by ·Comments Off on The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966, Roberto Rossellini)

Polite, ornate historical movie, shot 4:3 for television in grand color. I had to look this up: XIV was two Louises before the Louis who married Marie Antoinette then got killed in 1793 by the French Revolution. All these Louises had long reigns, so the movie takes place a good century before the Revolution.

This Louis seems a pudgy weakling, more interested in partying and women than in ruling the country, until his main advisor Cardinal Mazarin dies. From then on, the king decides to take charge, proclaims that all policy must be personally approved by him, and arrests the advisor who had schemed to take control after the cardinal’s death.

At the end, the King moves the palace to Versailles, and gets all the nobles to follow him there, consolidating all power around himself.

dying cardinal mazarin:

I wonder if there were commercial breaks when this first aired – it has the abrupt fade-outs at the end of scenes that usually signal that an ad is coming. J. Hoberman says Rossellini’s late TV works “have an intimacy well-suited to the small screen,” but I watched this movie and all his others on my laptop screen, so I’ve long ago lost the difference between theatrical and television. It didn’t seem any more intimate than the Ingrid Bergman films.

Some truth from Tag: “‘You always have to try to emphasize the emotion,’ said Rossellini. Despite the strange rumor in film textbooks that Rossellini siezes reality in the raw, in fact, he carefully crafts his display.”

Louis in his fancypants:

It has a theatrical quality, with people standing and stuffily proclaiming things to others who ought to know already. You’ve gotta mix exposition with your realism if you want audiences to understand your history-lesson TV-movie. The king seems a stiff actor at first, but I started to like him. He never smiles, and the closest he ever gets to a look of glorious kingly determination is a sort of sad droop with shades of anger. It’s quite a good movie but I guess I don’t understand what makes this different from other historical fiction, how Rossellini thought of his TV work as an educational revolution, or how this became an Anthology Film Archives staple.

Louis’s mom is kind of mean to him:

Renzo: “He had a utopian vision: to save the world through television. His utopian vision was that television could free mankind from ignorance, and that freeing mankind from ignorance would also eliminate hunger and unemployment and all other evils. He considered ignorance the source of all the world’s ills. He thought that his function as a mature director was to achieve this. Hence the idea of making films based on history as the font of knowledge, and the idea of describing the world through television.” Tag says R.R. announced in 1962 that cinema is dead and made a doc on the history of iron, which flopped, causing him to be quite depressed. A couple years later, Louis XIV was chosen to close the Venice Film Festival, and a third of the French population watched it on TV. Tag says you can learn more about the life of Rossellini’s historical subjects from a desk encyclopedia than from watching the films, so the films are more for conveying the emotions of the events. “Rossellini’s heroes are the loonies who turn the most damn-fool ideas into reality. … heroes whose inner fire takes us with them into our new reality. … but in Louis’s case, as often in history, the big effort is to subjugate people rather than illuminate them, to create slaves who think they’re free.”

scheming Fouquet:

The guy playing Louis was an office clerk and amateur play director, nervous on camera, reading most of his lines off a blackboard. Colbert, mustachioed advisor to the king, is Raymond Jourdan of Renoir’s The Elusive Corporal. But mostly they’re first-time or small-time actors. Script adapted by Jean Gruault, who worked with Rivette, Truffaut and Resnais.

Tag calls it “the story of a man who was afraid and so creates a new reality where he’ll control everyone … it’s a horror film.”

by ·Comments Off on Smoking/No Smoking (1993, Alain Resnais)

Watched for Resnais’s 90th birthday. One of the most excellent, entertaining and moving Resnais films I’ve seen. Too bad it’s five hours long so I won’t be able to show it to anyone else. Just two actors (Sabine Azema, recently great in Wild Grass, and Pierre Arditi, her resurrected fiancee in Love Unto Death) play about four characters each. Each movie begins with Sabine thinking about grabbing a cigarette – in one she does, in the other she doesn’t – and builds from there, branching into multiple stories based on different decisions made by the characters, all of them more meaningful and consequential than the cigarette, rewinding to show the opposite decisions and their outcomes, building a structured mega-narrative, showing how the same characters deal with different circumstances.

Smoking

Cartoon character intros. School principal’s wife Celia Teasdale grabs a cigarette, and school caretaker Lionel Hepplewick shows up to look at her garden. Lionel flirts with Sylvie, the Teasdales’ maid.

Five Days Later: the Teasdales admit their marriage is over. Red-cheeked principal Toby decides to leave for a while.

