Film as an Empathy Machine

The second installment of a two-part interview

Recently, the Utah Monthly had the chance to sit down with Bob Hudson (pictured above), a French professor at BYU, to talk about the French and Italian cinematic traditions. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity, and will appear in two installments. In the first half of the transcript, which was published last week, Hudson talks about how he fell in love with film and fills us in on key moments in French and Italian cinema following World War II. In today’s installment, Hudson talks about two living filmmakers whose great regard for human experiences like grief, sin and redemption makes their work particularly affecting.

Let’s talk about Nanni Moretti. Do you want to situate him a little bit in the Italian tradition and talk about some of your favorite films of his? 

Moretti’s international breakthrough came in 1993 with Caro Diario or Dear Diary. He’s part of what film scholar Peter Bondanella would call the “new Italian cinema,” this attempt to tap into something that’s more human and something that’s more relatable. So just as France had its moment in the 1950s where film had become this producer-driven machine, Italian filmmakers in the early 1990s are realizing that cinema houses are closing all over Italy, that people are renting VHS tapes, or just watching American or even French movies as opposed to going to movie houses and watching Italian films. And there’s no real great Italian films coming out through the 70s and 80s. So Moretti is part of this attempt to revive Italian cinema. Moretti is part of this collective insistence that film should hit on something real and something human. 

Moretti is an actor in most of his films, including The Son’s Room, from 2001, his most decorated film. In it, you have this nuclear Italian family: the father played by Nanni Moretti, and his wife and their two children, a teen boy and girl, who you spend thirty minutes really falling in love with because they’re real. They’re a traditional family who love each other but they have their problems. The daughter is dating this guy that isn’t great for her. The son has stolen a fossil from his school science lab, and they’ve got their little problems and things they are working out. But then thirty minutes into the film, tragedy strikes. The son that we’ve watched, and who we’ve watched the parents try to discipline and deal with, dies by drowning in a scuba diving accident. And you get the reaction of each member of this family. You lose a member of the family and this centripetal force that kept them together loses hold. They’re all kind of spun out in different directions, and you see them deal with and cope with this crippling, visceral grief.

Moretti is someone that really appreciates therapy. Psychotherapy is something he clearly really believes in and it plays a key part in his earlier films, even Caro Diario, but in this film, he plays a therapist, who becomes incapable of doing his job. We’ve seen him with his patients leading up to this moment and he loses the ability to help other people through their struggles and trauma because his trauma is just so much bigger than him. And there’s this fear in the film that maybe this family doesn’t survive. Maybe they don’t stick together after this event. And it actually takes them doing something for the dead son, finding out he had a girlfriend and doing something for her, that allows the family to come back together. They’re able to sort of connect with him beyond the grave by doing something for someone he cared about. And it’s just a really beautiful sentiment. Service, in a way, saves this family that will never be whole but who can now cope. It’s one of the most heart-wrenching and emotionally difficult, but moving films I’ve ever seen. 

Yeah, I agree. It’s a really poignant portrait of grief and its effects. And it’s not didactic. I think he does a good job of not saying this is how you overcome a tragedy, but he just follows a family as each person processes it in their own way and then sort of miraculously and understatedly, they come back together through this small act of service. 

Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at a film that Moretti did later, Habemus Papam, it’s pretty interesting because in that film he also plays a psychoanalyst that deals with trauma. So in the film the pope dies and there’s a new pope that needs to be called from the College of Cardinals. And the cardinal that is selected decides he does not want to be pope. He has this moment of breakdown, and he escapes from the Vatican. So he’s first talking to Moretti’s character, who’s a psychoanalyst, and then he flees. So, while it’s a comedy and a very comical film, it’s also a film that takes seriously the trauma and the psychoses of individuals. So I think that’s one reason why Moretti is really drawn to psychoanalysis as a vehicle in his cinema. It allows you to see what moves people. What are people scared of? What are people’s insecurities? And how can they cope with crippling grief or the anxiety of becoming pope—for an Italian, easily the most important position a human being can hold on Earth? It’s taking seriously his anxieties and his feelings as a human being. He’s not just a cardinal. He’s not just a future pope that’s been voted in. He’s a man that’s struggling. And with Moretti, some of the beauty of his filmmaking is that it takes human beings very seriously. 

