048 The Last Days of Chez Nous

On style as branding (or not), and life as motion

There is a pervasive way of thinking about film form and style that is synonymous with branding. A moving image will be shot so that, if you share a screengrab, the image will be representative of the brand of the product. Another way of putting it is that the film (or TV show) that “looks good” sells the product line of what we might call the “entreprauteur.” As we’ve seen, lower-budget stylish films have been serving as calling cards for directors, some of them talented, who go on to make a greenscreen paycheck and earn a lot of money.

Aspects of an authorial mise en scène in particular—the pictorial composition, blocking, color, production design, and so on—collapse into a kind of generative shorthand, which might be imitated indefinitely for new material. For example, look at the wave of AI imagery last year suggesting how different kinds of fictional Wes Anderson adaptations would look. The more well-known and discursively legible something is, the easier it is for AI to emulate it. We wouldn’t have nearly so much success with, say, AI generated imaginary films by Carl Franklin, a very good director by the way, or even by Gillian Armstrong, a bit of whose work will be discussed here in this letter.

I do want to say a few more things about this issue of style-as-branding, what I think it does & forecloses. In our media environment, images get pulled, mixed, matched, and circulated not simply out of their “original” contexts, but in an innumerable array of new contexts. It makes sense then that, as Lev Manovich and others would point out, new media is modular. The style of branded content lends itself readily to this modularity, to have its pieces taken apart, and responds in such a way that the visual look—its vibe—is baked into the image. It’s a combination of a pitch deck for future investors and also a 21st century equivalent of the American Biograph films that included the American Biograph logo in the profilmic image (so you know it’s from the authentic source). That’s often what “authorship” and “style” now amount to.

Do you notice how often movies and TV shows presently have picturesque compositions where ensembles, frequently in frontal & linear symmetric composition, often deadpan, appear as spectators, looking at something offscreen (even back at “us”)? These kinds of images feel, to me, constructed as if to give viewers the chance to say, “wow, what a perfect shot” and/or “look at this main menu of characters” - i.e., to create an image or a moment that can be captured via screengrab or gif, and perpetuated memetically. Examples:

Why does our media content do this so often now? I admit that I have not seen The Eternals. The Eternals image above may not even be a screengrab from the movie itself, but instead a promotional image; I don’t know. But that’s kind of my point: cinematic mise en scène seem predominantly now to be a commercial for itself. Airbrushed/photoshopped, drag-and-drop, arrange & color grade just so. It’s bloodless and risk-averse. That’s why what passes for authorial style or bold formal choices seem to me to be branding. It’s the author, or the IP, or a contract between the two. But it’s branding.

Gillian Armstrong’s 1992 masterpiece The Last Days of Chez Nous, by contrast, works differently. It’s really a whole movie in motion—the camera moves, the plot moves, there is really no beginning or end to anything beyond arbitrary designations, which is another way of saying that we’re seeing at every stage a number of beginnings and endings. Form is important to the film, and I’ll try to illustrate what I mean by this, but it isn’t important in a way that translates to (a) screenshots and gifs, (b) imitation and emulation, or (c) social media polemics about things like “relatability.” And I suspect this example is particularly instructive in this year 2024 precise because the kinds of things it does feel in some obscure way overlooked despite the over-saturation of moving images on screens all around us, all the time. The recognition, the discipline, and the practice of Last Days’ sort of movement have been on a gradual, amnesiac decline.

I adore this complex, rich movie. Written by famed Australian author Helen Garner, it follows the kaleidoscopic relationships within a family after the return to Sydney of one of its members. Gillian Armstrong has directed a number of well-loved films, like her fantastic 1979 debut My Brilliant Career and the 1987 film High Tide (both featuring the great Judy Davis) and the 1994 adaptation of Little Women. It’s possible that The Last Days of Chez Nous is her best work, though, and if you haven’t seen it, I recommend doing so post-haste. (You may be able to stream it on Kanopy, if you have access; DVDs or VHS copies can be acquired; and if you search around elsewhere online, perhaps even YouTube, you might find something.) This isn’t exactly the sort of film that can be “spoiled” by giving away plot points, but fair warning, I am going to discuss an important narrative development that take place in the middle of the movie.

It’s a very physical film, tactile; its proprioceptive and aromatic evocations are hard to deny. It begins with a low tracking shot of a woman’s legs and a roller suitcase, the close-mic’d friction on the stone ground and then keys in the door that bumps back against the wall as our introductory figure opens it and strides into the courtyard. “Yoohoo!” She’s returned home. Who is she? Who else lives there?

Vicki (Kerry Fox) takes a slice of Welcome Home cake and eats it with her hands, walking around the empty house. Mobiles hang from the ceilings; photographs on the walls. Vicki’s older sister Beth (Lisa Harrow), a writer, arrives. As we will see, this bohemian home is easygoing and open. No Protestant work ethic here, which is not to say that no work happens. Beth does a lot of that labor; she is something of a mother hen, living with her daughter Annie (played by Mirando Otto) and her French husband, JP (Bruno Ganz). To bring in more income, Beth takes in a young man, Tim, as a boarder. (Tim is played by an actor who is now a professor in Asian Studies)

("You can only have this piece of cake once; you can't keep on munching away at it." - JL Carr, A Month in the Country)

The family lives is a house of crafts and other modest pleasures: fruit, and cake that sits on the floor with tea and toys, and much dancing. The blood relations in particular (elder sister, younger sister, daughter/niece) exhibit delight and comfort in one another’s physical space and touch. There is specificity in the details, little touches that don’t seem like clumsy intrusions of Quirk, but instead read as natural and incidental. “You always go mmmmm when you sing.” Their living space can be a little cramped.