Five Weeks Later: Celia has started over as a caterer, is working her first event with Lionel, who proves a poor business partner. She loses her damn mind, very amusingly, and Toby feels awful and returns to her.

Five Years Later: funeral of local poet Joe Hepplewick, Lionel’s father. Toby has quit drinking, and Celia is still troubled after her catering breakdown. Lionel succeeded in the food industry, married a businesswoman and runs a thriving cafeteria, while Celia, whose idea it was, is a shell of her former energetic self, cared for by her sad husband.

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back at the catering job at the tail end of the breakdown, Lionel comes running up and assures Celia that she can count on him.

Five Years Later: Poet Joe’s funeral, Toby and Celia barely recognize each other. She’s still partnered with Lionel running their successful business, and Toby is a drunken mess. “At each funeral I feel like I’m being buried myself.”

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back in their garden, Toby Teasdale doesn’t leave his wife but proposes a vacation. Lionel is crushed that Celia’s leaving, and tells him the catering thing was just a pipe dream.

Five Weeks Later: comic scene at a hotel terrace. Lionel has followed them, got a job as a waiter, and keeps trying to secretly speak with Celia, bringing her desserts as a pretense. Toby finds out and has him fired.

Five Years Later: funeral for Toby. Celia is accompanied by Toby’s friend Miles, and obsessed Lionel is there working as a gravedigger, still following Celia.

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back at the hotel, Toby restrains himself after learning that Lionel has followed them. Celia admits she encouraged him and Lionel agrees to leave her alone.

Five Years Later: commemorative service to celebrate the school’s anniversary. Celia is still with Toby and they’re unhappy again/still. Lionel pops by, married and successful with a taxi business.

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back at the Teasdales’ garden when Lionel was flirting with the maid Sylvie on the first day of the fateful cigarette, he agrees to go out with her if she’ll stop dating other guys – so he never ends up involved with Celia at all.

Five Days Later: After their date, Lionel starts working on Sylvie, telling herself she needs to improve herself if they’re ever going to make something of themselves. She gets principal Toby to agree to help her learn about literature. Toby’s wife Celia comes home, complains at Toby to stop drinking, saying Miles saved his ass from getting fired. Lionel is pleased that Sylvie is taking her self-improvement seriously.

Five Weeks Later: town festivities and a rare sighting of poet Joe Hepplewick in a wheelchair, talking with Celia, then with Sylvie about her future with his son Lionel. She’s testy when talking with now-unemployed Lionel. Toby is looking better, inspired by his new role as Sylvie’s mentor, but she tells him she’s stopping the lessons because there’s no point. Sylvie gets stuck in the stockade, where she’s to be pelted with sponges later during the festival, and Lionel hits her with one instead of freeing her.

Five Years Later: Lionel and Sylvie have two boys, are christening their young daughter. Lionel is still kind of a fuckup, and he tells Celia that Sylvie is boss in their household. Toby is feeling better since quitting his principal job, acting as godfather to the baby girl. “I’ll personally keep an eye on her education.” “I thought you were fed up with education.” “This is a special case.”

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back at the festival, Lionel frees her after all, and Sylvie says she won’t marry him, then tricks him into the stockade.

Five Years Later: Principal Toby is sick-drunk at the school’s anniversary celebration. Sylvie is a reporter now, arrives to interview the principal, says Lionel married someone else. “She wasn’t as lucky as you were.” Sylvie thanks Toby for his lessons years earlier. “You showed me the way so I could escape,” and makes the principal feel happy again.

No Smoking

Celia decides against that cigarette, and misses Lionel’s visit, is visited by Toby’s friend Miles instead, who tells her that the school board is about to fire her husband for being drunk and erratic, that Miles is trying to save him. Celia says don’t bother, tells Miles that she’s leaving Toby anyway for being a shitty husband. But when she goes back in the house, Miles tells maid Sylvie to deliver the message that he’s going to try anyway, and that the four of them (he has a rocky marriage to serial cheater Rowena) should have dinner this weekend.

Five Days Later: in the garden, the only two who show for dinner are Celia and Miles – who recently saved Toby’s job at the school. Turns out Toby stayed away on purpose, wanted Miles to talk to Celia, deliver the message that Toby still wants to stay with her. But Miles is in love with Celia. Awkward dinner becomes stranger when Celia’s mom Josephine shows up, asks Miles a lot of questions (but she is very discreet). He is fed up, goes and hides in the shed, as Toby stumbles home and eats with Celia.

Five Weeks Later: confessions on the golf course. “It’s only gotten worse since he stopped drinking.” Red-haired Rowea taunts husband Miles, then gets him to read her a poem.

Five Years Later: Easter, and Miles sees Celia in the churchyard. Toby died years earlier and Miles and Rowena moved away. Back visiting now, but nobody seems especially happy.

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back at the golf course, Rowena tells Miles it’s not going to work out.

Five Years Later: School’s 50th, both couples are broken up, Miles and Toby have moved away and live together, with difficulty, and Celia has scored a job at the school.

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back at the beginning, Miles says he’ll defend Toby to the school board and doesn’t propose any dinner with Celia. Later, arguing with his wife on a walk through the Teasdales’ garden, Rowena locks him in the shed. Sylvie the maid lets him out, and he spontaneously invites her on a walk around the British coast, which he’d always wanted to do with his wife but never got the chance. Celia comes out to talk, says Sylvie left a message that she doesn’t like long walks, and that Rowena is out with another guy. Miles decides to go back into the shed.

Five Weeks Later: Miles is still in the shed, much to Toby’s annoyance. Rowena messes with Lionel, throws his pants in the fire when he removes them to show off, then talks her husband out of the shed, but he says he’s leaving to start over somewhere new.

Five Years Later: midnight mass. Sylvie, now married to Lionel, sees Miles in the churchyard. He’s waiting for Rowena. “You were right. You can’t start over again.”

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back at the shed, Rowena is nicer to Miles and gets him to come home.

Five Years Later: party at the school, Rowena scares off Lionel, is completely nasty to her husband.

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back at the shed, Celia delivers the message that Sylvie loves long walks.

Five Weeks Later: Sylvie lied, is complaining about her shoes and the cold and leg cramps on the first day of her hiking trip with Miles. They are infatuated though, and share a kiss, rare in this movie, but they’re also getting on each other’s nerves. They talk it out in a travelers’ cabin. “I always have my worst moments in sheds.” Sylvie wanders off, and Rowena arrives to collect her husband.

Five Years Later: Sylvie is just marrying Lionel, and Miles is walking her down the aisle. Rowena comes by in a red Devo hat and is pretty nice to her husband for once.

OR IT WENT LIKE THIS

Back on the hiking path, Miles refuses to follow Rowena and falls to his death in the fog.

Five Years Later: a memorial ceremony for Miles led by Toby. “His widow told us he has a preference for sheds,” so they dedicated a shed in the churchyard in his memory. Sylvie and Rowena separately tell Toby that they’ll come at times, sit in the shed and think of Miles. “Incredible, what a story. Hard to understand.”

Nice movie, with good music and a surprisingly strong endings to each title. Not shown above: Irene Pridworthy, school vice principal. Based on a play by Alan Ayckbourn (Coeurs) in which a different series of variations is performed every night, so it takes sixteen performances to catch them all. Resnais and his writers cut it down to twelve for the film. Won an award in Berlin, and best picture at the Cesars, also best director, screenplay, production design and actor, but actress went to Binoche for Blue.

Ayckbourn in 2007:

They all finish with a certain dying fall, except for a couple that go up in mood. In general, the point is that we do have free will and we can choose, but we can’t change unless we make a huge effort. Only Sylvie makes a big change; she’s the one who changes the most. If you don’t change, you just end up in the same place. How many men do we know who end up marrying the same woman again and again! At the end of their lives, people who have unsuccessful relationships will say weren’t they unlucky in love but maybe they were impossible to live with. Anyone who would marry Lionel Hepplewick in Intimate Exchanges must be mad!

I looked up five reviews, and each said the movie grew tiresome and wasn’t inventive enough with its premise – except for J. Rosenbaum, of course.

Resnais’ fascination with a highly theatrical cinema, first broached in Mélo, gets freakishly extended here, with two of the same actors running brittle, virtuosic relays between multiple roles. On the stage, Aykbourn’s plays were meant to be performed over eight consecutive evenings; eliminating the two most “English” scenes — a medieval pageant and a cricket game — Resnais commissioned Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui, his subsequent writers on Same Old Song, to squeeze this into two two-hour features, to be seen interactively in whatever order the audience prefers. In practice, Resnais reported that most French viewers hedonistically opted for Smoking first. And it appears that what they found more palatable than their Anglo-American counterparts is a principal identified by critic François Thomas as pivotal to Resnais’ later films — an alternation between affection and recoil, identification and distance, sweetness and bitterness reflecting the influence of Follies and other musicals by Stephen Sondheim.

by ·Comments Off on Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné)

In production for two years, from occupation to post-WWII, with Jews in hiding, nazi collaborators and members of the French resistance all working together on the largest movie set in French history. Carne was known for his poetic realist dramas and had collaborated with writer Jacques Prevert before on Port of Shadows, Daybreak and Les Visiteurs du soir. The music stays in the background where it belongs (unlike many American 1940’s movies), quality editing and camerawork that rarely draw attention, and an amazing (especially for nazi-occupied France) art and production design team. A massive hit, and one of the most universally loved movies ever. More importantly, Katy liked it.

