Playing in the Company of Men

NDTV Lumiere | Movies | June 11, 2009 at 10:48 pm

‘Playing in the Company of Men’ which premiered at the 2003 Festival de Cannes is a highly political fable of power, corruption, vengeance and renunciation. Set in the violent world of business and high finance, the story is about an adopted son of a wealthy arms dealer caught in a web of lies and brutality.

The film will be aired on the NDTV Lumiere TV channel on 16th June at 10 pm

Below is a note from the director, Arnaud Desplechin.

The Filming
Rather than adapting the play from start to finish, I decided simply to film several extracts, and to leave them disconnected. The idea arose from my great admiration for Pacino’s Looking For Richard, for Malle’s Vanya On 42nd Street; for those films which do not hide theatre. I believe that incorporating even the preparatory work, the casting, the rehearsals, allows different speeds, sudden accelerations, big ellipses, all of which are vital characteristics of the B-movie.

This film is assembled from these diverse raw materials, shot on a wide range of formats: video, 16 and 35 mm; colour and black and white; sound and silent.

Why Theatre?
In 1995, I saw a play, In The Company Of Men, by Edward Bond. It’s a story of the stock-exchange, of financial intrigue, of business take-overs. A violently political story, with – at its centre – a familial motif which touches me more than I can say.

These are not terribly sympathetic characters: they are today’s princes, and Bond has little sympathy for powerful men. Power has become an entirely abstract notion – even heads of state protest their impotence as a badge of honour. The last big war of the 20th century – the Cold War – was won by capitalism.

The poor sleep in the streets, the young are suppressed by the forces of law and order… we no longer know how to represent power. It no longer has a face.

Bond (Writer of the book ‘In The Company of Men’): “We should not tell children fairy tales, we should never lie to them. Rather give them the maps they ask us for”
In The Company of Men is one such map.

Bond: “I write about violence, simply as Jane Austen wrote about social manners. Because today it would be immoral not to…”

It surprises me that, at a time when cinema has given up describing the incredible fiction of the world in which we live, a theatrical writer should rise to the task.

The Influence Of American Cinema Of The 70s
Bond is a very ‘classic writer’. His is a violently poetic language, so complex and so rich, so multi-layered it seems to demand a commentary. Yet I discern the direct influence of popular American films of the 70s: All the President’s Men, Network, The French Connection, Marathon Man… In fact, I see the influence of cinema – Kurosawa, Welles, Oshima, Fassbinder – throughout Bond’s work. But what I value most are the echoes of this ‘humble’ cinema from an under-appreciated era.

Far from considering this heritage somehow shameful, I wanted to use it, to film theatre with the rough tools of the thriller.

Today, political cinema appears only to film the poor trapped in a dire economic inevitability, often coming dangerously close to resignation. There is a liberating function in the thriller: the search for a guilty party. Not the ultimate culprit, but those responsible for turning the world into a slaughterhouse.

Shakespeare
Bond’s play evinces many similarities to Hamlet. A man who determines to change his life; the dark story of an inheritance; the presence of ghosts. The prince imprisoned in Elsinore, paralysed always on the verge of action and condemned to endless cogitation. A young man trapped in an ancient world. But what if, unknown to him, Bond was also rewriting Coriolanus? One of Shakespeare’s most overtly political plays, it opens with the city starving. The citizens gather to debate the issue. Society is a single body.

Who is the stomach, who is the mouth?

Who eats whom?

Elsewhere, Coriolanus, the wounded, raging warrior, at the foot of the walls of Rome, dreaming of destroying everything.

I want to stress this fear of cannibalism. To participate in the life of men is to enter into the dirty game of dog eats dog. How do we participate in the circulation of power, of money, of words themselves, without partaking of a cannibal feast?

Two characters are confronted with this question: a prince, Léonard, and a poor warrior, Servun. Two adopted sons of the same monster. Léonard is so horrified by politics – the improved organisation of a cannibalistic system – that he ends up renouncing his place in the world.

What is incredible in Bond’s play is the way he manages to render concrete this black idea: that we live, however obliquely, by consuming human flesh. Our society is inhuman, not in any distant or schoolbook moral sense, but directly. It is necessary to save our humanity, and immediately…

I imagine a very young child as he watches adults eating – their enormous mouths chewing – and tells himself that it is a terrible thing to be an adult.

What can I say to that child?

Two Splashes
Two characters are confronted with the same question of inhumanity. Léonard, our hero, and the half-brother, Servun. While serving on a submarine, Servun was eating soup. An injured man walked past and a little blood fell on the canteen table. Automatically Servun wiped it up with his crust of bread. And swallowed it without thinking. Invited by an army psychologist to comment on different splashes – the ink blots of a Rorschach test – Servun is furious.

“That doesn’t mean anything. I just mopped it up…”

Bond takes Servun’s part: when a man occupies the lowest rung of the social ladder, hunger is what matters.

Whether he drinks human blood is of scant importance. Léonard is above all this, at the very top. And Bond names that which haunts this future company director: a responsibility.

How is it that one man should be the victim of a gesture without significance, and the other should be responsible for each of his own gestures?

Because for Bond, society is divided between torturers and victims. Bad for the torturers and even worse for their victims.

I believe that these two splashes – one of blood, the other of ink – constitute together one of the most cinematic images possible. One signifying nothing, the other signifying everything, pure action which goes beyond all comment.

On stage, we are merely told about them.

But I wanted very much to see them…

blogged by Shamath Mazumdar, NDTV Lumiere