by ·Comments Off on Fellow Citizen & First Graders

Toothache (1983)

I hurt my tooth on a potato chip, so what better time to catch up on some early Kiarostami films. I’ve had the Koker blu box set for a couple years now, so it’s time to watch that, but first checking out the films he made just before Where Is The Friend’s House.

This would be a completely uninteresting educational short – first half follows a kid who doesn’t like to brush his teeth, and second half is a lecture from his dentist. The one thing that gives it an edge is that during the entire dental lecture you can hear the kid and other patients squealing and crying while getting poked and drilled.

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Fellow Citizen (1983)

Stress-inducing condensed hour at work with a traffic guard tasked with preventing people from driving into the city center unless they have a permit or a special exception. Guess what, it turns out every single automobile driver in the city is a very special person with very special circumstances who deserves to be let through. Our guy lets them all through but feels increasingly taken advantage of and starts denying access more and more, among nonstop yelling and honking. Ends with a pure frustration montage set to the most psych-rock song of any Kiarostami film.

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First Graders (1984)

After an attendance-taking intro, we spend the day in the principal’s office doing conflict resolution. Unlike the people at the traffic stop, the participants here seem unaware of the camera. They are little kids with undeveloped concepts of right, wrong, truth, etc., and you can see their big puzzled thinking faces in closeup. Halfway through, the camera unexpectedly follows the kid on crutches home, getting a bicycle lift from his dad. Overall some suspiciously posed/staged camera angles for a straight doc. It also follows an American Beauty plastic bag, as AK keeps changing his mind about what kind of movie to make.

by ·Comments Off on Trafic (1971, Jacques Tati)

Very promising, opening titles over an auto assembly line, “with the participation of Bert Haanstra,” the factory work bringing to mind his great short Glas. Alas, Tati fell out with Haanstra (and his funders, and somehow Lasse Hallström), and this ended up a fitfully amusing, semi-improvised road-trip film that incidentally features Mr. Hulot as an auto designer helping transport his creation to a trade show.

The joke is that delays and misfortune make them miss the show completely – they get a flat tire, the truck’s clutch goes out, etc. But it’s hard to feel sorry for them (not that the movie asks us to) when they also run out of gas, get arrested for speeding through a border crossing, cause a ten-car rube goldberg car crash, and don’t seem to know what day the show starts – this is all professional incompetence. Anyway they’re a likable crew except for the grating American PR rep Maria.

Besides Hulot’s presence, you can catch glimpses of the style of the guy who made Playtime only a few years earlier, and can also catch his influence on Roy Andersson. Some cute bits: after the second garage stop Tati makes a rock music video out of traffic lines and road marking patterns. Montage of people’s windshield wipers matching their personalities, some good sight gags in the police station, Maria’s constant stylish wardrobe changes. But there’s also this disastrous bit:

Learned from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article that Haanstra shot the nose-picking montage, and at least some of it is unstaged.

Jonathan Romney for Criterion:

Tati certainly appears less in control than in the vast coordinated ballet of Playtime. For the most part, the jokes in Trafic drum up a sense of languid, almost apathetic chaos, without there always being conventional payoffs to give the comic business a sense of purpose. Notwithstanding the painstakingly synchronized pileup scene, the film is characterized by slow-burn gags that create an overall comic atmosphere rather than work toward a clearly defined goal … Without a doubt, Trafic contains a hovering tone of despair that makes it a somewhat melancholic pendant to Playtime.