The New York Times “Ne Change Rien” is about the work, the mix of inspiration and hard labor that performers draw on from moment to moment, an alchemical event that cinema rarely shows.

The Village Voice Costa’s solemn Ne change rien—could be described as idealized cinema: each a beautifully shot, rhythmically complex, wildly artistic, willfully eccentric quest for authenticity.

Time Out New York It’s exhilarating.

New Yorker Both a startling and lucid lesson in filming musical performance and a cinephilic marvel.

Hammer to Nail The film offers a total musical experience like few others ever have.

The Boston Phoenix Costa manages an effective visual environment to showcase the startling versatility and formidable talents of French chanteuse Jeanne Balibar.

Artforum From the sculpted lighting and precise compositions to the particular combination of sensuousness and severity, of tender immediacy and analytic distance.

The successful release in the US follows the release in France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Japan and the world tour of numerous international film festivals where the film has screened and applauded, since its premiere at the Director’s Fortnight of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

Simultaneously to the release, the director Pedro Costa was invited to curate a special parallel program that includes Andy Warhol’s SLEEP (to be presented by John Giorno) SOIGNE TA DROITE, by Jean-Luc Godard, NUMÉRO ZÉRO, by Jean Eustache,alongside films by Thom Andersen and Carl Th. Dreyer.

Light and Shadow, and Music on the Wondrous, Dreamy Side

By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Published: November 2, 2010

A movie doesn’t have to be busy to be bold.

The Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s “Ne Change Rien,” a black-and-white documentary about the French singer and actress Jeanne Balibar that opens on Wednesday at Anthology Film Archives, illustrates this assertion in its opening image of Ms. Balibar and two bandmates performing a slow song, Kris Jensen’s “Torture.”

The shot goes on for three minutes without a cut. The camera seems nailed to the floor. Mr. Costa, a chiaroscuro addict, favors shadow over light, so that the image suggests a monochrome silkscreen by a printmaker obsessed with old Blue Note album covers. Acres of coal black are etched by slivers of white light bouncing off instruments and musicians’ clothes and skin. Because the camera is at such a low angle, nearly half the frame is occupied by the ceiling over the musicians’ heads, an inky canvas dotted by spotlights that might as well be stars.

Like the planetarium scene in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” this opening shot turns a real space into a figurative one. And as it turns out, that’s Mr. Costa’s strategy throughout “Ne Change Rien.” The camera never moves to follow action. A piano has more keys than this film has cuts.

Mr. Costa seems to take his structural cues not from narrative cinema, but from recorded music. This is the big-screen digital video equivalent of a live album that mixes finished songs and stop-and-start outtakes: cinema as playlist. The material is assembled not chronologically, but according to a music producer’s intuitive sense of rhythm.

Eventually, the title — which translates as “Change Nothing” — comes to seem both a sly joke on Mr. Costa’s one-tableau-at-a-time structure and a declaration of his artistic principles. “Ne Change Rien” is fascinated by repetition, mistakes, awkward silences and the charged, quiet moments before and after performances. And it observes them all with a rapt, unblinking eye. Like Mr. Costa’s elliptical neo-realist dramas about the urban poor (“In Vanda’s Room,” “Colossal Youth”), this movie is a stylistic rebuke to commercial cinema norms, demanding curiosity and patience throughout.

Mr. Costa, who has cited Jean-Luc Godard’s “Sympathy for the Devil” (a k a “1 + 1”) as an inspiration for this film, has no interest in providing the expected documentary elements. He says nothing about the life or career of Ms. Balibar, who is the daughter of the physicist Françoise Balibar and the French Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar and who has acted for Jacques Rivette (“The Duchess of Langeais”) and Olivier Assayas (“Clean”), among other notable directors.

The film leaves biography, filmography and discography to Google and Wikipedia. “Ne Change Rien” is about the work, the mix of inspiration and hard labor that performers draw on from moment to moment, an alchemical event that cinema rarely shows.

While rehearsing “These Days,” a song with a complex rhythm, Ms. Balibar keeps time by lightly clapping a hand on her knee, then falls behind the beat and apologizes to her chief collaborator, the songwriter and guitarist Rodolphe Burger. Later, while rehearsing the song “Cette Nuit,” she has the same problem.

“Don’t slow down when you’re not supposed to,” says an off-screen voice — perhaps her vocal coach. (Mr. Costa doesn’t tell us.)

“I have the same problem on the piano,” Ms. Balibar admits.

“Stay on this wondrous, dreamy side,” the unseen voice tells Ms. Balibar. She does, and so does the movie.

Ms. Balibar performs the title song in an unbroken, tightly framed close-up, lighted by an off-screen spotlight that creates a halo effect akin to an old-fashioned Hollywood glamour shot. And yet it doesn’t come off as an ad for Ms. Balibar’s considerable physical beauty; it highlights the concentration on her face as she tries to stay in the opium-den groove that her smoky voice has conjured. If you were sitting in a nightclub audience instead of standing right next to her, you’d have no idea how hard she was working. Cameras record emotion as well as light.

Ne Change Rien

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan. Directed by Pedro Costa; director of photography, Mr. Costa; edited by Patricia Saramago; produced by Sébastien deFonseca, Abel Ribeiro Chaves and Cédric Walter. At the Anthology Film Archives,32 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village. In French, with English subtitles.Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

MOVIES

By J. Hoberman Wednesday, Nov 3 2010

Costa’s solemn Ne change rien—could be described as idealized cinema: each a beautifully shot, rhythmically complex, wildly artistic, willfully eccentric quest for authenticity. Ne change rien, shown here as part of the 2009 New York Film Festival, is an altogether more ascetic sort of new wave musical—its Godardian model is the open-ended, counterculture-confounding 1968 Rolling Stones rehearsal doc Sympathy for the Devil. Pedro Costa, legendary for his intimate, epic, underlit and often inaudible portraits of Lisbon slum-dwellers, here ponders the mystery of the contemporary French actress-turned-(or-perhaps-playing)-chanteuse, Jeanne Balibar (a favorite of Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin).

Call it the Passion of Jeanne: Accompanied for much of the movie by a single reverb-heavy guitar and a snare drum, Balibar demonstrates a carefully calibrated lack of affect and a voice as smoky as a carton of Gitanes. She favors the sort of Euro angst ballads that might have appealed to Nico or Nick Cave, mainly written by the singer herself with guitarist Rudolphe Burger. Less expectedly, Balibar can shift gears to trill Offenbach, performing the role of the street-singer in a no-frills production of La perichole.

The movie opens with Balibar’s fabulously deadpan cover of Kris Jensen’s “Torture,” the pop rockabilly lament best known to cineastes for its inclusion in Scorpio Rising, but, not a filmmaker to follow up one crowd-pleaser with another, Costa immediately risks losing the audience with half an hour of Balibar’s relentless drone scatting a single verse. (Balibar may be the daughter of a celebrated Marxist philosopher, but her process seems more Heideggerian, with songs as a sort of thought-work, broken down into repetitive chunks of sound.) Typically, one-fifth of the screen is illuminated, the extreme chiaroscuro lighting rendering the singer’s harlequin-featured face as a crescent moon in the inky void.

Something between a portrait and a performance doc, Ne change rien is entrancing—literally. I saw it at a 10 a.m. screening in Cannes and stumbled out as if from an after-hours bar. On one hand, the movie is powerfully soporific; on the other, it has a controlled, hypnotic, Sufi energy. The cinematography is stunning and beyond atmospheric. The music is highly intelligent and the structure is totally musical. Balibar as Balibar is undeniably charismatic. When, toward the end, she appears on a Tokyo stage with a band, discreetly gyrating in tight jeans and an off-the-shoulder sweater, to fervently intone the theme from Johnny Guitar, she’s nothing less than the muse of cinema.

NE CHANGE RIEN
Musicians Working
by Cullen Gallagher
November 3, 2010

Stunningly sculpted in high-contrast black-and-white celluloid, Pedro Costa’s Ne Change Rien is one of the few documentaries that can rightfully claim to actually be about music. Not a story about a musician or a band, and not a concert film either, but something different. And in a landscape overloaded with media, to find something that stands out as truly “different” is a rare gift, indeed.

