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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by ·Comments Off on La Haine (1995, Mathieu Kassovitz)

Expertly choreographed steadicam movie. I put off watching this, thinking it was about nazi youth or something, but it’s three smalltime criminals, not such bad guys (“the only good skinhead is a dead one”) who get into a spot of bother when one of them gets a gun (they all die). Unexpected Vincent Lindon appearance towards the end. The director went on to have an undistinguished career, the three guys ended up in (1) The Constant Gardener, (2) Three Kings & John Wick 3, (3) Irreversible & The Shrouds. Won best director at Cannes the year of Underground.

by ·Comments Off on The Green Ray (1986, Eric Rohmer)

Marie Rivière (marriage-plotter of Autumn Tale) gets into a series of awkward social situations, some of them self-caused (she’s a preachy vegetarian), while increasingly feeling that her summer vacation is slipping away.

Won the Venice Golden Lion, same year as The Beekeeper and A Room With a View. I should have realized Green Flash Brewing is named after the same phenomenon. I didn’t love this as much as others seem to, but Jake and Lawrence wrote good justifications for its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on Dahomey (2024, Mati Diop)

Really is a doc about artworks being repatriated from France to Benin. The conceit of having the ancient artworks do the narration and the responses from modern museum attendees made this more interesting than it might’ve been.

by ·Comments Off on The Second Act (2024, Quentin Dupieux)

Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”

by ·Comments Off on The Serpent’s Path (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

French remake of Kurosawa’s own film with Ko Shibasaki (Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) in the Sho Aikawa role, and Staying Vertical star Damien Bonnard as Creepy. This one is more straightforward, less cryptic than the original (especially in Ko/Sho’s plan and motivation), maybe more grounded and less absurd. As a spiraling-revenge film chock full of cool French actors (kidnappees, in order, are Amalric, Gregoire Colin, and Slimane the Temple Woods guy) I was bound to enjoy this, but after watching the original and its companion this year, and in the wake of the great Chime, this can’t help but feel superfluous.

by ·Comments Off on The Temple Woods Gang (2022, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)

Local gang carjacks some valuables from a Saudi prince who likes to dance incognito at grungy clubs. The gang is friendly with Mr. Pons, whose mom just died, and they seem like good-natured dudes, hanging out feeding the pigeons, but the prince’s guy hires Elite Jim, who suspects these guys straight away, and quickly hunts/kills them all. Mr. Pons is an ex-army sniper, which means he’s got a long gun wrapped in a carpet hidden in a storage locker somewhere, and out it comes for some fast revenge. I wouldn’t have started watching if I’d remembered Rabah made the decently forgettable South Terminal, but this one’s better: a grounded version of the crime/revenge movie.

by ·Comments Off on Last Summer (2023, Catherine Breillat)

Léa Drucker – coworker-friend of In My Skin, aging-backwards wife of Incredible But True – absolutely nailing her star turn here. Appropriately, as a kid she also appeared in Kung Fu Master. Her husband (Adele’s dad in Passages) brings home his estranged teen son Theo for the summer, and he’s a real asshole. When Léa discovers he burgled the house and stole her bag, she says she won’t tell if Theo acts like part of the family and drops the hostility. But he drops too much hostility and soon he’s having sex with his stepmom. Of course they’re caught, though it’s not clear at the end what the husband believes happened. Remake of recent Danish movie Queen of Hearts. Breillat joins Assayas among French directors who think adding Sonic Youth music will make their movie cooler (they’re right).

Breillat in Decider:

I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not interested in the question of the age gap. I am an entomologist. I look, and I represent things as they are, as naturally as I can … I was telling Léa, who’d never done an intimate scene of this kind before, that I have less interest in bodies than the nudity of the face. And I told her, don’t be mistaken, there’s much more intimacy in allowing the camera in close-up on your bare face. That’s what cinema is trying to get at, in the end. All I film is intimacy, and it’s all on the face.

At rogerebert.com she says her film is less moralistic than the one she’s remaking:

In terms of what happens for Léa’s character, it was very important that there be no kind of predatorial seduction [on Anne’s part, as is the case in the Danish film] – it needed to be something that happened to her in a moment that she’s caught off guard. She sets up a pact with him – when she says, “I won’t tell your father [that you robbed his house] if you agree to integrate [with] the family,” it’s at that moment that she signs her death warrant as a happily faithful wife. In that scene, he still looks very childish, quite chubby – he’s not beautiful in any sexualizable way – but at some point, he looks up at her, and suddenly the camera comes in very close, his face gets thinner, and his features get sharper, and he looks at her like a woman. That gaze is what she’s eventually going to succumb to because it’s a gaze that is hard to resist – it carries the promise and the potential to make oneself younger again.

by ·Comments Off on Four by Man Ray & Sqürl

The Starfish (1928)

He’s loving distorting the camera view and irising in, cross-fades, the poem as intertitles to the action. The starfish motion diorama halfway through is very great.

I stand by what I wrote last time. Watched the new restoration with music by Sqürl which I love whenever there’s guitar/feedback and/or drums (the all-keyboard sections feel too tame for these films). Man Ray and I were alive within a year of each other.

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Emak-Bakia (1926)

What I said before, and add double exposures, plus Man Ray inventing the anamorphic lens-twisting effect 55 years before The Evil Dead.

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Return of Reason (1923)

Film-surface object patterns, an underlit carnival.
Sqürl getting into it with the drums and keys, intense.

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Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice (1929)

Faceless dice men drive out from Paris, leading to some excessive shaky-cam driving scenes, arriving at a very modern castle. Judging from the sliding panels full of canvases it’s the home of a rich art collector – is this movie a tour of a rich benefactor’s fancy house, like that one Cocteau? Apparently.