Ma vie sexuelle and I Stand Alone

“‘Ma vie sexuelle’ and 'I Stand Alone’: two important films of the new French New Wave,” unpublished academic paper, fall 2000

In a 1998 New York Times article, Phillip Lopate examined a trend in recent French filmmaking that has been identified as a new French New Wave. Two young directors, Arnaud Desplechin and Gaspar Nöe, offer evidence that a potent new trend, whatever one labels it, has emerged in French cinema. Both directors have installed in their first films a definable authorial signature predicated on inventive formal and narrative strategies. Both directors rebuff objective realism for a more personalized — and stylized — mode of expression. But Desplechin and Nöe, joined under this press-concocted rubric, represent plainly dichotomous strands of the trend.

Ma vie sexuelle

Desplechin is praised by Lopate as “perhaps the most gifted” of the new New Wave directors and typifies the strand of young auteurs that “consists of Parisian, largely Jewish, intellectuals making realistic, urbane, analytical films about the lives of graduate students, wannabe writers, and professionals.” Both Desplechin’s 1992 feature debut, La Sentinelle, and his 1996 follow-up, Comment je me suis dispute … (Ma vie sexuelle), fit neatly into Lopate’s generalized description. The second of these, named by Lopate as “so far the masterpiece of the new New Wave,” is the more considerable of the two and better serves an argument for the director’s auteurist credentials.

Like Eric Rohmer, and less so Francois Truffaut, Desplechin is sensitive to the literary means of conveying his story, a tendency revealed most concretely in the highly novelistic, enigmatic voice-over narration. The narrator, somber and omniscient, delivers the first and the last (offscreen) lines of the film, weaving into and out of the film with the intent not of establishing time and place (though he initially provides a place — Paris — and will later establish time — “three months later,” etc.), or filling in the details of the narrative, but of supplying an interpretive frame through which the viewer may consider the film’s many characters and their entangled relationships. The language is that of a novel not of a film, and the insights that the narration provides seem unusually analytic, even esoteric. (Example: “Paul thinks it his duty to ‘think’ his friends. For him thinking them is a way of caring for them. He believes that his positive thoughts protect his friends from danger.”)

The narration is almost singly devoted to psychological character detail; it is not surprising, then, that one of the film’s earliest sequences finds the film’s apparent protagonist, Paul, on the psychiatrist’s couch, and shifts seamlessly to a childhood episode in flashback.

Desplechin, who co-wrote the screenplay with Emmanuel Bourdieu, relies on flashback and dreams throughout his film, using the same seamless, if not always clearly defined — or even clearly motivated — cutting design as he does in this introductory sequence. At one point, the director employs a psychic device seen in films like Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, installing a character, in this case Paul, in a flashback setting, where he observes his youthful self, and even speaks, unavailingly, to a character who happens to be his cousin Bob.

The shifting of the narrative tense — from the present to the recent or pre-adolescent past, to a present three or six months later — and the oscillations in narrative structure — from reality to dreams to inventive subjective interludes — speaks persuasively about the intellectually, morally clouded universe of these characters, dealing as they are with various existential crises. Paul, a 29-year old philosophy lecturer at Nanterre University in Paris who has not finished his doctorate, aptly characterizes this post-adolescent malaise. “In this way,” the narrator says in the film’s opening sequence, “he lives a half-life waiting to begin what he might call his 'life as a man.’”

Paul isn’t only dealing with this professional or academic crisis, of course. As the film’s title suggests, and as the narrator makes clear moments later, Paul’s sex life is an entirely different matter, one deserving much closer scrutiny.

For 10 years he’s been seeing the same girl, Esther [the narrator explains]. They don’t get along. For almost 10 years they’ve been trying to break up. For two years Paul’s been seeing another girl. But she happens to be his best friend’s girlfriend. Paul considers it impossible to steal someone else’s girl. This is where his problems begin.

Returning to the professional/academic realm, there is also the narcissist scholar Frederic Robier to consider. A former graduate school classmate of Paul’s, who, unlike Paul, has realized his academic promise and become something of a celebrity philosopher, Robier returns to the university to head the epistemology department. Robier and Paul’s uneasy reunion (occasioned by the rescue of a dead monkey from behind a radiator), and two subsequent encounters, are for Paul the source of profound angst and even a psychiatric breakdown. The obscure factors that contributed to the demise of their friendship are ultimately less important than the agonizing reminder of those factors that Robier’s return brings back for Paul; that agony is one of the most explicit, if subtly stated, emotions conveyed in the film.