Costa’s subject is French sensation Jeanne Balibar, a singer/actress who has also appeared in Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir and The Duchess of Langeais, as well as the recent animated feature A Town Called Panic and Olivier Assayas’ magnificent drama Clean. Already, this is more information than Costa gives you throughout the movie. Not until after the last shot of Balibar and her guitarist rehearsing backstage has faded to black does her name cross the screen. There are no interviews with her, no conversations with the band, and thankfully no celebrities or critics explaining who the musicians are or why they are good. Instead, Costa drops us in the audience, or puts us in the corner of a room, and asks us to both watch and listen. Ne Change Rien isn’t about the people making the music—it is about the music, itself.

Ne Change Rien documents the physical work that goes into the creation of music. It opens with a live performance of Balibar and her group’s seductive, mellow grooves, before moving to the studio where much of the film will play out. In one of the film’s finest moments, we watch for several minutes as Balibar struggles to find the beat while rehearsing her vocal part over a guitar loop. Nearby, the guitarist doubles melody on his instrument, and when that fails to help he begins slapping his knee and counting out loud. For musicians, this is a commonplace scene, but one that rarely escapes the cutting room floor because of its banality. But therein lie the scene’s brilliance: it is a purely experiential moment—precious, humorous, human—one that asks the viewer to endure the intimate struggle of the musician as they practice, practice, and practice still more. Stylistically, this scene also sets the tenor for the rest of the film. Costa privileges long, uninterrupted takes over the more conventional montage, and the director’s much heralded (and equally challenging) patience is deeply gratifying to those viewers who do not turn away frustrated.

To be fair, this is a challenging movie, which forgoes traditional dramatic arcs and instead finds pleasure in the minutiae of work, and the quiet, trivial moments of sitting around a studio waiting to record. Costa’s distinctive approach not only humanizes the musicians in his film, but also the music itself. Despite the technical details, the film is, in a way, more accessible (and of more interest) to non-musicians because it opens up to them a whole world that usually only musicians are privy to. So, go into Ne Change Rien with not only an open mind, but an open ear. Even if you don’t know who Jeanne Balibar is (I certainly didn’t), the film offers a total musical experience like few others ever have.

— Cullen Gallagher

Ne Change Rien

This otherworldly musical doc takes you strange places.

SMOKY SERENADE
By Keith Uhlich

In this captivating black-and-white documentary portrait, Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa (Colossal Youth) follows the French performer Jeanne Balibar while she records a drone-rock album and readies for a production of Jacques Offenbach’s comic opera La Périchole. The actor-singer is mostly photographed in canted chiaroscuro, face half-hidden in darkness, or in a deep-focus long shot, her slender and sultry figure writhing slowly in the distance. It’s as if she’s addressing us from the void.

The aesthetic is so consistently stark and surprising—you’ve never seen shadows as boundlessly black as the ones here—that the film doesn’t live or die on the music alone. Balibar doesn’t have a smooth singer’s voice; it’s reedy, abrasive, and Costa shows her working extremely hard to achieve the desired effects. (Perhaps cheekily, the first number is titled “Torture.”) Certain scenes, like one in which Balibar hums the same two-phrase refrain numerous times, nearly drive you mad with their willful repetition. Others are daringly dissonant: A long-held close-up of a sleeping cat and a static shot of two elderly Asian women in a coffee shop seem beamed in from another dimension. By the end, you feel curiously closer to the performer and her process without having any clue how you got there. It’s exhilarating.

Review: Ne Change Rien

Jeanne Balibar is a formidable talent
By GERALD PEARY | November 3, 2010

The shadowy, low-key lighting is Wellesian, the fetishist close-ups are Sternbergian, and, says Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, the basic set-up of rehearsals of songs that are never witnessed in completion is inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's One Plus One. In that 1968 film, the Stones keep doing parts of "Sympathy for the Devil," and finally there's the entire song. Here we get more, as some numbers in this demanding black-and-white documentary play out start to finish. Ultimately, Costa manages an effective visual environment to showcase the startling versatility and formidable talents of French chanteuse Jeanne Balibar. She moves deftly from simulating Dietrich and Nico to singing Offenbach opera to offering a rocking, unexpected take on the unheralded theme song written by Peggy Lee and Victor Young for the cult 1954 Western Johnny Guitar.