Girish’s Senses of Cinema entry on the film is short and excellent. Rough character sketches: “The film follows the Garbo-like Garance and the four men in her life: moonstruck mime Baptiste; philandering thespian Frederic Lemaitre; murderer-dandy Lacenaire and the wealthy, loveless count Edouard.”

Garance (Arletty, one side of the Daybreak love-triangle) is the center of the film, loved (in their own way) by four men. She meets the criminal off and on, begins to fall for the mime, ends up sleeping with the actor, then goes away to live with the count. It’s all less sordid than it sounds from stringing it into a single sentence like that.

Garance, first discovered as a sideshow beauty attraction:

Baptiste is the mime, played by actual mime Jean-Louis Barrault (the poet in La Ronde, later in some strange ones like Venom and Eternity and Chappaqua). He starts as a street performer doing free shows in front of the Funambules, berated by his more esteemed father, and ends as the people’s favorite entertainer, the Chaplin of his time.

Lemaitre is the actor (Pierre Brasseur, sinister psychologist of Head Against the Wall, below-right in his Othello blackface). He gets his break on stage in a lion costume at Baptiste’s Funambules, and works his way up to headlining Shakespeare plays at the “high” theater down the street. Lemaitre is a friendly fellow, though kind of insufferable about his own talent and ambition. Highlight is when he provokes a duel against the authors of a play which he self-reflexively destroyed onstage.

Lacenaire, thief and murderer, is Marcel Herrand, who specialized in playing “the high-class, scene-stealing villain,” played Fantomas in ’47 and the king in Fanfan la Tulipe.

The Count of Montray, who lures Garance away but never marries her (because she must remain free), is Louis Salou (uncredited in The Devil’s Hand), not a major presence, though he does have a duel scene with Lacenaire.

Pierre Renoir, Jean’s older brother and star of Night at the Crossroads, is Jericho, who moves between characters, a thief/fence/salesman/hobo. In the original draft, gentle Baptiste was to kill Jericho in the street, distraught at having lost Garance.

Natalie (Maria Casares, Death Herself in Cocteau’s Orpheus) marries Baptiste after Garance goes away with the count. In the second half they have a five-year-old son, though she knows that Baptiste would still leave her for Garance if he could.

Avril, Lacenaire’s henchman (Fabien Loris), is a threatening-looking presence, though Lacenaire himself performs the violence, which makes Avril squeamish.

Silk Thread, a fake blind guy (actually a gem appraiser with above-average sight) who befriends Baptiste – played by Gaston Modot, gamekeeper in Rules of the Game.

Baptiste’s landlady (at one point also Lemaitre and Garance’s landlady), along with Jericho, is one of the untrustworthy snitches in the film, a rare veiled reference to the current occupation of France.

Hyperactive director of the Funambules (and Natalie’s father) is Marcel Peres, who appeared in the sequel to Herrand’s Fantomas.

More from Senses:

The dreamlike passions and fragile sensitivity of Baptiste the mime form a strong contrast to the loud and blustery Frederic, who booms, “I will die from silence like others die from hunger and thirst”. Yet, while Frederic later achieves fame as an actor-star on the boulevard, the common folk are drawn to Baptiste and his delicate stories wrapped in the gauze of pantomime. … The amoral and dissolute Lacenaire writes farces which remain unperformed and unread. He ends up mounting a real-life assassination with the loving detail of a theatrical production. After the meticulous murder of the Count, the murderer waits calmly after the “performance” for the arrival of the police. The Count’s open contempt of theatre (“I don’t like this Monsieur Shakespeare: his debased violence, and his lack of decorum”) co-exists with a passionate bent for casual killing in the name of honor – thanks to that old tradition, the duel. Thus, theatre weaves its thread intimately into the fabric of every life we witness in the film.

A complex and tragic character, Garance’s easy devotion to the fleeting passions of love is innocent yet destructive; her flighty nature brings her a succession of moments filled with pleasure, yet the comfort of love eludes her. At the end of the film, when Baptiste runs into the carnival crowd, attempting unsuccessfully to catch up with the departing Garance, he is swallowed up by the “audience”, he is one with them, unable to be anything other than what they are. We have grown accustomed to seeing him in the privileged space of the stage, gazed upon by the admiring audience, straining forward silently in their seats. We are not ready for this fall from the rarefied spotlight of the stage to the bustling anarchy of the oppressively celebratory carnival crowd. It is a descent from artifice to reality.

Tidbits from B. Stonehill’s commentary on the first half:

Carne used Murnau tricks on the exteriors, constructing sets with diminishing size to give a feeling of greater depth, using small coaches filled with dwarfs in the background.

All four of the male leads were based on real historical figures – Lacenaire and Baptiste were actually on trial for murder at the same time. The actor who played Baptise suggested the film to Prevert and Carne.

From the beginning, when Garance is falsely accused for stealing a watch (in fact Lacenaire took it): “Now Baptiste surprises everybody by saying that he saw what happened, and he will now use his art to explain what he saw. In addition to being on its own a great work of art, Baptiste’s performance offers an allegory of his art can liberate a captive from tyranny. As Children of Paradise was being made under the watchful eye of the nazi authorities, Prevert and Carne could not risk any overt allusions to the political situation of the day, which is why so many of the films of this period are costume dramas and period pieces. But skillful allegory could keep the truth hidden, yet hint at its shape.”

Prevert was friends with cubist-innovators Picasso and Georges Braque. “Braque’s influence can be found in the presence of cubism in this movie’s asthetic. A cubist collage contains multiple perspectives on a central subject. In a sense, then, Children of Paradise is a cubist portrait of Garance, including as it does, how the public sees her in a circus tent, how Lacenaire sees her as his guardian angel, how Baptiste is smitten by her as a poetic ideal, how Frederique has seen her as a potential conquest…”

“But why should there be a difference between my dreams and my life?,” demands Baptiste. The film, which after all acts out some of its makers more cinematic dreams, would seem to confirm Baptiste’s demand. But not really, when you look more closely at this scene. Baptiste says, “je vous aime, Garance.” Yes, technically that means “I love you,” but he is using the formal form of address, “vous” instead of “tu,” the intimate form, as in the more natural “Je t’aime.” It’s not that Baptise is ungrammatical, it’s that Prevert, the poet who created him, is showing us that Baptiste has put Garance on a pedestal, and the very grammar of his “I love you” dramatizes that distance he’s put between them.

Baptiste surely has Garance all to himself, but he flees her bedroom. “Until now, Baptise’s idealism has seemed noble and indeed beautiful to us. Now we see that it is something he had better grow out of. Like Shakespeare’s heroes, the clearly-drawn characters of this film are great and likeable, but they are also deeply flawed. What kind of love story is it where the hero runs away from the embrace of the heroine? A love story where the obstacles are psychological and spiritual, not material, and that’s exactly what this clever poet and this artful filmmaker have in mind.”

Funny, I watched Foolish Wives and Children of Paradise the same week, each at the time the most expensive film ever made in its country.

C. Affron commentates the second half. “Frederique, whose ambition is to be a great tragic actor, is often involved in comic action. Baptiste, the mime who is supposed to make his audience laugh, is the serious one, on-stage and off.”

Terry Gilliam: “Watching it, I’m amazed at how much I’ve stolen from it.”

by ·Comments Off on Tout Va Bien/Letter To Jane (1972, Godard & Gorin)

Oh whoops – I planned to watch Weekend first, to go from the end of Godard’s beloved 60’s period, skip over his purely political post-May-’68 work with Gorin as the Dziga Vertov Group, and resume with Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane. But I forgot, and watched this before Weekend. No matter, probably. But as I’d heard, the Godard of the 60’s never returned after ’68. This is so similar to his 60’s movies, despite the bright pop color, the custom-built sets, meta-movie voiceover, married-couple storyline and (especially) major stars. No, it’s as talky as The Owl’s Legacy.

Long-Distance Singer Yves Montand and newly-oscar-winning Jane Fonda were both known to be politically-engaged, and both were hugely popular at the time, so it was perfect casting for Godard and Gorin – plus an opportunity for them to gripe about Montand’s previous “problematic” political films. But G & G really want to polemicize at length, so they note in the voiceover that the stars were cast and given a jaded love story out of commercial necessity.

Unwitting pawns in Godard and Gorin’s political agenda:

Boss Caprioli:

Opens with JLG’s most cinematic-illusion-shattering move yet, close-ups on all the checks he’s cutting for the film’s stars, technicians, sets and so on. The juicy center of the film (shot in nice loooong shots, many of them motionless) consists mainly of dudes giving long speeches about union labor, class divisions, the political system.