Look at the images above, which are part of the same shot. The camera pulls out from a tighter shot of Annie and JP playing cards on the floor while Annie eats oranges; we see Tim playing the mandolin in the chair nearby, while Fox & her sister enter the room from back in center screen, carrying bags to sit down on the couch. This space feels lived in, doesn’t it?

Even as the activities and motivations of the characters are variegated (just as they are for people in that thing we used to call Real Life), there are iconographic continuities and rhythmic cadences worth considering. The logic of The Last Days of Chez Nous has much to do with those iconic and rhythmic dimensions of the storytelling, which express in ways that the dialogue alone doesn’t.

About halfway through the movie, Beth takes a road trip with her father. She hopes that if they get away for a while, just to the two of them, they might learn to understand and get along with one another a little better. At one point, they quickly decide to pull over to eat a bag of oranges in their possession so that it doesn’t have to go through the inspection point at the state border. Take a look at this two and a half minute segment:

We can tease out connections and mirrorings between these two spaces—the space of Beth and her father, and the space of Vicki and JP. First, consider the oranges; a nice quick shot of the fruit (in a bag, outside it, some peels).

And a few shots of father and daughter stooped over, eating the oranges, shaking away flies. The flies! Insects, heat, dry air, the sticky juice of the fruit, the bitter pith, gravel and dirt beneath shoes—can you imagine these casual yet palpable evocations in any of the recent movies I pulled screenshots from above? I can’t. That’s part of my point about the kinds of experience that current, dominant aesthetic practices pass over.

Then we cut from this last shot to a shot of a fruit still life where Vicki has arranged an artful cornucopia, a variety of fruits in and out of the basket (but no oranges!): the shot echoes the close-up of the oranges moments earlier.

Vicki delights in her little creation by dancing as JP enters the kitchen, and after a moment he ends up dancing with her, and in a leisurely mobile shot, they dance together (a white colander appearing on JP’s head, perhaps echoing ever-so-faintly the white hat Beth and Vicki’s father wears in the preceding shots), as they move in and out of other rooms, before JP finally sits down on the couch with the paper while Vicki continues dancing at the threshold.

The motifs of fruit, the impulsive decision-making, and the presence of small messes (oranges and peels on a towel on a car hood, an array of unpacked groceries, untidy pillows and newspaper on a living room couch) imbue this brief stretch of the narrative with visual and tonal and minor symbolic “rhymes.” Coordinated movement, as a concept, seems to be a feature in both: Beth and her father both stooped over to eat the oranges, JP and Vicki dancing in tandem. These pairs are at entryways (a border inspection point; the dance scene beginning with JP’s arrival through the back door and Vicki stepping out through the front). What’s happening there subtly reflects, and is reflected by, what’s happening here. All of this takes place quickly, seamlessly; when you watch the film, or when you watched that clip, I bet you weren’t struck by any notion that Gillian Armstrong or her collaborators were trying to construct “one perfect shot” or to impart through imagery a weighty characterological schema. Yet the shots are not simply point-and-shoot functional. They have texture and connectivity. It all just seems to flow, though, right?

The mere existence of these features does not prove that the film is great or even interesting. I’m not doing anything special, either, I’m just noticing and suggesting things. But I do think that, as sustained throughout the course of the movie, imbuing an otherwise loose narrative with formal micro-structure and continuities, these choices or serendipities demonstrate how form remains expressive even when it does not translate to the hustle-economy of repurposed images. (Similarly, the value of a book should not be restricted to how many “quotable quotes” it has.)

And new things will come to the surface from this sequence. This playful interaction between Beth’s own husband and Vicki will grow into something else. The trip that Beth takes with her father, to improve that relationship, enables the other two to connect romantically, opportunistically. And that tryst has its own bittersweet incongruities; Vicki’s youthful idealism and naivete (“love’s more important than anything”) dovetails with JP’s loopy, egoistic pragmatism, which one might describe as romantic yet unsentimental. The remaining third of the film will involve the aftermath of the affair he enters into with Vicki.

The camera seems to float through a lot of The Last Days of Chez Nous, like a mobile bystander, peering in, following when appropriate. But it rarely dwells for long on any shot or composition. The moment’s passed before you know it. Screenshots can give a taste, or support an analysis, sure, but they don’t do any of it justice. And this mercurial dimension to the film’s aesthetic, its own camera-stylo, is part of what makes it all cohesive but unbranded. And I think it is crucial to what the film is doing, evoking, “trying to say.”

“The worst thing y’know is, is when you look back, and what you thought was solid ground behind just … just crumbles,” says Beth to Vicki at one point. For the young, life and love hurt because they’re novel, and the film is attentive to that point of view. It also explores thoughtfully how, as we age, life and love hurt precisely because they’re not novel, nor are they final. They keep moving, marked by everything that’s preceded. That’s what I take to be the spirit of the final shot, which I won’t spoil, though there’s actually nothing to spoil, just the next stage.