by ·Comments Off on Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962, Agnès Varda)

The liner notes say that Cleo’s real-time progression through Paris is very accurate, and that the only cheat is that the 90-minute film wasn’t titled Cleo from 5 to 6:30. This was more documentary-like than I’d remembered. Somehow I’d turned it into a Godard film in my mind (possibly because of his appearance in the film-within, or maybe because I saw Breathless the same week), but it’s really quite naturalistic, the long travel segments in buses and cars reminding me more of Rivette than Godard.

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Katy actually liked it – the first French movie she has liked in a year and a half (Amelie doesn’t count). She was especially happy about the guy Cleo ends up with at the end – an army guy on leave about to return to Algeria. They share a sense of foreboding in the park. He listens to her (unlike Cleo’s rushed boyfriend who visits her apartment) and accompanies her to the hospital, where her diagnosis is not so serious. Katy thinks the two of them will meet again, or at least that he will write.

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I haven’t seen Cleo (Corinne Marchand) in anything else, though she’s in Demy’s Lola. I loved the scene where her composer (Michel Legrand!) and lyricist come to her apartment to try out some new songs – Cleo sings one and gets lost in a close-up.

Trapped inside the song (where the nights are so long):
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Shut up, Michel Legrand:
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Cleo’s maid Dominique Davray had small parts in Any Number Can Win and Casque d’or, and her nude model friend Dorothée Blank is still acting today, appearing in Resnais’ new Wild Grass. Her boyfriend/lover José Luis de Villalonga was in Malle’s The Lovers. Varda (along with Antonioni with L’Eclisse and Bunuel with The Exterminating Angel) lost the golden palm to a Brazilian realist movie about a sick donkey.

Cleo with maid in awesome apartment:
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Dorothée Blank’s backside:
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Cleo with Villalonga:
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by ·Comments Off on Friday Night (2002, Claire Denis)

The movie dares you to stay awake, like a french Archangel.

Tried to watch this with Katy back in the apartment, but something went wrong. I remember her getting tired then mad, and I never tried to finish it. Then finally I watched again – then took a trip right afterwards and didn’t write anything until now, a month later. There’s not much to remember, plot-wise. A girl is packing her apartment preparing to move in with her fiancee. Stuck on the road during a transportation strike, she offers a ride to a guy (star of La Moustache). He plays it cool and eventually she’s chasing after him. Will they end up in a hotel bed together? Why yes, it’s shown there on the DVD menu, nice. Some computer animation and an iris-shot imagination scene weirdly spice up what’s otherwise a dreamy-distracted natural film. It needs its own sense of time though, maybe its own week, and I don’t give movies that sort of personal space, so I have a feeling this one’s sensitivity will get swallowed up by whatever Takashi Miike flick I watch next. Maybe I’ll try again with Katy sometime.

From E. Hynes’s just-published article in Reverse Shot:

Many films foreground, and take full advantage of, the fact that we like to watch. Rare is the film that considers and satisfies these desires equally. Rarer still is one that doesn’t make us feel guilty for our desires or their satisfaction. Friday Night is aware of guilt as an emotional response but doesn’t make it a moral imperative. … It carves out a space where desires and curiosities can be explored without corrective regret. If only for a night we’re set free to touch and feel and immerse ourselves in the moment. And our conduit—our eyes, ears, and hands—is a woman. As are our director, authors (Denis and Emmanuèle Bernheim, adapting her novel), and cinematographer (Agnès Godard). Denis’s film is radical not just for being so casually yet utterly feminist, but also for forwarding a feminine point of view as frankly universal.

by ·Comments Off on Comedy of Innocence (2000, Raoul Ruiz)

Only my second feature by Ruiz, as much as I’m always talking about the guy – and it’s kinda what I’d expected. Good movie with some weird craziness in the plot, but at the same time, it’s a French film, a classy drama about restrained rich people.

Camille’s dad is out of town – his mom (Isabelle Huppert, the year before The Piano Teacher), uncle Serge (Charles Berling of Summer Hours) and maid Helene are taking care of him until one day he announces that his real name is Paul and he wants to go home to his real mom. He guides Huppert to another woman’s apartment – she’s not home but creepy neighbor Edith Scob (also Summer Hours) shows them around.

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When beautiful Jeanne Balibar (the Duchess of Langeais herself) gets home, she tells Huppert about her son Paul who drowned two years ago, but also acts as if Camille is her Paul in the present tense. There’s no sense of paradox or surprise, nothing unusual, just these facts: Paul died and Paul is here. It’s not the kind of thing that could be done in an American movie without some character shrieking “how can that be? how can you say he died if you’re saying he is here in front of you?!” Huppert plays it cool though – invites Balibar to stay at her house so they can figure it out together.

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In the climax, Balibar kidnaps Camille/Paul and takes him to the barge where Paul had drowned. Huppert shows up and Balibar surrenders and apologizes, everything back to normal.

Ruiz uses a Sam Raimi anamorphic-lens-twisting effect:
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Is it pertinent that the maid might be having an affair with the uncle? That Balibar is after the uncle as well? That Huppert’s grandmother died of sorrow because of some incest incident? That Balibar’s neighbor Edith Scob is just as creepy and mysterious as Balibar herself? That a family acquaintance dies in a car crash near the end? That Camille has a businesslike 10-year-old friend who everyone had assumed was imaginary? All combines into an overall sense of mystery about identity, parentage, relationships, and what can be known.

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I thought I’d heard of Denis Podalydès who played Isabelle Huppert’s husband, but it’s actually his brother Bruno I’d heard of.

Unnerving, noticeable music by loyal Chilean Jorge Arriagada and not extremely impressive cinematography by Jacques Bouquin (The Film To Come, Life is a Dream) – he does that thing where the camera is always gliding slowly past the action an awful lot. Overall I dug the movie… looking forward to Ruiz’s other 99 features.

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by ·Comments Off on Amélie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

June 2014:
From a year when I was watching more movies than ever, and starting to get obsessed with my favorite filmmakers. Visually distinctive films that became instant all-time faves included Mulholland Drive, Pulse, The Royal Tenenbaums, Artificial Intelligence, Monsters Inc., Donnie Darko, Winged Migration, and Amelie. I’d caught up with Jeunet’s previous features on video (including the brilliant Alien Resurrection), always impressed by the atmospheric fantasy worlds, rube goldberg devices, intensely detailed production design, playful editing, cartoon camera angles and rubber-faced Dominique Pinon. With Amelie, he took his fantasy visions and hurled them into the present-day real world, creating a romance flick that keeps forgetting to be romantic because it (like the protagonist) is too easily distracted by everyday wonders.

July 2009:
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The cigarette-counter lady in Amelie played a lead in Not On The Lips. She did look awfully familiar.

Our narrator was the VHS-watching realtor in Hearts/Private Fears

And holy crap, Katy knew just from the trailer that the veggie-stand guy starred in Angel-A.

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by ·Comments Off on Summer Hours (2008, Olivier Assayas)

The highlight for me here was Edith Scob. I only know her as the virgin Mary in Bunuel’s The Milky Way forty years ago, but she was totally recognizable as the deathbed matriarch here. I mean, yeah Juliette Binoche is always good, but Charles Berling (Scob’s costar in Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence) was more the star here (and blonde L’Enfant star Jérémie Renier played their brother).

I heard this was a great movie, but right before it started I realized what I’d gotten myself into… an acclaimed family-secrets drama – surely another underwhelming handi-cam video a la A Christmas Tale or Rachel Getting Married. But no, fortunately this was the kind of filmmaking I can get behind, everything in order, with shaky cameras and close-ups only where necessary. Kind of surprising, really, that the director of hyperkinetic Irma Vep and Demonlover makes a classical-style family drama, but I’d seen Clean so I wasn’t too amazed. Another thing compared to the other recent dramas is that everything is supremely understated in this. Its themes are obvious, but they don’t come out in big emotional climaxes. The big payoff shot, Berling’s daughter framed in front of the family home, telling her boyfriend that she’s kinda sad that her grandmother is dead and the place is being sold, is tear-free and quickly interrupted and didn’t really hit me until a few minutes later in the parking lot.

Opening scene has three siblings at their mother’s house with Berling & Renier’s wives and kids (Binoche is too much the high-powered businesswoman to have time for a husband or kids), Scob talking privately about what will happen to the house and her possessions after she dies. Next scene a few months later, predictably, she is dead and the kids spend the rest of the movie deciding what to do with her house and possessions. It’s decided pretty easily that everything will be sold and the loyal servant (Isabelle Sadoyan, also a servant in Blue) will be dismissed, so there’s not much conflict, more the family members coming to terms with the property sale, the kids becoming the oldest living generation in their family.

by ·Comments Off on Gabrielle (2005, Patrice Chéreau)

“Time doesn’t matter, I’ve learned. It does as it likes.”

In the same week that I declared I wouldn’t watch any more French movies and then watched one anyway, I decided as long as I was transgressing I’d go ahead and watch another French movie and make it one which I’d actually like. And I did like it, but I didn’t exactly see what’s the big deal about it. The impetus for watching this now was the two articles on the film and director in this month’s Film Comment, so after watching, I read both of those and didn’t get a whole lot out of ’em. Now I’m thinking I shouldn’t have futzed about with High Art while I was sick, maybe just watched a zombie movie.

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Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert of The Piano Teacher and Time of the Wolf) leaves a note and walks out on her husband of ten loveless years.

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Husband (Pascal Greggory of Time Regained) reads the note, questions the servants, gets upset… but then she returns a few hours later.

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They argue, sometimes quietly among themselves, sometimes loudly in front of servants and guests. She’s upset, but always seems to have the upper hand.

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Finally he cries out for her love, and she says there was never any. He walks out defeated, to never return.

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Her affair is with her husband’s editor (an employee, I think), Thierry Hancisse of the last Costa-Gavras film. Don’t remember him having any dialogue. He’s at the house for two parties at the beginning and end of the movie (I think action spans a week) nervously reacting to their looks and words.

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Gabrielle alternately confides in her servant Yvonne (Claudia Coli) and pretends to confide in her… acts cruelly superior to her and treats her with empathy. It’s an even more interesting balance than the one with her husband.

Based on Joseph Conrad. Same cinematographer as A Christmas Tale. Would’ve been nice to see this in theaters, all low light and heavy grain, switching between black/white and color. The three-review round-up on Indiewire/Reverse Shot says plenty about the film which I don’t feel compelled to repeat here. Nice batch of DVD extras which I might go through sometime.

by ·Comments Off on A Christmas Tale (2008, Arnaud Desplechin)

The large family house still stands, where once lived two parents, two sons and a daughter (now grown with children of their own), and one best friend who often visited. They’re all somewhat miserable now, especially the daughter, a playwright who never smiles. The family reconvenes for the first time in years (after one had been banished for a time) in the big house because of a life-threatening illness. Old problems re-emerge, along with some new ones, and there’s a secret love affair involving the best friend. BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, here’s the acclaimed new holiday picture from the director of the even-more-acclaimed Kings and Queen.

An IMDB review of K&Q calls Arnaud’s earlier 1996 drama “a rambling, shambling, thoroughly engaging 3 hour trip through the lives of a group of rambling, shambling, lost characters, made by a director looking to pour as much raw life into a film as possible and let the rest sort itself out. He has no interest in a well-knit story.” The same goes for this one, much to Katy’s frustration. This is roughly the same kind of movie as Happy Go Lucky, but instead of following the quirky life of one main character for two hours, we’ve got ten main characters for two and a half, so obviously we come away with less depth from anyone here than we did with Poppy in H-G-L – another Katy complaint. I liked the movie a fair bit. It’s an engrossing family sketch with great performances and no big scripted moments, fake-sounding climactic speeches or tidy resolutions, and the filmmaking was spot-on, tracking skillfully between a hundred different people and events (and featuring a hundred different music styles), cutting quickly without every becoming wearying or losing the threads of things. But then again, the Traumatic Family Drama isn’t really my bag, and while I’d happily watch this again over Rachel Getting Married (our last big family trauma film similarly featuring lots of shaky-cam cinematography), I’d even more happily forget both of ’em and sit through another show of Happy-Go-Lucky (or, ahem, The Royal Tenenbaums).

Junon (Catherine Deneuve, last seen in A Talking Picture) is sick (not visibly), needs marrow transplant. Her jolly, supportive husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon of Same Old Song) rigorously calculates her chances of survival. Hot-tempered middle child Henri (star Jean-Do in Diving Bell and the Butterfly), eventual marrow donor, bounces around with his new girlfriend Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos, star of La Moustache and Read My Lips) joking around and getting people upset at him. Tormented oldest child Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, Jean-Do’s dictation assistant in Diving Bell) tries to protect her schizophrenic, suicidal teen son Paul, usually without the help of her husband Claude (Hippolyte Girardot, intrusive downstairs neighbor in Flight of the Red Balloon). Meek youngest child Ivan (filmmaker and regular Raoul Ruiz actor Melvil Poupaud) hangs out with wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni of Love Songs and Ready To Wear, daughter of C. Deneuve and Marcello M.) and their two kids, and best friend/cousin/painter Simon.

Whew. So having introduced the characters, here’s where I lay out their story arcs and intersections, but I can’t think of a whole lot of those. There’s some to-do about Paul, a potential marrow donor, and whether his mental state is up for it. Junon and Faunia go shopping. Sylvia sleeps with Simon, in one of the only forward plot developments.

Easier to list are things the movie brings up which are not fully explored (or only barely). The childhood death of a sibling (who also needed a marrow transplant). Why Liz went from tolerating her brother Henri to hating him. Ivan’s reaction to catching his wife in bed with his cousin. And so on… but maybe it’s all comprehensible in hindsight, removed from the kinetic hustle of the movie. Take Henri’s Jewish girlfriend Faunia: a veiled attack on his possibly antisemitic mother, with whom he’s had a bitter history, plus, as an outsider who has never met the family, a window for the audience into the family home, someone for whom old family frictions can be described without the movie having to resort to narration (although it does – main characters talk to the camera), her outsider nature reinforced by her Jewishness on Christmas eve (she goes home before the day). Hmmm, that actually wasn’t so hard.

