima, it’s a strange cross-cultural fusion of high European art film and the transgressive, nakedly leftist Japanese auteur, but I imagine he enjoyed taking aim at continental proprieties and sanctimony. His French connections go deep, though; one of his early works, 1960’s Night and Fog in Japan, riffs on title of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog to craft a mirrored (if formally distinct) film regarding the long fallout of WWII from the Japanese perspective, as filtered through the crackdown on leftist student groups by US-appeasing authorities in the era of Red Scare. From Below trackers may notice the pairing of Hiroshima Mon Amour and this week’s film as more irresistible curatorial punnery. Later, for his uber-transgressive Freaks Only masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses, Oshima had to ship the undeveloped reels to France to escape Japanese censorship, making it an ‘official’ French coproduction.
We’re excited to kick off Ape-ril with you this week!
Charlie, Stefan, Stark