THE NOTION OF A PEDRO COSTA musical might seem incongruous in light of the Portuguese filmmaker’s best-known work: the stringent, momentous Fontainhas trilogy, about the lives of Cape Verdean immigrants in Lisbon slums (released earlier this year in a Criterion boxed set). But the hypnotic Ne Change Rien (2009), a black-and-white study of the French actress-turned-chanteuse Jeanne Balibar’s musical endeavors, is very recognizably a Costa film, from the sculpted lighting and precise compositions to the particular combination of sensuousness and severity, of tender immediacy and analytic distance.

Costa speaks often of the value of work and the daily grind—in describing the Fontainhas films, made in close collaboration with the neighborhood’s poor inhabitants, he has invoked the model of the old-Hollywood studios—and he brings a materialist focus to his subjects and the activities that consume them. The obvious point of comparison for Ne Change Rien is Costa’s 2001 documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, for which he holed up in the editing room with the filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. But while that film was about a specific creative endeavor, the postproduction of the 1999 Straub-Huillet feature Sicilia!, this is a more free-from monument to artistic work process, composed of performances, rehearsals, and studio sessions.

Costa’s extreme chiaroscuro effects push his images to the verge of abstraction: Most scenes are submerged in inky darkness, barely illuminated by a single, sometimes off-screen light source. Balibar and her band are mere silhouettes at times; more often than not, at least half her face is in the shadows. The camera doesn’t move; the framing and lighting tend to render ambiguous the context of a performance. What matters is the moment. Even though a few of the songs ended up on Balibar’s album Slalom Dame (2006), the movie resists a making-of trajectory. More than a music film, Ne Change Rien is a film that’s musical in form, and also one that’s utterly committed to filming music as a thing in itself.

Balibar has brought to both period roles (Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais [2007]) and contemporary ones (Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life [1996]) a striking blend of poise and vulnerability, and this paradoxical allure extends to her singing: Her sultry voice has a pearly ring to it but it’s also a bit unsteady, and as a screen star in a world of music pros, she gives off a hint of diffidence. In scene after scene, Costa captures Balibar and her collaborators (most prominently, the guitarist Rodolphe Burger) as they work through long, looping jams, or break a song down into bars and phrases. Costa, a former musician, recognizes the sheer labor involved, most pointedly in a sequence that begins with a wordless vamp—Balibar, chain-smoking, tapping her knee, going da-da-dee-da-dum—and slowly layers on lyrics and instruments over the course of an obsessive, trancelike fifteen minutes. (Costa has said he’s noticed that the walkouts tend to start around here, “when the work begins.”) There are moments of comic exasperation, too, when the singer practices an Offenbach opera, accompanied by an off-screen voice coach whose running critiques (“Genoux doesn’t have three n’s”) provoke a curse under Balibar’s breath.

Above all, Costa has an uncanny feel for what it means to make music together. In one scene, Balibar reshapes and repeats a refrain—“peine perdue” (“pains in vain”)—wringing nuance from the dreamy incantation; Burger backs her up on guitar, singing softly. They never share a frame, but in cutting between a shot of Balibar and a reverse shot of Burger as they listen to the playback track, make adjustments, try again, crack each other up, stop, start again, Costa establishes the shivery intimacy of collaboration. (La Peine Perdue is the title of an abandoned script by Jean Eustache, and Ne Change Rien’s neo-chanson repertoire includes, alongside a few Balibar-Burger originals, several film-buff choices: Kris Jensen’s “Torture,” immortalized in Scorpio Rising [1964]; the Johnny Guitar theme; “Weeping Willows,” from Chaplin’s A King in New York [1957].)

