by ·Comments Off on Passages (2023, Ira Sachs)

Franz breaks up his marriage to Ben because he’s fallen for Adele. Ben starts going with Erwan, Franz wants to get to get Ben back while keeping Adele. Everyone gets sick of Franz’s shit and he ends up alone. A typical love triangle story, only set apart by the unusually hot leads and strong use of Franz’s nude thrusting ass and his ridiculous wardrobe.

The only screenshot I took was the music credits… which song was I looking for? Brendanowicz says it’s “the best designed/lit/composed/colored film I’ve seen all year, but I didn’t find it very interesting,” so maybe Laura Citarella should write a movie for Ira Sachs to shoot.

by ·Comments Off on Smoking Causes Coughing (2022, Quentin Dupieux)

A movie of distractions – appears to be a superhero story, but nothing actually happens. The Tobacco Force gets introduced destroying a turtle guy and soaking some bystanders in turtle gore. Then they take some time off and tell stories – about a woman with a isolation helmet stuck over her head, and a guy reduced to a sentient bucket of blood from a severe workplace accident – while their lizard-faced enemy is off blowing up the world. Dupieux’s things tend to be short and absurd, definitely worth watching every year or two.

Adèle Exarchopoulos is the other woman in the helmet story, Blanche Gardin (producer of France) is the bucket carrier, and going way back, the director/star of Man Bites Dog plays Lizardin. Our five cigarette-themed superheroes, who claim they do not promote smoking, include Vincent Lacoste (lead detective of Irma Vep Remake) and Anaïs Demoustier (maid of Bird People).

by ·Comments Off on The Five Devils (2022, Léa Mysius)

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.