Could you say a little bit about the Dardenne brothers? Specifically, I’d love to hear you talk about their apparent interest in error, grace, and redemption. 

Interesting pairing, because the Dardennes really care about people, too. They are from Wallonia. In fact, they’re from Liège, in the southern, French-speaking part of Belgium. To be more specific, they’re from Seraing-sur-Meuse and all of their films are situated there. They actually got their start as documentary filmmakers. Two brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, one trained in the applied arts and the other one trained in literature and philosophy. So you get one that’s sort of more the creative filmmaker side, and one that’s more on the screenwriter, literary side. And they just meld together so perfectly. They started their careers as documentary filmmakers, examining workers in and around Liège. 

However, when they made this turn to start making feature-length fictional films, they began to really pull ideas for their films from the headlines. They’re not making new stories. They’re basically taking ideas from the news and making movies from those. And their films are often focused on delinquent youth, unemployment, drug addiction, immigration, labor laws, these really bad situations in their hometown and depicting how people work through these major problems to come to some sort of redemption. So, I know I just said that very generally, but if you look at a film like The Child, you have this teenage boy who falls in love with a girl. Both of them are from a working-class background. She becomes pregnant and, although underprivileged, goes ahead and has the baby. Almost on a whim, the father in the story, who is played by Jérémie Renier, whom the Dardennes discovered in La Promesse, takes the baby and sells it on the black market to gangsters. And, obviously, when the mother comes home, she loses her mind, she goes nuts. It makes sense she would, and they basically have to take the money from the baby and find more money and spend the rest of the film trying to hunt down the same criminals he sold the baby to to buy the baby back. So, not to spoil the film, but as usual there is a moment of redemption in that about making huge mistakes or making huge errors in judgment. Can you ever come back from that? Is redemption possible? And that’s what happens in a lot of their films. They don’t give up on people.

Another one that comes to mind is called La Fille inconnue, featuring Adèle Haenel, who is from Belgium but not from their hometown, something they’ve started doing more lately. But she’s a doctor in a small practice and, as the film begins, her clinical assistant is quitting on her. Just then, someone comes banging on the doors after hours and needs help, and they kind of shoo her away to deal with what’s going on in their office. And it turns out whoever this young woman was, this unknown girl that’s in the title of the film, is found dead across the street from her medical practice. So, this woman, this doctor, decides that she’s going to seek to find out who that girl was and why it happened. And in so doing, she gets caught up in this really seedy underbelly of illegal immigration and sex trafficking in Liège. It’s really dark, but she refuses to give up. So she has that moment of error in judgment that leads to an effort to make it right and finding redemption. So, the Dardenne brothers would not qualify themselves necessarily as Christian filmmakers. In fact, I’d say that they’re agnostic at best, but they have this idea, this belief in humanity, and this belief, that we might see as repentance and redemption that plays out in a number of their films. 

Could you talk a little bit about the distinctive formal aspects of the Dardenne brothers’ films?

Yeah. So a lot of time it’s handheld cameras. There are very few non-diegetic elements. Maybe some very spartan red or white opening credits, and then you get into the film, you get eighty to ninety minutes with the characters and the Dardennes tell their story without any narration, again with no soundtrack other than the diegetic sound from the film. And then usually there’s not any neatly-tied-up-with-a-bow happy ending. It’s always very ambivalent in the ending. But you do have this hope for redemption for each of their main characters, and that’s something beautiful about their filmmaking. So, yeah, a lot of tight and herky-jerky shots but it builds to a focus on the humanity of otherwise everyday Belgians who deserve our due respect as they figure things out.

I’d love for you to talk briefly about your tradition of visiting French filmmakers’ graves, if you could. And then also talk about three films you think should be on everyone’s list. And if you’ve already mentioned some of them, you can mention them again.