Paul’s afflictions and various exorcisms, are, however, eclipsed by Esther, who almost imperceptibly becomes the film’s emotional focus. Her character might be easily overlooked: she is, after all, the woman who Paul breaks up with at the end of part one and dismisses repeatedly in conversations with friends and with Esther herself. A long stretch of the film’s second part makes no mention of her. But Deplechin’s story, in one of the film’s few cyclical dramaturgical gestures, finally, perhaps inevitably, returns to Esther and Paul’s relationship.

Of perhaps greater consequence is the investment Desplechin makes in film time and nuanced psychological observation of Esther, who, when we finally see her again, has entered a state of clinical depression. Her delicate, almost ethereal condition gives expression to some of Desplechin’s most imaginative flights of filmic invention, and even affords the director opportunity for the kind of blunt symbolic meaning that is largely absent, or at least muted, in the film.

From a strictly visual perspective, Esther’s individual scenes in the film’s third hour do not seem to amount to much. She is seen beginning classes at a translation school, making friends with another female student, and having what Janet Maslin describes as “worries over her irregular menstrual cycle.” Before this string of events, we are reacquainted with Esther in a chance meeting she has on a Paris street corner with Bob, Paul’s cousin, in which she is literally rendered speechless. It is difficult to determine the exact cause of her speechlessness — I was left as baffled by her halting utterances and imprecise pantomimic gestures as the Bob is — but the effect is nevertheless touching.

In typical Desplechin fashion, the film’s attention remains with Esther, but the setting has changed. Cutting from the street corner where the camera has lingered to observe Esther’s last self-conscious gesture, we are re-situated inside a restaurant at a table with Nathan and Sylvia — Paul’s best friend and his best friend’s girlfriend with whom he was formerly (and surreptitiously) involved. Nathan notices Esther outside on the street and, with Sylvia’s urging, leaves the restaurant to invite her in. Esther’s reaction and perfunctory resistance, seen through the restaurant window, seem consistent with her reaction to Bob; but now, we learn when she sits down at the restaurant table, she is able to express herself vocally. Still, she is uncomfortable and proceeds to knock over a tea cup and a bottle of water — deliberately it seems — and abruptly exits. Her exit sets up one of the film’s most unexpected and revelatory sequences. Striding purposefully down a Paris street (in a brisk tracking shot), Esther begins to recite a letter to Paul, continuing more vulnerably from a table in a café where she addresses the camera directly. “I decided to take a walk to stop my tears,” she explains. “Then I stopped to write this letter.” She doesn’t write the letter; instead, she addresses the camera as if only Paul was watching, reciting her lilting message in tears. The scene epitomizes the kind of thoughtful transgression that makes Desplechin’s film both challenging and richly rewarding.

Desplechin leaves Esther again; but her reappearance occasions one of the film’s most elegant and inventive sequences. In a series of precisely framed static shots, the last of them in long-take, we see Esther doing mundane things — drinking a cup of tea, washing the cup and drying it, sitting on her bed. But underscoring the montage and assigning meaning to it is Desplechin’s very insistence in showing these mundane things. In one of the film’s few instances of character solitude and diegetic calm, Krishna Levy’s otherwise pensive musical score rises on a Ravelian crescendo, ascribing to the quotidian an almost epiphanic significance.

Desplechin further betrays his sympathies for Esther (or, to impute less directorial partiality, his preoccupation with Esther), by staying with her as she goes to her class; appraises herself in the bathroom mirror, clutching her breasts as she playfully mimics the sound of exploding bombs; and grapples with her “irregular” menstrual cycle.

Desplechin renews his theme of transcendent prosaism, reintroducing Levy’s score as Esther prepares to take (in some detail), and then performs, a pregnancy test. The music crests as she lies in her bed, dressed in only a robe, awaiting, and presumably contemplating, the result. The entire sequence runs an extraordinary 10 minutes, removing from consideration all of the film’s other characters and developments. When we are returned to other matters — including what the narrator calls “the ultimate humiliation” for Paul, “the nadir of his decline” — it isn’t long before Esther returns, this time encountering Paul.

Perhaps more important than the encounter is its aftermath. Desplechin sets up a typical counterpoint of emotions, elliptically cutting from a climactic kiss on the street in open daylight to an unsettling shot of Esther, tremulously dialing a hallway telephone, veiled in moody, unnatural light. She is unable to say anything more than, “Hello, Paul?” before breaking down into a fit of inarticulate anguish, sobbing helplessly into the receiver over several long, wrenching moments, in constricting closeup. She desperately composes herself, screaming into the phone: “For me you’re dead” — echoing a line she had spoken to Paul on the street: “Leaving me was your death.” Esther thrusts the phone down and finally settles on the ground. Desplechin’s camera follows her, sinking into abstract light and recording her for several uneasy moments in extreme close-up before abruptly cutting to a shot of her alone in bed.

Over the course of the extended solitary interludes (which I have described) and the painful denouement with Paul, Desplechin has painstakingly set up the scene that follows — the culmination of our encounters with Esther. Having made the rejuvenating discovery of blood on her bed sheet, she places a cigarette between her lips and smiles reflectively, before Desplechin cuts abstractly to a tight, unfocused shot of her hand on her knee. In the shower, she laughs compulsively as the blood, diluted by water, runs down the drain between her feet. But as Levy’s mystic orchestral theme has fully reasserted itself, Esther has slumped to the ground and begun to cry as compulsively as she had laughed.

The scene is an extreme expression of the modulation that typifies Desplichin’s film and the emotionally volatile characters that populate it. The blood — and the menstruation that has resumed to cause it — has important symbolic meaning as it represents Esther’s final liberation from Paul (she had stopped taking the pill after their breakup and was three months late for her period). But the realization finally proves too overwhelming for her, and in anything but a cliché, her laughter turns to tears.

There are, in fact, refreshingly few clichés to be found in the film. Ma vie sexuelle is never facile or conventional in its portrayal of young people, individually or in a group. This seems especially noteworthy when one considers how fraught with formula and convention films handling similar demographic substance can be.

One factor to consider is Desplechin’s screenplay, co-written, as I have mentioned, by Emmanuel Bourdieu. The concerns of these characters, their intellectual and emotional preoccupations, and personal psychologies seem uniquely — and authentically — their own. This is to say that, in much the same way that the younger characters in Jean-Luc Godard’sMasculine/Feminine are idiosyncratic and not the cynical product of contrivance or calculation (presumably at the hands of “out-of-touch” “adults” who would seek to exploit youth culture, making standardized generational assumptions toward debased monetary objectives), Desplechin and Bourdieu’s post-adolescent “yuppies” reveal similar idiosyncratic impulses, and do so rigorously. A sampling of lines from the film offers some support for this assertion. As Paul and Esther are breaking up, Paul says to Esther, in a typical expression of the perverse rationality that pervades the film: “If I screw up my life, I’ll never forgive you.” Earlier he comments: “I can’t go out with a girl if I don’t know how it will end.” Jean-Jacques, a character involved with the troubled and capricious Valerie remarks: “When I’m in your arms, I want to be a hero. Alone, I find myself rather heroic. With you I’m filled with self-disgust.”

Desplechin proves himself willing to subvert convention on another level as well. By film’s end, Paul, Ma vie sexuelle’s nominal hero, has become an ambivalent anti-hero who snoops in Valerie’s bag and reads her diary; misleads Esther (with whom the audience’s sympathies now clearly lie); and resumes his relationship with Sylvia, his best-friend’s girlfriend. More paradoxically, Paul — a student (and former assistant professor) of philosophy — declares near the end of the film to have located the meaning of life inside a pair of panties. “That’s my greatest pleasure. When I realize life is worth living, even if it’s unbearable,” he says.

Desplechin and Bourdieu’s screenplay works with great efficiency, exercising a terse, highly controlled dissemination of narrative detail and devising fluid temporal lapses. A long scene devoted to Jean-Jaque’s New Year’s Eve party at the beginning of the film omits a crucial detail, not revealed until it better serves the context of a fight that Paul and Esther have after the party. As Paul complains that her pot smoking and flirting with the host was “annoying,” Desplechin cuts back to the party to show the omitted scene — a “dis-continuity” device used to more pivotal effect in La Sentinelle.

The subtle shift of scene involving Esther on the street is an example of this temporal fluidity, as are the flashback scenes involving Paul and Sylvia’s relationship, the first of which occurs with no clear narrational stimulus. Cutting from the dimness of Paul’s apartment late in the evening to a white, otherworldly summer sky and craning down to a shot of a swimming pool (which has been cued on the soundtrack by children’s voices) Desplechin transports his narrative to the first flirtatious encounter of Paul and Sylvia.

A much different use of temporal discontinuity, toward a psychological objective, occurs much later in the film. Again, the narrative provides no direct stimulus. Cutting from a lively debate involving Ivan, his diocese delegate, and the dubious bishop, we are deposited into an unfamiliar natural locale, far removed from the film’s Paris setting; only subsequently does the scene reveal itself to be a dream of Paul’s involving a macabre encounter with his adversary Robier.

Francois Gedigier’s editing is important to consider as well. The efficiency of the screenplay is underscored by the cutting. Scene changes are abrupt, with scenes beginning and sometimes ending in seemingly arbitrary, offhanded places. The suddenness of these changes is further produced by the method of scenic transition: using cuts while abstaining almost entirely from the use of dissolves, fades to black, etc. Likewise, the total absence of establishing shots promotes this abruptness, and a sense of dislocation.

The cutting also works on the level of narrative opposition and tonal contrast. A scene where Paul and Esther are fighting in bed cuts to a scene where they are naked in bed, having just made love. “You’re a pain,” she teases him, underlining the irony of the circumstances. This shift of tone is constructed elsewhere in less precipitous fashion.

What becomes clear in watching Ma vie sexuelle, even from the first moments, is the relentless control that Desplechin exerts on the film’s environment and milieu. In this film and in his first film, La Sentinelle, the director seems obsessed with the play of light and dark and of shadows, particularly on faces. Similarly, the undulations of cigarette smoke play into this notion.

Deplechin’s rich, painterly use of color is characteristic of this control as well. Throughout the film, color asserts itself thematically; nowhere is this thematic effect — and tight control of environment — more in evidence than in the title sequence. Leaving Paris, where the prefatory sequence (and the remainder of the film) is set, Desplechin obliquely sets up the flashback to Paul’s childhood that ensues. A stunning montage of static, exterior shots of a river, the rows of houses along the river, bridges and brick walls, and finally a tracking shot that moves along the water, is suffused uniformly in somber blues and looming darkness. The sequence seems to expound upon the oblique but still portentous cue that punctuates the prefatory scene, and as it figures in the title sequence, seems to set a tone for the film.

Desplechin’s use of sound also works toward this notion of control. While much of the sound seems to be naturally derived direct sound, there is use of subjective sound in at least two instances. The first is a scene involving Esther and Paul at the conclusion of part one. Paul has decided to leave Esther and is expounding, tediously, on his decision. Desplechin underscores the tedium and comments on the dearth and perhaps also the excess of meaning in Paul’s words by massing multiple strands of dialogue on the sound track. While Paul alternates between speaking into her right ear and her left, none of the words on the soundtrack appear to correspond with the words being uttered on the visual track. This conflict has the effect of calling the viewer’s attention to Esther, in an attempt to read her expression for any coherence or meaning in Paul’s words. And just as the soundtrack seems “out of focus,” Paul, drifting in and out of view behind Esther, is shot out of focus, again placing an emphasis not on Paul’s words — which the soundtrack is clearly emphasizing — but Esther’s reaction to his words.

The other use of subjective sound in the film occurs later, in the dream sequence that finds Paul coming upon what appears to be his antagonist, Robier, hanging from a tree. In this sequence, the only sound used is the non-diegetic orchestral score that swells up to punctuate the eeriness of the scene. The diegetic silence, allied with unnatural light from a white sky, establishes this eeriness and indicates the scene’s unreal — or dreamed or imagined — origin.

Finally, Desplechin’s authorial control is demonstrated by his direction of actors and by deft optical constructions. A poetry and economy of expression exists throughout the film; a scene early in part one best illustrates this. In the flashback to Paul and Sylvia’s first encounter, Paul intrudes on Sylvia dressing in the locker room. No words are spoken, but a remarkably fluid, if ambiguous, range of meaning is conveyed through physical and facial expression. Opening the stall where Sylvia is undressed, Paul looks on with what appears to be a mixture of ardor and unease. But it’s actually Sylvia’s reaction we see first. She is composed, even apathetic. She turns to face him, to expose herself fully, and sits down on the bench. The cut revealing Paul’s expression of ardor and unease reverses to a shot of Sylvia, now shot in shadowy closeup with the same impenetrable pose, which, in its intrepidity, unnerves Paul, who irresolutely shuts the door.

Ma vie sexuelle makes few claims to realism in the most objective sense of the term (as it applies to film). Desplechin exerts such control over environment and milieu as to make his extensive use of natural settings and lighting sources a form of pure, personalized expression; his screenplay and characterization evince similar iconoclasm; and his direction and representation of actors is again too singular to accommodate any claim of objective realism. A more constructive term to use in discussing the realism of the film might be “naturalism.” Desplechin is attuned to the rhythms and cadences of everyday living, of a very distinctive kind, and his film speaks expressively of his particular sensibilities.

Gaspar Nöe’s I Stand Alone holds objective realism at a similar distance.

I Stand Alone

Nöe is a writer-director who has abruptly asserted himself as part of a new guard of French directors represented by Erick Zonka (The Dreamlife of Angels), Mathieu Kassovitz (Hate), and Bruno Dumont (Life of Jesus). Nöe, apparently, would have little regard for films of Desplechin’s class (artistic or economic), preferring abrasive depictions of working-class experience — thematic matter, to American preconceptions at least, of a decidedly “un-French” character. Then again, Nöe is a director of a decidedly un-French character. Expressing an affinity with American directors Todd Haynes and Todd Solondz, Nöe has attracted comparisons to Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.

Through a bluntly efficient opening sequence we learn that Nöe’s anti-hero, an unemployed butcher — in his own words “a sorry chump” “as common as can be” — was born in 1939 and abandoned by his mother two years later. His father, he learns, was a French communist murdered in a German death camp. At 14, he finds work as a butcher, operating his own shop at age 30. He meets a woman. They conceive a child in a hotel room across the street from the factory where she works. Nine months later she abandons the butcher and their newborn daughter. The daughter is mute and is institutionalized when the butcher is imprisoned for a stabbing. Upon release, he goes to work in a bar. He impregnates the bar’s matron. They leave Paris and move into a dreary flat with the woman’s mother in a suburb in northern France. The date is January 3, 1980 — minutia that magnifies the film’s realism.

In the unsettling events that ensue, we see, through an unflinching lens, the butcher’s misanthropy deepen to the point of a murderous, incestuous, suicidal storm. But it’s the butcher’s off-screen narration, in the form of an interior monologue that puts I Stand Alone at a psychological distance from other films dealing with comparable disaffection — say, Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down. Though it is laced with misogynist, racist and homophobic paranoia, the nihilism Nöe’s butcher espouses is coherent, ideologically consistent, and, at times, persuasive.

Since its New York debut and a limited American release in May 1999, I Stand Alone has gathered favorable attention and even some momentum. But viewer be warned: Nöe’s feature debut, rated NC-17, is difficult viewing. (Nöe concedes the point: a clever title card announces before the film’s most brutal sequence: “WARNING: You have 30 seconds to leave the screening of this film,” counting down the 30 seconds.) The Village Voice called the film “the most disturbing film of the decade.” Yet it is graphically less savage than Man Bites Dog, a 1992 Belgian film shot provocatively in the cinema-verité style. And with its immaculate composition, its deep, solemn hues, and its unexpected eloquence, I Stand Alone resonates long after all the blood has been shed.

The opening sequence, set disquietingly to a martial score on the soundtrack, provides an anterior context, rendering the terse “life story” of the film’s protagonist to which I have earlier referred. Nöe uses in this sequence a kind of montage (that might be better described as a slideshow), framing before a black backdrop a series of stills, in visual harmony with the film’s compositional and tonal agenda. Nöe interrupts the chronology of the images with brisk fades to black, a visual motif established in the prefatory sequence.

The sequence sets up two other motives important to the film. The first of these is an attention to geometrical design; this attention finds expression predominantly in the exteriors of buildings. In the “montage” sequence and throughout the film, Nöe frames square and rectangular structures, calling attention to linear detail, and, in effect, de-emphasizing the utilitarian qualities of an edifice by redefining it in abstract terms. This becomes especially evident in the meticulous compositions that render buildings at pitched angles. Nöe similarly uncovers the abstract qualities of bar counters, bridges, streets and alleyways, and hallways.

The second of these visual motives is the use of color. Like Desplechin, Nöe exerts a painterly control over his physical environment. And like Desplechin, Nöe works in a consistent tonal register, dominated by harvest reds and golden yellows. But thematically, Nöe’s use of color carries with it much different consequences. Unnaturally intense and devoid of any ambiance, the color grimly harmonizes with the narrative. Elsewhere Nöe uses color to similar effect. “Paris can be bleak,” the butcher agonizes upon his return to the city. Nöe underscores the point with shots of a Parisian landscape drained of life and color, imbued in the bleakest browns and grays.

Finally, to offer some scrutiny to the film’s lingual expression: Nöe lays out two overt themes in the film’s opening moments — Morality and Justice — and returns to them throughout the film. Both are tied, through the butcher’s charged off-screen monologue and onscreen dialogue, to class and economics. One unidentified man asks another in the film’s prefatory sequence: “You know what morality is? Morality is made for those who own it. The rich own it.” He waves a gun in the air. “Here’s my justice,” he declares defiantly.

Later, the butcher, in voice-over, fumes:

The rich hardly ever go to prison. Prison is made for the poor. And laws are made for the rich. So the poor got no right to steal. Just to be ripped off and fucked over. … White collar scumbags … can steal your money, your happiness, your dignity. All in total legality. Every day these crooks, sons of crooks, protected by laws written by their kin, slip their hand in your pocket and their finger up your ass.

Nöe’s social and ideological objectives are further established by his characterizing the film’s narrative, in the title sequence, as “the tragedy of a jobless butcher struggling to survive the bowels of his nation.” Where the film Falling Down seems only exploitive of the angst it portrays, Nöe dares to explain, even rationalize his butcher’s extreme alienation and barbarity, placing it in its austere context and never backing down. In creating this context of extreme alienation, both physical and psychological, Nöe engenders a curious empathy for the butcher whose cognitive point of view is the only one we are given. If his words are disposed toward shocking hyperbole and idiomatic excess, we are still not impervious to more introspective moments that find the butcher lamenting: “When it comes down to it, any asshole’s done what I’ve done. I don’t know. I’ve got to find a reason, whatever. Anything to make me want to hang on for another 20 years till I die.”

Nöe’s use of characterization adds further resonance to the butcher’s words. Almost every individual in the film seems only to validate the butcher’s misanthropy, whether she be wife or mother-in-law or he be a prospective employer or immigrant proprietor. The only uniformly sympathetic character in the film — to the butcher and to the viewer — is the daughter, with whom the butcher has a troubled relationship marred by incest, real and imagined.

Characteristic of the film’s difficult ambivalence, the most graphic scene in the film, depicting the murderous, incestuous, suicidal storm to which I have alluded, gives way to a scene of almost sanctifying dimensions, set to the delicate strains of Pachabel’s “Canon in D.”

To conclude, Nöe’s nonobjective (or subjective) orientation functions to intensify the film’s sense of realism while simultaneously producing an unreal effect. This conflict is typified by the intense redness of the blood that spurts rhythmically from the daughter’s neck as she lies on the floor near the end of the film. Ultimately, the entire sequence is revealed to be a projection of the butcher’s thoughts. It is this projection of psychologies, through graphic images and through the running interior monologue, that marks Nöe’s most obvious departure from objective realism.

Likewise, the director departs from an objective filmic style in many obtrusive ways, the most notable of which are the sudden off-screen gun shots which underscore with jarring effect a range of camera movements and cutting devices: zooms in, zooms out, tracks left, tracks right, tilt shots, jump cuts and shock cuts. These gunshots also announce title cards — or nothing at all.

Kathleen Murphy, writing in Film Comment, likens the camera itself to a gun. “Aiming [it] like a gun, Nöe audibly fires shots full of stomach-turning violence and nihilism,” Murphy notes in a 1998 review. In a world — and a film — where “Everyone’s got a gun,” the metaphor is directly on target.

Bibliography

Lopate, Phillip. “Grim, Shocking, Didactic, a New New Wave
Rolls In.” The New York Times, November 22, 1998, Section 2,
pp. 15, 26.

Maslin, Janet. “A Rumpled Don Juan for the Philosophy Set.”
The New York Times, October 3, 1996, Section C, p. 18.

Murphy, Kathleen. “New York (1998 New York Film Festival).”
Film Comment, November 1998, p. 55.