by ·Comments Off on Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick)

This is France, but we’re not bothering with subtitles or even accents, because those hadn’t been invented yet in the 1950’s. WWI, fighting against Germany, with rightly celebrated tracking shots through the trenches, from the clueless higher-ups patrolling the men they know nothing about, to the middleman Major Kirk Douglas, a serious star some five years after The Big Sky. Posh general Adolphe Menjou (in one of his final films) has pressured scar-faced general George Macready (evil older husband of Gilda) into commanding an attack to capture a hill in exchange for a promotion. The attack will be a huge failure, killing hundreds of men. Two higher-ups (Gen. George and Lt. Roget) will act supremely dishonorably, the former by sending men to die in a pointless and poorly-planned maneuver and ordering fire upon his own troops, the latter by personally killing a subordinate with a grenade in a cowardly moment. But both will get off without punishment, instead picking three soldier representatives to die by firing squad for the operation’s failure, futilely defended in military court by Kirk.

Three dead men: Paris (Kiss Me Deadly star Ralph Meeker) because he’s the only witness to Lt. Roget’s murder of a soldier, Ferol (Timothy Carey, who doesn’t fit in with the rest of the movie, but it’s wonderful) and Arnaud (Lloyd the Bartender from The Shining), who had a great pre-fight speech about death vs. pain, and gets knocked down by Ferol in their holding cell and has to be executed while unconscious on a stretcher.

I thought of it as a powerful anti-war film (with a different approach to the insanity of war than Dr. Strangelove), but Gary Giddins’s commentary says it’s not exactly anti-war, but “about power, class, manipulation and the absurdity of war as a continuation of those civilian instincts.” He also says the pre-battle politicking between officers isn’t in the source novel.

The Future Mrs. Kubrick:

Menjou at Marienbad:

J. Naremore:

Kubrick is especially good at drawing sharp visual and aural contrasts between the château where the generals plan the war and the trenches where the war is fought. The Schleissheim Palace outside Munich, where much of the action takes place, later became a location for another film that depicts upper-class intrigues amid the architecture of a decadent past – Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad – and the opening sequence in the palace interior, where Adolphe Menjou suavely manipulates the ramrod stiff but insecure George Macready, was influenced by one of Kubrick’s favorite directors, Max Ophuls, who had died on the day it was staged.

by ·Comments Off on Cosmos (2015, Andrzej Zulawski)

Two friends, spiky-haired Fuchs and moppy Witold, rent a room from Sabine Azéma (maintaining her manic energy from Wild Grass) and Jean-Francois Balmer (That Day, Chabrol’s Madame Bovary). They share the house with young couple Lena (Victória Guerra of Lines of Wellington) and Lucien (Andy Gillet, Celadon himself) and Azéma’s niece/maid Catherette. Then the boarders are invited on a trip to the country with the family. That’s all that happens – but not really, as most of the characters start out wired, talking nonstop and behaving strangely, and animals and people may or may not be dying, showing up hanging from trees. At the end I thought it was all quite astounding to watch, but wasn’t sure what it all meant.

K. Uhlich:

What does it all mean? Wrong question. And it’s probably absurd to even ask. Better, instead, to fully submit to ŽuÅ‚awski’s last symphony of insanity and paranoia, which ends, cheekily enough, with a gag reel (quite the meta final statement).

C. Huber in Cinema Scope has the best explanation of what is actually happening here:

Attempting to forge order from the chaos of the real world, Witold builds a private cosmos founded on arbitrary associations. Increasingly aware of facing a universe of possibilities, in which every connection can be randomly made, and thus is equally profound and silly … Witold is seized by an existential vertigo … In short, it becomes impossible to distinguish the awesome from the absurd, and Zulawski’s cinema of intensity has been zig-zagging with furious power between those two poles for nearly half a century.

