Correspondances (Eugène Green, 2007)

I'll write about the laptops and e-mails in this "mini-film" Eugène Green made in 2007 some day (36 minutes long, one of those Jeonju Digital Shorts -- and part of the same project that produced Costa's The Rabbit Hunters), but for now I'm preoccupied with a different issue: though Le Monde Vivant, for instance, is often noted for its lack of costuming, Green's as much of a sartorial fetishist as Wes Anderson.

Men: Oxford shirts in muted colors (tucked in, with an unbuttoned collar), jeans and khakis in unfashionable cuts and shades, unshowy boots and dress shoes. Women: plain dresses (neither too long nor too short, sometimes in subtle lace), unpatterned blouses and cardigans, neither too baggy or too tight. Unadorned, but not bare. In short, what Green fetishizes are the young men and women who don't care about fashion, who shop and dress on autopilot because their minds are preoccupied with other things: love, cinema, etc. He can't believe (and he doesn't believe we'd believe) that a person who pays attention to fashion can really be fully devoted to something. His characters own old furniture and plain things, and wear their hair in plain (but never ugly) ways, because they don't care about objects, they care about ideas. And therein lies their youthful beauty.

Seberg's Swimsuits

Jean Seberg is always ready for a swim in Bonjour Tristesse, and always in a different swimsuit. The red one brings out her girlishness, the blue one the color of her hair, the yellow one the tonalities of her skin. In fact, she rarely wears the same outfit twice throughout the movie; Mylène Demongeot, on the other hand, is intexricably linked to the few items of clothing her character is given: the blue-and-white dress, the ridiculous red swimming outfit she wears when she gets sunburned.

It's not quite as staggering a feat of customing as the 46 cheongsams Maggie Cheung wears over the course of In the Mood for Love (an average of one new dress every two minutes), but it has the same effect. If Wes Anderson in his movies teaches us to learn the character by learning their clothing, by seeing the same scarf or jacket just as often as we see their face or hear their voice (through "the clothes they are"), then Preminger and Wong want us to understand Seberg or Cheung not through the clothes they wear, but through the way they wear clothes. The thought is no longer "Man, that swimsuit looks good on her," but that swimsuits, whether yellow, red or blue, fit her so well to begin with.