Saturday, July 17, 2010

Correspondances (Eugène Green, 2007)

I'll write about the laptops and e-mails in this "mini-film" Eugène Green made in 2007 some day (36 minutes long, one of those Jeonju Digital Shorts -- and part of the same project that produced Costa's The Rabbit Hunters), but for now I'm preoccupied with a different issue: though Le Monde Vivant, for instance, is often noted for its lack of costuming, Green's as much of a sartorial fetishist as Wes Anderson.

Men: Oxford shirts in muted colors (tucked in, with an unbuttoned collar), jeans and khakis in unfashionable cuts and shades, unshowy boots and dress shoes. Women: plain dresses (neither too long nor too short, sometimes in subtle lace), unpatterned blouses and cardigans, neither too baggy or too tight. Unadorned, but not bare. In short, what Green fetishizes are the young men and women who don't care about fashion, who shop and dress on autopilot because their minds are preoccupied with other things: love, cinema, etc. He can't believe (and he doesn't believe we'd believe) that a person who pays attention to fashion can really be fully devoted to something. His characters own old furniture and plain things, and wear their hair in plain (but never ugly) ways, because they don't care about objects, they care about ideas. And therein lies their youthful beauty.