Alphaville (1965, Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution)

Alphaville starts out well enough; the main character Lemmy Caution checks into a hotel in Alphaville and the concierge takes off her clothes and offers to sleep with him in a monotone voice.  It seemed like an interesting look at a future torn apart by electronics, machinery, money, and war, the usual themes in Jean-Luc Godard’s work (at least those are the ones I can pick up on).  But Godard is not a simple filmmaker, he cannot tell a film simply.  He adds all these irreverent, pretentious moments, often in fumbled cutaways; he distorts his soundtrack, at one point cutting out during the dialogue, complete silence for several seconds, and then returns with a voiceover.  This is not for me.  Long before the end of the film I was lost; I don’t want to make myself seem stupid.  I simply couldn’t follow moment to moment.  The dialogue, stilted and detached, a Godard trademark, did not make sense sentence to sentence, and often word to word.

I’ve had a strange relationship with Godard’s films.  Breathless was the first I saw and it bored me.  My next few Godard films fared no better and I was convinced he was a dated, overrated filmmaker.  Now having seen the scope of his work I no longer hold the same belief and have come to this conclusion: Jean-Luc Godard was the most experimental French New Wave director and always ran the risk of failing.  He experimented with structure, genre, casting, and was interested in movie art rather than entertainment, though his successful pictures are extremely enjoyable.  50 years after Breathless, Godard is still revered as one of history’s most important auteurs, even if in his more recent years the director has struggled to make an engaging film.  The first period of his career, Breathless through Weekend, was a highly productive time, and where all of his masterpieces reside.  Alphaville simply isn’t one of them.

As far as I could understand, Alphaville is a galaxy or a planet in a galaxy that is controlled by Alpha 60, a supercomputer that has put an end to individual thought and freedom, imagination, art, and religion.  The people who live there have numerical tattoos, probably for no other reason than the Nazis did that to their victims and Godard is drawing the parallel there.  Every cliché one can think of is present in the film, including the love conquers all ending that seems to me to be the only moment of achieved satire.  Alpha 60’s computerized voiceover is omnipresent in the film; it pops up over conversations, to provide exposition, or to offer aloof insights into humanity as Godard sees it.  In fact, when once his films may have had social relevance, his work has not aged well.  Take for example his section of the anthology film Love and Anger, where two sets of characters have long dialogues that cut back and forth between couples to the point where their personalities mix and they become one another.  That film is so obviously a criticism on the Vietnam War, and when watching Alphaville I could not help think of that film.  I don’t know what Godard is attacking here though.  He takes jabs at America and capitalism which personally I found offensive because they are antiquated and biased.

Behind it all though, I can’t help but think that Godard is laughing at all his critics, offering a simple ‘fuck you; I suckered you into my world’.  He may have succeeded but I would have liked a better film to manipulate me this way.

The simple fact is that Godard never learned how to make movies.  He may have had great ambition and indeed made a few masterpieces (Vivre sa vie and Contempt), but his work is uneven.  Godard seems too to have developed an ego, understandable since his debut feature is often considered one of the three most influential films in cinema history along with Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane.  He had the clout to make his films in this way because no matter what, movie-going snobs of the 60s would rush to his films simply to brag that they’ve seen them.

Despite the fact that I did not for an instant enjoy this film, the fact is I hated nearly every minute of it, I could not help notice how many science-fiction films it did influence.  Kubrick’s 2001 is the most obvious with Hal undoubtedly taking a cue from Alpha 60.  Alphaville even mentions that Alpha 60 is the continuation of corporations like IBM, and every letter in “Hal” is just one removed from that real life company.  It is reminiscent of Blade Runner in its noir elements including a detective-like figure trying to kill a robot, or in this case the inventor of one.  Plus all the citizens of Alphaville come off as robots; something I consciously thought was going to be revealed at the climax.  Even François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 was influenced by Aplhaville in its similarly bleak future with disconnected humans who resort to bizarre physical moments in public.  Godard in turn must have been influenced by other films; to me he seems to have been influenced by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.  Lang co-starred in Contempt and while Metropolis thematically, artistically, and ambitiously shares nothing with Godard’s sci-fi flick, this parallel seems appropriate.

There were elements I enjoyed in the movie.  First was the music, which kicks in right away in homage to Hollywood noirs.  I always enjoy Anna Karina who is beautiful and unfortunately wasted in this lengthy role.  She has been much better elsewhere.  Perhaps with a better leading man than Eddie Constantine, who fumbles through the infrequent action scenes, the film might have come across as more authentic.  I can’t help think of Belmondo who played a similar character in Breathless and was innocently sexy and charismatic.  The lack of imposing hero is a noir staple so I may be overly critical here.  I just didn’t like this movie.

Alphaville (1965)

(a.k.a. Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Jean-Luc Godard

Stars: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina and Akim Tamiroff

France

In French

Runtime: 99 minutes

IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058898/

Purchase Alphaville on Criterion DVD at Amazon, or stream now via Amazon Instant Video, and check out books on the film and Jean-Luc Godard in the links below:

Passion of Joan of Arc, The (1928, Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La)

Depending on the day I might name another film, but I always return to The Passion of Joan of Arc as probably the most powerful film I have ever seen.  Its images are unbearable to watch and its story horrifying and breathtaking.  It is that rare film that I would label an art film.  But let that not dissuade potential first-time viewers.  Passion is an experience unlike any other.  It jolts complacent viewers out of their haze and forces us to actively witness the persecution of Joan of Arc by the men of her own faith, men of the same institution that would canonize her in 1920.

Joan’s trial and imprisonment lasted nearly a month, immediately followed by a regular trial which lasted 2 months.  Joan constantly faced her accusers and must have spent hundreds of hours alone in her cell, a hell I am not strong enough to handle.  Dreyer has condensed the trial, or at least the dramatic and cinematic structure of his film creates a vacuum where it feels as if Joan’s suffering lasted mere hours.  Dreyer was right to do this.  In changing what we know of reality, he creates a most palpable experience of Joan’s ordeal, and we feel more readily her enormous suffering.

This is not a religious film.  It is not propaganda.  The story might be significant to Christianity but it is also important to history.  It is a document of a woman who believed and of the institution threatened by her power, heretics and hypocrites all.  Dreyer does not argue that God exists.  His characters all have their faith, but it is the will and nearsightedness of man that interests the director.  Joan is never beyond human means, the clerics who judge her the same.  The notion of holiness is non-existent.  Prayers are never answered and religious symbolism is absent.  Even a shadow of a cross is meant only to ease Joan’s nerves.  The film does not infuse its images with a higher meaning.  This creates an authenticity missing in traditionally religious films.  The film is always about convictions.  Even when Joan is paraded outdoors and we see her many compatriots clamoring for her release, these people believe in the abilities of this woman, not directly in a higher power.  This gives the film a wider appeal and enhances the experience because a true work of art must be objective, otherwise its appreciation will always be marred by its bias.  Dreyer is less preoccupied in converting his audience and more interested in documenting for himself an important personal point.

Why do her judges cry when she recants her forced confession, sealing her death?  Have they found someone with true faith?  Do they despair at ending a life?  Are they ashamed?  Of themselves or of their actions?  Joan is in a state of grace.  I cannot recognize someone in this position but Joan’s serine expressions in the face of torture make me believe she is.  A monk asks her, when trying to recant her recantation, of her great victory, implying it will die with her.  Joan knows her martyrdom will bring about the victory God spoke to her of.  Her death will prove to her wrongdoers the truth of her convictions.

The film feels as if it were somehow never intended to be viewed by a movie audience.  The way it is put together neglects, for example, clarity in visual storytelling—continuity, establishing shots, establishing for the audience where characters are in relation to each other and the room—Dreyer is not interested in such concerns.

Dreyer originally intended the film open without credits.  Imagine what that would be like in a theater, where we sit down and the film begins for us.  When the lights darken, history opens up on the screen.  The experience wouldn’t work on home video.  It must have a jarring effect, and I must side with the director when he argued that audiences must be stripped of all clues of artifice.  Credits tell us we are seeing a play.  Dreyer’s original intentions, ignored throughout the years, would begin the film exactly as it should and as it continues throughout: jolting the viewers.  There is only one point-of-view shot, only one moment when the film functions as traditional cinema.  Joan looks on the floor and we see that she sees the shadow of a cross created by the window panes.  The rest of the film is filled with images that lack continuity.  Characters constantly look at each other and each new shot shows something different from the view point of who-knows-where.  Every shot creates a disorienting effect.  There’s an almost abstract shot as Joan is burning.  The soldiers guarding the judges are preparing for retaliation.  Maces are dropped to them from the windows of the towers, and this shot swings back and forth like a pendulum, ticking down to Joan’s ultimate victory.  Often times the images suggest characters are literally on top of each other: Joan looks at the top edge of the frame and we then see a shot of a judge who is facing Joan.  We know they are looking at each other but the images defy our understanding of cinematic language.

There is a shot close to the end of the film that reminds me a lot of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.  It’s of a man without legs wheeling himself around on a cart.  A similar image exists in Potemkin on the Odessa steps.  I am struck by the documentary-like qualities such images of human deformation have in our times.  We in the civilized world cannot imagine anybody disabled to such a degree.  We are away from wars, and in our society we’ve become so jaded that we turn the other way at the suffering of the homeless or, more surprising, strangers on the streets.  These images, we’d like to believe, are fake, but Dreyer uses grim reality to recreate a grim tale.  There’s an equally disturbing shot of Joan’s arm being bled.  Apparently it is a real arm being pricked and real blood pulsing out.  Because films today are all artificial, truth belongs to another time.  While the film itself is an artifact these images make the film feel like war footage shot during Joan’s time.  Another image I link with these is the horrifying shots of Joan’s burning body.  The flames are so thick, but there looks as if a real face is in the fire.  I swear I can see a nose with flames shooting off it.  I know, at least I have to believe, that Dreyer did not burn a human being, not even a corpse, but the authenticity of the whole experience made me question what was actually burnt during the making of the film.

Why make a film like this?  It feels reactionary, like a battle cry from the director against the religious persecution of the innocent and against the banality of artistic convention.  Passion defies it, giving its audience the visceral experience of its subject matter.  It does something no other film is capable of.  It demands attention and holds us spellbound until the final, bleak images of Joan’s death.

At the center of The Passion of Joan of Arc is a remarkable performance by Renee Falconetti.  I hope I can express myself better than others who simply state that it is the greatest performance ever recorded on film.  I don’t deny this, only find that the phrase itself is not enough to describe Falconetti as Joan and it shortchanges her brilliant accomplishments.  First I must say that she never appeared in another film.  Roger Ebert correctly argues that because history is not saturated with her face that in this role she has become eternal.  Ingrid Bergman in the same role is Ingrid Bergman.  Falconetti’s haggard appearance, her masculine or rather unglamorously feminine face, has become the image of Joan of Arc for all time.  On her face is written the real account of the ordeal as if we’ve been given a photograph, from a time before such alchemy, of Joan.  Falconetti delivers what seems contradictory to the medium of silent film—a naturalistic performance.

Look at the very best of silent cinema.  To compensate for a lack of booming voice, actors usually chewed the scenery to make their points.  They became larger than life.  Falconetti at first is very expressive with her eyes.  When she is first questioned, her eyes are wide, almost as if entranced by God.  As I saw this recently for maybe then 8^th time, I noted that in her first scene she is slightly artificial.  I can think of two reasons why: perhaps in Falconetti’s reading of the events, she believes that Joan would be proud and vital, that she would stand up boldly to her accusers.  It’s an appropriate tactic.  I think the reality might be a bit different, and it is my second assumption: the film was shot in chronological order, and I think the strain by the strident Dreyer forced Falconetti to give the performance she gives, but this also undermines her efforts, but I think it’s practical to consider this.

Very quickly any notion of artifice is gone.  There are some shots where only the slight turn of Falconetti’s head is enough to convey Joan’s plight.  Her performance is truly unique.

I saw the film recently at Harvard, an archival print taken from the Cinematheque Francaise’s 1980s restoration.  It featured no musical accompaniment.  I viewed the film exactly as Dreyer would have wanted.  The Criterion DVD features the silent soundtrack, but also offers Richard Einhorn’s fantastic musical piece “Voices of Light”, a project inspired by the film.  I love Einhorn’s score.  I’ve seen the film several times with it.  I even listen to it on my iPod, but my viewing at Harvard was the first time I saw the movie silent.  It has a special quality without music.  Einhorn’s music dictates a certain pace to the images, and often drives the film.  Without music I was able to focus on the images.  I found myself involved in the movie in ways I never was before.  Without my secondary sense at play, my eyes studied the screen, and everything I needed to know was shown to me to great effect.  The film does not need music, let alone dialogue or sound effects.  Words don’t matter.  Faces tell all.  The sounds of the cracking fire during the burning exist in the frame.  Hearing them actually will not help at all.  Silence is the perfect accompaniment to the film.  It is most powerful.

Most movies don’t seem to matter anymore after seeing The Passion of Joan of Arc.  Perhaps this is because few films of its kind have actually been made.  It is proof that elegant cinematography and precise editing do not qualify a film as art.  This way of thinking links cinema closer to painting.  The cinema is more rugged, less formal than that.  What makes The Passion of Joan of Arc a work of art rivaling the works of da Vinci is the absolute visceral experience the film is to sit through—the passion with which the story is told.  We are disoriented by Dreyer’s imagery and cannot escape it.  It is such a powerful experience that the image of Renee Falconetti as Saint Joan will be with me until the end of my life.

Passion of Joan of Arc, The (1928)

(a.k.a. Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La)

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Writers: Carl Theodore Dreyer, Joseph Delteil

Stars: Renee Falconetti, Eugene Silvain and Andre Berley

France

Silent with French intertitles

Runtime: 82 minutes (at 24 fps)

Purchase Criterion's excellent DVD of The Passion of Joan of Arc at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Joan-Criterion-Collection-Spine/dp/0780022343/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1303831607&sr=1-1

(be sure to listen to the audio commentary for a comprehensive audio essay on the film by scholar Casper Tybjerg)

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019254/

Potiche (2010)

She is the queen of kitchen appliances.  She is Catherine Deneuve in François Ozon’s new Potiche.  Deneuve plays Suzanne, the spoiled wife of Robert, the CEO of her dead father’s umbrella factory.  She has a beautiful house, gorgeous clothes, servants, two beautiful kids, and she gives to Robert something which justifies her existence: status.  She is a trophy wife.

Potiche is set in 1977, a fact Ozon revels in.  The fashion, the cars, the color palette all point to satire, but the look is so thick and wonderful that we may as well be watching a documentary.  The umbrella factory is threatened by strike, and the stress gives poor, unsympathetic Robert a near heart attack.  With a pacifist, anti-capitalist son, Laurent, and an inexperienced daughter, Nadège, it is decided that Suzanne takes over negotiations with the workers.  Thus this trophy wife takes her first step into the modern 70s.

The film is a feminist love song.  I am a feminist.  But Potiche is very superficial about politics.  The film gives women the opportunity to work outside the home, and though Suzanne proves to be brilliant in her position we are never shown any of her savvy.  The company is turned around in a cut!  This is the feel of the film; it supports the energy Ozon infuses.  Potiche is a kind of French fairytale.  Suzanne is granted things and they are taken away.  It is French because, while the politics are fluffy, the film has great insight into its characters.  Suzanne, unbeknownst to everybody, has in the past had numerous discreet affairs, just like her husband.  The only difference is that Robert is out in the world and his sex is already free.  Suzanne knows a housewife’s place and knows how to play the game and win.  After her husband and daughter coldly take back the umbrella factory, Suzanne is dissatisfied with her life again and decides to run for MP, a political office.  Here she is allowed to be active in her liberation, but like her handling of the factory Ozon goes little in depth on her campaigning.  She visits local shops for photo ops and that’s just about it.  Suzanne triumphs and never breaks a sweat.

In a way Potiche is immune to criticism.  It is perfect style, high energy, it’s very funny and has the right side of the argument, or at least a liberated side—I can only speak for my politics.  What else can I say?  I enjoyed myself.  There, that’s it, except for a trend I’ve noticed with its leading lady.