Bonkers and gorgeous-looking, as I’d hope and expect from the late Zulawski (only the second of his films I’ve seen, after Possession), shot by young André Szankowski, who was in demand by the old masters (Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon, Oliveira’s Em Século de Energia). Based on a book by Witold Gombrowicz (which does indeed feature a writer lead character named Witold), who has also been adapted by Skolimowski (30 Door Key).

by ·Comments Off on Francofonia (2015, Aleksandr Sokurov)

M. Sicinski:

With its first-person musings and associative image-track, Francofonia‘s first half resembles nothing so much as a late Godard video, but the approach and mood is open and accessible even as the subject matter turns highbrow … But most of the remainder of the film is spent dramatizing the wartime cooperation between the Louvre’s Vichy-era chief, Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and Nazi cultural attaché Franz Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath).

A complicated movie which I thought about for days afterwards, but I waited long enough before writing anything down that now it’s not fresh in my mind and I’m hesitant to write anything at all. A variety of styles, aspect ratios, color palettes, time periods and strange effects (the film’s soundtrack waveform visible alongside the picture was a new one to me). Some Russian Ark-ian museum cruising with your host Napoleon, who showed off paintings of his own exploits and earned a big laugh at our screening when he gazed at the Mona Lisa saying his usual line, “It’s me.” Even the regular historical drama scenes (Louvre chief meeting his Nazi overseer) don’t go in the directions you’d expect of a historical drama and they culminate in a wondrous bit where each character is told by the narrator how his life will end up.

by ·Comments Off on Dheepan (2015, Jacques Audiard)

At first I thought Audiard seems influenced by the Godfather movies, from the young enforcer who takes over a crime business in A Prophet to this movie’s immigrant stories (dunno how Rust & Bone would fit in), but after it became clear that Dheepan was heading towards rage and revenge, I thought of it as a more currently-fashionable Harry Brown (others are saying Straw Dogs).

The most interesting twist: Dheepan and his “family” are only pretending to be a family in order to get refugee status and flee Sri Lanka, where Dheepan was a Tamil Tiger. They live together like strangers, only playing the family role for outside observers, but gradually begin to respect and protect each other. Meanwhile, the block of apartments where they live and work is a drug hub which turns violent when lead dealer Vincent Rottiers (young Jean in the Renoir biopic) returns from prison. With these pieces in place, the movie gets to create a crowd-pleasing finale where Dheepan draws on his violent past to protect his makeshift family. M. D’Angelo: “After nearly two hours of depicting the improvised family’s patient adjustments, negotiations, and compromises, Audiard abruptly switches to Hollywood fantasy, and there’s no sign that he’s doing so ironically, metatextually, or with any other subversive purpose in mind.”

Still a pretty good movie. I’m not as upset about this winning the palme d’or (or Loach winning in 2016) as others are. Regardless of the winner, I’m still seeking out as many of the acclaimed competition films as possible (so far: Carol, The Assassin, The Lobster, Sicario).

by ·Comments Off on Cul-de-sac (1966, Roman Polanski)

I follow a lotta must-see movie lists, and supposedly one of my core interests is the Criterion Collection. Movies that are generally accepted as great, released in pristine quality with valuable extras – it’s a no-brainer. At the halfway point of every month I reload their site all day until the new disc announcements appear, and I agonize over which titles I need to buy during the next half-price sale and which are okay to rent from netflix (in the increasingly rare case that they’re actually carried).

And yet it’s not unusual for a month to go by where I watch no Criterion blu-rays, and I think I’ve figured out why that is. I think in the back of my mind, when the Criterion discs come out they lose their sense of urgency. This movie is now readily available in a near-ideal form, so no need to worry about that. Perhaps the wealth of extras is actually hurting as well – I know when I watch Red I’m gonna have to watch another hour’s worth of (really great!) bonus material, which takes up extra time. I’m always threatening a Criterion Month to catch up, but somehow that never happens, while Shocktober and Cannes Month and the Shorts Project and Rock Docs and TV shows and my random decision this month to watch six adaptations of Crime & Punishment go off without a hitch.

So damn it, I’m declaring that from now until Shocktober is Criterion Month.