A bit personal, but sure, why not? When I’m in France, I do like to visit homes of filmmakers and filming locations of the films that I enjoy, but also make a point to go to their graves and visit. It’s kind of a solemn moment to me. I’ve always liked cemeteries. That might make me weird, but I like cemeteries. I like the peace there. I like this idea that the spirit of that individual who is buried there, that maybe they’re aware that I’m there and realize that I care and that their legacy is something I’m committed to continuing. So, I often sit there and sometimes will leave gifts, depending on the filmmaker or something that was important to them, like a heart-shaped potato for Agnès Varda, for example. But I like to sit there and enjoy those calm moments and even have a little prayer in my heart that that person, wherever their soul might be at this time, that they’re aware their art moved me. And so it’s something I like to do. It is something I very much enjoy. I think they’re aware of it, too. I like the thought that I may have communed with someone who has passed but who matters to me.

Roger Ebert once said that “films are a machine of empathy.” And that’s one of the reasons that I’m drawn to film. Speaking of the Christian or religious underpinnings of film, empathy should drive us as film viewers to want to be better people; having spent two hours or ninety minutes with a character, we should want to learn the lessons that they’ve learned and apply them to ourselves. So there’s something deeply human and deeply spiritually enriching in film that comes through those “empathy machines.” So I think my favorite films or the films that I think are the most important for people to see deal with that type of empathy that you can have for individuals.

A lot of them we’ve already talked about are on my list, like the Italian neorealist film I mentioned called Bitter Rice. You can see on my wall behind you there, I’ve got some memorabilia from that film. A lot of Italian neorealism focuses on Rome or on cities, but Bitter Rice looks to the rice paddies of Vercelli and looks to women who work as seasonal workers there. Something that Giuseppe De Santis, the director, was big on was women workers and how difficult their lives were and how hard they labored to provide for their families. So, I thought that was a really interesting and beautiful film. De Santis wanted to make a crime/heist film, but also a neorealist film that focuses on human struggle. And he nailed it. It’s just a great film. 

I haven’t talked enough about Jean Renoir. He’s one of my very, very favorites. I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk a bit more about him. I think his film, The Grand Illusion, is a great film to show how people can come together during a period of conflict in a similar way that Rossellini did in Rome, Open City. It’s about how people can come together in conflict hoping for a better tomorrow. It’s a film he made before World War II about World War I, but it was rereleased in the United States in the 1960s during the Vietnam period. And he did this sort of opening introduction to his film where he said the lessons of The Grand Illusion are still pertinent today. Because “if we don’t learn to get along with each other and overcome our differences, we might just have to say goodbye to our beautiful world.” And I think that’s a great message that he gets out there. So that film would definitely be on my list. 

Another of my favorite films and one of his films that I like the best is called La Peau Douce or The Soft Skin, by the great French New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut. And it’s actually about, believe it or not, a French literature professor that has an affair with a flight attendant; and even if that seems really seedy, and it is, you kind of have this moral moment where infatuation gives way to the reality of what he’s done. So there’s this realization of sin and its effects. The way Truffaut shoots it is really beautiful. And the ending is a surprising ending, and I’m not going to give that away this time. But you have this guy that gives in to infatuation and kind of has to cope with the consequences of the transgression he’s committed. I don’t think it’s on many people’s list as their favorite of Truffaut, somebody who made so many, many great films, but it’s one of my favorites.

Who else? Varda and Jacques Demy are simply marvelous and they influence Damien Chazelle as much as Truffaut influences Greta Gerwig. She’s a modern genius. And Jean-Luc Godard influences Tarantino. Scorsese made a whole four-hour documentary of how Italian standards influence his filmmaking. Jean-Pierre Jeunet is great and he is at least tangentially influenced by Moretti. These are my favorites. For me, a great film has to depict human beings experiencing real human emotion and growing. Great films make us better people and invite us to open wider the tent of our hearts. Learning to recognize the humanity, the dignity, even the divinity of your fellow beings is one of the most Christian things we can do. Film is a great vehicle for that.