DESPLECHIN: AUTHORSHIP AND ESTHER KAHN
By Zach Campbell
It's a bit unsettling to look forward to a movie so much and then see it live up to every expectation and, at the same time, defy them all. Esther Kahn accomplished this, and ever since I walked out of the theater, alone, feeling as though I should find a park bench and cry for a while, I have been unable to get this film out of my head.
Esther Kahn took a while in getting here, but that's not unusual for Arnaud Desplechin's films. His first feature to be distributed in the United States was My Sex Life, or How I Got Into an Argument, a three hour drama about a philosophy student and his friends and lovers. It was made in 1996, and released here the following year. I suppose its relative success brought on the release of the one feature film that Desplechin made prior to My Sex Life, which was La Sentinelle—made in 1992, and release in the States in 1998. Esther Kahn premiered in 2000, and is only now playing commercially in America, two years afterward. When a film this good is delayed for so long, it's troubling.
Over two and a half hours long, Esther Kahn is based on a section (of the same name) in Arthur Symons' book Spiritual Adventures. The story is only about twenty pages long, ironically. Symons is a now-obscure figure in British literature, but for some of his lifetime he was a respected, established writer, poet, and critic. Roger Lhombreaud's biography of Symons laments that "practically nothing" was written on him for the fifteen years before and after the author's death. Since then, little more has been published. Symons remains, according to Lhombreaud, "one of the most important interpreters of French literature in England," and he is often lumped in with the Decadent writers of the late Nineteenth century.
What is fascinating about Symons is that, despite his very real links with the Decadent poets and other prominent intellectuals of his time (he assisted a young James Joyce on a few occasions), he was "aside and aloof from any movement" (Lhombreaud). The character Esther Kahn is similarly distanced from the people in her own environment. A key passage, early in Symons' piece, reads, "The gestures of people always meant more to her than their words; they seemed to have a secret meaning of their own." How much Symons' own life contributed to the creation of Esther as a displaced character is beyond me, but it certainly contributed something.
It becomes difficult to tell where Esther Kahn, the film, remains a skilled adaptation and where it becomes a new, transcendent expression of one of the most exciting intellectuals in contemporary French narrative cinema, Desplechin himself. The film is like no other I've ever seen; that description is clichéd, perhaps even when it comes to this specific work. But it is true.
Take, for instance, a particularly stunning scene in which Esther Kahn, walking home from her new job at the factory, meets her rabbi. The introductory shot is of Esther, in long shot and in the right of the frame, her back to the camera, in the foreground; then the rabbi, in long shot on the left, several feet behind Esther, facing the camera. The camera appears to zoom in to the rabbi, and then smoothly pans right to a close up of Esther's face in semi-profile—it's not a zoom after all, but a physical camera movement, for in order for the pan to have been possible, the camera could not have zoomed in and remained stationary several paces behind both Esther and the rabbi. The shot of Esther's face is held for a few moments as she speaks. Then, a cut to a shot of the reverse composition of the original, with Esther on the left (facing the camera) and the rabbi on the right (back to the camera). This positions Esther as the pivot for the camera: her movements and existence are what inform the way Desplechin moves his camera and cuts his footage.
It is the same way with spatial aesthetics, where Esther is constantly cramped. Even outdoors, her surroundings threaten to overwhelm her. The stark architecture she passes by and under never impose themselves, but they nonetheless exert a sense of suffocation. Even during her trip her sick grandmother's room is tight: though she is outside, the narrow walkway dictates a strict, predetermined course for her. The one consistent exception to this rule of emotional and physical claustrophobia is the stage. When Esther performs, she is free to move in the open space onstage, and she is free to mimic others and express herself: an action she learned as a child never to perform at home.
This ventures into the realm of acting, which is a tricky one to navigate when talking about Esther Kahn. Some have characterized Summer Pheonix's performance as being difficult to judge as "bad" or "good." I don't have any problems labeling her turn a magnificent one, so I have few internal conflicts to work out in relation to how Pheonix's performance is in itself a text to look into for the way movie acting can blur the lines between fiction and reality and speak great truths. What interests me more is the way Desplechin refuses to valorize Esther's ascent into being a great actress and a strong woman. The few scenes that show her acting or rehearsing reveal an unexpressive speaker who moves stiffly and without much enthusiasm. By eliminating the dramatic payoff of depicting success, Desplechin makes it clear that his focus is solely on Esther herself and not what her professional status is supposed to represent. This is not about the birth of a star, but the transformation of a person—a subject both more mundane and more profound than the former.
