Assayas’ ‘Cold Water’ finally out in U.S.
Hard to believe for those of us who were introduced to his work when he was a brash young filmmaker, but Olivier Assayas, at 63, is suddenly an aging master of French cinema.
Still at the top of his game, Assayas is unmatched in current cinema by his ability to create subtle films with finely detailed characters, warts and all. (His last two films, “The Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper,” turned Hollywood star Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” into an international arthouse Cesar Award-wining actress.)
So it’s very good news that his 1994 film “Cold Water,” sort of a Holy Grail among Assayas’ fans in the United States, is finally getting a release through Janus Films. It starts Friday, May 4, and it is a mustsee.
Imagine Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” remade as a juvenile Bonnie and Clyde tale set in the early 1970s, a time of shifting cultural values in France. A searing, uncompromising portrait of teenage rebellion and emotional volatility, it features a breakout performance by the mesmerizing Virginie Ledoyen (“A Single Girl,” “8 Women”), whose star once shown so brightly that she was handpicked by Leonardo DiCaprio as his co-star in his first post-”Titanic” film from 2000, “The Beach.”
Ledoyen is Christine, the emotionally disturbed product of a broken marriage. She is in love with Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet), who constantly clashes with his stepfather. For both, school is to be endured and, when possible, missed. They are accustomed to committing petty crimes together, and one day, Christine is Gilles’ accomplice as he attempts to steal some record albums from a department store.
He gets away; she is caught by store security and turned over to the police. Her stern father commits her to a mental institution; Gilles vows to break her out. Christine wants them to escape to a commune to live off the grid (a thing even in the ’70s).
Much of “Cold Water” is tough to watch, and yet at the same time you can’t take your eyes off it: It’s endlessly fascinating. Even if Assayas doesn’t make it easy for you to do so, you feel for these children — for that’s what they are. That is underlined by a marathon, bravura sequence of a rural-set party, complete with bonfire, thrown by Gilles’ and Christine’s high school friends, with the blaring music of the day.
“Cold Water” is a film that boldly strikes off in its own direction, even arriving at its own open-ended conclusion near the edge of water, a la “The 400 Blows.” And to think it had pretty much not been seen in the Bay Area for 24 years before last month’s screening of the restored version at the SFFilm Festival. It screened at SFFilm in 1994, but never got an American release and was never on home video in the United States.
Assayas’ next film, “Irma Vep” (1996), one of the great ruminations on cinema that starred Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung as herself, was his first to be released in the U.S., and he has been a mainstay ever since, with films such as “Clean” (also with Cheung, who was briefly his wife), the family drama “Summer Hours” and the terrorist epic “Carlos.”
“Cold Water” is an important part of his oeuvre, but a word about the origin of this 92-minute film: It began as a one-hour TV episode on a 1990s French anthology series called “All the Boys and Girls of Their Age.” The rules called for each episode to be shot on Super 16mm, with story lines about adolescence set between 1960 and 1990. Others who contributed to this series included Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis and André Téchiné.
What a series that must have been.
G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com