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.
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:
“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.
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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.”
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:
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).
Brigitte Bardot has absurdly great hair in this movie, and likes to sunbathe nude in the garden, so all the boys are after her, to the disapproval of her foster parents. Land baron Curd Jurgens (Richard Burton’s rival in Bitter Victory) is feuding with holdout landowner Christian Marquand (Flight of the Phoenix), and both think they’ve got a chance with Brigitte, but when she’s threatened with losing her home, wallflower J-L Trintignant steps up and marries her. Marriage isn’t much of an impediment to the other two guys, and J-L (beaten up by the local ruffian minutes after his wedding) isn’t strong enough to hold onto her, so people get shot and boats get burned up. Good-looking at least, from Clouzot’s usual guy. Not exactly a vital cinema classic, but in the early days of Criterion DVDs, we took whatever we could get.
A change in mood from my last French movie, the actors perfect little models through the supernatural events – nobody cries, while Léa Seydoux rarely stopped.
Trying to watch this again with Katy, if she’ll agree. A short and straightforward pandemic project with just a few actors – but writing a story that depends on the performance of identical eight year-olds seems risky, and damn, they pulled it off.
Courtney Duckworth’s Cinema Scope writeup is the one.
Lovely French movie about life being complicated, starring the great Léa Seydoux, whose Blue Is the Warmest Color co-star I saw last night in The Five Devils. She’s a professional translator whose philosopher dad (Rohmer and Assayas regular Pascal Greggory) is losing his memory and stability and vision and needs to go into a home. The movie’s about heavy things but it moves beautifully.
Léa meets Melvil Poupaud, a cosmo-chemist who studies meteorites like in that Herzog movie, but he’s married, and goes back and forth with his intentions, as her dad gets moved to worse and then better facilities… it’s more like one fine year (the film is named after the dad’s unfinished autobiography).
Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: “In a year with no shortage of similarly themed French films (see Claire Denis’ [Both Sides of the Blade] and Emmanuel Mouret’s Chronique d’une liaison passagère), One Fine Morning makes a case for itself not by upending conventions, but by applying them with care and consideration.” Key review by Vadim Rizov, who liked it not as much.
Five Devils is unfortunately just the name of a sports complex where Adele Exarchopoulos works with her disfigured ex-friend Nadine – the movie isn’t about devils, but a girl with an incredible sense of smell. Her mom Adele tends the pool, and her dad Jimmy’s a fireman, so fire and water. Dad’s sister Julia comes to stay, after spending time in jail for the fire that messed up Nadine, so everyone’s on edge.
The girl Vicky makes jars of special scents, which cause her to black out and visit past events from before she was born – invisible to all except Young Julia, who panics whenever the girl appears. After the fire ruptures the two young couples (Adele and Julia, Jimmy and Nadine), mom and dad end up together, so V wouldn’t have been born if she hadn’t (passively) prompted the fire.
Fun movie to think about, and to watch – despite its three different “Total Eclipse of the Heart” scenes. Nadine also starred in Nimic with Matt Dillon. Hugo Dillon plays a fireman here, apparently no relation.
Mike D’Angelo:
I kinda loved it, perhaps because I’d given up hope of ever again being caught off guard by what I think of as the “La Jetée”/Twelve Monkeys theory of time travel, in which visiting the past means that you were always present there. Mysius and her co-screenwriter, Paul Guilhaume, deploy their eternalism in a unique fashion (homemade perfume as proxy-Proustian time machine, with a silent, watchful Vicky visible only to her future aunt) and for singularly perverse ends—this is basically a dual tragic love story rooted in kids’ inadvertently destructive power, acknowledging that their mere existence in the world (crucially, Vicky never actually does anything during her visitations) can fuck up adults’ lives, and leaving startlingly open the question of whether or not parents’ deep, abiding love for them is worth it.