Esther Kahn (like My Sex Life) is narrated, which makes another high-profile film that uses old-fashioned third-person narration (other recent examples are A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Amélie, and The Royal Tenenbaums). Esther Kahn is perhaps less stylized in its narration than the others: the speaker tends to be a little more straightforward, not clever as in Jeunet or Anderson, and not wise as in Spielberg. He merely observes, which is what the entire film is about, in a way: Esther observing others, and the audience observing Esther. Desplechin's un-ironic use of irises in the first part of the film (they are abandoned in the narrative shortly after Esther gets her first acting job) clue us in to the idea of focusing on particular elements of a larger picture: barely concealed hurt and anger circulating through the veins in Esther's fists clenched around her chair, for example.
The degree of care and devotion given to Esther are qualities that are visible in both La Sentinelle and My Sex Life. What makes Esther Kahn a strikingly different experience is the manner in which Desplechin relays this. In all three films, the actors are given a lot of range, and are photographed in a way that allows them to differentiate themselves from one another. (In My Sex Life, the only character who I felt was "pinned down" by the camera was Sylvia, because of her constant nude motif that propelled the character into an objectified status.) It is essentially a combination of distinct personalities that colors Desplechin's first two features.
Esther Kahn is something apart, however. It is not so much just a combination of personalities as it is a blending of acting styles and tones, so that Summer Pheonix's internally charged opacity co-exists naturally with Ian Holm's reserved, traditional turn (which is no less skilled, if perhaps less engaging).
What's more, Desplechin's cinema is one that, for me, is most fascinating when it depicts characters reacting. In La Sentinelle, this could involve the reaction of Emmanuel Salinger to the bizarre shrunken head that haunts him, or perhaps the more realistic situation: reaction to his unappealing roommate. The passages in My Sex Life that I found more involving and intelligent were the most surreal, absurd, macabre ones: the monkey behind the radiator, Matthew Amalric's dream about his hanging rival, his flashbacks of Sylvia. This cinema of reactions reaches its purest, most extracted crystallization so far in Esther Kahn, which involves nothing if not predominantly the story of a woman reacting to what she sees, and it sets up acting as nothing more than the human action made to filter experience through our own physical, mortal controls.
One can say that this happens, on a smaller scale, with the character Esther in My Sex Life (Emmanuelle Devos, who is as irksome in Esther Kahn as a minor character as she is sympathetic in My Sex Life as a major character). The events to which she must react are very different from those that her boyfriend Paul (Amalric) reacts to: hers involve relationship problems and her menstrual cycle, more realistic problems that culminate and come through in Esther's speech, delivered brilliantly by Devos to Amalric in one scene in a park. This was the most moving scene in My Sex Life, and strangely enough it contradicts the genius of those more surreal scenes I found so enjoyable and evocative. I think what this points to is that Desplechin possesses a two-pronged talent of depicting human reaction. The first, and easier, method is to throw in strange devices that create abnormal circumstances, creating environments for fascinating psychological studies with the characters. This is what La Sentinelle bases most of its appeal on, and it makes up much of My Sex Life's appeal as well. But the second method, which has become more apparent in the later part of Desplechin's small oeuvre, is one in which people only react to each other, and whereas Desplechin made mistakes, or did not go far enough, in much of My Sex Life, he has captured it perfectly in Esther Kahn: after all, if my theory about acting is correct, than virtually every scene is specifically about one person reacting to another, and Esther reacting to all of it through her acting, her dreaming, her self-inflicted misery.
This is not to say that Esther Kahn is devoid of those initial "strange devices" (shrunken heads, dead monkeys). The form in which we find them in Esther Kahn, however, is not so much in the plot as it is in individual scenes, amplified for emotional effect. I would say the equivalent of Emmanuel Salinger trying to figure out why the hell a shrunken head is in his life is mutated into Esther "shocking" the audience by repeatedly hitting herself or eating glass. (I was unable to see the longer cut of Esther Kahn, but I hear of a surreal dream sequence that could also fit into this category.) If Desplechin really is a director of reactions, and his work in this realm is separable into two different methods, then what we have is the work of a filmmaker confidently asserting his own talents, and developing his strengths so that they not only grow stronger and more refined, but they also evolve.
It is with this theory that the concept of progression in Esther Kahn, dealing with the character herself, can be linked to Desplechin's own progression. He is gradually becoming a major talent (though, in many ways, he already is). For his sake, I hope the emotional nature of his own journey is less devastating than it was for poor Esther.