Leos Karax is looking for a “soul sister”
French filmmaker Leos Karax is the author of talented and crazy films. He has made only 4 films, however all 4 were considered top movie events.
Leos Karax has surrounded his name with legends and makes films, the bottom-line of which is love. Actress Catherine Deneuve, cast in Karax’s “Pola X” movie, said that for Karax love is either too little or too much, and often it turns into a disease. Karax makes heroines of his movies the women whom he falls in love with. And when the love is over, he stops making films till he falls in love again. When talking to us in Yerevan he said, “I am almost a retired filmmaker, and cannot film too many movies because I think that certain things must be changed in my life so that I can start to think about new films.” He said that there is a very appropriate expression in French. When people are looking for a close person they are saying, “Looking for a soul sister.” “And cinema is the rendezvous of soul sisters,” he said.
For Karax, the Caucasus and Russia are very interesting. He also likes to read the novels of Dostoyevski and Plotonov, and thinks that his next film will start from our region. Karax avoids the glitter of cameras and noisy journalists. He prefers to lock himself inside an empty room or silently stand on the street to watch the flowing rhythm of traffic. Only he knows where this rhythm can take us. “Even in my fatherland of France I feel myself as a stranger, and when I appear in foreign countries I feel even more lonely and confused. Of course it also happens when during the change of the environment this feeling of solitude suddenly disappears.”
Bold Iranians
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi decided to make his “Out of game” movie when his daughter, 12, asked him to let her go and watch a soccer match in Teheran stadium. “I knew that it’s not allowed but couldn’t refuse my daughter. I told her we could go but to promise that she would go home when she got convinced that they wouldn’t let her enter the stadium.” The girl wasn’t allowed to go to the stadium and sit next to men, but the daughter found a way. “My daughter didn’t tell me how she had tricked the police, but when she got home I decided to make a film about it,” Panahi said in Yerevan before the presentation of his movie.
Jafar Panahi’s previous two films are prohibited to be shown in Iran. And when the filmmaker decided to film his third movie he decided to be slightly cunning and not include his name among the filmmaking staff. Besides that, he decided not to include very famous actresses to play the role of women in men’s outfits. That way it would be safer. “I wanted to create not a serious film but a funny one,” said the director. The movie “Out of game” is a fun story about sports and the fans that wish to struggle to get into the stadium. This film actually creates more questions than answers. The girls in boys’ outfits get arrested and are kept in the stadium till the end of the match. In those scenes the girls are not victims at all, and even make demands. The law that forbids them to be in the stadium next to men also protects them from being detained, because no men can touch them or scream at them. This is the beginning of pretty ambiguous and absurd scenes. If the woman wants to go to the restroom, no man can be around her. But how can you make sure that no one enters the bathroom if there are hundreds of thousands of men in the stadium? And one of the soldiers, who is at the stadium and who hates soccer and was there just on duty, does his best to make sure that no one enters the bathroom while the girls are in there. And one of the girls takes advantage of this and runs to the stadium, as the soccer game is calling her. The sexual inequality seems distinct for both girls and guys. The girls are talking to their guards and asking them why they cannot watch the game. “Because during the game the men curse and the women shouldn’t hear that,” answers the soldier, whose only dream at that moment is to get rid of the girls and go back to his home village. “I will plug my ears,” promises one of the girls. They respond to her, “You can’t plug them properly anyway.” This illegal situation is suddenly turned into a short-term friendship among the people present at the soccer stadium. When the people of Iran are celebrating their victory in soccer, the outlaw girls and the officers are starting to understand each other and spare each other’s feelings.
The creation of this film proves that film directors even in the conditions of strictest criticism are able to create tiny masterpieces. If real life doesn’t satisfy them, they create a new life and situations on the screen. And the “out of game” situation becomes a new game, where it’s quite easy to understand each other.