Catherine Deneuve has nothing to prove.  She has made herself an icon with a terrific body of work spanning 60 years.  However, I’ve noticed a kind of lull in her recent work going back 10 or 15 years.  It’s similar to the first period of her career.  At the beginning her onscreen persona lacked dramatic weight, held back possibly by her delicacy and beauty.  It wasn’t until her defining work with Buñuel, and to a lesser extent Polanski, that Deneuve showed her range.  Truffaut brought her to the brink.  In the 90s and 2000s she’s been very productive but stuck in a similar mood as her earliest performances.  Perhaps she is too big an icon, a legend, for the directors who work with her, and her roles, not her acting, lack depth or resonance.  She is always perfect, but in a way the material doesn’t seem up to her.  Her most diverse role in recent memory was in Gaël Morel’s Apers lui, which was itself an average film.  François Ozon has used Deneuve before, and both of their films together play more like stylized film tributes than serious works of cinema.  In Potiche, I don’t think the homage of having Deneuve running an umbrella factory is lost on the director.  Though the film is a further opportunity for Deneuve to play satire, Suzanne’s depth is all on the surface.  She fits in perfectly in this charming, fun film, but I hope before too long a director, even Ozon, will take advantage of the Deneuve we’ve seen in The Last Metro.

I guess what I’m talking about is serious drama.  I should confess a bias against comedies, though more and more I’m finding ones that actually work.  I just need to avoid Judd Apatow.  But it seems that satire has become the new dramatic oomph, and I need to accept it.  But there is one story arc in Potiche that I found fascinating.

Laurent, Suzanne’s son, goes through a subtle change.  I may be the only one who’s caught it because it might only exist in my mind, but his story adds a subtext speaking more generally to the lack of liberty for parents.  The first we hear of Laurent, Suzanne tells her husband that their son is bringing home a girlfriend, the baker’s daughter.  Robert is unhappy.  At first he admits to snobbery until Suzanne presses him.  He confesses the girl may very well be his own illegitimate child—Laurent may be dating his sister!  Laurent is devoted to his mom and she loves him dearly.  She hires him as an umbrella designer and here I noticed a shift in his look.  He looked incredibly, stereotypically gay, right down to the pink ascot.  When Suzanne runs for MP, we learn that Laurent has left his girlfriend to stick by the most important woman in his life—Suzanne.  Suspicious enough.  They both then note a handsome blonde kid handing out flyers for Suzanne’s campaign.  He is the son of one of Suzanne’s ex-lovers.  Suzanne (figuratively) thinks he could be her own son considering the timing of her relations with his dad.  I think Laurent has come out, and the blonde kid is his boyfriend.  Laurent gives him very intimate looks but nothing is said.  The trap that this lays for parents is that it offers little leeway in discretion.  By the acts of both his parents, Laurent might, in either relationship, be dating his sibling.  It’s something funny for me to note, though insubstantial to the film itself.

I hope this doesn’t read like a mixed review.  I enjoyed this film—I carried a smile all the way through.  Though it may feel lite, it is fun and the actors are terrific.  I haven’t even mentioned the great Gerard Depardieu as the Mayor.  He has an interesting relationship to Suzanne and to Laurent, and just to see Deneuve and Depardieu on screen together again is worth it.

Potiche (2010)

Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Pierre Barillet (play), Jean-Pierre Gredy (play) and Francois Ozon

Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini and Jeremie Renier

France

In French

Runtime: 103 minutes

Potiche is currently playing in select cities across the US.  Check it out if it comes to your region.  It is currently available on Blu-ray and DVD in Europe via Amazon (France):

http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B004FQC0B2/ref=s9_simh_gw_p74_d4_i1?pf_rd_m=A1X6FK5RDHNB96&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=02V RJPT6CAA7BD2CY7BB&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=463375573&pf_rd_i=405320

(beware that the Blu-ray is region 'B' locked and does not feature English subtitles)

http://www.amazon.fr/Potiche-2-DVD-Catherine-Deneuve/dp/B004FQC09O/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1303709485&sr=1-1

(also without English subtitles)

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1521848/

Zooey (2006)

This movie sucks.  This movie is worse than bad because for a while it is very good—completely unoriginal, but it has a sweet, optimistic attitude towards its seemingly lowlife characters.  Zooey is the love story between a drugged out prostitute and her loser hustler husband.   The title character dreams of leaving New York for the pure snow and polar bears of Northern Canada.  She keeps a diary and a video log of her thoughts.

The one thing to understand about this movie is that it is written, shot, acted and directed as if it were a college project.  If indeed it was then it is impressive.  Regardless, this tells volumes about the conventional direction of the screenplay.  Zooey and her husband Angel are down on their luck.  They both want to escape their criminal lives, but Angel is haunted by some thugs he owes money to and Zooey’s problems are double or triple his.  Her best friend has a cute teenage son who spends a lot of time with the married couple, and when the mother is killed he stays with Zooey and Angel for a while.  These scenes are terrific.  Jordan Burt who plays Jake, the son, is terrific.  Not just because he’s so cute.  He’s baby-faced and innocent but very aware of his mother’s job.  When we first meet him, Zooey and his mom are having a rather explicit discussion regarding money and Angel, and I found it very sad that they don’t even watch themselves in front of this kid.  Later we find out Jake loves wrestling, and his scenes with Angel as they practice wrestling and Jake learns to defend himself are cute and really elevate this movie into a different sphere.  I overlooked much that was wrong because the film was giving me something special.

Jake is later placed in an orphanage, and determined to get him back Angel and Zooey take on legit jobs.  He delivers flowers and Zooey works her way up at a beauty parlor.  The same narrative problems as before—the film is unrealistic and predictable but I grew to love these characters and really was waiting for the sappy scene when this odd family would be reunited.

But as formulaic as the good stuff is—Angel doing good at his job, Zooey at hers, having quit the streets, off heroine in a matter of moments apparently, and now they have their tickets to Canada and their application to adopt Jake appears excellent—the bad stuff comes one, two, three.  All in the same night, Zooey is threatened back into her former profession; Angel is beaten and robbed of all their money, and Zooey lands in jail for soliciting a cop.  I kept waiting for their car to break down and guess what?  It did.  It is melodramatic and unsophisticated storytelling and when the story was happy and in a positive direction I went with it.  I was smiling and laughing at all the positive implausabilities, such as when a john gives Zooey $800 just to talk.  The fall from prosperity is shockingly bad.  At this point the movie is too stupid to be predictable.  Things happen randomly and the worse the situation it seems the better for the writer / director Sherman Lau.  The film is not depressing because it is distracting.

The whole feel throughout is rough and patchy.  The film feels like a self-indulgent exercise from director Lau.  Though I liked the beginning of Zooey very much, it is clear that the film needed several rewrites if it was to achieve a gritty realism I believe the director was after.  He has strong points, too.  I loved that there wasn’t any nudity or sex in the picture.  The scenes of Zooey servicing her johns are almost all taken as long shots of the darkened car.  We hear some things and are left to imagine this sweet girl doing them.  We enter the cars three times.  Twice when Zooey is attacked and once when she shares a very interesting dialogue with a man who has now picked up his first prostitute.  He is dying of cancer and though this is highly unlikely in real life, it worked.  In fact, what Lau does most effectively is depict the life of a cracked-out hooker not as a series of dramatic events but a steady, monotonous and hellish existence.  It’s Zooey’s profession, and to make a living every night she’s out on the streets.  Sarah Louise Lilley does a good job with her character but this feels like amateur hour.  Worse is Xavier Jimenez as Angel.  He is really giving a by the numbers performance that feels worked out to a fault.  There is no spontaneity in him.  The best performance, as I said, is by the kid.  But the acting isn’t the problem here.  It’s not even the writing exactly, it’s the decisions by Lau to turn what at one point was an unconventional family story into a revenge shootout.  He can make his film as he wants to but don’t be careless with characters I’ve grown to like.

I would be attacking this film if I didn’t like it, but because parts of it are so good I am very disappointed.  I didn’t expect a happy ending, though it would have made this material more interesting.  Depressing is always welcome with me because it is often more realistic but this film lives in a fantasy created by other movies.  The girls working the streets strut and pose and act just like you’d expect them to.  In all my time in a big city I have never seen prostitutes this clichéd.  If the film is a fantasy then make it one I want to see.

