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.

–
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.

–
Return of Reason (1923)

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

–
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.

by ·Comments Off on Le Samourai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville)

I misremembered this as being more similar to Ghost Dog, which I also need to rewatch soon, but hopefully not as a memorial screening. For all his alibi setup, when Delon gets to the club he acts extremely suspicious and everyone notices him. Rounded up with some other suspects, he gets off because pianist Cathy Rosier says he’s not the man. Then his contract guys try to kill him, he goes in for revenge, then foolishly goes to see the girl again, where cop Heurtebise has set a trap.

Even when wounded and on the run, always take time to feed the birds:

by ·Comments Off on Pauline at the Beach (1983, Eric Rohmer)

The third of six “Comedies and Proverbs” after Aviator’s Wife and A Good Marriage. Arielle Dombasle returns from the latter, taking her niece Pauline (Amanda Langlet of A Summer’s Tale) on a beach trip, where they run into troublesome boys of various ages, all of whom would like to bed the ladies. Older family man Henri (Féodor Atkine of High Heels and Sarraounia) scores with Arielle but is suspected of being a pedo when he covers for young Sylvain (Simon de la Brosse of The Little Thief and Assayas’s Disorder), while windsurfer Pierre (Pascal Greggory of Gabrielle and La France) frowns from the sidelines.

A rare cinematic appearance from Bongo Fury:

Arielle & Féodor:

Pauline has got it figured out:

by ·Comments Off on À nous la liberté (1931, René Clair)

Pre-Modern Times ironic drama equating schools and assembly-line workplaces with prisons. Henri Marchand gets out of prison and looks up his cellmate-escapee Raymond Cordy (Wooden Crosses) who now runs a phonograph factory.

Now being chased by both criminals and cops, the two guys weigh their options: friendship, money, status, escape – and come to the correct conclusion.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor)

I got a new dumb idea: to watch a bunch of movies called The Big ____ and call it The Big Movie Series. Not planning to rewatch The Big Heat (Lang) or The Big Boss or The Big Sky or The Big City or The Big Short or The Big Shave or The Big Snit or The Big Sick or The Big Picture… maybe The Big Lebowski or The Big Sleep… and I wonder if there’s an HD version of the extended The Big Red One yet.

our boys:

Idle rich pretty boy Jim (John Gilbert, star of The Merry Widow the same year) surprises everyone by enlisting in the army during WWI, teaming up with slack-jawed steelworker Slim (Karl Dane of fellow big movie The Big House) and officer/bartender Bull. At this point I got tired of hearing “You’re In the Army Now” on the blu-ray soundtrack so I put on Jason Moran’s album of WWI music, and loved how the slide-whistle song synched up with the Three Stooges-ass scene when Jim is walking with a barrel on his head. This is while they’re in France before the fighting starts, and Jim is falling for a pretty local (Renée Adorée, also Gilbert’s costar in Tod Browning’s The Show).

french girl:

Once they’re in the trenches, each gets his chance for heroism and revenge and death. WWI battle tactics are depicted as: walking in a straight line towards machine gun and cannon fire like robots until some yokel has the idea of throwing a grenade at the enemy. Only the rich guy gets to live, and back home his girlfriend and his brother try to pretend they haven’t fallen in love with each other while he was away, but he could care less, he hobbles back to France as if his beloved farmgirl really needs a yank with a wooden leg. But I kid, it’s a beautiful scene, made that much better by the Dirty Three album I put on after running out of Jason Moran songs.

my new motto:

by ·Comments Off on Every Man For Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard)

“Paul Godard” (Jacques Dutronc of a couple Zulawski films) leaves his hotel and is offered anal sex by the valet, my second JLG movie in a row to address that topic. Then he’s making weird incest jokes with the soccer coach of his daughter (actually Alain Tanner’s daughter), and the movie will stay perverse until the end. After Numero Deux we’re back to scripted domestic dramas with lovely photography, though Amy Taubin ties these two together, “both films dealing with the failure of intimacy and with marriage as hell, particularly for women.”

Divided into sections, also following TV producer Nathalie Baye (a Truffaut regular) and prostitute Isabelle Huppert (who’d just starred in a Chabrol). Marguerite Duras is an offscreen presence in the beginning. The “Slow Motion” segment (this whole film was known as Slow Motion in England) is post-production slow-mo, sequential freeze-frames. At the end we get nice payoffs for Paul’s annoying behavior and the movie’s big disruptive music which had seemed to bother the characters, as he gets hit by a car (in slow motion, of course) then his daughter and ex walk past the musicians playing the movie’s soundtrack.

–
Scenario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979)

The rare making-of to come out before the feature, JLG explaining his intentions for the movie they hadn’t shot yet. He speaks of wishing to write vertically on a typewriter instead of horizontally. The two women move in opposite directions, Huppert in the direction of meaning, while the man tries to fly above it all… explains his philosophy of superimposition and dissolves, which I only half followed, and of slow motion which mostly makes sense. I wondered with his idea of the music being secretly diegetic if he’d seen Noroit and Duelle. Says he compared lighting notes with Wim Wenders, who I think was working on Hammett. He plans for a scene where Denise will go into a forest “and in the forest she’d run into Werner Herzog… who will introduce, with typical German madness, the world that lies behind things… Perhaps all this isn’t very clear.”

by ·Comments Off on Les Parents Terribles (1948, Jean Cocteau)

Cocteau was briefly prolific as a filmmaker after the war and Beauty and the Beast – this came out a couple months after The Two-Headed Eagle, then Orpheus premiered just over a year later. It’s got smooth camera and nice lighting, if that’s what you’re looking for, but feels too stagy.

Belle and the Beast are back, human and in love, but his overprotective parents are out to stop their marriage. Marais’s dad (Marcel André) is having an affair with his own son’s belle, to teach them a lesson or something, worrier mom (Yvonne de Bray of Eagle) has health problems, and aunt Leo (fashion icon Gabrielle Dorziat) is either helping or fouling everything up. Everybody’s overdoing it until mom can’t take it anymore and does herself in.

The Most Manipulative Family of All Time:

The two sides of Aunt Leo:

by ·Comments Off on Smoking Causes Coughing (2022, Quentin Dupieux)

A movie of distractions – appears to be a superhero story, but nothing actually happens. The Tobacco Force gets introduced destroying a turtle guy and soaking some bystanders in turtle gore. Then they take some time off and tell stories – about a woman with a isolation helmet stuck over her head, and a guy reduced to a sentient bucket of blood from a severe workplace accident – while their lizard-faced enemy is off blowing up the world. Dupieux’s things tend to be short and absurd, definitely worth watching every year or two.

Adèle Exarchopoulos is the other woman in the helmet story, Blanche Gardin (producer of France) is the bucket carrier, and going way back, the director/star of Man Bites Dog plays Lizardin. Our five cigarette-themed superheroes, who claim they do not promote smoking, include Vincent Lacoste (lead detective of Irma Vep Remake) and Anaïs Demoustier (maid of Bird People).