To accompany the ongoing Earshot Jazz Festival, Northwest Film Forum is screening Pedro Costa’s Ne Change Rien (Don’t Change a Thing), through November 3. It’s almost iconically a French arthouse film, a music documentary done in long static shots, in deep black shadows where skin luminesces. There’s smoking and wine drinking and rigor.
It’s a departure, topically, for director Pedro Costa, I’m told, but it is terrifically Gallic: in its foregrounding of a surface aesthetic, in its intellectual inquiry, in its refusal to submit to entertainment. There is a French self-sufficiency (Costa is Portugese, but big in France) that can be taken for pretension, but isn’t. That’s why artists love France–whatever else is true, there you can say you are an artist and people won’t ask what you do “really.”
Here, you learn what Jeanne Balibar, actrice, chanteuse, does “really.” Costa, I think, displays a wry sense of humor by having the film open with Balibar singing “Torture.” (You can find most of the songs here, with guitarist/songwriter Rudolphe Burger, on her album Paramour.) The camera’s obsessive focus aside, there’s no glamor here, no enormous swells of applause, if there’s an audience, it barely registers.
The heart of movie–finally “heart” is what it is, a rhythmic muscle–is a scene that will defeat the unwary. Balibar in rehearsal struggles with a tricky song in which she vocalizes against a syncopated bass line, trying to count out the vocal line’s beat, but falling off it. She tries again, she tries again, it becomes almost the equivalent of the desert scene in Lawrence of Arabia. She wants it completely internalized, and it becomes a yoga–for her and the audience in the theater.
When you hear the song in its finished form, it incorporates a sample from Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly.” That also is terrifically Gallic.
So there are these episodic scenes, from performance in nightclubs, cramped studios, impromptu rehearsals, to the party for a single. It’s always night, or near enough. A répétiteur for a production of Offenbach’s La Périchole works Balibar over, making sure she understands that pop singers don’t get to interpret–there is a proper way to sing it. You hit the consonants like so. The “O” is rounder here. She’s not corrected on each single syllable, but you get the sense that they are making concessions to time. Balibar stifles yawns, begins to make faces, swears at herself. The indomitable coach demonstrates.
If you get restless or bored, lose focus–exactly. This is not a film that performs for you; the static shots make you sit still for it. It doesn’t make you a better or worse person, if you can or can’t at any given moment. Costa won’t even let you dreamily doze to the music. He pulls the music out from behind Balibar’s vocals to (she’s in the studio, with headphones), drops them in (you’re watching from the booth), depending on the perspective.
If the half-light elicits reverie, it’s like one of those fugue-like “office” dreams you get when over-tired, where the tasks repeat, papers keep piling on. But that is “the work” for an artist, to keep steadily at it. The film doesn’t end, in that sense; it’s interrupted, but the shifting islets of white in darkness persist, in new, perhaps better arrangements.