Zooey (2006)

Director: Sherman Lau

Writer: Sherman Lau

Stars: Sarah Louise Lilley, Xavier Jimenez, Rachel Roberts and Jordan Burt

USA

In English

Runtime: 91 minutes

Zooey is available to view right now on Amazon Instant Video.  The film has been released on DVD, but seems to be OOP.  Amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002WQI7E6/ref=atv_feed_catalog&tag=imdb-amazonvideo-20

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419286/

Little Sparrows (2010)

Conversations a dying mother has with her three daughters allows each of them to make a crucial decision they seem to have been avoiding in Little Sparrows, a love letter to mother / daughter relationships.  An ordinary film about this subject would be sentimental and soapy, and while Little Sparrows isn’t trying to accomplish anything new in terms of storytelling or cinema, it is an entertaining and very insightful take on this material.

Susan is the matriarch of a small but loving family.  Her husband James is an actor, always has been away from his family, and much of the love centers around Susan, Nina, her eldest daughter, herself a widow with two children, Anna, an actress married to a film director, and Christie, the youngest, enrolled in medical school.  The film unfolds in confessionals and each daughter is given her own chapter in this three-act piece.  First is Anna, who is having an affair.  Her husband seems a decent enough guy, though at an awkward moment during their last Christmas together, James asks Mark why he hasn’t given his daughter a part in a film.  James warns him that Anna might be unhappy and indeed she may be.  The film got off to a mediocre start because Anna’s story isn’t original nor is it interesting.  The caliber of the acting constantly saves this film from going under, so I stuck with it.  Christine we follow next.  Her story isn’t that original either but director Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen makes some very refreshing story developments.  Christie is a lesbian, a fact she has decided from a very young age to keep to herself —the result of an embarrassing and private incident with another girl.  With the certain death of her mom and the pressure of keeping her girlfriend a secret I suppose, Christie tells her mom and Susan is happy that her daughter has someone who loves her.

Coming out stories often focus on the horrible things that parents sometimes do when learning the truth, or at least being confronted with the truth because parents always know.  But the key word is sometimes, and it is often the fears of the kid that prevent them from admitting or confiding in their parents.  The reality sometimes isn’t that scary.  That Susan is not fazed and that she holds her daughter in bed afterwards and caresses her skin was the perfect choice for director Chen to make.  Arielle Gray looks great in this part.  She’s probably the best looking lesbian I’ve seen in a movie, and I’m not making a joke.  In movies lesbians are either smoking hot or really butch.  It’s one extreme or another, and Gray looks like a normal kid.  She dresses fine and indeed seems to have a knack for fashion and decoration, her hair and makeup are minimal and feminine and her physique is like any realistic 20-something college girl.  Maybe being mostly confined to American depictions of lesbians, who often suffer more in the media than gay men, I am more impressed with this aspect of Little Sparrows than I should be but I was all the same.

Nina, the oldest daughter’s story, really fascinated me.  More than her siblings she has been connected with death.  Her husband died at a time when she was thinking of leaving him; their children were small, and now she has raised two happy kids.  Nina is her mother’s confidant and best friend, Susan confesses her own bit of guilt and admits that now at the end of her life she doesn’t yet know if it was the right decision.  She tells her daughter to remember to take care of herself.  Nina had recently run into an old friend of her dead husband’s, who we sense she has mourned terribly regardless of their marital troubles, but Nina’s closed-off emotions are preventing her from perusing a relationship.  Susan’s words force each of the girls to make a drastic change.  In Nina’s case it opens an opportunity for future happiness.  The great thing about the film is that we never see anything beyond Nina asking the man out.  Their relationship is left for us to discuss.  Christie’s talk with her mom literally changes her life.  Relieved of the burden of her secret, she moves in with her girlfriend, leaving her dad all alone.

Things don’t quite work out for Anna.  Anna, though, is in a very difficult stage in her life, but who never is?  Anna’s lover has broken off their relationship which pains her.  Susan senses something wrong and tells her daughter to know what to value in life.  She now does, and Anna goes back to her husband, confesses her infidelity and he leaves her.  In the end, Anna and her father, robbed of his youngest and his wife, find each other in the end.  Little Sparrows might not be unique, but it is insightful enough to know that there are no perfect scenarios.  Christie’s happiness, for example, pains her father, though it is unintentional, and he is not selfish enough to stop her.  Nina’s reaching for happiness forces her to go outside her comfort zone which is never pleasant.  But even when life is cruel opportunities still remain, and it is up to us to identify them.

The film doesn’t linger on the death scenes.  The only sappy moments exist in the setting and dialogue between mother and each of the daughters—the hospital talks full of wisdom.  Great credit to actress Nicola Bartlett, who plays Susan.  Bartlett has few screen credits and hopefully Little Sparrows launches her career because she is terrific.  Even in those soapy exchanges her demeanor and focus weigh down the ludicrousness of what her character is saying.  True as the words might be, it is predictable that she’s saying them at the end of her life.  I often wonder why movie characters gain so much wisdom when facing death.  I also wonder why this kind of film always gets made.  It must be that the death of a parent, for those of us lucky enough to have loving parents, is so moving that filmmakers often feel compelled to tell their stories.  What a paradox!  That they are financed and produced often enough shows that it’s not only artists who are sentimental.

A good companion film to this is a French / Canadian romantic comedy, The 3 Little Pigs.  It is about three brothers meeting with the death of their mother.  In addition to depicting the differences between men and women, and for that matter the similarities, these two films are unique and very enjoyable takes on some very familiar material.

Little Sparrows (2010)

Director: Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen

Writer: Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen

Stars: Nicola Bartlett, James Hagan and Nina Deasley

Australia

In English

Runtime: 88 minutes

Little Sparrows is available on DVD from Film Movement exclusively as part of their DVD-of-the-month club.  It is their April 2011 release.  The disc will available to non-members on October 4th, 2011:

http://www.filmmovement.com/filmcatalog/index.asp?MerchandiseID=254

To subscribe to Film Movement's DVD-of-the-month club, check out their official site:

http://www.filmmovement.com/

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1642266/

Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (2008)

A film about the great Andrei Tarkovsky faces many challenges.  The man’s work was so unique, so specific to the individual receiving it, that any interpretation of the man would be accused of discriminating against, say, my interpretation.  I don’t want to have to say this but in the context of the documentary Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky I feel that I must: I am not religious.  I was raised Catholic but religion, superstition, science-fiction, and magic hold equal value for me.  All are man-made concepts.  With this perspective I have still loved Tarkovsky’s films.

I think it fair to claim that director Dmitry Trakovsky finds great spirituality in Tarkovsky’s work.  Many others have too, but in claiming that Tarkovsky was a spiritual filmmaker and by reason a deeply religious man does not compute with how I have viewed Tarkovsky’s films.  He was an artist in search of acceptance in an increasingly dispassionate world that persecutes its free thinkers.  Though his movies require one’s full attention and indeed surrender, his art is very simple.  I used to think he was a complex artist, but the longer I’ve been familiar with his work the more I’ve understood that Tarkovsky asked questions and required no answers.  Answers are subjective and lead not to interpretation.  Religion is subjective; it is specific to a point of view and is not available for scrutiny.  If my assumption of Trakovsky is correct, then fine—let him make his film as he wants, but he is doing a great disservice to Tarkovsky’s reputation in context to how many view religion today here in the United States.  It’s become an ugly thing.  People get away with inflicting a great deal of pain, often violence, against others by hiding behind religion.  These people exist on the fringes, we are told, and yet are never contradicted by religious leaders.  Tarkovsky created out of humanity.  His characters, some religious, others maybe unaware of the concept, are seeking beauty and truth in art and humanity.  Often they are blinded with anger or rage or self-pity, but truth exists in an abstract form.  Truth in Tarkovsky, seldom if ever specified, is always metaphysical, not tangible.  It is never in the form of a cross.  Now, I may be confusing religion with spirituality but for me they are the same.  I felt that this documentary was made for those who love Tarkovsky and who are religious.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

This was my overwhelming reaction to the documentary, and I think it’s a valid argument.  I, someone for whom religion is non-existent, have been moved to stillness by Tarkovsky.  Andrei Rublev is spellbinding, an epic about the role of the artist figure during inhuman times.  Stalker gave me something that I think is fair to compare to a religious experience since film is my religion.  I was entranced, and if Stalker had continued for the rest of my life I would have lived a great and full existence.  Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky never allows for an agnostic or atheistic rendering of the director, and though the film doesn’t assault with religion, an all-around more broadened view would give a greater sense of the importance of this great 20^th Century artist.

