Comedy of Innocence (2000)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: François Dumas and Raúl Ruiz

Based on a novel by Massimo Bontempelli

Cast: Isabelle Huppert as Ariane; Jeanne Balibar as Isabella; Charles Berling as Serge; Edith Scob as Laurence; Nils Hugon as Camille; Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre as Hélène; Denis Podalydès as Pierre; Chantal Bronner as Martine; Bruno Marengo as Alexandre

Canon Fodder

 

Judging its initial tone, with a significant French actress in Isabelle Huppert in the lead, Comedy of Innocence feels like a conventional film from the Chilean director Raúl Ruiz. However, as with Huppert's own career being full of idiosyncratic films, and Ruiz's sense of "conventional" filmmaking (including one American film with William Baldwin called Shattered Image (1998)) being unpredictable in itself, Comedy of Innocence does change as it goes along. It is, in a period of working with bigger budgets and actors like Catherine Deneuve, an attempt to make a Ruiz film for a wider audience. But this is still a Ruiz film. This is not even factoring its source material being from a novelist and playwright, Massimo Bontempelli, who worked magic realism, and especially when you compare this to a true exception from the radical career of Ruiz, of a compromise, Comedy of Innocence does prove more radical than presumed. That exception came with one of Ruiz's last films before his 2011 death, A Closed Book (2010). A British produced novel adaptation, of a Gilbert Adair novel with the author penning the screenplay, it was thankfully not his last production, its themes of art and with a lead character being blind, including how he literally has no eyes due to an accident, fully making sense as a subject for Ruiz to tackle but feeling like a movie from a working direction contributing little of their own personality to it. It feels conventional and also feels perfunctory, lacking Ruiz's personality, which would have found its mystery thriller plot twists far less interesting than they are in the actual film we got. Comedy of Innocence, even when it tries to rationally explain key plot points, cannot be extracted from Ruiz's willingness to undermine conventions.

Huppert's lead Ariane finds, after her son Camille's birthday, him telling her he wants to see his real mother. This figure, Isabella (Jeanne Balibar), commands a significant prescience when she enters Ariane's life, a mother who lost her son and with Ariane's son seeing himself to be Isabella's. The film eventually offers an explanation grounded in reality - manipulation both by Isabella but also Camille the son himself being more mysterious than presumed - but Ruiz's film even in the later plot reveal, Camille wanting a different family, feels ghostly and ill-at-ease in spite of its title. This belongs as well to a period of cinema of my youth called the "Artificial Eye" era, which helps considerably for its tone, where the former British distribution company, before becoming Curzon Artificial Eye in the 2010s, distributed world cinema especially French and European films of the late nineties and 2000s very much with this film's presentation. Prominent actors like Huppert herself were in them, many like this are set among middle class or well off families, and their cinematography and visual looks were relaxed with very little to radically challenge the aesthetics, with the use of normal urban environments a commonplace aspect.

This could however prove a fascinating aesthetic for certain directors to make a film within. Again with Huppert, you can look to another film she made within the same year, Claude Chabrol's Merci pour le Chocolat (2000), which in a major spoiler disrupts the idealised middle class French family with the reveal of poison having been used in hot chocolate. Likewise, Ruiz's film here is calm and almost alien to his legacy before, especially his golden era of the eighties for me of delirious filmmaking, but the ghost of that era between the late seventies to The Golden Boat (1990), is evoked. That era was distinct as, working in whether context he could, in a prominent cinematic style especially in the obsession with colour gels, and the ghost of his unconventional plot structures breaks through here in its lapses away from its apparent rational explanations and sudden distorted coloured scenes, the later evoking those eighties films. This film has a lot in common with his previous films. Despite being her beloved son, Camille is very close to a figure like the boy from City of Pirates (1983), who talked of being a killer, Camille here sinister eventually in how he gets more serious, beyond his years, and that when he gets angry. Carrying all the time a film cassette camera, he can even use it to torment a person, even his real mother Ariane, by filming them at a vulnerable moment. Despite very little seemingly happening onscreen beyond the grounded drama, this film's narrative feels haunted as other Ruiz narratives were in strange magical touches beyond logic.

Even within its aesthetic, cutting away many of his flourishes from the past, Ruiz still has his traits here. The cuts to coloured distorted views, or for when Isabella suggests Ariane's own wall paintings in her home on the wall look like pregnant women, all intrude and make the film more elusive than presumed. It is a film, in spite of trying to ground itself in the finale, which feels increasingly at odds to itself on purpose. And whilst more rationalised - i.e. more accessible to a wider audience - this is still a film about eventually Camille having two mothers in a fraught psycho dramatic relationship. That the ghost of Isabella's son may have possessed Camille is evoked, and that his seemingly imaginary friend Alexandre is revealed to be a real boy, who can appear out of nowhere when the crisis even connects to his relationship to Camille, offers a film more than it may suggest on purpose. It lacks the tangents of other Ruiz films, but in mind to the source material's author and he himself, Ruiz makes a film fully of his own still with is dramatically also compelling on a surface level.

It emphasises Ruiz as an auteur, but credit is where it is due too, that this is also a compelling narrative which defies a thriller or a mystery genre template in its structure, and that Isabelle Huppert is a huge virtue here too. Mentioned before, her career, whilst as well being a legend in French and European cinema, has always been idiosyncratic, from a cameo in her earliest roles in novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet's Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) to Jean Luc-Godard's Every Man For Himself (1980). She is a great case of the star as an idol who also encourages creativity in her desire to grow as a performer as, alongside the tradition of idiosyncratic figures like Ruiz being work in French co-franchised films, she is a paradox of a immediately recognisable and bankable actress on the marquee yet one who wants to make her own creative choices which allow unique productions being made. Tilda Swinton is one of the sole figures outside of the European stars, with great legacies, who immediately springs to mind as an equal comparison, and here particularly, this film for me, as a later film from Ruiz, manages to build a rewarding parallel between two different eras of cinema (Ruiz and this era of world cinema) I love to considerable effect.