A change in mood from my last French movie, the actors perfect little models through the supernatural events – nobody cries, while Léa Seydoux rarely stopped.
Trying to watch this again with Katy, if she’ll agree. A short and straightforward pandemic project with just a few actors – but writing a story that depends on the performance of identical eight year-olds seems risky, and damn, they pulled it off.
Courtney Duckworth’s Cinema Scope writeup is the one.
Lovely French movie about life being complicated, starring the great Léa Seydoux, whose Blue Is the Warmest Color co-star I saw last night in The Five Devils. She’s a professional translator whose philosopher dad (Rohmer and Assayas regular Pascal Greggory) is losing his memory and stability and vision and needs to go into a home. The movie’s about heavy things but it moves beautifully.
Léa meets Melvil Poupaud, a cosmo-chemist who studies meteorites like in that Herzog movie, but he’s married, and goes back and forth with his intentions, as her dad gets moved to worse and then better facilities… it’s more like one fine year (the film is named after the dad’s unfinished autobiography).
Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: “In a year with no shortage of similarly themed French films (see Claire Denis’ [Both Sides of the Blade] and Emmanuel Mouret’s Chronique d’une liaison passagère), One Fine Morning makes a case for itself not by upending conventions, but by applying them with care and consideration.” Key review by Vadim Rizov, who liked it not as much.
Five Devils is unfortunately just the name of a sports complex where Adele Exarchopoulos works with her disfigured ex-friend Nadine – the movie isn’t about devils, but a girl with an incredible sense of smell. Her mom Adele tends the pool, and her dad Jimmy’s a fireman, so fire and water. Dad’s sister Julia comes to stay, after spending time in jail for the fire that messed up Nadine, so everyone’s on edge.
The girl Vicky makes jars of special scents, which cause her to black out and visit past events from before she was born – invisible to all except Young Julia, who panics whenever the girl appears. After the fire ruptures the two young couples (Adele and Julia, Jimmy and Nadine), mom and dad end up together, so V wouldn’t have been born if she hadn’t (passively) prompted the fire.
Fun movie to think about, and to watch – despite its three different “Total Eclipse of the Heart” scenes. Nadine also starred in Nimic with Matt Dillon. Hugo Dillon plays a fireman here, apparently no relation.
Mike D’Angelo:
I kinda loved it, perhaps because I’d given up hope of ever again being caught off guard by what I think of as the “La Jetée”/Twelve Monkeys theory of time travel, in which visiting the past means that you were always present there. Mysius and her co-screenwriter, Paul Guilhaume, deploy their eternalism in a unique fashion (homemade perfume as proxy-Proustian time machine, with a silent, watchful Vicky visible only to her future aunt) and for singularly perverse ends—this is basically a dual tragic love story rooted in kids’ inadvertently destructive power, acknowledging that their mere existence in the world (crucially, Vicky never actually does anything during her visitations) can fuck up adults’ lives, and leaving startlingly open the question of whether or not parents’ deep, abiding love for them is worth it.
Prince Alfredo’s dying flashback to 2011 flits from a forest musical to a dinner scene where Al (now curly-haired Mauro Costa) gives a dinner-table speech to camera about how older generations are failing us. He decides to become a fireman, is shown around by Affonso (André Cabral). The firemen train to The Magic Flute, and entertain themselves with nude reenactments of famous artworks. While Al is looking at a penis slideshow he gets a call saying his dad has died of covid and he must return to the royal family, but he’ll always remember his time with Affonso, who I guess becomes president of Portugal. A much sillier movie than The Ornithologist.
Michael Sicinski on Patreon:
Will-o’the-Wisp is a critical inquiry into Portuguese history staged as intellectual gay porno, a Hottest Hunks of the Fire Brigade charity calendar that lights upon the legacy of colonialism, Western visual culture, and the ornamental irrelevance of Portugal’s faded aristocracy.
Charles Bramesco in Little White Lies:
Sex should be fun and just a tiny bit goofy, an intuitively understood real-life concept that nonetheless eludes filmmakers all over the globe.
funeral fashions of the future:
Catching up with a True/False film we missed at the fest, with special guest Katy’s Mom. After a traumatic incident, local man Richard invents bulletproof vest, promotes it endlessly by shooting himself and by publishing a newsletter counting the lives he’s saved. He’s not so interested in discussing lies he’s told or lives he’s endangered with a later revision to the vest that simply didn’t work as well, and confronted with Richard’s uncomplicated hero-story version of the truth, Bahrani interviews a “saved” cop who turned on his friend, wearing a wire to prove the company knew they were selling a deadly product. Most upsetting scene is when Richard gets his combat-addled dad to shoot him, most upsetting omission from the film is that Richard also invented explosive bullets to defeat his own vests. Instead of simply nailing Richard, who offered free guns to cops who’d kill the guys who shot them, Bahrani follows a redemption story of the fallen-out friend and his reformed attacker.
It’s Wednesday, so I checked the theater site to see what’s playing this weekend, or more specifically if Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is opening here, but nope. Hey the new Paul Schrader, that’s something. Pipeline‘s final showtime is this afternoon, after holding on for nearly a month – I’m very proud of it and Blackberry for their long theatrical lives, even though the only time I’ve personally been out since True/False was to see those city symphony shorts. Anyway, time to watch Pipeline on video like a chump (and later to chump-watch Blackberry and the Schrader and, alas, Showing Up).
And hey, it’s good! Speaking of Reichardt, I expected to be reminded of Night Moves, but this is more procedural, less psychological, with less murder and guilt, but still some heavy repercussions to the (successful) titular operation. Really good fakeout about a member of the group who’s spying for the cops – true, but she’s feeding them misinformation so half the group will stay anonymous.
I only knew Sasha Lane – also feat. Leo’s son from The Revenant, the Idaho girl from The Assistant, a Marvel kid, a White Lotus dude, a Woman King warrior, a Pixar dinosaur, Disney’s Pocahontas, and the bad boyfriend from the beginning of It Follows.
Based on a manifesto and adapted a la Fast Food Nation into a narrative, a level-up from Goldhaber’s Cam. In the excellent Filmmaker interview he says it was 19 months from conception to premiere, and calls it a heist film:
Nobody watches a bank robbery movie from the ’40s and says, “These people are trying to get people to go rob banks.” They see that movie and say, “This is a movie that’s talking about structural inequality and getting me to empathize with characters who feel like they have no other option than to rob a bank.” This movie follows eight young people who feel like they have no option but to blow up a pipeline. I don’t think of the movie as propagandistic, because there’s no cause and effect. They don’t blow up a pipeline and solve climate change. The doing of it is the narrative catharsis in the same way that it is in a heist movie. I want this movie to be given the same dramatic permission that genre is given.
The title might be the island name, not like there are men named Enys. I didn’t know. Rough-looking for a commercial film, with visible splices – I’m sure this is on purpose for textural reasons – and sometimes the image reverses, freezes or deteriorates. Mary Woodvine is very good as nearly the only human in the movie, scientifically observing an odd, plasticky flower on an island cliff. The island is haunted by miners, and by people lost and drowned at sea (represented by a tall rock memorial), and by Mary herself, suicidal in flashback and maybe in the present. She drops a rock down a deep hole every day, presumably in reference to “Hyperballad,” and starts to grow lichen when the flowers do. All sorts of thematic visions appear in the last half hour until Ghost Mary picks a flower and becomes the stone.
Brendanowicz: “I like that it tugs on a number of threads without insisting on any one of them as a skeleton key, which is a trickier feat of calibration than it appears.” Blake watched with a better sound system than I did: “Just as the image’s graininess never lets you forget that you’re looking at an image, conspicuous foley work verges on cartoonish, with isolated radio noise, footsteps and creaking doors amplified to the point where they become haptic. Zoom lenses and an infinite depth of field are likewise put to good use, destabilizing our sense of scale.”
Flowers Blooming in Our Throats (2020, Eva Giolo)
Nice sound design in an a/g short, how rare. Sync sound effects, professionally blended between shots. Focus on hands and arms… slapping and clutching, spinning tops, clipping flowers, with and without a red filter. I take the film as an ASMR parody, with its hair-brushing and rubberband-snapping, edited too quickly to evoke whatever trance state the youtubers seek.
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Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You (2019, Brandon Cronenberg)
“Eventually I realize I’m in a kind of hell.” Deragh is a brain-implant patient describing the dream states the device puts her in. Three dreams under different color filters, then a good ol’ glitching-video-signal nude freakout before the Twilight Zone ending.
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Tomb of Kafka (2022, Jean-Claude Rousseau)
Prague. A small room. The desk has a hat on it. One of the windows is green. Usually there’s a white-haired man without anything compelling to do. His activities have equal weight as the quick fadeouts or fidgets of the camera refocusing. Sometimes a cutaway to a forest or a dead bug. We watch the man read for a minute or two. Hey, I could be reading. Didn’t I get a new Laszlo Krasznahorkai book? I could’ve been reading that.
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Dear Chantal (2021, Nicolas Pereda)
Chantal is renting a place from the narrator’s sister, a painter. He’s an Akermaniac so asks to be in charge of communication, which we hear as flatly-narrated letters. Nice shot of brushing leaves from a skylight. Opens and closes with the quote: “Letters never written nonetheless exist.”
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Blank Narcissus (2022, Peter Strickland)
A “rediscovered” Midsummer Night’s Gay Porno with audio commentary by a director mourning his long-lost relationship with the star. Maybe Strickland isn’t as great as I’d been assuming.
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Open Sky, Open Sea, Open Ground (2022, Baus & Gills)
Ecuador… Grainy film with a wrecked water/shuffle soundtrack of people running across a beach from boat to truck, delivering containers of fish while besieged by pelicans and gulls. I was rooting for the pelicans.
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Emergence Collapse (2021, Rainer Kohlberger & Jung An Tagen)
Liquid cityscapes! Best guess is it’s nighttime photography turned into pure digital moosh with the color dial turned to eleven. Some of the most tripped-out shit I’ve ever seen. Loses a point for the nightmarish music, sort of a generative-autechre.
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Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021, Sky Hopinka)
Wow, a convincing and succinct blend of earth, sky and water. Images upside-rightside overlapping, the sky masked by a person-walking silhouette, desert and plants blurred into blasted lines as if viewed out a rocket-car window.
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Mélodie de brumes à Paris (1985, Julius-Amédé Laou)
The only short I watched from the free offerings of Prismatic Ground, which was like most film festivals in not having very clear communication about its streaming program.
Opens on a dubbed guy having a breakdown out the window of an artificial-looking apartment, yelling at neighbors and passers-by to blow up the buildings of the oppressors (start with the bars, banks and pay toilets). He mutters himself to sleep on the can, the synth soundtrack alternating with a pop song repeating the film’s title. In the morning he walks through the fog to a bar, his thoughts still on bombs, is the only customer but still can’t get served (because of racism, not because they heard him advocating for the violent destruction of all bars). He finds his dead father and confesses to being a merciless killing machine during the Algerian war. That night he’s being harassed by a drug dealer when a white doorman starts being racist, the director yells cut but the doorman doesn’t stop, and the cast and crew start fighting with the white locals.
Good looking movie with nice fourth-wall-breaking and synth music. I do think a few of the voiceover lines were clunky (guy is haunted by the past, we know because he says “the past, the past”). Star Greg Germain also appeared in the similarly themed Soleil O and popped up in everything from Chabrol movies to Emmanuelle sequels.
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Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916, Roscoe Arbuckle)
Farmhand Roscoe marries Mabel and they move into a cottage her parents buy when a shady realtor’s car breaks down outside their house. R&M sleep as far apart as possible inside, while outside his romantic rival the Hated Milk Machine conspires with some random thugs to … push their house into the ocean? Or it happens to slide away during a storm while HMM and the thugs are attempting to break in. Either way, they don’t become adrift until the last 7 minutes. The cops and parents somehow save them, meanwhile HMM and the thugs gamble all night, argue over the wad of cash, then all die in an accidental explosion. I know that watching silents while listening to Zorn is a cliche with me, but Cleric playing Bagatelles vol. 12 was perfect for this.
Mabel’s parents with villain Al St. John as the HMM:
Formally superior to the True/False Venus movie we half-watched, it’s a casting call of men (all men) reading aloud from the eponymous book, a girl’s early-1900’s sexy diary, assumed to have actually been written by a creepy old man. This opens certain conversations – one guy wants to know why we speak of toxic masculinity but not toxic femininity, another won’t read the page he’s assigned because it’s too vulgar (then the off-camera director, the only female voice among a hundred men, reads it to him). But mostly it’s not interrogating or contextualizing the text. And it’s not an audiobook movie – the film somehow remains focused on the delivery of the words, more than the words themselves. Neither is it scolding the men (always in pairs) or the viewer for participating, but rather it becomes celebratory in scenes where all the readers gather and chant passages from the text in unison. A strange and wonderful movie.
real film heads would know you don’t hire a boom operator for a casting call:
Beckermann’s career sounds worth exploring, as laid out by Darren Hughes in Cinema Scope (there’s also a book on her out there by the Austrian Film Museum). Beckermann:
I like to be surprised. I didn’t know these men before. There was a waiting area with a buffet, and then I just asked my assistant to bring two or three in. So I didn’t even know who would be with whom … Today there are many taboos. At the time when Mutzenbacher was written you had Sigmund Freud, and people talked about sexuality probably more than today.
if a guy with an ear-horn comes along, you absolutely put him front and center:
