Dom: Recently I finished watching the entire filmography of a director – which is one of those rare things that actually doesn’t happen very often for us. Liam goes through filmographies more than I do. It’s also difficult when the directors have been working since the sixties or whatever, and it’s difficult to catch up with their filmography. But Jean-Pierre Jeunet has only been working since the nineties, so that was fairly easy. He’s only made a few films as well, only five feature films. He has one coming out this year, but I’m not going to include that for this. He also has another short film that I haven’t seen and again I’m not going to include that because I am lazy. So, in order, his first film was Delicatessan… actually no, he did a student film, I’ll talk about that first. The film was called Things I Like, Things I Don’t Like which starred Dominique Pinon, the guy who stars in every Jeunet film. It’s him talking about things he likes and things he doesn’t like. It’s a very brief film, there’s a bit of visual trickery and it’s fun to watch! It’s not going to blow your mind, but very few short films do, I guess. Depending on the director.

Liam: Four words: The Muscles, Rocket Man.

Dom: Unless they’re into short films like Svankmajer. And anyway, his first feature film was Delicatessan, a film about a post-apocalyptic world and a butcher who finds people, kills them and sells their meat to people. The butcher has a daughter who’s not entirely unattractive, but looks otherworldly. Almost like Mr Bean’s girlfriend. And Dominique Pinon flirts with the aforementioned girl when he becomes the butcher’s apprentice, and ahh, it turns out that he was a clown! And all these people are looking for him, and… it’s actually a bit too complicated to go into here. In fact, I’m not sure if I completely understood all of the plot, but it didn’t really matter because the scenes were always enjoyable enough or emotional enough or visually stimulating enough to work well. Jeunet has this thing that becomes more obvious in Amelie, where he deliberately shoots things with a very noticeable, vivid colour pallete; his films are very green and brown, and it always conjures up this image of France as being very stereotypically French, very idealistic. That’s essentially why Amelie got rejected from Cannes, because they thought it was too obviously French. It was too happy and uninteresting to them. And that was the cut without music, so that would’ve been interesting. Imagine Amelie without music. And not only was Amelie really damn popular, probably the most popular film of that year, but every Cannes from that year on has become more and more dark and disturbing (laughs). The official selection this year was extremely gloomy, with Kinatay, Antichrist and The White Ribbon.

Liam: Well, to get into the official selection next Cannes, Jeunet should maybe take some pointers from fellow Frenchman Gaspar Noe. Perhaps they should collaborate.

Dom: Well, interestingly I think Jeunet’s next film is some sort of war flick, so it’s no Amelie. But it’s not like A Very Long Engagement. I don’t know, I’m probably totally wrong on this, but I was thinking like… his version of Inglourious Basterds. But anyway, that’s Delicatessan. It’s a very black comedy, and it’s very… I don’t really know if critics liked it (Roger Ebert didn’t like the first two Jeunets, that and City of Lost Children). I think that Jeunet’s films are more audience hits than critical hits. Although with City of Lost Children I can see where Ebert’s coming from because I didn’t really like it as much. Actually wait, it wasn’t City of Lost Children next, it was Alien Resurrection next! Which again I didn’t really like. It’s funny, because it does have distinctive Jeunet touches to it. It’s odd, for a start. Again it has a bizarre colour palette and everything looks unrealistic, even for a sci-fi film. Deliberately unrealistic, I should add. Dominique Pinon plays a character in a robotic wheelchair with guns and… it’s really weird and ridiculous. It’s still not very good, but again I’m not sure if you can blame this sort of thing on the directors, because David Fincher did Alien 3 and hated the shit out of it, totally disowned it. Like David Lynch and Dune. Fincher went on to make Fight Club and Se7en – and like Jeunet, he is a director with a love for insane colour schemes – and interestingly, every director who has worked on the Alien series actually has been a good director, which is very strange for a franchise.

Liam: Yep.

Dom: I’m going to be ostracised because I’m going to point out that with Alien… I didn’t really like any of the Aliens much, to be honest. I enjoyed them all, I mean, I watched them all in order. I have the boxset; I’m not sure why I do, but I do. Back when I had enough money to just blind-buy anything. They were all enjoyable but at the end of it I didn’t find any of them particularly amazing. I think I’m totally the wrong age group for it, I don’t know. With Alien, it IS very cleverly done, but it is still a shocker film as opposed to the films that started all that kind of thing, like Psycho, how many actual in-your-face scary scenes are there? There’s like two. One is incredibly famous, the other one not-so-famous. And it’s like… yeah. Alien Resurrection wasn’t that good. And City of Lost Children also wasn’t that good. (laughs)

Liam: Are you really a Jean-Pierre Jeunet fan?