The concept of the documentary is intriguing.  Director Dmitry Trakovsky tries to make sense of a quote from an artist with whom he is a kindred spirit: “Death does not exist.”  Trakovsky’s narration is a bit too academic.  It always feels as if the director is keeping his true reactions and emotions hidden, buried beneath creative metaphors.  It is college essay writing, but he hits on something very interesting in his introduction.  Trakovsky shows a couple of pictures of himself and his family from when they left Russia and came to the US.  Trakovsky was a cute kid, by the way, and this idea of searching for an artist with so much meaning in the researcher’s life is very relatable.  I myself am fascinated by the cinema of Pasolini, who actually comes up in this documentary.  His lifestyle and his way of cinema, a cinema akin to poetry, albeit a gritty, often ugly poetry, and his politics—as an Italian-American never having been to the birthplace of my parents, the notion of Pasolini is for me very romantic and palpable.  The concept of the film would seem to say less about Tarkovsky and more about Trakovsky, or at least Russia in the wake of Tarkovsky’s death.  And that would be a great documentary.  Instead, interview after interview is presented, some priceless, few others bewildering, and some of these accounts really stop the film.

I can appreciate actress Domiziana Giordano, the Botticellian beauty from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, even if her comments are vacuous and aimless.  She does recount something very interesting: he was a bit chauvinistic but being away from his family in Italy he adopted her as a daughter.  Better still is the interview with Andrei Andreevich Tarkovsky, the director’s son.  I was amazed that Trakovsky could locate the heir to this great director.  I sometimes forget that Tarkovsky existed in our time.  His work is so powerful it feels as if it came from an age before cinema.  Anyhow, Andrei, the son, was not allowed to leave the USSR when his parents decided to remain abroad.  The son reveals here that he was used by his government as a kind of bait to get the fugitive Tarkovsky back home.  The son defiantly says he will not return to Russia, and he now lives in Italy and France.  Though these accounts are great, 2/3 through the movie, Trakovsky himself comes to the realization that he has only been collecting inanimate testimonies.

Great documentaries document less and build impressions; it’s all the cinema can do.  Films give us a sense of life and cannot recreate it as the act of viewing a movie is a step removed from living.  Cinema is impressions; truth is aloof.  Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky fails in giving a real sense of who Tarkovsky was or what his contributions were to cinema or, in a greater context, to 20^th Century art and of his place in the great lineage of Russia’s artistic history and how the director has and will shape it.  Trakovsky interviewed too many subjects and presents too much of them.  This is why the film feels more like Trakovsky documenting.  Father Michael McCormick, an Orthodox monk living in California, is one subject too many.  His segment shuts down the film.  He mumbles about how Tarkovsky shaped his life in the church, but he comes off more as a film buff than a spiritual man.  I can understand the interest in a documentary about Tarkovsky to interview a monk but McCormick simply does not relate anything meaningful and, for that matter, cannot form a cohesive thought.

The film does open up in its final segments.  After traveling to Sweden to interview the great actor Erland Josephson, Trakovsky returns to his homeland, something Tarkovsky was never able to do.  Trakovsky speaks first with a Russian filmmaker who claims that filmmaking conditions haven’t changed much.  Many of those who worked with Tarkovsky are still active in the profession, another reminder that Tarkovsky lived not too long ago.  These scenes in Russia give a sense of what the director was after in his opening narration.  It brings full circle his idea but it’s a little too late.  The film feels like a work in progress.  I commend the director for focusing on a unique subject.  An American kid who closely identifies with Tarkovsky is a rarity given our popular culture, but the first hour really needs to be reworked.  It may have helped to see more of Tarkovsky’s images.  I am not familiar with documentary filmmaking but I am aware that claiming fair use isn’t as easy as it sounds, so maybe clips weren’t at the ready to really give a sense of the man’s cinema.  To be sure there are many excerpts, but in even these we don’t get a sense of Tarkovsky’s cinema.

The bottom line is this: will Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky entice unfamiliar viewers to Tarkovsky’s films?  I don’t think so.  It may be that the film is aiming for those who are already familiar, but because Tarkovsky is so powerful and oddly enough so accessible (I really do believe this—his movies aren’t as daunting as many have described) I think more could be done to showcase the director.  Dmitry Trakovsky has a worthy subject and some great material shot all over Europe and with a more intuitive, artful approach he may yet find a terrific film.  “Death does not exist” might refer to the fact that artists truly never die because their work exists for as long as it is appreciated.  Revolutions pass and time vanishes, but the art produced throughout the centuries is still with us.  Andrei Rublev is, in part, about this very topic, and if Trakovsky’s goal of the documentary was to also prove this point then he had succeeded, but the concept and execution seem too simple.  It’s obvious, and it might be why the film doesn’t linger in my mind they way Tarkovsky’s films do.  Still, Trakovsky should again be commended for what he set out to achieve.

Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (2008)

Director: Dmitry Trakovsky

Writer: Dmitry Trakovsky

Stars: Donatella Baglivo, Erland Josephson and Fabrizio Borin

USA

In English, Italian and Russian

Runtime: 89 minutes

Visit the film's official website to find theatrical showings all over the globe, as well as learn more about director Dmitry Trakovsky and his work, and purchase a copy of the DVD:

http://trakovskyfilm.com/

The film is also available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Meeting-Andrei-Tarkovsky-Dmitry-Trakovsky/dp/B004FVLWQQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1303156572&sr=1-1

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1461246/

8 Women (2002, 8 femmes)

Catherine Deneuve is a film icon.  She has worked with some of the best filmmakers of all time, past and present, and to see her alongside other great French actresses in 8 Women is a pleasure unto itself.  That the film is fun is an added bonus.

8 women are stranded at a snowed in mansion with a dead body in an upstairs bedroom.  The victim is Marcel, who we never see, Deneuve’s Gaby’s husband.  Their oldest daughter Suzon arrives home from college the day her father’s corpse is discovered.  She tries to piece together the last few hours of these very catty, very different women to solve the horrible murder of her father.  That the murderer might be someone she loves is a consolation of sorts.

There’s Mamy, her elderly grandma, played by Danielle Darrieux, an icon of French cinema going back to the 1930s (did I mention 8 Women was made in 2002?).  Mamy is wheelchair bound, and out of charity Marcel and Gaby had taken in her and Augustine, her unmarried, frumpish daughter, Gaby’s jealous sister.  Another French icon—Isabelle Huppert, muse to Claude Chabrol.  The sexy new maid, Louise, may have something to hide.  Emmanuelle Béart plays her.  Most innocent are Madame Chanel, the long time family cook and nanny to Suzon, and Catherine, Suzon’s kid sister.  Catherine is into mystery novels, something her Aunt Augustine doesn’t approve of.  She’s played by Ludiving Sagnier, a gifted young actress whose talents have been employed by Chabrol and Christophe Honoré.  This is an accomplished cast.

But wait—that’s only 7 women.  Marcel’s estranged sister Pierrette arrives looking for the brother she knows is dead.  Pierrette is played by the last of François Truffaut’s famous leading lady lovers, Fanny Ardant.  Perhaps because of Truffaut’s untimely death in 1984, Ardant never got the attention she deserved as an actress, but in Confidentially Yours, Truffaut’s final film, her work in that genre comedy stands up to Jeanne Moreau’s or Catherine Deneuve’s.  Deneuve was Truffaut’s lover in the late 70s, early 80s, and it is suggested that Truffaut had a breakdown when the actress left him.  Ardant was the one who restored his spirits, or so legend goes.  This gossip isn’t really relevant, but it’s in the spirit of 8 Women.  Director François Ozon must have understood the history he was bringing together by uniting Deneuve and Ardant on screen, especially in a dishy cat-fight of a picture.  This back story doesn’t interfere with the film.  But looking at the amazing cast that spans the whole history of French cinema—from poetic realism in the 30s to the 50s films of Max Ophuls, the New Wave and post-New Wave and beyond; 90’s cinema and today—I couldn’t help thinking of these facts.  8 Women is a fun film with style, brave, campy performances by its stars, and a great traditional mystery.  Getting lost in its actors is a complement.  A bad film with all these women would feel more gimmicky.

Gaby had kept her husband and his sister apart, or so she thought.  Nothing is what it seems in Ozon’s mystery musical.  That’s right, the film is a musical.  It’s kind of off-putting at first.  The opening shot, a wide pan along the grounds of the family mansion, looks intentionally phony.  The whole film looks like a 60s parody, down to the wigs and eye-popping color.  When Ludiving Sagnier sings the first number, in both her look and the choreography she reminded so much of Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap.  That must have been intentional.  The song, “Daddy, Daddy” You Ain’t with It”, sounds exactly like a song we would’ve got from a live action Disney film of the time.  What’s odd about the music is how Ozon stages it in context to the film.  There are 8 songs, and each one is a solo by the actresses.  They come off more as monologues; they don’t advance the story at all.  One could make the case that they hold up the picture, but not I.  The songs give us information into the respective character.  For example, when Isabelle Huppert sings, we learn her neurotic tendencies that often hurt her sister are in part to spare Gaby’s feelings.  Deneuve’s own song is very odd, and it leads to her and Ardant making out on the floor of the grand hall.  I never expected to see something like this in a movie.  What can I say?  It’s fun to look at.

The mystery in the film is old-fashioned fun.  There’s nothing original.  You have the self-appointed Poirot character, the nosy detective who forgets to cast a light into her own mysterious comings and goings, a wife who stands to gain an inheritance, jealous relatives and a sexy, dangerous sibling.  The hired help has run of the house so they’re suspect too.  The isolated mansion, guard dogs that don’t bark, a key to a locked door that is stolen, transference of guilt—everything that makes a great mystery work.  The musical is a bit odd in this context, but as a movie that loves movies, a movie lover with eat this up.  The style, the cast, the music, the genre mishmash, and the cinematic history and tribute that becomes 8 Women guarantees its admiration from people like me.  I will remain light on the story development.  In this kind of picture every twist is more fun to discover while watching.

In her office, Gaby has a portrait of herself from when she was young.  The painting is a breathtaking likeness of Deneuve.  Looking at those sharp cheekbones I was reminded of images of her from Belle de jour, the era where Deneuve was exceptionally beautiful.  I thought momentarily of the sadness of aging.  Deneuve has done so gracefully, and when she’s on the floor with Ardant, there is a moment when she looks EXACTLY like her younger self.

8 Women is Ozon’s most successful picture.  I’ve never thought too highly of him as a director, maybe because he is better known in the US than Honoré, my contemporary favorite.  His films are always either too stylized or boring.  I think the genre, the grandiosity of the material, and the cast allows Ozon to revel in his indulgences.  I saw the preview of his newest film, Potiche, also starring Catherine Deneuve.  I’m seeing it next week, but already I am pleased to see this same pictorial style at play in his newest film.

8 Women (2002)

(a.k.a. 8 femmes)

Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Robert Thomas (play), Francois Ozon and Marina de Van

Stars: Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Ludivine Sagnier and Firmine Richard

France

In French

Runtime: 111 minutes

To purchase 8 Women, visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/8-Women-Fanny-Ardant/dp/B00007J5VT/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1303015572&sr=1-1

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283832/

Under Capricorn (1949)

Alfred Hitchcock was once called the greatest director of screen melodramas by the British press.  This was during his first period in England, probably in relation to the 6 thrillers that constitute his best British work.  A forgotten and very hard to find film (in retrospectives, at least) made in the US, Under Capricorn, is probably Hitchcock at his melodramatic best.  It is not a suspense picture, though it resembles one.  This might be one reason for the film’s commercial and critical failure.

Under Capricorn isn’t a great film, but it is not boring.  I’ve seen it three times in maybe 5 years, and it’s most effective the less often you see it.  Hitchcock’s best pictures can be viewed over and over again, but Under Capricorn is preposterous and over the top, laden with actors with incorrect accents (the two leads!) and a soap opera plot.  It tells the cruel history of the colony of Australia, once used by the British as a detention camp for criminals.  The society, such as it is, is limited, and many of the colony’s most prosperous citizens were themselves inmates, many often sentenced falsely accused.  Sam Flusky, an Irishman from the time when the UK ruled with violence, is such a citizen, a man who with his first freedom made himself a success.  Into the colony comes Charles Adare, a carefree cousin of The Governor’s.  Charles is warned against keeping an engagement to Flusky’s home, but against reason he visits the haunted mansion and partakes of wine and dinner.  It is here we meet Flusky’s wife, Henrietta.  Their love affair resulted in scandal, and the death of Henrietta’s brother.  Because he did not fire the first shot, Sam got 6 years at the colony.  Henrietta, madly in love, fled to Australia to be near her love.

In the first of the many story conveniences Charles knew Flusky’s wife, Henrietta, back in Ireland; his sister was good friends with her family.  Henrietta is obviously drunk when we first meet her.  She stumbles into dinner barefooted with nightgown.  She solemnly refuses a drink from Charles.  Charles, with permission by Flusky, is determined to cure Henrietta of her malady and make her popular among the socially aware and mistress of her own house, which is currently run by the pushy maid, Milly, who carries a secret passion for the Mister.

Under Capricorn was Hitchcock’s second color film and a project during a quasi-experimental phase in the director’s career.  He was brought to America by producer David O. Selznick.  The two did not get along.  Selznick, a tyrannical producer, allowed the director little freedom, and when the contract expired Hitchcock became his own producer.  His film solo film, Rope, was technically brilliant but nearly put an end to Hitchcock’s newly formed production company, Transatlantic Pictures.  Rope is a film that exists with very few aesthetic cuts.  Hitchcock wanted the feel of a stage play by having 10 minute sections of the film shot in real time, and all but two “cuts” are seamlessly dissolved to create one single-take picture.  Under Capricorn might have been Hitchcock’s realization that his desired technique couldn’t work as cinema, so while he still peruses it in Under Capricorn, the image is livelier with cuts and more visually pleasing camera glides and pans.  The approach suits well the material of Under Capricorn.  When Charles and Flusky speak of Henrietta on the porch, the camera glides effortless up the house, into Henrietta’s room, showing the audience her in drunken turmoil.  The very first extended take, Charles walking into his cousin’s room, has grace and well-meaning, but the limitations of Technicolor technology, namely the heavy weight of the camera, are evident as the camera bounces to the cameramen’s walking motion.

This brings up a point I would like to discuss.  When I saw Under Capricorn at Harvard recently, filmmaker Morgan Fisher introduced the film, speaking beforehand about how 35mm negative can only run for 11 minutes in the camera, and allowing for roll and slate, slightly less.  He noted that if one of the long takes is fouled up 4 minutes in, more than likely the roll of film would need changing because the time allotted for the shot was in direct conflict to the remaining time left on the used reel of film.  It’s an interesting piece of info.  Also, when Hitchcock’s camera moves from one part of the set to another, every area has to be lit perfectly in advance.  Unlike Rope, which took place in one apartment in two different rooms, Under Capricorn moves all about, into previously closed doors, up the sides of buildings and stairs, and that each section of the set needed to be factually constructed and pre-lit is an enormous undertaking for the crew.  Fisher suggested that while watching these films, the audience is made aware of the life behind the camera.  I don’t agree.  Hitchcock was a skilled filmmaker.  Not only did he take risks, he knew how to make them work.  I think the whole of his artifice blends away when he puts the pieces of film together, no matter how long each segment.  Only film people might be aware of how Hitchcock shot this film.  Average viewers unfamiliar with the inner workings of filmmaking won’t be conscious of Hitchcock’s efforts.  I certainly wasn’t.  After studying the man and his work, I am still suckered into to his stories and cannot see the seams.

I won’t linger on it but Technicolor is stunning.  The print I saw was a BFI restoration and it was beautiful.  Most DVD production companies when working on three-strip Technicolor alter the tone and intensity of the color to make it look contemporary.  Technicolor is supposed to have a subtler palette than we’re used to.  Most of Under Capricorn has a grayish look, partly because of set and costume design, but the palette was softer than I was expecting.  Only The Criterion Collection’s Technicolor releases retain a film-like look among American DVD production houses.  Thankfully, Image Entertainment’s excellent DVD of Under Capricorn does, too.  Until seeing the BFI restoration on screen I was convinced Image used a bad print, but their DVD seems to have used the same restoration.  I noted only two differences: the blue introductory titles cards regarding the restoration are missing on the DVD, and overall the film has a slightly more faded look than the 35mm print, but fans eager to see Hitchcock’s rarest Hollywood film should not hesitate in purchasing Under Capricorn on DVD.

