_New Orleans, Mon Amour_

[septimus_...@q.com]

New Orleans Mon Amour_ was shot a year after Katrina.
Unlike director Michael Almereyda's previous films, this
is shot in a verite style, on high definition video,
seemingly improvised and with numerous non-professional
actors, although a night scene with the main actor
Christopher Eccleston retains the signature low-def,
pixelated-video rawness Almereyda always like.
Eccleston plays a surgeon living in the affluent part
of New Orleans and who volunteers his time to help the
victims of the hurricane. He is still haunted by the
disaster, which left him and his interns stranded on
the roof of a hospital one night, not knowing if they
would be rescued. He is haunted by other things: his
divorced wife (played by Isabel Gilles, who appeared in
_Metropolitan_ and the director's _Happy Here and Now_),
whom he is trying to remarry; his one-time young
mistress Hyde (Elisabeth Moss) who has returned to
the city as a volunteer to tear down water-damaged
houses; and a patient who dies on his operating table
while he is confused about the women in his life.

While Eccleston's character flounders, Moss's is
luminous, despite living in squalid tents and
straight-jacketed by the petty politics of her
fellow volunteers/commune members. She positively
glows in the New Orleans summer, its sunlight and
the moisture. (The camera eats her up, flatters
her every gesture; she is a Sarah Polley who can
act.) Moss is most memorable as President
Bartlet's intelligent youngest daughter in _The West
Wing_; I've seen her once or twice in _Mad men_,
which is another highly acclaimed HBO show that puts
me to sleep. Here she plays another girlist young
woman, but this is still her most interesting adult
role. Her interactions with the non-professional
actors and children are the high points of the film.
While her character re-ignites her romance with
Eccleston's surgeon, he is much older, brooding, and
the sparks don't exactly fly.

As they say in reviews, the city is another major
character in this film. The devastated, deserted
houses and auto junkyards litering the outskirts of
the downtown area, as well as the graffiti and angry
words of the locals towards their abandonment, give
this film a in-the-moment authenticity that cannot
be recaptured later on with a more elaborate, pricy
shoot. These proceedings also give a solid grounding
for Almereyda's amorphous script. The writer-director
has a fertile mind, but is at his free-association
best when riffing on genres or a literary text.
Here the pent-up emotions of the city speaks for
itself, are given voice by the diverse cast of jazz-club
musicians and ordinary citizens.

Almereyda intentionally references Alain Resnais'
masterpiece _Hiroshima, Mon Amour_, even using Delerue's
discordant cords at the end. The two love triangles in
two destroyed cities are the obvious parallels, but
otherwise the differences are more poignant. Emmanuelle
Riva's character is an actress who only *play* a nurse
a film-within-the-film. Her Japanese lover is untouched
by the atomic bomb either; both seem outsiders whom Resnais
entrusted with narrating his poetic view and cool vision
of the WWII tragedy. Almereyda allows a multitude of
first person voices in his film, and the two leads are
very much part of the city and its history. There is a
sense that their characters -- and perhaps the filmmaker
himself -- are drawn to tragedy, do not feel complete
unless surrounded by it. The alternative is to act
indiffferent and selfishly go on with their lives, of course.
In retrospect, perhaps living with yourself in the midst
of momentous changes has been a main theme of Almereyda's
oeurve. The other main motif is the ghost. Ghosts are
everywhere in Almereyda's horror films (_Nadja_, _The
Eternal_) and even his Shakespeare adaptation. The
film ends with the two leads, uprooted from even their
uprooted city, floating aimlessly down the swamps in
an improvised raft. It is the most poetic image in the
film, and it seems signifcant that, at long last,
Almereyda's protagonists manage to stay together at
the film's end.