I watched a fair number of Polanski films in the last couple years, and am starting to make sense of his style. The Apartment Trilogy is dark and weird, but at least two of the three films have bits of heightened silliness. Carnage and Fearless Vampire Killers are ridiculous, and I thought I was supposed to take Ghost Writer seriously as a drama, but perhaps not. I wouldn’t say Cul-de-sac is one of my favorites, but I get its mood: a hostage thriller with the tension constantly undercut by comic situations and performances.

After a robbery gone wrong, gorilla thug Lionel Stander and mortally wounded Jack MacGowran (the nutty Professor in the following year’s Fearless Vampire Killers) hole up at a castle on the shore, not realizing that the tide would trap them there for the next day. The castle dwellers include insecure author Donald Pleasence, introduced being dressed as a woman by young wife Francoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s sister in life and in The Young Girls of Rochefort). Lionel alternates between seeming quite menacing and seeming like a dumb guy with nowhere else to go, after he’s disowned by his crime bosses via phone and his partner dies, lumbering into scenes of marital discord like a disfigured remake of Knife in the Water. Stressed, Pleasance alienates his wife and the friends who come to visit while Lionel is still waiting for word from the bosses (pretending to be a drunk uncle or something). Pleasance does finally transform from emasculated dress-up doll to heroic man of violence, shooting a marauding Lionel, but it doesn’t last – he’s freezing up moments later, and Francoise flees, leaving him to his freakouts.

Won the golden bear in Berlin, playing with Lord Love a Duck and Masculin Feminin. First film appearance by Jacqueline Bisset (Day For Night, Under The Volcano) as one of the visitors. Donald Pleasence is campy here, but to be fair, it seems like he’s supposed to be. I only know him as the least-convincing part of such realist films as Halloween, Phenomena, Mr. Freedom and The Pumaman. If only I knew a Pleasence expert who could explain this guy’s methods. Lionel Stander is an actor with an interesting history. He worked throughout the 1930’s and 40’s (Hangmen Also Die, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, A Star is Born). His Eugene Pallette-like voice endeared him to Preston Sturges in the late 1940’s, then he was blacklisted for many years before showing up here.

David Thompson:

What Polanski created with Cul-de-sac was a cinema of the absurd, delving into situations of humiliation, role-playing, and betrayal, and evoking an unsettling atmosphere quite unlike anything else on the big screen. This is underlined by his then favorite composer Krzysztof Komeda’s haunting music, a nagging cross-mix of cool jazz and early pop electronica that continuously twists back on itself in repetitive phrases — even to the point where, when Teresa plays a gramophone record of the main theme, the needle becomes stuck … Polanski had previously approached the august Beckett about making a cinema version of his revolutionary Waiting for Godot. But the author saw no reason for something conceived for the stage to be adapted into a film and refused the rights. Nevertheless, Beckett’s exploration of universal human experience through a pair of philosophical bums had a great influence on the young Polanski, as did the disturbing plays of his contemporary Pinter, with their theme of, yes, imposition, laced with menace and black humor. Although he would downplay it, Polanski’s eventual casting of Jack MacGowran, who had acted in Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s Endgame, and Donald Pleasence, who was in both the stage and film versions of Pinter’s The Caretaker, suggests more than pure coincidence.

by ·Comments Off on Tom at the Farm (2013, Xavier Dolan)

Psychodrama following young Tom (Dolan), whose boyfriend has just died, visiting the departed’s mother and brother for the funeral. Brother Francis threatens Tom to shut up about his late brother’s sexuality around their mother Agathe, first insists Tom leave and then prevents Tom from leaving… meanwhile Tom alternates between wanting to flee and to stay, while bonding with Agathe and getting into a twisted hate/need relationship with Francis.