It’s melodrama and it’s rip-roaring.  It’s silly and fun and gothic.  In many ways it reminded me of other sources, most notably the novel Jane Eyre.  Rochester is a cursed man in a castle both shunned by and shunning society.  He is closed off from emotion and depressed at the reality of his situation.  Henrietta represents both Jane, the new servant girl who gives Rochester life after so much darkness, and Rochester’s long-suffering wife.  This parallel, at least in cinematic circles, becomes even more appropriate when considering the various 20^th Century adaptations of the novel, and of the novel Rebecca.  Rebecca was Hitch’s first American film and one of his greatest and best surviving films.  Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of “Rebecca” was scored by Bernard Herrmann, a composer who would make the greatest contributions to 20^th Century music working in film, and specifically with Hitchcock in the 50s and 60s.  Herrmann scored the greatest film adaption of Jane Eyre, starring Orson Welles, and adapted his radio score for Rebecca for that picture.  Under Capricorn is in the gothic tradition, where morality and social obligations counted more than one’s happiness.  Flusky wants his wife cured of her illnesses so that she may be happy, but that she cannot help herself weighs heavily on him.  Milly, the maid, doesn’t help.  This is another throwback to Hitchcock’s Rebecca.  Milly is very much like Mrs. Danvers, obsessed over the person she serves and willing to kill those who threaten her own happiness.

One thing I felt the film did terrifically, or at least as honestly as the Production Code would allow, is show what’s it’s really like for someone dependant on alcohol.  Ingrid Bergman’s Henrietta is a slave to her drinks.  In her early scenes it’s the only thing that brings her happiness.  It’s quite alarming to see alcoholism so seriously depicted on the screen.  The Lost Weekend by Wilder is kind of a joke, but it is like Hitchcock to take a serious subject in a less than serious script and treat it with due seriousness.  It is Hitchcock’s much-overlooked strength to supply his movies with honest character portraits.  Even in melodrama they are relatable.

Joseph Cotton and Ingrid Bergman are terrific actors.  Both had been better in other Hitchcock films but given the limitations of the material they do just fine.  One thing that initially took me out of the picture was their accents.  Both are supposed to be Irish.  Cotton, an American, speaks his lines with his normal New York voice.  Bergman fares even worse because of her thick Swedish accent, and on top of that she attempts an Irish brogue.  It’s kind of amusing at first, but Bergman was great with screen melodrama.  In fact all classic Hollywood actresses could figuratively bleed on screen.  Maybe it was the era.  Bergman could turn her head away in shame or heartbreak as good as anyone.  It sounds like I’m making fun, but Bergman was a dynamic talent, especially with terrific scripts.  She always is convincing in love, but every time she calls her husband’s name in Under Capricorn I kept thinking of another Sam...  The supporting cast is superlative, another Golden Age staple.  Margaret Leighton as the villainous Milly and especially Cecil Parker as the governor are simply fun to watch.  Parker has a way of delivering lines as only an old-fashioned Englishman can.  The least impressive is Michael Wilding as Charles.  The role is boring and he matched it.  It was easy to see why Henrietta was always passionately devoted to Flusky, even if for the majority of the film their relationship remains a mystery.  Supporting the material is the great score by Richard Addinsell.  Not to use the word again but it is in the melodramatic tradition: lush, full orchestra giving it all.  His music is intrusive in some of the quieter moments but he has some terrific themes and more importantly orchestrations.

I recommend Under Capricorn to all eager to see Hitchcock films.  It belongs to a series of non-suspense pictures that really come to define the director’s career.  We expect the Psychos and North by Northwests but films like Lifeboat and Under Capricorn really showcase the stories and characters that Hitchcock was most interested in.  It’s wonderfully over the top.

Under Capricorn (1949)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Hume Cronyn (adaptation), James Birdie (screenplay)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotton, Michael Wilding and Margaret Leighton

USA

In English

Runtime: 117 minutes

To purchase Under Capricorn on DVD from Image Entertainment, visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Under-Capricorn-Ingrid-Bergman/dp/B000093NSH/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302731065&sr=1-1

Under Capricorn is available for viewing via online streaming at The Internet Archive:

http://www.archive.org/details/UnderCapricorn

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042004/

Au hazard Balthazar (1966)

Au hasard Balthazar is the kind of film that gives art films a bad rap.  It is stoic and remote; none of the characters can express themselves and the only redeeming quality of the film is that Balthazar is an attractive donkey.  The film chronicles Balthazar’s life, from his young days to death, and we bear witness to the many cruelties inflicted upon him.  The concept is fantastic: examining life through the lifespan of an animal, but the execution is dull—painfully dull and pretentious.

I guess the main human character is called Marie.  As a girl she was friends, or even soul mates, with the son of the first owner of Balthazar, named Jacques.  When the owner’s daughter dies that summer, the family leaves, and Marie and her Father, caretaker of the land, are left to themselves.  Balthazar’s talents as a fieldworker are rendered useless with modern technology and he’s passed around several members of the community.  He carries bread to neighbors, guided by a mean young man named Gérard who becomes the villain of the story.  It is primarily in his scenes where the film displays a surprising lack of story development.  For one thing, every “villain” is always portrayed as a villain.  They’re never human.  Gérard rapes the grown up Marie.  This part I could relate to.  Marie, waiting for the boy who loved her long ago, the one who has disappeared, now accepts her fate with this loser.  It made sense because of her family background.  Her father is a proud, repressed man who turns down every opportunity for prosperity.  Someone takes his daughter’s virginity and the girl is so oppressed that she initially mistakes his rape as a form of love.

However, in addition Gérard harasses a drunkard throughout the film; he trashes a bar, steals, and is rude to everybody, including Marie.  I know people like this exist, but the film never allows him any other facets to his character.  He is always just bad.  Marie, after becoming a prostitute and destroying her family’s reputation, has her outlook on life changed.  She is dead on the inside, and when Jacques returns, she agrees to marry him after confessing her past sins.  Gérard and his cronies strip her naked and beat her.  Her father and new fiancée catch the men who abuse her but they don’t react to them.  They just stare into the window as Marie cries while the men get away.  In real life I would think their initial reaction is anger and they would want to kill these guys before even checking if Marie was okay.  But Au hasard Balthazar never plays fair.  It prefers to stylize its characters’ emotions to create a pseudo-artsy mood.  Another example: when her husband is about to die, Marie’s mother prays to God not to take him away.  Her words or rather her diction lacks any sincerity.  She’s just saying lines.  If the villains fare badly in Au hasard Balthazar, the bystanders are clueless, and the innocent are naïve and brain-dead.

Another thing that bugged me: I had to struggle to understand the relationships between the characters in the film.  They seldom speak, even more rarely do they speak to each other.  They don’t address one another by name or relation.  I didn’t know until the end that the old woman was Marie’s mother.  She’s so cold and distant in her earlier scenes that I figured her for the maid.  Only when she prays for her husband’s life did I understand.  My feeling constantly was that Bresson needed to lighten up.

Ingmar Bergman is one of the few artistic filmmakers.  He’s not really remembered today outside film circles.  In both “The Simpsons” and “Animaniacs”, two terrific satirical cartoons from the 90s, the most famous image from Persona—Liv Ullmann in extreme close-up in the foreground, Bibi Andersson facing her screen position in the background—has been parodied.  In both of the parodies, the characters speak in a fashion similar to the characters in Balthazar.  This really sums up the mainstream’s impressions of art films.  The reality is that Bergman was a very passionate writer / director.  Persona, and in particular the described scene, has so much humanity and sadness and the stoic mood generalized on it is the result of bad art films like this one.

I have to admit that this is the first Robert Bresson film I’ve seen.  My first few Godard films led to my initial negative opinion of the director, but as I discovered more of his work I gained new insights into JLG, and now I find Godard’s work fascinating, if still uneven.  Perhaps the same will happen with Bresson.  I will say though I was not impressed with Au hasard Balthazar.

