Hooves on the Turf

Only a few days ago I was thinking: isn’t it amazing that everyone must acknowledge their own death as it’s happening; an incredibly courageous thing to do, even when done in cowardice, which means no mortal escapes at least one heroic deed—the experience of death alone makes everyone’s life extraordinary.

This brings us to Michel Gondry’s latest film. Since reading reviews before watching a movie is a ridiculous idea, I went to Village East Cinema thinking The Thorn in the Heart was about Michel Gondry’s idiosyncratic family, and that the woman in the poster/trailer was his mom; maybe The Gondry’s were a real-life French version of a Wes Anderson family, with a subtler, darker sense of humor. It turns out the primary characters of the documentary are Michel’s 80-something aunt, Suzette, and her middle-aged son, Jean-Yves. Both of them are wonderful characters, but I found the troubled Jean-Yves (who built elaborate sets for his model trains and made Super 8 movies as a child) to be a subject worthy of further investigation; yet the film is less about anything singularly remarkable than it is about the fact of having lived.

“Has anyone read a good review of this movie?” Michel asked before the screening. Once it was over, and as the Q&A progressed, it became clear that he was a little perplexed by the harsh criticism he’d received in the media. By no means was he discouraged, or even convinced (he said he watched it with us from a fresh point of view, and still thought it good), but just perplexed. From the sounds of it, a common complaint seems to be, “What is the point of showing a movie about your aunt to the the whole world?” For one thing, he said, the few theaters screening it doesn’t add up to “the whole world”. What it comes down to was eventually brought up by someone in the audience: the media’s thirst for subjects that are extraordinary or sensational. Michel said, very candidly, what I thought was a poignant commentary on an Avatar-obsessed generation: “When everything is extreme, there is no room for the subtleties of life”. As a generation we find a high death toll in Haiti, outrageous human rights violations, the politics of the food industry, the mother of octuplets all worthy topics of documentation, but don’t know what to make of an ordinary 80-year-old woman’s life, whose only marks of distinction are having taught multiple generations of children, raised a troubled son, coped with her husband’s death, and her increasing blindness.

The criticism probably stems from resentment about Michel Gondry getting away with making a prolonged home video about his aunt. But once a filmmaker has introduced himself through earlier works, you need to have a little faith in him. Michel slipped it in without much emphasis, but it seems his motive was the opposite of reckless filmmaking: as someone who’s had the privilege of making a career out of his hobby, he finds a sense of duty in documenting “ordinary” lives spent toiling. What’s telling is that the film originated from his teenage son’s suggestion, “You should make a documentary about Aunt Suzette, she has so many stories”; and what ’s remarkable is that he’s made no compromise between being a loving relative to his aunt and cousin while pushing them, as a filmmaker, to difficult topics that had long been buried. A perfect example is a scene where Suzette breaks down into tears and Michel moves into the frame to hold his half-blind aunt close to him as he’s filming the scene; this basically encapsulates Michel Gondry: there is no line between his person and his craft.

Stand-out cinematography is absent in this movie, and stop-motion animations that Michel is known for are scarce. When the crew runs out of tapes, they switch to a lo-fi handheld camera, and you can tell that Michel is too invested in the unraveling story to care about production. But you can’t expect him to leave us without his quirks: the transitions feature Jean-Yves’ train models, the movie opens with a long joke at the dinner table, at one point you witness the crew’s failed directions at Suzette, and my favorite: they decide to recreate a scene from the day before in which the middle-aged Jean-Yves is trapped in the bathroom and yells out like a baby to his mother, who only hearing the screeching voice, runs around the house trying to figure out where exactly her son is.