Cannes Month is all about becoming familiar with the fest-regular directors whose work I’ve never seen before, so now that Dolan has won Cannes prizes with five of his six features, and starred in the best Cannes GIF of the year, he’s top of the list, despite my favorite critics’ aversion to his movies. I chose maximalist Dolan’s most pared-down work, also his only movie that didn’t go to Cannes (it opened in Venice instead, winning a critics prize).

In the second half, as part of Tom’s flip-flopping allegiances, he recruits coworker Sarah (Evelyne Brochu of Orphan Black), who played the dead lover’s girlfriend in photographs sent to the family, to join him at the farm. Maybe the invitation is meant to cheer up the mother, though Tom forget to tell coworker-Sarah details about girlfriend-Sarah’s fictional life, or maybe to rescue Tom, though once she arrives he informs her he’s staying. Just after her visit, Tom finally gets spooked enough by Francis’s past behavior to make his escape. Dolan makes all this indecision and ambiguity work for the movie, maintaining tension by never giving away exactly what the characters are thinking. Actors are shot largely in closeup, but outside dialogue scenes there’s enough shot variety that it doesn’t become Blue Is The Warmest Color-oppressive.

Full cast:

D. Ehrlich: “If Tom at the Farm is occasionally impenetrable as a drama, it’s seldom less than gripping as an exercise in suspense.”

A. Muredda in Cinema Scope disagrees:

One detects Dolan’s yearnings to transcend his wunderkind origins in the thematic heaviness of the push-pull almost-romance between Tom and his abuser, the kind of charged dynamic that lends itself to critical think pieces on the twin horrors of homophobia and conformism. This pretense to seriousness aside, Tom à la ferme feels like a mild regression: too artfully manicured to work entirely as a thriller, and not florid enough to be a pure melodrama.

by ·Comments Off on Hors Satan (2011, Bruno Dumont)

Meditative drifter David Dewaele (a Dumont regular who died in 2013) and sad teenager with family problems (Alexandra Lemâtre of no other films) are apparently friends (I can’t shake K. Uhlich calling them “Hipster Jesus and Anime Goth Girl”), and in the opening minutes he murders her stepdad for her.

Rest of the film is less story-driven and more mystical than we’d expect from that opening. David is some kind of a healer. Alexandra is pursued by an amorous guard, but she likes the emotionally unavailable David instead. There’s a forest-fire / walk-on-water scene that brings to mind Nostalghia, a disturbing rabies-sex scene, the unexpected rape/murder of Alexandra and her much-more-expected resurrection. What does this mean for the case against her murderer, who gets caught in the previous scene?

Strange sound design – during long shots we hear someone (the cameraman?) breathing loudly. I rather liked this movie, but my critics who’d seen his earlier work did not. S. Tobias: “Another tedious variation on themes that would seem too specific to repeat … His impeccable style has never been in question; it’s his purpose that seems in doubt.” I’m also not sure what it adds up to, but it’s mysterious and pretty enough (Cinematographer Yves Cape also worked on Holy Motors) to keep me happy for a couple hours.

Mom, on encountering her resurrected daughter:

Andréa Picard defends the film in Cinema Scope:

Hors Satan‘s elliptical nature and multiple readings are firmly beholden to the film’s form; Dumont has referred to his emphasis on “sensations” and the retrospective (instead of fleeting) meaning of images attained through careful composition and construction. With a striking refinement and reduction of his palette, and a sly sense of humour, Dumont has reached a new level in his filmmaking.

Played in some sub-category of Cannes with Elena, The Day He Arrives and Martha Marcy May Marlene.

by ·Comments Off on Simon Killer (2012, Antonio Campos)

Maybe it’s a gimmick, but it worked for me, belatedly. I spent most of the movie wondering at the widescreen cinematography (which seems to use its black bars as a weapon, subtracting from the picture rather than adding) and the going-nowhere story, only gradually realizing that friendly, innocent Simon is being revealed as a liar and woman-beater.

Adam Cook:

The portentous title immediately creates an anticipation for the events that will follow. Yet whilst there is a logic to the title, Campos smartly plays with the audience’s expectations as this is not a serial killer thriller but the character study of a detached sociopath who leeches off others before discarding them when they have fulfilled their usefulness. Simon is a complicated and ambiguous character, weak and pitiful yet cunning and manipulative. He is a man who adapts himself to take advantages of situations, appearing hurt and helpless yet always in control.

American Simon is Brady Corbet (part of the Melancholia wedding meltdown) and his girl in Paris is Mati Diop (35 Shots of Rum), and the two cowrote their parts together with Campos, whose third feature Christine premiered at Sundance the week I watched this.

by ·Comments Off on Lumière! chapters 1 & 2

Holy shit, the Lumière films have been remastered in HD and look incredible. I understand no spoken French, so played the music-only track on the blu-ray, though I’ll bet the narration is super interesting. Hope this comes out in the U.S. eventually.

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Sortie d’usine III (1896)

Sortie d’usine II (1896)

Sortie d’usine (1895)

Three takes shown in reverse order (and with declining picture quality). There are dogs (the same dog?) in all three, and dudes who need help riding their bikes.

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Débarquement du congrès de photographes à Lyon (1895)

The first self-reflexive movie? A photographer notices he’s being filmed, his own camera aiming towards our camera.

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Repas de bébé (1895)

This baby would be 120 years old now.

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Forgerons (1895)

Hammering and cranking – right as the film ends the anvil guy is being poured a drink. Can’t help but notice how clear the scene looks even with the fast hammer motion. I wonder what (approx) framerate this was shot at. Reportedly a remake of an Edison kinetoscope from 2.5 years earlier.

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Arroseur et arrosé (1895)

Classic hose gag, ends in a spanking.

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Partie d’écarté (1896)

While drinks are poured, cigars are smoked and cards are played, the waiter in the background is overreacting to the scenario, single-handedly inventing silent-film ham acting.

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Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1897)

It’s coming right at us!

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Démolition d’un mur (1897)

I’d like a hand-cranked wall-demolisher. Everything was hand-cranked those days – construction equipment, cameras, fireplaces. Afterward this film is played in reverse, which is apparently a thing projectionists did to blow minds, a post-post-production effect.

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Panorama de l’arrivée en gare de Perrache pris du train (1896)

Looking out the side of a train, with nice view of a horse-and-wagon bridge. “Panorama” apparently meant “moving camera”.

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Arrivée d’un train à Perrache (1896)

Another train arrival (possibly the train we rode in the previous film). The behavior is what’s odd here. Bunch of uniformed mustache fellows waiting anxiously for the train to arrive, motioning at it, grabbing its handles seemingly in an effort to make it stop faster, then opening all the nice-looking cushioned side doors as a Napoleon-hatted man in the distance slowly paces.

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Place des Cordeliers (1895)

Nice angle on a busy street. Horse-drawn double-decker bus!

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Place Bellecour (1896)

Some of these are probably really special if you’re familiar with the corner today. Wonder if that hotel being built in the background is still standing. Unexciting until right at the end, a car reading “Absinthe Premier” appears on the right side. An advertisement like we put on tops of cabs and sides of buses, or – still my heart – an absinthe delivery truck??

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Quai de l’Archevêché (1896)

It must have been unusual that this street would be flooded, given the huge audience of people watching from the sidewalk as cars pass by. But maybe not, since there’s also a boat. Don’t these people have somewhere better to be? Ah, “floods of the Saône river during the first week of November, 1896” says IMDB.

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Place du Pont (1897)

Camera glides beautifully down a trolley line, but Lumiere didn’t have great timing with this one, as we stop to allow a rubble truck to pass. I guess those are simply bus ads for alcohol after all, since here we’ve got “Dunoise liquor exquise” and “Alcool de menthe” (probably De Ricqlès). My new theory is that these are party buses full of college students, who hop from one to another when they want to try a different spirit.

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Concours de boules (1896)

A pretty damned exciting game of boules with a big crowd of suit-wearers, who are apt to dash into the middle of the court right when someone’s about to throw.