I have something cruel to confess.  About halfway through the film when it became embarrassingly obvious that the donkey was going to eventually die, I kept waiting for Balthazar to kick the bucket.  Yes, the animal was cute and I didn’t like seeing him abused, but I was more depressed that I was watching a boring movie rather than at anything that was happening on the screen.  It felt like the movie would never end.  Then, in the final shots when Balthazar closes his eyes and finds his way to the ground, I was kind of struck, more so because an animal was dying than because of the journey the film took me on.

One final complaint, something I never understood.  Why were Gérard and his buddies always borrowing or stealing Balthazar?  It made no sense logically.  A heavy, slow donkey isn’t really the best animal to assist in a robbery.  Perhaps Gérard’s actions were meant to be symbolic.  I didn’t have the patience with this film to care.

Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

Director: Robert Bresson

Writer: Robert Bresson

Stars: Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green and Francois Lafarge

France

In French

Runtime: 95 minutes

Purchase Criterion's terrific DVD of Au hasard Balthazar on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Au-Hasard-Balthazar-Criterion-Collection/dp/B00092ZLEY/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302555289&sr=1-1

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060138/

Love Songs (2007, Chansons d'amour, Les)

Why is sadness and humor so closely related?  Christophe Honoré’s musical Love Songs is a bittersweet film that remains one of the great pleasures from this productive auteur.  He takes a revisionist approach to the movie musical, telling a contemporary story with contemporary music by the French songwriter Alex Beaupain, and the result is a joyous and very sad story of love, loss, and life redeemed with new love.

Three people, Ismaël, Julie, and Alice, share a life together in Paris.  Alice is into non-sex, and Julie is desperate to keep Ismaël but unhappy with their current life.  She confides to her sister Jeanne that Ismaël is forcing her to break up for him.  Julie dies almost literally of a broken heart and Ismaël becomes an emotional wreck.  He dodges Julie’s loving family, tries to build on his friendship with Alice, but to spare himself pain he distances himself from emotion.  Until Erwann.  Erwann is a young kid determined to have Ismaël love him.

Louis Garrel is my favorite actor.  He embodies cinematic spirit better than any performer today, and he reminds me a lot of Jean-Pierre Léaud.  Léaud was a very divisive actor from the New Wave and is Garrel’s godfather, so the parallel is fair to draw.  But Garrel is more accessible than Léaud maybe because he’s more handsome and his personality more playful and innocent.  Even when he’s in bed with two women he retains his innocence.  The secret might be that he’s a terrific actor.  He has become a muse for Honoré, but the director’s true muse is Chiara Mastroianni.  Love Songs was her first film for Honoré and she has since appeared in every one of his films, including a single shot in La belle personne.  She is very good as Julie’s sister, and like her mother she can handle a musical.  The dynamic between these three characters is the saddest thing about Love Songs.  It is clear that Julie loves Ismaël because she gets so easily upset at him for disappointing her.  For possibly many reasons, Ismaël is constantly keeping her away.  We see him more than once avoiding true physical emotion with her, which only aids Julie’s worsening emotional health.  When she dies, Ismaël is destroyed.  Her family is destroyed, and Jeanne tries to get Ismaël to remain close to them.  I think it quite clear that she is in love with him.  And he constantly disappoints her, too.  She finds a woman in his bed that isn’t Alice and Jeanne is hurt.  She finds someone else in his bed and things become clearer for her, but not easier.

The obstacle the film might have with mainstream audiences is that it believes in pansexuality, the idea that sexual pleasure is not be limited by gender.  I think that is a very unrealistic argument.  Most people know which sexual partners appeal to them.  But because Love Songs is a musical, I was swept away.  That Erwann could get through to Ismaël is a satisfying finale but wholly unrealistic.

So a good question to ask: in a musical, is the story more important or the music?  Can we forgive a fantasy if the music is so infectious?  To each his own, but I certainly could.  Love Songs has an implausible story.  I don’t believe that Ismaël, who we’ve seen sexually linked with three different women, would fall for Erwann, a boy, no matter how adorable he is.  Yet, this is a fantasy and I wanted to believe that Erwann’s potent amours would break Ismaël down and rebuild him.  I’m probably using the wrong words to describe the situation.  The film really isn’t sentimental or sappy.

Honoré’s greatest strength is the energy he brings to his films, an energy and rhythm always supported by the grittiness of real life.  He is a cinefile two generations removed from the New Wave, and this connection is important to follow a lineage through the great history of French cinema.  Honoré is the finest director of his generation, the thematic and stylistic heir of Godard and Truffaut.  He doesn’t believe in simple emotions, at least as a filmmaker.  That’s why parts of this film are heartbreaking.  I haven’t seen my share of musicals, but what I understand is that they are happy, with happy endings.  The ending of Love Songs is hopeful but the tragedy of loss always hangs over.  Take the song “Au parc,” sung by Jeanne.  She describes the renewing seasons and the ever-present playful children at the park she and her sister grew up in, but she always remembers, “It will all be there, except for you.”  Or the unusual love song Ismaël sings to Erwann when they first make love.  He asks Erwann to find Julie inside of him and kill her a second time so that Ismaël can move on.  Their love is built on need more than sexual attraction.  Erwann, a virgin, desires Ismaël and Ismaël needs a body to cling to.

The real revelation in the cast was of course Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet as Erwann.  He’s since become a regular in French films.  I like him a lot in this film.  He has a terrific voice.  If I had to name the scene-stealing performance though, I would signal out Clotilde Hesme.  She plays Alice, the third party in the ménage-a-trois.  I felt her role was not as substantial as Garrel’s or Ludivine Sagnier’s as Julie but Hesme has a quality about her that is charming and a regal look that I found stunning.

Alex Beaupain has written the music for every one of Honoré’s films.  In what forms a trilogy, Dans Paris, Love Songs, and La belle personne are, in Beaupain’s words, ‘movies with songs’.  Love Songs is their only full length musical.  Beaupain is a great songwriter.  His lyrics are intelligent, ironic, and absolutely charming.  I listen to his two studio albums at the gym and I don’t even understand French.  They just sound great.  I won’t do a song by song breakdown, but “De bonnes raisons”, the opening number, is in many ways a call back to the 60s.  Towards the end of this upbeat swanky song there’s a guitar riff, nearly buried under the lyrics, that is so 1960s it just makes you smile.  “La Bastille” is one of the saddest songs in the film.  Julie sings about how the rain outside empties the square of the angel statue of the Bastille.  Each member of her family takes a section of the song, and we see that while they love and are happy, such happiness is joined with the sorrows of life.

But the storytelling remains simple.  If I have one negative criticism it would be that the film is rushed.  It’s almost 100 minutes but especially with my most recent viewing I felt the story was hurried through.  Often times the pace is too quick; we aren’t given the time in between story beats to contemplate or even orient ourselves.  Other times, especially in the latter half of the film, this rushed approach hinders the storytelling.  Some things feel washed over just to get to the next musical number.  For example, when Erwann gives Ismaël his keys, inviting him to stay, Ismaël not only has a change of heart by agreeing to go home with him, he seems excited by the idea.  This is contrary to what he has just said.  Such changes of mind are understandable, but the film doesn’t make his sudden change of mind clear.

The plot isn’t the thing.  All I can say to recommend Love Songs is that it makes me happy.  I can talk forever about these moments, like when Ismaël jokingly tries to cut off Alice’s tongue with a pair of scissors or when Alice kids him about not being circumcised when he’s Jewish; or when Alice, Julie and Ismaël dance on the streets of Paris; or the playful and dynamic song “Le distance” where Erwann tires to seduce Ismaël; and every scene with Julie’s family.  Come to think of it, Love Songs is one of my favorite films, imperfect as it is, sad as parts of it is, but its energy and mood make it a lot of fun to watch.

Love Songs (2007)

(a.k.a. Chansons d'amour, Les)

Director: Christophe Honoré

Writer: Christophe Honoré

Stars: Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, Clotilde Hesme, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet and Chiara Mastroianni

Music: Alex Beaupain

France

In French

Runtime: 95 minutes

Buy Love Songs at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Songs-Ludivine-Sagnier/dp/B001DJ7PUA/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302383159&sr=1-1

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0996605/