Dom: (laughs) I’m surprised, actually, I expected City of Lost Children to be a lot better, but it was just too confusing, plot-wise. I don’t usually find that to be a particular issue. You know, I sat through three hours of Inland Empire and didn’t give a shit if I didn’t understand any of it. The thing that makes it work is that every single scene, even if you don’t understand what’s actually going on as such, in terms of plot or whatever, you get some sort of feel from it. In Lost Highway most of the time you get more of a creepy, horror feel whereas in Inland it’s… well, I don’t know what it is, but you feel emotional in some scenes, you feel like laughing a lot in some scenes, and in others you just feel piss-scared. It’s a really ambivalent thing, like some of the scenes in Eraserhead where you’re torn between a bunch of emotions. And in Eraserhead, there is a scene where I was so devastated by what the main character had done. In City of Lost Children there was none of that, and in Delicatessan there kind of was, even if you didn’t understand particularly what the characters are or what they’re doing, you get a feeling for them as people, whereas in City of Lost Children you just have a bunch of non-descript kids and Ron Perlman, who was also in Alien Resurrection. He’s this beefy American actor. To his credit, he learned all his lines phonetically in French, so good on him! But he… I don’t mean this as an insult, but he actually looks like an orangutan.

(Liam bursts out laughing)

Dom: (laughs) I don’t mean that as an insult. He does, his face, he even has reddish kind of hair. It’s him, he’s lost his brother to these people who use kids to manufacture dreams, and he is helped by this little girl. They have this really strange relationship which… feels kind of paedophilic, since they kind of sleep together and stuff, but I don’t think it’s intended to be paedophilic. I’ve got no idea, it’s really weird! I can’t picture Jeunet doing that, although in Amelie there are scenes where she wonders about orgasms, so I don’t know, how innocent is his work? (laughs) This was his dark period too, so yes. It’s also funny because the girl looks a lot like Eli from Let the Right One In, so that made me think even more of paedophilic undertones. (laughs)

Liam: That scene in Let the Right One In will haunt me forever. I remember I left the room deliberately as I was watching it with my friend Lachlan, and from the bathroom I heard this horrified scream of “WHAT THE HELL” coming from his room.

(Dom laughs)

Liam: In one incident my dad was asleep on the lounge out the back, so I decided to watch Let the Right One In. And of all the times for him to wake up he had to wake up during THAT SCENE.

(Dom laughs)

Liam: “WHAT IN THE BLAZES?!?!” Yeah, he wasn’t expecting it.

Dom: Exactly, you don’t really watch these movies in public. But yeah, City of Lost Children. At one point there’s sixteen versions of Dominique Pinon, you know, stuff like that. It’s just way too confusing. And then, a couple of years later there’s this sudden turnaround and he makes Amelie, which is delightful; it’s ridiculously fun to watch. It’s two hours but it honestly feels like twenty minutes. I could watch it on repeat, I literally could. I’ve probably said that about a few movies, like I don’t think I could actually watch Satantango on repeat even though I really would love to go through it again, but yeah. It’s just so joyous; it’s the sort of campy, happy France that you imagine France to be like when you’re thirteen.

Liam: I should say, I watched Irreversible a day before I watched Amelie; two French films by two modern French directors. Total polar opposites who present two totally different visions of France. Although now I think about it, the colour schemes in both films were kind of similar, so it’s funny interpreting Amelie as the aboveground, daytime of France, and in Amelie’s universe, Irreversible still happens at night.

(Dom laughs)

Liam: So basically Amelie walks out of her apartment and down into this dingy underground crossing, and THAT scene happens!

Dom: Amelie sets up people in the movie, she sets up Dominique Pinon with the hyperchondriac girl. He seems to be this kind of aggressive, wife-beater guy, and so then they enter the world of Irreversible and he beats her up and then smashes her face in with a fire extinguisher.

Liam: The idea of him smashing Audrey Tatou’s face in with a fire extinguisher is hilarious.

Dom: And then she just winks at the camera with half of her face missing.

Liam: “How many faces are getting smashed in with fire extinguishers at the moment?” “Fifteen!”

Dom: Audrey Tatou is ridiculously fun to watch. She plays a character who is technically selfish and out of it, but she is so charming that you don’t care. She reminds me of a contemporary Anna Karina. Anna Karina can waltz around in a film, be a total bitch to everyone and you still think she is the most delightful person in the entire film. But yeah, I’m not entirely sure what else to say about it. It has a really fun soundtrack and there isn’t a single boring scene. And the last film is A Very Long Engagement which is a World War I film about… World War I! Audrey Tatou plays this girl, and she has loved this boy since they were kids, and the boy goes off to fight in World War I, and very obviously hates the crap out of it, he and a few other soldiers decide to do the old wound-yourself, “Oh, I’ve been shot by the enemy, I need to be taken home” routine, but of course the officers have the whole “Nah, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot” policy, “now we’re going to shoot YOU in the FACE.” And the idea is that they’re to be killed, but there is the possibility that he survived, so she spends the entire film looking for him. The opening scenes are fairly conventional, but as it goes on it becomes more and more Jeunet, ridiculously slapstick comedy. It has a very green colour scheme like his previous films. It wasn’t as strongly received as Amelie, which is fair enough, really, but I wondered if the reason why I enjoyed it so much was more because I was a Jeunet fan as such rather than because it was really good. I don’t know, but I really enjoyed it. And that’s the filmography! There’s one coming out this year and I will get around to talking about it once it comes out. This probably wasn’t very interesting, but Liam wanted me to do it!

Liam: What’s the name of the new film?

Dom: I don’t know. I’ve only read about it once. (laughs) Kind of embarrassing that I don’t know.

EDIT: Whoops, incorrect about City of Lost Children being after Alien Resurrection. Pardon me.