Small Cuts (2003)

The obsession of 'signifie' and 'signifiant' is not enough to make a good film. Pascal Bonitzer should have remained in our memory as a brilliant film theorist back in the '60´s. It was not necessary to take the camera. The result is quite frustrating. It´s a pity for his excellent leading actors.

This is, I think, meant to be a cold film - its summing up moment for me is when we have an extended close-up of Gaelle's ring on the ground in the snow, the white gradually darkening with the stain of Bruno's dark red blood. The camera simply watches the beauty of the movement, enjoys its aesthetic simplicity, and refuses to pan back to Bruno and let us witness his emotion and what is going on with him as he slowly bleeds. This is a deconstructed road movie; Bruno goes on a mission to deliver a message - a message whose sense we never learn, and whose effects ultimately seem irrelevant or minimal. Each trip in the car sees Bruno get involved with increasingly desperate sexual couplings, but there is no sense that these will progress anywhere. Indeed, it is noticeable that this film emphasises the way in which Bruno is in fact rejected at places that connote not travel as such, but the (unromanticised) stasis that travel also necessitates - in getting lost, at the airport, at the car park. Not so much on the road, then, as off the road - our lives here are not so much the American myth of untrammeled spaces, more full of constraint, difficulty and so on. The question repeated throughout the film in reference to Bruno's putative Communism, but what about the wall, becomes symbolic for me of the film's whole point. Neither sexual desire, nor 'love', nor ideology, can overcome the blocking 'wall', the stasis that haunts us. The cuts to Bruno's hand are perhaps the least disturbing thing in this beautiful, cold, bleak film.

Daniel Auteuil's Bruno in Petites Couperes is a middle-aged model of his Pierre in Christian Vincent's La Separation of 10 years ago. In both films, youthful confidence in left-wing ideology and love (mutual metaphors) crumbles into paranoia - manifesting itself as trapped aggression in Pierre and desperately comic womanizing in the more recent Bruno.Unfortunately for Auteuil fans, the actor has become reliant on a uniform world-weariness (not unlike compatriot Johnny Hallyday in Leconte's recent l'Homme du Train). Acting it ain't, and becomes rather frustrating as the film progresses. Pascal Bonitzer doesn't help as the writer/director of the project. His sequencing of episodes overlaid with connecting symbolism fail to mask the film's lack of rhythm. I was particularly furious that the imposingly dramatic/romantic backdrops of Grenoble were made virtually redundant by a cameraman who was obviously shivering in the cold.Krisitn Scott Thomas almost rescues the show with her female counterpart to Bruno, Beatrice. She dramatizes the dizzying contradictions intended as Bruno in a character of increasing complexity to the point of becoming surreal. Bonitzer cannot sustain this though, and the flagging plot demands Beatrice to even out into another bourgeois mannequin. In doing so Bonitzer shows then denies Scott Thomas the Oscar cabinet.All the characters' submersion into the bourgeoisie may be a viable and indeed tragic outcome, but in this case it's a cop-out of a cadence (unlike the brutal, painful denouement of La Separation). A serious disappointment, 4/10.

Petites Coupures is exactly the opposite of actual american cinema : smart, elegant, fun. Daniel Auteuil plays a french journalist communist disturbed by his ideas, his wife, his girlfriend and women he meets. After "Rien sur Robert", Pascal Bonitzer shows us his billiant way to write and direct a good movie. He perfectly films women . This guy loves women, it's obvious. Pascale Bussière, Ludivine Sagnier, Catherine Mouchet and Kristin Scott-Thomas are beautiful. Don't waste your time, run to watch it.