Costa’s films have inspired some fine and enthusiastic writing, but the director, an eloquent polemicist and keen cinephile, may be his own best critic and explicator. Anthology Film Archives is supplementing its run of Ne Change Rien with a carte blanche selection by Costa that doubles as terrific contextual criticism, connecting the movie’s ideas and gambits to other examples of portraiture and music films. The selections include Eustache’s rarely screened first feature, Numero Zero (1971), which consists mainly of an interview with the filmmaker’s grandmother, and a Thom Andersen double bill, pairing the new Get Out of the Car (2010) with - — (1967), his seminal experimental rock doc, codirected with Malcolm Brodwick. Jean-Luc Godard is represented not with One Plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil, 1968), the Stones-in-the-studio chronicle that Costa has cited as an inspiration for Ne Change Rien, but with the Jerry Lewis–inflected comic riff Soigne ta Droite (Keep Your Right Up, 1987), which features the noodlings of the electro-rock duo Les Rita Mitsuoko. The one performance documentary in the series, also one of the acknowledged classics of the genre, is The Sound of Jazz, a 1957 CBS special that peaks with Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Fine and Mellow.” As Lester Young steps up to deliver a piercing, mournful sax solo, Holiday, perched on a stool, looks in his direction, listens, smiles, and responds. It’s as vivid an instance of artistic collaboration as has ever been filmed: a goosebump moment involving two people and a third thing.

— Dennis Lim

With the presence of the director Pedro Costa, the release of the film NE CHANGE RIEN is also accompanied by a Retrospective and the video installation MININO MACHO, MININO FÊMEA, at the "void+" Art Gallery, showing materials from IN VANDA'S ROOM (NO QUARTO DA VANDA) and COLOSSAL YOUTH (JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA), and entitled in the language of Cabo Verde, beautifully capturing the “moment” and “space” of Fontainhas, a Lisbon slum town.

The film NE CHANGE RIEN by one of the most relevant filmmakers of our times, Pedro Costa, dedicated to compelling French actress Jeanne Balibar as a singer, is released theatrically in Spain to rave reviews:

The documentary NUNO TEOTÓNIO PEREIRA – A MAN IN THE CITY, directed by Joana da Cunha Ferreira, will be presented at the Horizons section of the 28th Internacional Festival of Films on Art, taking place in Montreal from March 18 to 28.

Nuno Teotónio Pereira is above all known for his work as an architect. Yet throughout his life, although he never stopped being an architect, he was much more than that... The film is a captivating voyage to the heart of his artistic creation...

After having also its national premiere at INDIELISBOA, the film is now honoured with this international selection for the most important annual event celebrating creativity, innovation and the performance of artists on the big screen.

Honorary Mention from the Official Jury

Special Prize from the Youth Jury

At the 12th edtion of FAMAFEST that took place from the 13th until the 21st of March, in Vila Nova de Famalicão.

For those who love Fado and the charming city of Lisbon this is a must-see gem about a unique a girlish lady, who sings “fado” out of conviction and love, taking us with her across the city of Lisbon, visiting the places she most loves and knows, exposing herself as a generous, lively and unique person...

In Portugal, the film premiered at the last edition of the independent film festival –INDIELISBOA, and its international premiere was in the competition of FIPA – 23rd International Festival of Audiovisual Programs – Performing Arts section, undeniably the most exciting event devoted to the finest of television fare in the world.

GENTE DA CASA | PEOPLE FROM THE HOUSE, the new documentary by Ruy Otero & Carlos Gomes will be in competition at DOCLISBOA VII INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, for the best national documentary among a distinguished choice of 10 films in total.

The festival is taking place from the 15th until the 25th of October in Lisbon, Portugal, and has been acclaimed by many:

James Norton – Vertigo
«doclisboa has established itself as one of the world’s leading documentary film festivals»

Ulla Jacobsen – Dox
«The selection at doclisboa shows that there is a festival that selects films for their artistic value»

Tue Steen Müller – Dox
«It happens, but not very often, that you get the feeling that a festival is made for you,
that it has a selection of films that matches your view on documentaries and your taste.
Doclisboa2008 did so.»

GENTE DA CASA | PEOPLE FROM THE HOUSE
Portugal, 2009, 96’

A house and the building of it over a year and a half.Machines, tools, materials, laborers.
Architects, builders, workers.Those who arrive and those who go away, throughout the
process until the work is done.The work on a daily basis, and the lives of all these people.
The people of the house.

Section National Competition – 18 OCT Cinema Londres 4:30 pm | 22 OCT Culturgest 7 :00 pm

www.doclisboa.org