Shot by Eric Gautier, an impressive Assayas and Resnais D.P. who also did Into The Wild and Gabrielle. References include Shakespeare, Emerson, Funny Face, The Ten Commandments, The New World, and Angela Bassett’s ass.

by ·Comments Off on Story of a Cheat (1936, Sacha Guitry)

A washed-up gambler (played by the writer/director) sits at a cafe recounting his life. We watch different episodes while he narrates. These episodes have no spoken dialogue except for this narration. So we are listening to Guitry talk for eighty straight minutes – no easy task.

Begins as a promising comedy. Our guy (“The Cheat”) steals from his mom, so isn’t allowed to eat the poison mushrooms that kill his entire family. Goes to live with an uncle, gets a job, this is when I start to realize that he’s never going to stop talking, and it gets less fun. It’s an okay movie, light, and funny at times, but seems nothing special.

Anyway, our cheat lives honestly and works hard after the mushroom incident, but seems to attract scoundrels. Eventually he embraces it and gets rich from cheating casinos – but one day his dealer is a guy who saved his life in WWI, and he takes it as a sign to stop cheating… but now he’s addicted to gambling, so he loses his fortune. Along the way he meets a woman who tries getting him to join her jewelry-robbing schemes, he marries a girl for tax purposes (it’s a business-only relationship, but years later he has sex with her in disguise, heh), he moves to Monte Carlo and becomes a croupier, and he tries to avoid an old woman (present-tense, in the cafe) who was his first fling back when he was an elevator operator.

I liked the opening credits best – filmed like one of those knowingly cheesy behind-the-scenes pieces from classic Hollywood, Guitry introduces all the major cast and crew on-camera. This is one of Guitry’s two most well-regarded films. I’m not gonna knock myself out to see the other (incidentally it’s Pearls of the Crown).

by ·1 Comment

The missing link between Celine & Julie and Marie & Julien (with some Gang of Four thrown in).

Jane Birkin (under a decade before La Belle Noiseuse but looking two decades younger) and Geraldine Chaplin (eight years after Noroît) are working as actresses with Silvano (Facundo Bo) in a play performed in Silvano’s actual apartment. Play was ripped off from famous/rich playwright Clémont Roquemaure (Jean-Pierre Kalfon of L’Amour Fou and some Philippe Garrel movies). One day he’s in the audience, invites the three to perform a new play in his house, based on the sordid love triangle of himself, hanger-on magician Paul (André Dussollier, the realtor from Coeurs), and the now-missing Beatrice.

G. Chaplin and Paul:
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House-fellow Virgil (László Szabó of Godard’s Passion and Made in USA) doesn’t have much to do until the end, when he shares wacky scenes with Birkin. He spends his free time translating Hamlet into Finnish (predicting Hamlet Goes Business points out Glenn Kenny).
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Third-wheel Eléonore – Sandra Montaigu of Hurlevent:
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There’s not actually a ton of love here, but there are lots of triangles… the film is rich with triangles. And magic and mystery – the girls see visions and premonitions in mirrors and through keyholes. And the mansion is visually insane (D. Cairns calls that first screenshot the “streaky bacon” room). And the premise gives us enough of Rivette’s performance/identity motif for at least two movies… I mean, the actor characters are portraying the other characters in the film… it starts to fold in upon itself and collapse like Bjork’s Bachelorette video. That the movie even has a conclusion (public performance of the play culminating in Beatrice’s mysterious reappearance) seems moot. This is three hours gladly spent in Rivette Country… not his best movie, but one of his most Rivettian. Like his Wild At Heart.

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This was the full three-hour version, happily out on DVD. Jonathan Rosenbaum says: “Rivette’s 1983 two-hour Love on the Ground is a minor work, but at a 1989 Rivette retrospective in Rotterdam I saw a superior three-hour version-the first I knew of its existence. Rivette told me on that occasion that it was the only version he believed in; he implied that the release version merely honored his original contract.” JR later echoed that even the three-hour version is a minor work, and others would agree. Senses of Cinema calls it “a mere footnote”, Slant says “precious, lifeless, and ultimately meaningless.” Ouch. But J. Reichert at Reverse Shot, G. Kenny and D. Cairns all liked it, and I’m throwing in with them.

I haven’t found any online mention that the two lead actresses are named Emily and Charlotte – the names of the two famous Brontë sisters. Rivette’s next film would be an adaptation of Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

Barbet Schroeder makes an appearance after spending 20 years producing French New Wave films. He’ll spend the next 15 directing Hollywood thrillers.
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