by ·Comments Off on Petite Solange (2021, Axelle Ropert)

Locorazo screening number one. A change in the formula this year, we’ll get into it later. Really nice to see a soft, grainy movie from this decade that doesn’t look like digital glop.

Solange was doing fine at school until her parents decided to get divorced – now she gets detention, steals from a store, cries during class. Mom (Lea Drucker, very good as usual) is an actor, dad (one of the guys I didn’t mention who Juliette Binoche dates in Let The Sunshine In) runs a guitar shop and has been seeing his coworker. Solange says she knows her parents don’t love each other, but she’ll try to stay alive anyway. Axelle wrote La France and Mrs. Hyde and Don Juan, and plays the dean in Bozon’s Mods.

by ·Comments Off on L’Humanité (1999, Bruno Dumont)

Slow cinema starring a vacant-eyed cop reacting to news of a raped/murdered little girl, whose body we get a nice long leering stare at. The cop just wants to hang out with his neighbor Domino, but she’s dating bus driver Joseph, whose route goes right past the murder site. After some investigation, he finds Joseph arrested in boss’s office, tearily confessing, then our cop goes home and has a long hug and cry with Domino, then cut to the cop in handcuffs. Think I liked this best of Dumont’s pre-Quinquin slow art films, though somehow I missed “a brief shot that shows Pharaon levitating in his garden.”

by ·Comments Off on The Smugglers (1967, Luc Moullet)

Excessively, whimsically French-new-wavey – a silly-ass low-budg indie comedy, more admirable than enjoyable. Brigitte (Francoise Vatel, a Brigitte in Brigitte and Brigitte) and Francesca are stuck with the same guy, a “customs officer”/smuggler. When they get cornered they keep rewinding the film until they figure out the right strategy for escape. Their schemes are successful, but it gets tiring so they move into the city and get government jobs. “Stealing a few minutes from the boss raises the personnel’s morale and efficiency.” The director: “Bresson praised the grace of the film. But did he mean it or was he just fucking with me?”

Kayak battle:

Most relatable scene: Francesca does the dishes by hyperballading them off a cliff:

by ·Comments Off on Misericordia (2024, Alain Guiraudie)

It brings me no pleasure to report that the weird gay french movie is 10x better than the Cannes-winner. I really don’t mean to be contrarian, this only makes it harder to predictably find movies I’ll enjoy.

Jeremy the French Bill Hader-via-James McAvoy (actually Felix Kysyl, Gorin in the Hazanavicius Godard movie) is from Toulouse, returned to the small town where he used to live for a baker’s funeral. Jer stays with widow Catherine Frot (of the Belvaux trilogy), and his presence bristles deep-voiced Hermit Walter and especially the late baker’s Big Quinquin-looking son Vincent. The Vincent rivalry gets heated to the point that Jeremy ends up killing him with a rock in the woods, burying him in a shallow grave, which doesn’t seem great for the future of his relationship with V’s mom.

Enter Phillippe, the best movie priest of the year, who becomes a co-conspirator and helps Jer, who’d been making up new night-of-the-crime stories whenever his old ones got busted. Phillippe says that murder is fine, and achieves his goal of getting naked in bed with Jer, this scheme being more complex and better thought-out than the murder conspiracy itself. If I’m not making it sound strange enough, there’s a cop who keeps sneaking in at night and trying to get Jer to confess to the crime in his sleep.

Priest, Widow Martine, and Unwitting Widow Annie:

from his Film Stage interview:

I think that I work a lot on emotions and I work a lot on questions that I want to provoke in the spectator. But I always have the feeling, by the time the film is over, that I’ve somehow missed something … by the time I get to the stage where we’re at now, I don’t quite remember what my intention was from the beginning … I’m not sure that what I even had intended was doable or realizable from the start.

by ·Comments Off on Downhill (1927, Alfred Hitchcock)

Movie about Ivor’s life repeatedly falling apart even though he’s rich, white, and handsome. First his college buddy, a trend-following buffoon with a pretty sister, knocks up local girl Mabel. She pins it on the rich boy so his family will pay her off, even though scholarship kid Tim was the culprit, and Ivor is expelled on moral grounds and kicked out of his home.

Subtle, Mabel:

But Ivor inherits some money, somehow? He marries a fancy actress, who spends all their cash, cheats on him, then kicks him out of the apartment. He spends some time pathetically mooching off pathetic older women then runs off to France. Fortunately back home, Tim is dying and deathbed-confessing to clear Ivor’s name, so his family takes him back when he returns home half-starved.

Hitch pulls off some really great framing and closeups, but the movie felt like a chore, a couple steps down from The Lodger, so I opted to cut my losses and skip the couple hours of blu extras for now.

by ·Comments Off on The Empire (2024, Bruno Dumont)

The mythology of warring intergalactic races (the evil Zeroes and noble Ones) battling for control of the hearts of humanity is cheesy even for Dumont, but his French countryside weirdos-getting-exponentially-weirder schtick is on point. Both sides are pretty ramshackle, the antichrist kid Freddy is pretty easily kidnapped then re-kidnapped. If you follow the characters and story, it’s all deflated and lame – the long pauses and awkwardness and mismatched performances are the whole show. The space forces collide, forming a black hole over Earth which annihilates all of them and the police car belonging to Team Quinquin – Carpentier gets all the dialogue, the Captain now too twitchy to handle anything else. Elsewhere, the cellphone demon was in the latest Three Musketeers reboot, angel Jane in the latest Count of Monte Cristo.

by ·Comments Off on Two Diaries of a Chambermaid

Diary of a Chambermaid (1946, Jean Renoir)

New maid Paulette Goddard (Modern Times) gets off on the wrong foot with mistress Judith Anderson (a chambermaid herself in Rebecca) by joking with the bearded master (Reginald Owen, the 1938 Scrooge), not realizing who he is. She meets desperate maid Louise, cook Marianne, and asshole valet Joseph, and gets to work. But this place is annoying and creepy: the valet (Francis Lederer, who started out in Pandora’s Box) is after her, the mistress is dressing her up for a visit from long-lost son George (sickly, secretive Dorian Gray), and the next door neighbor (Goddard’s husband Burgess Meredith) keeps breaking the family’s windows and eating their flowers. She announces she’s quitting and the valet goes mad, announces that he’s stealing the family’s treasures, then robs and murders the neighbor while the police are having their annual parade. Weird that I’d follow up Murder a la Mod with another movie that opens with a diary and features icepick murders.

Paulette, Burgess, and squirrel:

–
Diary of a Chambermaid (1964, Luis Buñuel)

The French director had made an American film, then the Spanish director makes a French one. Now the maid is less headstrong, and has been hired to care for Madame’s dad, who wants to grab her leg while she wears special boots and reads to him. For Buñuel’s whole career everyone blabbered about surrealism, while he just wanted to put women’s legs on the big screen.

Everything is darker and more explicit in this version – Master Piccoli is allowed to sleep with the maids as long as he doesn’t get them pregnant, and Valet Joseph wants to open a Cherbourg cafe and pimp out the maid to soldiers. The valet is still a celebrated bird torturer, also a racist activist, whose 1934 “down with the republic” march gets the movie’s final words (while Renoir’s parade featured “vive la republique” fireworks). Instead of robbing the neighbor, he rapes and kills a local girl, the same day the old man dies. The maid works on helping the cops convict Joseph (and fails), but there’s no son to swoop in and save her from these awful men, so she ends up marrying the neighbor – no escape, no justice.

Madame in her laboratory:

Unlike the Renoir this one has no pet squirrel, but we do see a mouse, a frog, ants, a boar, a rabbit, a basket of snails. Supposedly Buñuel’s only anamorphic widescreen movie – maybe he regretted its mind-warping effect whenever he moved the camera. Starring Jeanne Moreau the year after Bay of Angels, and Master Piccoli after Contempt… Valet Joseph is also in A Quiet Place in the Country, Madame in Chabrol’s Bluebeard. Watched these on oscar night… they won no oscars, but Moreau got best actress at Karlovy Vary.

The Mirbeau novel was adapted again in France with Lea Seydoux, but directed by a notorious pedophile, so it’s both tempting and not tempting to watch. The book has the girl’s (not the neighbor’s) murder and Joseph stealing the family silver, then unlike both of these movies, the maid marries him and moves to Cherbourg. Randall Conrad in Film Quarterly compares the films, championing the Bunuel over the Renoir (which has no eroticism and a “deficiency in conception”):

At the least, Celestine is a moral witness to the bestiality of Joseph, something she tried to stop and couldn’t. But perhaps her secret attraction, her fear of it, and her individual powerlessness make her an accomplice to Joseph’s rise. In that case, Joseph’s assertion – “You and I are alike, in our souls” – takes on full meaning … [Buñuel] returned in his film to the France he left in the thirties, and created its portrait … The film has the closed structure characteristic of Buñuel: the end is a beginning. An individual’s gesture toward freedom not only fails but lays the ground for still worse oppression. The era that has begun, as the [fascist] demonstrators turn the corner and march up a street in Cherbourg, is the one we are still living in.

by ·Comments Off on L’important c’est d’aimer (1975, Andrzej Zulawski)

I’m going with the original title, since the English That Most Important Thing: Love has always annoyed me. Made between The Devil and Possession, the camera rushes and roams, the Delerue music rises and fades.

Seedy burnout photographer Fabio Testi (a Monte Hellman regular) interjects himself into the lives of fallen actress Romy Schneider (Inferno, The Trial) and her husband Jacques Dutronc (the Godard of Every Man For Himself). They’ve all got some intense half-unspoken feelings for each other, and strict rules around their encounters. Despite his own money problems, Fabio bankrolls a Shakespeare play with Klaus Kinski to get his new actress friend some self-respect. Feels very based-on-a-novel, and it is, but Zulawski and DP Aronovich (Providence, Time Regained) keep it interesting enough.

Fabio’s book collector friend:

by ·Comments Off on Golden Eighties (1986, Chantal Akerman)

A mall-set musical. Nobody respects horny young Robert, not his girl Lili at the salon across the aisle, not even his parents who run the clothing store where he works. Lili waits until Robert is about to marry her coworker Mado before running off with him. Meanwhile his mom has her own drama, bumping into long-lost American lover Eli, who wants her back, while she focuses on running her shop and barely gives him the time of day.

Reluctant salon owner Lili played the lead in a Vicente Aranda movie.

Jean (Jean-François Balmer of Cosmos) owns Lili’s hair place but she doesn’t love him, so he finally wrecks the place in a rage and sells his lease to the neighbors.

Robert’s mom Delphine, post-makeover, with Eli: American director John Berry, who made He Ran All The Way with fellow blacklistee John Garfield

Pascale Salkin (left, the girl who isn’t Maria de Medeiros in I’m Hungry, I’m Cold) bounces between plots, and is the only person in Golden Eighties to also star in The Eighties, which is somehow not out on video. Would-be fiancee Mado later appeared in Carnages. Nathalie “Conann” Richard played a nameless hairdresser coworker of theirs, and neighbor Sylvie who runs the snack shop was in films by Demy, Varda, Sautet, Ozon, Lelouch, etc.

Robert’s dad has the best voice of the men here (Charles Denner aka The Man Who Loved Women). Delphine Seyrig would only star in one more feature – Joan of Arc of Mongolia – before dying of cancer at 58.