“Under a calm surface, everything’s changing. Everything’s changing within every class. And She and He, swept up in it, also change.” Yves is a formerly-idealistic filmmaker (“a screenwriter during the New Wave”), now doing commercial work. Jane is a radio news reporter, and the two are at a factory office when the workers hold a major strike and lock the boss in his office for five days. So we get interviews with the boss (Vittorio Caprioli of Il Generale della Rovere): “the glaring injustices of Marx’ and Engels’ day are over,” and the shop steward: “our salaries haven’t kept up with increasing production, and even less with corporate profits.” It’s weird for a leftist, pro-workers movie that I can easily find who played the company manager, but not which actor played Stacquet the shop steward.

Some business in a supermarket that I didn’t understand because I wasn’t paying close attention anymore, but the long back-and-forth dolly shot reminded me of the factory scene in Manufactured Landscapes. Yves and Jane at their day jobs. Scenes of the factory in operation, of struggle in the streets. A token love-story-resolution ending in a cafe, which seems extraneous even as a joke, since the couple never got any development.

Great cross-section of the factory offices:

Yves, disillusioned:

From an interview with a wide-eyed bathrobe-clad Godard: “It’s quite striking. When workers are interviewed [on TV], these people are given 15 brief seconds when they haven’t opened their mouths all year. We give them 15 seconds, or even three minutes, to speak. ‘What do you think of the strike? What do you think of your lot in life?’ Who can answer when he’s had his mouth sewn shut?”

Letter To Jane (1972)

An hour-long photo-essay posed as a letter to Jane Fonda, analyzing a newspaper photo of her in Vietnam talking (or, as Godard & Gorin rightly point out, listening) to some unidentified men. She’d visited the country after the filming of Tout Va Bien but before its release, starting the ridiculous “Hanoi Jane” controversy, during which the press took the actions of a movie star more seriously than the war itself.

Godard and Gorin take turns narrating (in English), and each takes pains to avoid any interest in their voice, so the movie becomes a didactic lullaby. I got bored almost immediately.

See also: Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice and Farocki’s Workers Leaving The Factory

by ·Comments Off on The Immortal Story (1968, Orson Welles)

Hour-long, splendorously Wellesian, elegant little movie about storytelling, made between Chimes at Midnight and F for Fake. Why does nobody ever talk about this one? A French production (I watched the English-dubbed version) based on a novel by Karen Out of Africa Blixen and shot by Willy Les Creatures Kurant.

On Macao (a Chinese island then controlled by Portugal), Welles is a fat rich man who takes things very literally, cares only about his accounts, which his accountant (filmmaker Roger Coggio) reads to him every night. One day, Coggio reads his boss the prophecy of Isaiah instead. Welles doesn’t like prophecies, things that are not yet true, so he counters with a “true” story he heard about an old man who hires a sailor to sleep with his young wife, to produce an heir. He’s enraged when the accountant tells him this is a fable, retold by many sailors with variations, and Welles insists that they perform the story for real so that somebody in the world will be able to tell it truthfully. He’s got the old eccentric rich man part covered, now just needs someone to play the young wife and poor sailor.

A poor sailor:

In the town square, the great Fernando Rey (a couple years before Tristana) gives some back-story. It seems that Jeanne Moreau (same year as The Bride Wore Black) grew up in the house Welles now occupies, until her dad killed himself over a 300-guinea debt to the old man. Coggio talks her into playing the wife out of curious revenge – she agrees for a price of 300 guineas. They pick up an honestly down-and-out, recently-shipwrecked sailor (Norman Eshley of a few 1970’s murder films – one thinks of Welles’ own role in The Lady From Shanghai) and pay him five guineas to play the role (he doesn’t seem familiar with the fable).

Coggio awaits Moreau’s reply:

Afterwards:
– “Now you can tell the story”
– “To whom would I tell it? Who in the world would believe me if I told it? I would not tell it for a hundred times five guineas.”

And the accountant finds Welles dead in his chair.

This Is Orson Welles reveals that there were supposed to have been a series of short films based on Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) stories. The Heroine was canceled after a single day’s shoot, and A Country Tale was to star Peter O’Toole. Welles would later adapt another Blixen story into The Dreamers.

PB: You were interested in the idea of power…
OW: No. He doesn’t have the power – you show that it’s meaningless.
PB: He fails-
OW: It doesn’t even begin to work – it’s a dream. That’s the whole point of the story. He has no power: not that he does have it, but that he pretends that he does. It all turns to ashes.
PB: Why does he die?
OW: He’s getting ready to die when the story begins. And he dies when the thing can’t work. He dies of disappointment, in his last gasp of frustrated lust.

Senses:

Welles was only in his early 50s when he made The Immortal Story for French television, but it appears as an almost too perfect summary of his career; a metaphorical tale of impotence, memory, power and mortality made on a tiny budget in Europe it both chases its own tail and is a deeply felt film of melancholy mood and sensibility. The film has the quality of a miniature; short in length and minimalist in design. It also appears depopulated, as if the product of a fragmented dream or imagination.

by ·1 Comment

Leisurely-paced, straightforward story of silent film star George Valentin and early talkie star Peppy Miller. He’s struck by her early on, helps her career get started, and they stay acquaintances, but he’s more focused on his career. He sinks his savings into a big film, written produced and starring himself, which comes out and flops the day after the stock market crash and the same day as Peppy’s massive hit Beauty Spot. After she becomes famous she stalks him, buying up his pawned and auctioned belongings, and putting him up in her mansion when he’s hospitalized after burning up all his films and nearly himself. Another suicide attempt, with a gun this time (punchline provided by George’s dog) before Peppy manages to find him a worthwhile job as a film dancer.

Good supporting cast. John Goodman is the film producer, James Cromwell is Valentin’s extremely loyal chauffeur/assistant, Penelope Ann Miller (who played Edna Purviance in Chaplin) is Valentin’s wife (then ex-wife), and a weird little appearance by Malcolm McDowell, who must’ve been spotted near the set that day and hastily recruited. Writer/director Hazanavicius and stars Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo made the OSS 117 spy comedies before this.

UPDATE:
It’s been commonly reported that The Artist is the first silent film since the first academy awards in 1928 to win best picture. But it’s also the first novelty film since 1929’s weak (but with sound! and in color!) Broadway Melody to win the award.

by ·Comments Off on L’assassinat du Père Noël (1941, Christian-Jaque)

An unexpectedly excellent Christmas movie (Katy was suspicious of the title) that turned out far better than Good Sam. The movie expertly sets up a series of eccentric characters in a secluded mountain town, building suspense as Christmas draws near because two major characters wear the santa suit and we know from the title that one of them will die. But instead a third santa is killed, plus the local church’s prize jewel is stolen from the nativity exhibit, and the movie becomes a somewhat lighthearted murder-mystery.

It’s just not Christmas without a crazy cat lady:

Cornusse (Harry Baur, star of Raymond Bernard’s Les Miserables, tortured to death by the Gestapo a couple years after this movie) is a globe-maker whose daughter Catherine (Renee Faure, star of Bresson’s Les anges du peche) suffers from Disney Princess Syndrome. A Baron (Raymond Rouleau) returns to his castle after a decade-long tour of the world, stricken with leprosy. Villard (Robert Le Vigan of Duvivier’s remake of The Phantom Carriage) is an athiest schoolteacher planning his annual fireworks assault on the church during Christmas services. Mother Michel (Marie-Helene Daste – wife of Jean, appropriate since the teacher/student rapport was bringing Zero de Conduite to mind) is a crazy woman who wanders the town asking about her long-dead (and stuffed) cat.

Globe-maker and daughter:

Villard is trying to win Catherine’s heart, but he’s too ordinary for her – she pines after the mysterious baron. She sneaks off to his castle while her father Cornusse plays Santa throughout town. When Santa comes to the castle looking for the three kids of the groundskeeper (one of whom is sick in bed and grumping about Christmas), the Baron lets him fall asleep then takes the suit.

Great scene: Villard whirls about in celebration with the other pub denizens, the camera whirling with him, alternating with shots rotating around broken-hearted Catherine

But when Santa shows up murdered it’s neither of the men – a stranger. Turns out Jean Brochard (of Diabolique and I Vitelloni) hired the man to steal the diamond, then killed him and planned to flee town alone. Mystery solved, jewelry returned, and the Baron never had leprosy (he’s just antisocial) so he and Catherine live happily ever after.

by ·Comments Off on Le Doulos (1962, Jean-Pierre Melville)

I actually kept up with all the plot confusion, so better write this down while I still remember it. Thief Maurice (Serge Reggiani, would-be star of Clouzot’s Inferno) kills and robs his fence/friend Gilbert (Rene Lefevre, Monsieur Lange in The Crime of Monsieur Lange), goes home to girlfriend Therese, hangs out with friends Silien and Jean, then gets caught robbing a house the next night, kills a cop who knew Silien and Gilbert, and gets arrested for both killings, neither of which can be proven.

From another POV (with a few holes), as soon as Maurice leaves Therese’s house robbery, buddy Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo, one of three Melville movies he did between Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou) runs in, ties up Therese (smacking her around first) and asks her where the robbery is taking place. Cops cars arrive just as Maurice’s partner has started drilling the safe – the partner and the cop are killed, and Maurice faints with a bullet wound, picked up by persons unknown in a car. Belmondo visits the police station, a known informer, and offers to call around the bars looking for Maurice – they catch him in one, and he’s arrested. Meanwhile, Therese turns up dead in her car at the bottom of a ravine. Looks like Belmondo has locked up Maurice for offing his cop friend, and killed his girlfriend too. On top of that, Belmondo finds the buried jewels, cash and gun from the Gilbert killing (Maurice had left Therese a map, in case anything happened to him). In jail, Maurice (who’s as much the star of the movie as the over-the-title-credited Belmondo) hires a dude to kill Belmondo once they get out.

But Belmondo turns out to be a true friend who’s extremely good at covering for Maurice’s crimes. Belmondo killed the girl for ratting, saved Maurice at the scene of the heist, met up with his own ex-girl (Fabienne Dali of Kill Baby, Kill) and used the jewels to frame Michel Piccoli for the murder(s). So all is well… or it would be, but Maurice remembers that he’s got a hit man after his friend, so he races to Belmondo’s house and everybody gets killed.

So much twisty plot going on, I barely noticed anything else. Seemed like one of Melville’s more busy, exciting films.

by ·Comments Off on Toni (1935, Jean Renoir)

A story of hot-blooded foreigners who come to France to work, getting in torrid love affairs then killing each other. Renoir beginning on a rare burst of pessimism that would lead to La Bete Humaine.

Toni (Charles Blavett of Stormy Waters and Manon of the Spring) is sleeping with his landlady Marie (Jenny Helia of La Bete Humaine), but has the hots for Josefa. She seems to like him too, but ends up sleeping with Albert, a supervisor at the quarry where Toni works.

Toni and Marie:

Toni and Josefa:

Two years later, Josefa has a kid, her husband Albert is cheating, and Toni still lives noncommittally with Marie. Josefa’s uncle Sebastian, a friend of Toni’s dies, and after Toni gets in a fight with Marie over whether he’s attending the funeral, she tries to drown herself.

Josefa can’t deal with her husband anymore, so plots to escape with her cousin Gabi (“Andrex” of Hotel du Nord), with whom she’s been cheating for years. But the escape goes wrong – Josefa kills Albert, Gabi flees on his own and Toni takes the fall, gets shot down as a train full of new immigrants arrives to take his place.

Eureka provides context:

Based on a police dossier concerning a provincial crime of passion, it was lensed by Claude Renoir on location (unusually for the time) in the small town of Les Martigues where the actual events occurred. The use of directly-recorded sound, authentic patois, lack of make-up, a large ensemble cast of local citizens in supporting roles, and Renoir’s steadfast desire to avoid melodrama lead to Toni often being labeled “the first ‘neorealist’ film”. Renoir himself disagreed. Although Toni is acknowledged as a masterly forerunner of neo-realist preoccupations and techniques he wrote: “I do not think that is quite correct. The Italian films are magnificent dramatic productions, whereas in Toni I was at pains to avoid the dramatic.”

M. Campi:

Renoir continues his investigations of depth of field and the moving camera and makes painterly use of the natural landscapes to counterpoint the drama. He delights in establishing landscapes from foreground to the distance with his characters weaving through diagonally. The organization of the movement within the frame is breathtaking but never straining for effect or obvious. Like nature itself, these elements flow effortlessly, belying the care and attention that has inspired them.

T. Milne:

Toni is not a shapeless mass of observed reality – in fact it is as strictly formalised as any Renoir film. It has a circular construction – the arrival of a batch of immigrants is repeated at the end. This suggests that the events we have just witnessed, though shattering to the lives immediately touched by them, have left no lasting mark on the social milieu. … The fundamental structuring element is the way Renoir contrives to impose the slow serene rhythm of Provence on each scene, so that the urgency of passion or despair – Josefa and Toni laboriously pushing a handcart down a leafy lane while, she tries to make him act upon his love for her, Marie drifting across the lake to stage her suicide – is absorbed by the tranquil, passive landscape.