by ·Comments Off on That Day (2003, Raoul Ruiz)

An impeccably shot but disturbingly off-kilter comedy-thriller, a very successful genre mash-up with the perfect amount of Ruizian surrealism (not way too much, as in The Golden Boat).

Michel Piccoli, apparently wearing some eyeliner:

In short, a father (Michel Piccoli) is scheming to have his daughter from an earlier marriage (slightly mental, confined to home, played by Ruiz regular Elsa Zylberstein) killed by allowing a murderous psychopath (Bernard Giraudeau) to be released from the asylum and led to his house – but the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other, and he ends up killing almost everyone in the movie but her. Meanwhile a couple of cops, using some kind of ridiculous logic, decide to stay away from the likely crime scene until later in the evening, at which point the father kills himself and the cops arrest the head of the asylum (Féodor Atkine of The Silence Before Bach and Sarraounia).

Below, a portrait of soon-to-be-murdered family members. From L-R:
not sure, Roland (Laurent Malet of Chabrol’s Blood Relatives and Demy’s Parking), Leone (Edith Scob, between Comedy of Innocence and Summer Hours), Luc (Jean-Baptiste Puech), Hubus (Jeunet regular Rufus, Amelie’s dad), Bernadette (Hélène Surgère of Intimate Strangers, who died last month)

The actors, especially our two leads, are amazing. Ruiz gets in some nice long takes, deep-focus shots (not as absurd as the ones in City of Pirates), some anamorphic-lens twisting (a la Comedy of Innocence), some black comic dialogue (twice when people Pointpoirot was about to kill die on their own, he responds “that wasn’t me”), ridiculous story developments (all this murder is over the inheritance of a condiment fortune) and melodramatic elements (I think the valiant, surviving house servant Treffle is the brother of asylum head Warf).

Treffle with Warf’s mustache:

Pointpoirot’s blood-sugar meter during one of my favorite scenes, a one-take cartoon shootout vs. Roland:

Livia is excited at the start of the movie because all astrological signs point to this being the biggest day in her life. In the park she chats with a guy from the easily-escapable local asylum, taking a break from a bike ride with his companions, and someone shouts at Treffle in recognition – I think that’s the setup for his being related to Warf. Piccoli’s ex-wife got the “Salsox fortune,” which the daughter will inherit, so Livia was supposed to die along with brother Luc (she actually kills Luc) – not other brother Roland (shot) or Hubus (heart attack) or Bernadette (stabbed) or Leone (hit by car).

Lovebirds:

Bernard Giraudeau as Pointpoirot. This was one of his last movies, as he died of cancer last year.

Elsa Zylberstein was also in the movie This Night, which is not a sequel to That Day.

Grunes:
“Switzerland, in the near future,” a once-neutral nation through which tanks are now rolling, evoking images of the military takeover of Ruiz’s native Chile in 1973, precipitating his flight to Europe.

Police chief, with a bit of food in the foreground:

Slant:

There are more than enough laugh-out-loud moments — Livia and Pointpoirot’s slow dance is scored to the chimes of the dead relatives’ discarded cell phones, while Edith Scob … exults the nuances of bottled sauce — but Ruiz’s best gags are formalist: A cut from the misty outdoors to a dining room has one of the characters polishing the camera’s eye, and the extended chase between Pointpoirot and Livia’s gun-toting brother is staged as a repeatedly advancing-receding tracking shot in a posh hallway. That Day is a Chabrolian parody, just as Colloque de Chiens is a goof on Fassbinder and Shattered Image is an erotic thriller send-up…

Piccoli and Scob:

by ·Comments Off on Around a Small Mountain (2009, Jacques Rivette)

A tiny film for Rivette, near the end of his career, with his old collaborators. Centers around two people – Jane Birkin (not as great as she was in La Belle Noiseuse) and Sergio Castellitto (greater than he was in Va Savoir) – who meet at a tiny circus, near the end of its life.

From the commentary: “One of the things that attracts Vittorio to the circus troupe is his sense that they have no director. He sees an opportunity, a possible role for himself.”

The first scene is magic: Jane is broken down on the road en route to re-joining the circus after many years away (due to the on-stage death of her boyfriend) when non-circus-performer Sergio, acting more like he belongs in the circus than anybody, stops and fixes her car, with no dialogue at all. After that, Sergio remains somewhat magical, but Jane’s story becomes something more scripted and typically movie-like than usually found in a Rivette film. Apparently it’s all full of interesting metaphors, and after reading Sam’s comments I’m sure I should give it another shot, but it didn’t strike me as hard as Don’t Touch the Axe, or practically any of his others, for that matter. It’s not like I understood his intentions in making Joan the Maid or the symbolic meaning behind Va Savoir, but I loved them nonetheless, and this one lacked that immediate power. It was, however, his funniest movie since Le Pont du Nord (not counting Up, Down, Fragile, which I haven’t seen), and that’s more than I can say for Rohmer’s final film, to which Sam admiringly compared this.

Anyway, I enjoyed the movie, just not as much as I expected to. Some great non-naturalistic lighting, some good awkward stage scenes (a bizarre clown bit that revolves around broken dishes), and my second favorite moment after the wordless open, Jane Birkin walking the tightrope, first towards the camera with the tightrope at bottom of frame, so we can see she’s truly performing the stunt, then it pans up slightly as she turns around, so she walks back with the rope itself out of the shot, the titular mountain (the French title is roughly 36 views of Saint Loup Peak) in the distance.

by ·Comments Off on Love Unto Death (1984, Alain Resnais)

Each scene (and the definition of a scene ranged from a single spoken sentence to a 6-8 minute stretch) is followed by complex music over a dark screen with falling snow, the snow sometimes thick and heavy, sometimes falling at different angles or drifting sparsely or entirely absent. Katy liked the movie but disapproved of the unhappy ending and the snow scenes. I loved the whole thing, am thinking of extracting the snow music and burning a CD.

The final Resnais film with Jean Gruault, writer of Mon Oncle d’Amerique and La Vie est un roman. Scientist Elizabeth (Sabine Azéma – I was recently loving her in Wild Grass and she’s just as great here) is the new girlfriend (2 months) of archaeologist Simon (Pierre Arditi of Not on the Lips, Coeurs). He gets checkups and is found to be in perfect health, yet he experiences fainting spells, possibly heart attacks, and at the beginning of the movie he’s declared dead by family doctor Jean Dasté (L’Atalante star, also of The War Is Over), who is embarrassed that Simon awakens a few minutes later.

Their good love/hate friends (André Dussollier – in Love on the Ground the same year, hard to recognize at first without his white hair – and Fanny Ardant – I recognized her from La Vie est un roman and Katy from 8 Women) both work in the church, and Simon is a fervent nonbeliever. Now that they have reason to be talking about life and death, suicide and resurrection, there’s much heated disagreement, then the two try again to comfort Elizabeth after Simon dies (again) from his mysterious ailment. Has a harsh but beautiful ending.

Grunes, always succinct:

Resnais tweaks Time in L’amour à mort. A genetic botanist, Elisabeth works toward the future; an archaeologist, Simon digs into the past. … Sometimes the inserts are only blackness, and sometimes the inserts are so frequent that the human drama seems what’s inserted. … As Simon dies again Elisabeth promises to join him. They already seem a fully meshed couple; the Martignacs, an unmeshed one. Resnais’s final shots suggest that the film has always really been about the Martignacs.

Except for Sabine’s horrid black coat, there’s no infernal fashion or general early-80’s ugliness, but then again, this is set in the countryside. I suppose all the garish proto-punks were confined to Paris at the time.

MAY 2025: Watched in HD, beautiful movie.

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After watching Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, which documents the director’s experiments with visual effects and attempts to integrate them with his stories via dream sequences, then reading at the end that he later used all these effects in The Prisoner, what could I do but run straight out to watch The Prisoner.

And boy did he ever put those effect experiments to use. It is full of light and color and lines and boxes, reflections and refractions. Real tight framing and editing, very clockwork in a wonderful way, with outstanding music, acting that seems unexceptional at first, but gets better. I’ve liked all the Clouzot movies I’ve seen, but have heard nothing about this one, so figured it’d be a dull late-career entry (it was his final released film), but no, he went out with a bang.

Gilbert (Bernard Fresson of Z and Street of No Return) is an artist who specializes in mass-produceable objects with geometric patterns that cause optical illusions when you spin them round. Stan (Laurent Terzieff of The Milky Way) runs a gallery where Gil and other guys are putting on a show. And Josée (Elisabeth Wiener of Duelle) is Gil’s girl, who jealously spies her man Gil talking to a reporter in a hall of mirrors, and so strikes up a chat with leering Stan, going back to his place to look at photos of “handwriting”.

The only thing I remember of Josée’s day job is that she spends some hours looking at interview films on an editing table, commenting that she can’t understand submissiveness and masochism in women. Of course this is a setup, and when she’s at Stan’s place she “accidentally” spies a slide of a naked girl in chains, which fascinates and excites her. Oh of course, it’s just another thing Stan dabbles in, photographing nude bondage sessions, but Josée is now obsessed, insists on attending the next one. Maguy (Dany Carrel, returning from Inferno) poses, Stan photographs and Josée watches anxiously.

Josée soon agrees to be photographed herself, and starts a heated affair with Stan. This was one year after Belle de Jour (and given Clouzot’s pacing, he might have written this film before Buñuel even dreamed of his). Clouzot’s picture is both less and more extreme than Buñuel’s – it’s surely more passionate and less clinical, when considering two directors I would’ve expected the opposite. The photographic sessions, even Maguy’s first one with minimal nudity, are erotic as hell, the height of sexy editing. It may be ultimately more tame than Belle de Jour though, with overall less to say about societal norms and sexuality.

Husband vs. lover, splendidly shot through a half-reflecting window:

Stan has a more poetic penchant for suicide than did the desperate, more tragic Dominique in La Vérité:

Interesting to watch this in the same month as Lady of Burlesque (1943), From Here to Eternity (1953), Monika (1953 but released in the U.S. in ’56), The Apartment (1960), Knife in the Water (1962) and even The Girlfriend Experience (2009). Half were (or at least were intended to be) sexually progressive films when released, all seem very of-their-time, and only The Apartment and this one still seem capable of shocking anyone today.

I loved the camerawork – mobile, but always with a specific goal, a plan to paint a picture through time. Clouzot, 60 years old, a widower with heart trouble, doesn’t seem quite up to the task of smashing a complacent society and visual expectations to bits with his camera, but he has no trouble smashing his lead actress to bits with a train, something he attempted earlier in Inferno.

D. Cairns:

And as a final note of strangeness, the film ends with a woman in a hospital bed calling for the wrong man—the very same ending as Richard Lester’s seminal Petulia, released the very same year. No possibility of one film influencing the other. Instead, both films must be hooked into something, something out there in the ether. Cinema can do that.

by ·Comments Off on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009, Bromberg & Medrea)

Very good doc on the film Clouzot almost made between La Vérité and La Prisonnière, starring Romy Schneider (of Welles’ The Trial) and Serge Reggiani (just off Le Doulos and The Leopard). The couple is on their honeymoon, or maybe just on vacation, in a small town shot in black-and-white, and Reggiani becomes increasingly wildly jealous of everyone his wife has contact with, his state of mind represented with color fantasy sequences and optical-illusion effects. Decades after the film fell apart (mainly because the writer/producer/director’s overreaching ambition clashed with his own perfectionism for details, wasting time and money and tiring the cast and crew) the script was filmed in the 90’s by Claude Chabrol, which I believe was the first of Chabrol’s movies I ever watched, too long ago for me to compare the finished movie with the Clouzot fragments.

Clouzot got some great cinematographers and effects people, including Claude Renoir, Rudolph Maté (The Passion of Joan of Arc) and Andreas Winding (Play Time). It was also the first credited film work by William Lubtchansky, who is one of the main interview subjects. The documentary is very excellent, showing much of the never-finished film (the color footage in particular looks amazingly vibrant, like it was shot yesterday), and not getting into irrelevant sidetrack stories. Interiors (and therefore most of the dialogue scenes) were never shot, and there’s no surviving sound recording from set, so two actors read from the script on a black stage, providing missing context.

by ·Comments Off on Merry-Go-Round (1981, Jacques Rivette)

When someone in the film world dies I don’t always run out and watch one of their movies – only when it’s someone meaningful to me, like Claude Chabrol, Dennis Hopper and Eric Rohmer. I once considered holding a monthly “death of cinema” screening, inviting people over to watch the work of whoever had died that month (there’s always someone), but as with all my plans to watch movies in groups, it fell through – nobody liked Rohmer’s final film, so Katy suggested I not do that anymore. But Maria Schneider warrants a memorial screening because she starred in one of the few Jacques Rivette films I haven’t yet seen, and I happen to have a nice subtitled copy of it handy.

Maria Schneider at dinner:

Schneider was allegedly exploited in Last Tango in Paris, backed out of Caligula, fired from That Obscure Object of Desire, and not up to the task of leading a Rivette picture, which probably explains her replacement in certain sequences by a different actress. But she’s still revered for her part in The Passenger and for being so naked in the early 70’s. This was actually Schneider’s second movie titled Merry-Go-Round – the first was in 1973, a (West) German remake of La Ronde.

Schneider’s costar is Warhol actor Joe Dallesandro, the houseboy/lover in Blood For Dracula. Yes, this is weird casting for a Rivette movie. But production-wise we’re in familiar territory, with the Out 1/Duelle team of Schiffman, de Gregorio, Tchalgadjieff and Lubtchansky (X2). By the end we’ve got triple-cross conspiracies, psychics, secret weapons, assassinations and meetings in the park, so the Rivette touchstones are all there. It’s also surprisingly good-looking (if not up to Duelle/Noroit standards) for such a reputedly troubled film.

Joe and Maria:

The story goes that Maria’s father is presumed dead and some four million dollars left in his care are unaccounted for. Maria’s elusive sister Liz (Danièle Gegauff, a producer on Out 1 and star of a single Chabrol film) summons Maria and Joe (Liz’s boyfriend) but fails to show up herself, so these two meet and go on an adventure together. Liz shows up briefly, along with a bunch more characters, each of whom want to help either Maria or her possibly-alive father, or more likely, want a share of the money. Most suspicious is Shirley (Sylvie Matton, whose husband directed her and Udo Kier in his adult horror Spermula), who is possibly either Liz’s best friend, the father’s ex-lover, Joe’s sister or none of the above,

Maria’s sister Liz with Suspicious Shirley:

The movie seems to fits neatly in the Rivette filmography, with on-camera musicians like predecessor Duelle, and a couple of characters chasing around the country trying to solve a possibly imagined mystery a la follow-up Pont du Nord. But there are some wrinkles. The grasp on the mystery is soon lost and Joe and Maria ramble, their relationship growing increasingly unpleasant, then the plot returns with a puzzling vengeance in the last half hour. Plus there are unexplained fantasy scenes, with Joe and a suspiciously Maria-like girl (played by Hermine Karagheuz, Marie in Out 1) chasing each other through forests and deserts, with appearances by snakes, rifles and a mounted armored knight.

Marie/Karagheuz:

Jean-Francois Stevenin (“Max” in Le Pont du Nord) is in an early scene with the two sisters, and seems to kidnap Liz (cue Walter: “the girl kidnapped herself”). Seemingly trustworthy lawyer-type Renée (Francoise Prevost of Vadim’s segment in Spirits of the Dead) and the mysterious Shirley put our duo up to collecting the key and combination/location of the father’s safe in order to retrieve the money (this is never done, as far as I could tell). Psychic Mr. Danvers (Maurice Garrel, Philippe Garrel’s father, played Emmanuelle Devos’s dying father in Kings and Queen, also amusingly in a movie called Noli Me Tangere) pretends to be the post-plastic-surgery father of the sisters. Liz is rescued (or “rescued”, depending if we believe Walter) by Maria with Renée’s associate Jerome (Michel Berto, Honeymoon in Out 1, also in a Robbe-Grillet film) armed only with a pipe. In the end it either all goes wrong, or all goes according to plan, as Liz is shot by a sniper and Maria unloads a pistol into poor Mr. Danvers.

Mr. Danvers, we hardly knew thee

Whenever the movie just doesn’t know where to go, it cuts to either the live musicians or the fantasy scenes. I wasn’t sure what to make of them, but they grew on me. I liked the bass-and-clarinet soundtrack, the colorful, mobile cinematography. The physical action, fist-fighting and such, were pretty inept, especially coming right after Duelle starring the sprightly Jean Babilée. Movie was made to fulfill contractual obligations after the collapse of the proposed four-part series that yielded Duelle and Noroit, but then was a huge failure itself, so I’ll bet the exec producers wished they’d just left Rivette alone.

The musicians: Barre Phillips at left worked on the Naked Lunch soundtrack with Ornette Coleman, and John Surman at right has put out 20+ albums and hopefully changed his hairstyle:

Cinema-Talk:

It just has the right amount of disregard for plot that nothing seems remotely forced. This is almost unheard of in Rivette’s world. For as great as his other films are, they (almost) all seemed to be dragged down by unnecessary elements that were thrown in at the last minute. Here, everything is so completely natural (one cannot stress this enough!) that the 150-minute running time feels fairly short.

The two sisters, plus friendly assistant Jerome:

Rivette:

We started work with the two actors, and after 8 days, things were going very badly. It was like a machine that, once set in motion, must continue running despite changing regimes, forced or arbitrary accelerations, until the energy was all burned up, exhausted. That’s not at all how we filmed L’Amour fou, even if there too, the spectator feels he’s witnessing an encounter. … It’s an exaggeration to say that we placed Maria and Joe together in front of the camera and waited to see what would happen. We had a starting point of course, and then we made up the beginning of a story, with a father who had disappeared, but all along we told ourselves, this is just a pretext for Maria and Joe to get to know each other. I like that idea: two people get together because a third, who has arranged to meet them, does not show up. There have no choice but to get to know each other. It’s a situation I imagined in the context of the Resistance. Thinking about it again later, I think it was the subject of Robert Hossein’s Nuit des espions. And since I didn’t feel like making a film about the Resistance or the terrorist underground, it became that more banal situation, two people convoked by a third who is only the sister of the one and the girlfriend of the other. But since the relationship between Maria and Joe rapidly became hostile, we were forced to develop the story-line; from a mere pretext it took on a disproportionate importance. Maybe that gives the film a certain vagabond charm, I don’t know, but it really is a film with a first half-hour that’s quite coherent, and then it searches for itself three times, three times searches for a way out.”

Renée:

E. Howard:

The bulk of the film consists of Ben and Léo wandering around the French countryside, ostensibly searching for clues to Elisabeth’s disappearance or the safe combination needed to get their hands on the missing money. What they actually do is mope around a lot, wander through abandoned houses, and joke and fight and patter, improvising goofy bits like the one where Ben mocks the conspiratorial obsession with the number three by counting off increasingly lengthy numbers consisting entirely of threes. In the film’s best scene, the duo takes a break for dinner at an abandoned house whose refrigerator is improbably well-stocked: they crack open cans of sardines and make salads and drink the juice from jars of cherries, sitting across from one another at a long table with candelabras in the center. Léo jokes that it’s a bourgeois meal, and the two of them have fun playing hide and seek from behind the candle flames, and soon the conversation turns into a lighthearted seduction where it’s obvious that the actors are having as much fun as the characters.

Our heroes, looking tired and frumpy in the morning light:

Rivette again:

I like a film to be an adventure: for those who make it, and for those who see it. The adventure of this filming, I must admit, was a bit fitful: the course which was established at the outset was corrected many times, in response to contrary winds, lulls, or gentle breezes. I only hope that the finished film, with all its detours, keeps something of the dangers of the crossing, of its uncertainties, of its unclouded moments-even if, at the end, one notices that perhaps the voyage has been circular: like a “merry-go-round.”

by ·Comments Off on Finis Terrae (1929, Jean Epstein)

When I realized there is a movie called Finis Terrae from 1929 and another called Finisterrae from eighty years later, I set out to watch them both. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. The latin phrase means “ends of the earth.” There’s a place in Spain (where the 2010 film is set) called Finisterra, and a university in Chile called Finis Terrae (how wonderful), but this Epstein film was set on Ouessant, a small island off the coast of France (today home to an airline called Finistair), and on the even smaller island of Bannec. As the opening titles tell us, “on an island where winter storms wipe out all forms of life, four men come in two teams to spend the summer collecting seaweed in total isolation…”

A gorgeous film, made on location with nearly as many credited cinematographers (one of whom would later work on Vampyr and Hotel du Nord) as actors. Very simple story, a bit too poetically-paced at times, but it worked – I found it very affecting by the end. Apparently not much is known about the film on the web. I’ve seen it listed as a documentary – it’s clearly not, though Epstein seems to have cast local workers instead of film actors.

Strange that the team leaders look to be about sixteen, and their barely-named assistants are large middle-aged men with mustaches – why not the other way around? Ambroise, one of the two young men cuts himself on a broken bottle of liquor belonging to the other, Jean-Marie, causing both a grudge between the men and an infected sore on Ambroise’s finger that gets worse over the next few days, preventing him from working and finally threatening his life … “during a becalmed period making it impossible to cross the waters without the requisite wind in the sails. Cue a rescue mission launched from the mother island, Ouessant, to get them back to at least a semblance of civilisation.” (A. Fish)

D. Cairns:

When the sick boy starts to hallucinate, the movie almost oversteps its stylistic bounds by trying to evoke a state the audience is already in: Epstein snap-cuts a jangling montage of looming ECUs and what look like off-cuts and deleted scenes into an abstract nightmare that threatens to turn the whole experience into abstraction and dissonance, with no way out save the declaration of a cinematic Year Zero from which we can start afresh. Seriously, the movie feels like it was made tomorrow, or at any rate made in 1929 by time-travelers.

A. Fish again:

It would be Epstein’s parting glory; oh, other films would follow in its wake, but they weren’t worthy of him and he’d disappear, a fossil, a megalith one might say, of a silent era, not yet put out to pasture but with the fires not so much raging as flickering in the hearth. He wasn’t alone, one could add Gance, l’Herbier and de Gastyne to that list of exiles, yet his is a name that should stand tall in French film history, but instead often merits at best a paragraph in conventional histories.

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It’s hard for me to write about Jacques Tati movies, since mostly what I do is recount a movie’s story and actors I’ve seen before, and Tati films have almost no story and no actors I’ve seen before. Watched this one because I’d just seen M. Hulot’s Holiday when I found out The Illusionist would be playing theaters here, and thought I’d keep the Tati ball rolling.

Tati himself stars as a town postman inspired by an American newsreel and by his taunting neighbors to deliver the mail faster and more efficiently. So at least it has more of a story than M. Hulot’s Holiday (its story: “everyone is on vacation”) but really it’s the same type of movie as Holiday, gently introducing a bunch of characters and setting up unassuming comic situations which overlap in time and place, as Tati’s character guides us around town. This time I had even less sense than usual of who’s who in the cast, possibly because we watched the roughly-restored color version (first French film to be shot in color) on our TV, and in the wide shots (most of the film seems to be wide shots) faces looked blurry.

Funny that while he was breaking technological barriers, experimenting with color in this film and with scale in Playtime, he made such backward-looking movies. This may as well have been a silent film, and The Illusionist looks wistfully back from the late 50’s towards the heyday of vaudeville. Parade was his final anachronism, being one of the first-ever features shot on video and featuring mime performances in a circus tent. I can’t say I fell in love with Jour de fete, just found it to be a pleasant good time, but something about Tati’s movies and his career always keeps me fascinated, so I’m sure I’ll come back to watch it again.

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I saw this ages ago and didn’t get it. Now that I’ve enjoyed Mon Oncle and seen Playtime a few times, I wasn’t thrown by Tati’s Buster Keatonesque style – series of gags setting up the next series of gags, with funny sound effects but almost no dialogue. Other notable similarities to Playtime: jokes about malfunctioning technology (mostly automobiles, but also an indecipherable train station announcement speaker) and an extended delay before the first appearance of our hero Tati/Hulot.

It’s a weirdly understated gag movie – some big slapstick scenes like when Hulot sets off a box full of fireworks, but mostly more subtle. There are enough unnamed characters intersecting in different ways in each scene to make Altman proud (I especially noticed a young woman with a Princess Leia hairdo).

I watched the original full-length version – most DVDs only have Tati’s own re-edit from the 70’s. I’m sure that by the time I rent the Criterion and watch the shorter version I won’t be able to precisely recall the differences. Half of Tati’s movies exist in multiple versions – Jour de fete is in black and white and color, Mon Oncle is in French and English and Playtime had a bunch of different edits.

Leia with an insufferable leftist who insists on talking politics while everyone is on vacation:

Hulot annoying a hotel worker: