by ·Comments Off on The Two-Headed Eagle (1948, Jean Cocteau)

A perfectly fine historical drama with some fab lighting and good faces (La Pointe Courte‘s Silvia Monfort). Coming between Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus, it lacks most of the sfx magic of those, but it’s so neglected I was half-expecting it to be lousy. I didn’t even have the correct title, knowing it as The Eagle Has Two Heads, while The Two-Headed Eagle makes more sense.

Monfort is the audience-surrogate newcomer to a castle where the widowed queen has shut herself away for ten years, and is about to hold a ball. Queen Edwige Feuillère (just off starring in a Dostoevsky adaptation) is surprised by a visitor at her window who looks exactly like King Jean Marais, and the bulk of the movie is psychological spy games between these two. She calls him “My Death” (which is very Cocteau) since he’s meant to be an assassin, the corrupt cops outside pretending to search for him. He is of course a poet, and she of course falls for him, in a dignified/suicidal way.

Police chief Jacques Varennes (La Poison) hides in a treehouse, and he and the queen run around giving everyone contradictory orders, until she gets to die with her king as she’s always dreamed (Marais taking a nice fall down the stairs).

The queen uses a room-sized model palace as a shooting gallery:

by ·Comments Off on Daguerrotypes (1978, Agnes Varda)

In which Varda proves she can find good cinema anywhere, by wandering down the street into all the small shops and turning her neighbors into movie stars. There’s too much of the magician, but his magic show serves to bring together the people we’ve been seeing in separate shops into one space. Since I can’t take screenshots off the Criterion channel, I’ve stolen a still from their website.

by ·Comments Off on Les Cousins (1959, Claude Chabrol)

Handsomely depressing youth movie, 100 straight minutes of dudes talking shit with big camera moves. Paul is New Wave regular Brialy with a dumb stache, lives in the city, and his cousin Charles (Gérard Blain, pinch-faced title star of Le Beau Serge) stays at his place while in university. They throw parties: an older weirdo named Clovis likes to drink and scam people, Paul puts on Mozart and does a dramatic monologue in German, an opera-singing strongman is invited. Charles fears that he’s a boring provincial mama’s boy, then bores us talking about his provincial mama.

The contested Florence is Juliette Mayniel, first victim in Eyes Without a Face:

It would seem an innocent movie of youth in the city, but there’s the Chabrol name and all the ornamental guns around (“good thing we have no bullets”). Then Paul steals Charles’s girl, and we’ve got a meek guy living with the girl he wants and the cousin who stole her in a house full of guns, uh oh. Charles absolutely loses himself in studying, while Paul stays out getting drunk, but Paul passes his exams and Charles does not – then Charles locates the bullets.

by ·Comments Off on The French Dispatch (2021, Wes Anderson)

Back in theaters for this one. I love going into Wes movies with absurdly high expectations, because he always meets them. I’ll read the hater critics some other time – maybe they were looking for something more than an endless parade of favorite actors and impeccable production design, but I wasn’t. Much of the movie is in 4:3 black and white, and either my screening was over-matted or the titles appear at the extreme top and bottom of frame.

Bookending segments in the newspaper office, with editor Bill Murray alive in the first piece and dead in the second. Bicycle tour through the town of Ennui by Owen Wilson. Story 1 is relayed by Tilda Swinton, involving art dealer Adrien Brody patronizing imprisoned painter Benicio del Toro whose guard/model is Léa Seydoux (they get some actual French people in here sometime). I was least involved in the middle piece, about faux-May’68 student revolutionary Timothée Chalamet’s affair with reporter Frances McDormand. Then Jeffrey Wright is reporting on celebrated police chef Steve “Mike Yanagita” Park, who helps foil a plot by Edward Norton to kidnap chief Mathieu Amalric’s son.

Michael Sicinski (Patreon) also liked the Benicio story best:

By contrast, Anderson’s snotty riff on May ’68, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” succumbs to the director’s worst comedic instincts, essentially declaring that political desire is nothing more than sublimated horniness … The final segment, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” sort of splits the difference, although it is elevated considerably by a fine performance from Jeffrey Wright, channeling James Baldwin as a melancholy ex-pat uncomfortable with his journalistic distance. The story itself is mostly just a riff on The Grand Budapest Hotel‘s portrait of courtly civility as a bulwark against anarchy. But it’s Wright’s representation of honest inquiry, and humanistic curiosity, that makes it far less silly than it should be.

Watched again a month later, with Katy this time.

by ·Comments Off on Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau)

Before heading to the theater I checked the movie’s length on letterboxd, stopping to chuckle at their plot description about a fireman reuniting with his son, obviously a database glitch since everyone knows Titane is about a woman having sex with cars. But it’s both! Agathe Rousselle, obsessed with metal and fire, is hiding from the cops after a serial-murder spree, having killed at least five hot young people plus her parents, and decides to masquerade as the missing boy on a poster. Now her adoptive dad wants to bond with her, while she’s trying to hide the evidence that she’s been knocked up by a hot rod.

Movies do love to open with car crashes – good crash here, though I liked the Empty Man kid’s coin-on-teeth routine more than Young Agathe’s vroom sounds. After Annette and It Still Lives, this is my third mutant baby (titanium-spined cyborg) in a couple months, and after Videodrome and the Tsukamotos this has become a flesh-machine-themed week. Raw star Garance Marillier plays a friend/victim, and is again named Justine. In Raw, Justine’s sister was Alexia and her roommate was Adrien, and in Titane those are the two names Agathe goes by – something’s going on here. Alexia’s real dad is Bertrand Bonello, and in her new life she’s got Claire Denis regular Vincent Lindon as a dad and Dardenne regular Myriem Akeddiou for a mom.

The switch from car-humping icepick murderer to mute sullen teen firefighter is abrupt, but it works in the moment. Scott Tobias in The Reveal:

Its heroine’s body is stretched and mutated in Cronenberg fashion, and as she recedes ever more dramatically from social acceptability, Titane stirs intense alienation and loneliness. But a disarming sweetness sneaks its way into the film, too, as the conventional boundaries of gender and family are scrubbed away and a relationship defines its own terms.

by ·Comments Off on Les Abysses (1963, Nikos Papatakis)

“Do women have freedom?” Two young sisters trash a large house and grouse at each other until the masters return, and everyone yells at each other, and there’s a lot of slapping. The girls announce that they’ve wrecked things because they’re unpaid and mistreated, sabotaging a year’s vintage of wine which was to be included in a deal to sell the house. The servants stick around, and the family puts up with a lot – too much, and the sisters finally murder the wife and daughter and are sentenced to death in postscript.

Francine Bergé, the older of the sisters, played the villain in the great Judex the same year, later the villain in Rivette’s The Nun. Nico’s directorial debut premiered at Cannes 1963 (in competition with Harakiri, I Fidanzati, Baby Jane, big winner The Leopard). Watched as part of a Criterion spotlight – they say he was a controversial figure who worked with Casssavetes and Jean Genet. Took a break halfway through the movie when Katy came down, and we watched Farran’s introduction to Judy Holliday, and perhaps I should’ve watched a Judy instead of a Nico.

by ·Comments Off on Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noé)

It’s Cannes Fortnight 2021! I was gonna watch this anyway, eventually, then noticed there’s a new Gaspar playing Cannes this year, so “eventually” became now. In in the mood for some cinema after taking things easy post-True/False, rounding up some recent Cannes titles I missed, and some by this year’s crop of directors.

Wonked-out closing/opening credits sequence, then the camera spirals and weaves around a courtyard, Massive Attack’s La Protection Centrale. I didn’t know what was happening for a good long time, the I Stand Alone guy philosophizing with anonymous Frenchman Albert Dupontel (a war survivor in A Very Long Engagement), but it becomes clear as the movie woozily whips us through the rest of the story in reverse order. I was gonna say it takes us from one sordid scene to another, but that’d be underselling one of the most extremely sordid films of the last twenty years. I read a piece recently, thought it was by Charles Bramesco but can’t find it now so who knows, calling Promising Young Woman a weaksauce take on the rave/revenge story, and it came to mind a few times while watching this, a decidedly strongsauced rape/revenge story, because is that such a desirable thing? Is the point to seek out the most extreme rape/revenge cinema? Ultimately, the “time destroys all things” thesis, the film title and the reverse-action gimmick framing the horrors had me appreciating this much more than, say, Revenge, though I can’t feel naughtily transgressive about liking a movie that comes highly recommended by every critic I respect.

by ·Comments Off on A Town Called Panic (2009, Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar)

A bunch of silliness in the first half which escalated wonderfully in the second. At the beginning Cowboy and Indian try to construct a last-minute birthday gift while Horse takes piano lessons with a cute female horse. But pretty soon they are all enslaved by snowball-prankster kung-fu scientists within a giant arctic penguin robot. Plastic toy stop-motion!