Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”

French remake of Kurosawa’s own film with Ko Shibasaki (Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) in the Sho Aikawa role, and Staying Vertical star Damien Bonnard as Creepy. This one is more straightforward, less cryptic than the original (especially in Ko/Sho’s plan and motivation), maybe more grounded and less absurd. As a spiraling-revenge film chock full of cool French actors (kidnappees, in order, are Amalric, Gregoire Colin, and Slimane the Temple Woods guy) I was bound to enjoy this, but after watching the original and its companion this year, and in the wake of the great Chime, this can’t help but feel superfluous.

Local gang carjacks some valuables from a Saudi prince who likes to dance incognito at grungy clubs. The gang is friendly with Mr. Pons, whose mom just died, and they seem like good-natured dudes, hanging out feeding the pigeons, but the prince’s guy hires Elite Jim, who suspects these guys straight away, and quickly hunts/kills them all. Mr. Pons is an ex-army sniper, which means he’s got a long gun wrapped in a carpet hidden in a storage locker somewhere, and out it comes for some fast revenge. I wouldn’t have started watching if I’d remembered Rabah made the decently forgettable South Terminal, but this one’s better: a grounded version of the crime/revenge movie.

Léa Drucker – coworker-friend of In My Skin, aging-backwards wife of Incredible But True – absolutely nailing her star turn here. Appropriately, as a kid she also appeared in Kung Fu Master. Her husband (Adele’s dad in Passages) brings home his estranged teen son Theo for the summer, and he’s a real asshole. When Léa discovers he burgled the house and stole her bag, she says she won’t tell if Theo acts like part of the family and drops the hostility. But he drops too much hostility and soon he’s having sex with his stepmom. Of course they’re caught, though it’s not clear at the end what the husband believes happened. Remake of recent Danish movie Queen of Hearts. Breillat joins Assayas among French directors who think adding Sonic Youth music will make their movie cooler (they’re right).

Breillat in Decider:

I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not interested in the question of the age gap. I am an entomologist. I look, and I represent things as they are, as naturally as I can … I was telling Léa, who’d never done an intimate scene of this kind before, that I have less interest in bodies than the nudity of the face. And I told her, don’t be mistaken, there’s much more intimacy in allowing the camera in close-up on your bare face. That’s what cinema is trying to get at, in the end. All I film is intimacy, and it’s all on the face.

At rogerebert.com she says her film is less moralistic than the one she’s remaking:

In terms of what happens for Léa’s character, it was very important that there be no kind of predatorial seduction [on Anne’s part, as is the case in the Danish film] – it needed to be something that happened to her in a moment that she’s caught off guard. She sets up a pact with him – when she says, “I won’t tell your father [that you robbed his house] if you agree to integrate [with] the family,” it’s at that moment that she signs her death warrant as a happily faithful wife. In that scene, he still looks very childish, quite chubby – he’s not beautiful in any sexualizable way – but at some point, he looks up at her, and suddenly the camera comes in very close, his face gets thinner, and his features get sharper, and he looks at her like a woman. That gaze is what she’s eventually going to succumb to because it’s a gaze that is hard to resist – it carries the promise and the potential to make oneself younger again.

The Starfish (1928)

He’s loving distorting the camera view and irising in, cross-fades, the poem as intertitles to the action. The starfish motion diorama halfway through is very great.

I stand by what I wrote last time. Watched the new restoration with music by Sqürl which I love whenever there’s guitar/feedback and/or drums (the all-keyboard sections feel too tame for these films). Man Ray and I were alive within a year of each other.


Emak-Bakia (1926)

What I said before, and add double exposures, plus Man Ray inventing the anamorphic lens-twisting effect 55 years before The Evil Dead.


Return of Reason (1923)

Film-surface object patterns, an underlit carnival.
Sqürl getting into it with the drums and keys, intense.


Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice (1929)

Faceless dice men drive out from Paris, leading to some excessive shaky-cam driving scenes, arriving at a very modern castle. Judging from the sliding panels full of canvases it’s the home of a rich art collector – is this movie a tour of a rich benefactor’s fancy house, like that one Cocteau? Apparently.

I misremembered this as being more similar to Ghost Dog, which I also need to rewatch soon, but hopefully not as a memorial screening. For all his alibi setup, when Delon gets to the club he acts extremely suspicious and everyone notices him. Rounded up with some other suspects, he gets off because pianist Cathy Rosier says he’s not the man. Then his contract guys try to kill him, he goes in for revenge, then foolishly goes to see the girl again, where cop Heurtebise has set a trap.

Even when wounded and on the run, always take time to feed the birds:

The third of six “Comedies and Proverbs” after Aviator’s Wife and A Good Marriage. Arielle Dombasle returns from the latter, taking her niece Pauline (Amanda Langlet of A Summer’s Tale) on a beach trip, where they run into troublesome boys of various ages, all of whom would like to bed the ladies. Older family man Henri (Féodor Atkine of High Heels and Sarraounia) scores with Arielle but is suspected of being a pedo when he covers for young Sylvain (Simon de la Brosse of The Little Thief and Assayas’s Disorder), while windsurfer Pierre (Pascal Greggory of Gabrielle and La France) frowns from the sidelines.

A rare cinematic appearance from Bongo Fury:

Arielle & Féodor:

Pauline has got it figured out:

Pre-Modern Times ironic drama equating schools and assembly-line workplaces with prisons. Henri Marchand gets out of prison and looks up his cellmate-escapee Raymond Cordy (Wooden Crosses) who now runs a phonograph factory.

Now being chased by both criminals and cops, the two guys weigh their options: friendship, money, status, escape – and come to the correct conclusion.

I got a new dumb idea: to watch a bunch of movies called The Big ____ and call it The Big Movie Series. Not planning to rewatch The Big Heat (Lang) or The Big Boss or The Big Sky or The Big City or The Big Short or The Big Shave or The Big Snit or The Big Sick or The Big Picture… maybe The Big Lebowski or The Big Sleep… and I wonder if there’s an HD version of the extended The Big Red One yet.

our boys:

Idle rich pretty boy Jim (John Gilbert, star of The Merry Widow the same year) surprises everyone by enlisting in the army during WWI, teaming up with slack-jawed steelworker Slim (Karl Dane of fellow big movie The Big House) and officer/bartender Bull. At this point I got tired of hearing “You’re In the Army Now” on the blu-ray soundtrack so I put on Jason Moran’s album of WWI music, and loved how the slide-whistle song synched up with the Three Stooges-ass scene when Jim is walking with a barrel on his head. This is while they’re in France before the fighting starts, and Jim is falling for a pretty local (Renée Adorée, also Gilbert’s costar in Tod Browning’s The Show).

french girl:

Once they’re in the trenches, each gets his chance for heroism and revenge and death. WWI battle tactics are depicted as: walking in a straight line towards machine gun and cannon fire like robots until some yokel has the idea of throwing a grenade at the enemy. Only the rich guy gets to live, and back home his girlfriend and his brother try to pretend they haven’t fallen in love with each other while he was away, but he could care less, he hobbles back to France as if his beloved farmgirl really needs a yank with a wooden leg. But I kid, it’s a beautiful scene, made that much better by the Dirty Three album I put on after running out of Jason Moran songs.

my new motto: