Inspector Bellamy (2009, Bellamy)

There’s a lot going on in Inspector Bellamy. What could have been a simple mystery instead layers multiple story threads, each working separately the way real life does, and in unison, creating a psychological portrait not just of its lead character but of the world he inhabits.

Inspector Bellamy is curious; about the machinations of life, the reasons why. He is on vacation with his beautiful, youthful wife Françoise, but cannot get away from what we assume is his passion: crime. A mysterious man shows up with a confession—he has killed someone. We know from the opening credits that a car has crashed off a cliff, killing—deforming—the driver. Television reports tell us the deceased man was not who everyone thought it would be. Instead of the insurance salesman who owned the car, the victim is an unknown, and the insurance salesman has attempted to defraud his company and is now in hiding. The man who visits Bellamy is in fact the missing man, at first under the thin alias of Noël Gentil but really Emile Leullet. Who is the dead man then, and why does Inspector Bellamy indulge Leullet in his late night confessions? Does he want to single-handedly solve a popular mystery for fame? For justice? His own curiosity? The answer comes after the climax which is less anti-climatic when viewing the film as a straight-forward mystery, but the reason for Bellamy’s indulgence allows us to understand his entire career as an inspector.

The story threads of Inspector Bellamy are slow in revealing themselves, but the film is more rewarding for it. In comes Bellamy’s brother, Jacques, handsome, young, a loser and a drunk. Bellamy and Jacques have a tense relationship, and Françoise is the mediator between them. But the more The Inspector discovers about the Leullet case the more he is convinced his life mirrors it, that his wife is having an affair.

I admit at first I was lost. That is to say so many small things were happening in short bursts that I did not know what the true story was. For example, characters are introduced who seemingly have no narrative purpose (they will not advance the mystery—this includes the brother character); there are too many convenient personal connections between unlikely characters, etc. It is lucky the film was directed by the seasoned professional Claude Chabrol and stars Gérard Depardieu. Depardieu especially leads an extraordinary cast through a series of twisting scenes with (at first) no purpose and succeeds in making them interesting, so even when I was lost I was not frustrated. Tensions are hinted at, maybe only suggested, by Chabrol, and little by little these present themselves as more menacing and complicated to the extreme.

Chabrol is known mostly as the French Master of Suspense, a moniker that does as much a disservice to him as it did to Hitchcock. Both filmmakers used a popular genre to convey personal interests and demons. Here Chabrol is concerned with being old and overweight, married to a beauty and feeling insecure. There is more, some of which I’m sure exist in my own reading of the film, but anything beyond a superficial telling of the plot is harmful. Things are more fun to discover on your own. But understand the thriller plot is merely the starting point for a personal film filled with character and insight and commentary. The final scene in court where Leullet’s lawyer defends him with a song is a kind of mocking sting at the absurdity of the judicial system which often feels as if it’s working for those who know how to circumvent it rather than for justice.

The film gives me renewed interest in Chabrol’s past films. I’ll admit to not being a fan. I’ve enjoyed his recent work and think Inspector Bellamy is his best effort since 2000, but his past masterpieces, laid during the infancy of the French New Wave, have always bored me. He seemed to me a pale imitator of Hitchcock’s, someone whose work felt more like cheap but brisk 70s American television. I noticed with Inspector Bellamy how this film, more than his other recent works, mirrors his earlier output, particularly Les biches. The machinations of the plot seem to service the dysfunction underneath, and with this renewed interest I may pick up again on Chabrol’s early career.

There isn’t much more for me to say. The film is entertaining and surprisingly subtle. I don’t want to talk about how the various subplots merge into the ultimate story being told, and beyond that the film can stand on its own. Being Chabrol’s final film and first collaboration with Depardieu, this is a film that doesn’t need my recommendation to endorse it.

Inspector Bellamy (2009)

(a.k.a. Bellamy)

Director: Claude Chabrol

Writers: Claude Chabrol and Odile Barski

Stars: Gerard Depardieu, Clovis Cornillac and Jacques Gamblin

France

In French

Runtime: 110 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188983/

Stolen Kisses (1968, Baisers volés)

It is said that the average person will change professions several times in his life. There may be many reasons for change, but it is sad when one’s own character prevents him from charting a course and sticking to it. Antoine Doinel, the hero of The 400 Blows, has not quite grown up. Let me rephrase that: Antoine and his environment are changing at different speeds. When once Antoine’s insolence was charming, as an adult it is clear he may never find his way. But is that as sad as I think? In between his gigs as a soldier, a concierge, a detective, a stock boy in a shoe store and a television repair man (I think I’ve got them all) there is always love, sweet, impulsive love. In this regard Antoine will never age.

François Truffaut’s major preoccupation was romantic longing. We see it in every one of his pictures: Two English Girls and A Woman Next Door are both about obsession; in The Bride Wore Black love manifests itself as revenge for a lost love; Fahrenheit 451 details the love of books, and The 400 Blows was the love of childhood, of cinema, of friendship and liberty, all also themes in Truffaut’s work. In Stolen Kisses his themes clash in ways the director might never had hoped for. In the summer of ‘68, France experienced a revolution begun by students fed up with poor conditions in state-run universities. Riots and demonstrations (often one and the same) shut down industries; unions joined in the students’ struggles, and when the government appointed a new director for The Cinematheque Francais, ousting founder Henri Langlois, filmmakers joined in.

Langlois was one of the two most important people in Truffaut’s upbringing, along with Andre Bazin, film theorist and co-founder of Cashiers du cinema, the underground film magazine that Truffaut wrote for as a critic. Langlois, apart from single handedly preserving films that otherwise would no longer exist, gave Truffaut the opportunity to see films that no longer circulated in popular movie houses, and through Langlois, Truffaut and the entire Cashiers crowd gained their excessive love and knowledge of the history of their craft. Truffaut was so upset over Henri Langlois’ firing that he formed the Cinema Defense Foundation, an organization determined to give control of the Cinematheque back to its founder. The director supposedly made phone calls for donations in between takes on the set of Stolen Kisses.

For all of it though the film is mostly apolitical. If one does not research the topic it wouldn’t make a lick of difference when watching the film. Sure Truffaut opens the film with a shot unrelated to the story, the sad image of the French Cinematheque closed to the public (and he also dedicates the film to Langlois), but he does not address any riots, in fact completely ignores the plight of the students, a cause he championed in his private life. The reason for this is simple: he was not a political filmmaker, though it makes the words of Jean-Luc Godard at the 1968 Cannes Festival both ironic and searing, accusing himself and all filmmakers presenting that year that they were behind the times since no film detailed contemporary France, the struggle between the students and the extreme right-wing government. Is this a fault of Truffaut’s or merely something that proves him as a true auteur? I’m inclined towards the latter since I myself detest politics in films. Truffaut was more interested in the arts and humanity, in love and romance and friendship. Life should not stop because of political upheaval, instead this upheaval is a part of our lives, and we should live and rally against the opposition.

In this regard, Stolen Kisses as a movie is not one of Truffaut’s best pictures. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it is too improvisational; that is there exists a free-wielding structure that can be great in another movie but here it left me... not bored but ambivalent towards the screen. I hope that makes sense. Watching it in action the film moves as briskly as anything Truffaut made and it’s filled with beautiful, touching moments, but it lacked the earnestness of The 400 Blows, the film that gave us Antoine Doinel. Maybe I shouldn’t be comparing the two films. They are quite different.

Here Antoine is becoming a man. He (like Truffaut did) receives a dishonorable discharge after volunteering for the service. The man dismissing him wonders why he volunteered; speculates it was to impress a woman, but we soon learn the truth: Antoine read a book about the service and his experiences in the army merely did not match it. This is the problem with Antoine as he gets older. I may be biased since personally I’m not prone to risky, hasty decisions, but the older he gets the less “cute” his misadventures seem. He doesn’t seem to understand that the years will go by whether or not his romantic fantasies are indulged, and in trying to live as he thinks he should he is forgetting to live. But that is not right—this is my own attitude talking. Antoine lives an exciting, experience-laden life. His many professions allow him to sample a whole universe set up by tradition and necessity. He is constantly working, obviously, making enough money to keep an apartment (and certainly doing better than an old school friend he meets on the streets who rummages through trash—perhaps a dig at the government for failing its youth).

Jean-Pierre Léaud reprises the famous role. This man was a conduit of the New Wave. I get the feeling that we, the audience, have never known the true Léaud. Truffaut used him to express his own flighty moods and Godard used him as an anarchic symbol, another extension of someone else, and through it all Léaud let himself be shaped. He is a true chameleon, a divisive actor whose improvisation style never seems to be wrong. He always fits his films, even when he stands out. I can admit though to finding him pretentious sometimes, though seldom with Truffaut. Throughout the Doinel films he doesn’t shape an arch for the character. He simply performs the role as Truffaut wrote it, experiencing life as Antoine has in Truffaut’s script. This relaxed attitude towards his craft (and least that’s how it appears to me) is fascinating, and proves that movie acting is about having spirit and knowing lines, and very little complexity.

Stolen Kisses is Léaud and Truffaut’s lighthearted take on the growing adventures of Antoine Doinel. He is no longer the lost kid we first knew. He is a young man, making his way in the world and constantly lost in it through a free-wielding spirit in search of love. I along with millions of people since 1959 have adopted Antoine as a friend, a son, a spiritual partner, and care about him deeply. I guess ultimately I found Stolen Kisses somewhat melancholic; that Antoine cannot keep a job and moves with the wind does not speak well for his future endeavors.

Stolen Kisses (1968)

(a.k.a. Baisers volés)

Director: Francois Truffaut

Writers: Francois Truffaut, Claude de Givray

Stars: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claude Jade and Delphine Seyring

France

In French

Runtime: 90 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062695/

Antoine and Colette (1962, Antoine et Colette)

There is a perverse pleasure in falling love, in watching someone you’re attracted to from afar, forever inching yourself closer, anxious and scared of if or when you’ll say something. And when you finally do, you’re intimidated and excited. There is also a love for the cinema, a love possibly more infectious, without limits, for young love is seldom ever permanent, and almost always sours.

Antoine Doinel returns in a short film François Truffaut made as part of the omnibus picture, Love at 20. Doinel’s segment, Antoine and Colette, shows what might be the hero of The 400 Blows’ first romance, one that begins as we might expect from the once troubled teen. He and his friend René are at a youth concert, and Antoine sees a beautiful modern girl sitting with a girlfriend. He watches her, is as absorbed in her looks as the listeners are to their classical music. He follows her out but does not engage. He sees her again three times that week, and finally on their fifth encounter, he speaks to her.

Truffaut is the most infectious and loveable director I’ve yet discovered. He crafts intimate tales of amour, stories that range from innocent, to obsessive, perverse, and comical. In Antoine and Colette he mixes all his elements into one of his most pleasurable experiences. While a short and therefore better equipped to be tidy and fluid, there is a sharp earnestness to the director’s storytelling, sometimes relying on an off-screen narrator to simplify narrative montages (telling us Colette sees Antoine as a friend) and swift, unexpected but incredibly honest changes in his characters’ character and actions. For example, Antoine soon takes an apartment across the street from Colette’s. For a moment, if that, it seems cute and innocent, but it really is a creepy thing for anyone to do; to pack up and live next to the person you’re courting. It is obsessive, insecure behavior, in line with the upbringing we’ve seen of Antoine in The 400 Blows. The perverse nature is Colette’s rejection of Antoine, leading him on, maybe unintentionally, and confirming what he seems to understand during a after dinner soirée at Colette’s parents’ request. Colette brings her new love in, embarrassing her mother and crushing Antoine. This love does not end well, but throughout it all we feel the energy of Truffaut, that untouchable magic he infuses his movies with.

This bittersweet tale gets its lighter moments in Truffaut’s storytelling. For example, Antoine works at a record manufacturer. Why? No reason; it is an interesting and appropriate profession for a young man of Paris in the 1960s. There is a fabulous short scene showing Antoine pressing his first record, a gift he later makes to Colette. This is so charming, so carefree, and a gimmick unique to the cinema. I believe in most other mediums such a progression of narrative would seem cheeky, but it works here. Or, for another whimsical twist, try Antoine and Colette’s parents’ relationship. Love is not always sexual. Affection can exist for someone whom you feel in sympathy with, someone whose look moves you in profound ways. The narrator says that the parents “adopt” Antoine as Colette becomes scarce to them all. To change the focus of the story from the young couple to the young man and the parents is a sweet twist, one I loved to see considering how uninterested we know Antoine’s parents were. The final shot is quite rewarding, the odd family sitting down to watch television.

So Antoine has found love, a love more fundamental. He has gained parents, and with that the dignity of having two people to rely on. This is the second chapter in a series of films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel, and like the whole of Truffaut’s work, these films are pure pleasure—whimsical and spontaneous living creatures. They remind me of why the cinema is my true love.

Antoine and Colette (1962)
(a.k.a. Antoine et Colette)
Director: Francois Truffaut
Writer: Francois Truffaut
Stars: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Marie-France Pisier, Rosy Varte and Patrick Auffay
France
In French
Runtime: 31 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1180329/

Criterion has released Antoine and Colette only as part of their terrific collection, "The Adventures of Antoine Doinel." It shares the same disc as The 400 Blows, but remember while Criterion has issued several different editions of The 400 Blows, including a Blu-ray, the edition available in the box set is the only one containing the short film. Antoine and Colette was released with another Truffaut short, Les mistons, by Fox Lorber a decade ago, probably with sub par image quality, but the disc is easily affordable via the Amazon links below:

Flight of the Red Balloon (2007, Voyage du ballon rouge, Le)

It’s almost impossible to describe how joyous it is to watch a film like The Flight of the Red Balloon.  It’s a masterpiece, the best film I’ve seen in the last 10 and more, and its power comes from the simplicity and beauty of its story, its images, and from the lives portrayed.  I used to think that for a film to be powerful and profound it must be dark or ugly, downright depressing so it can easily move its audience, but that is an immature thought.  The Flight of the Red Balloon is about the peaceful and hectic qualities of life that make existence such a magical thing.

I can’t give a plot summary.  It would sound boring, banal even, and may discourage potential viewers. Things happen in the film but they are elliptical, and a linear description would not serve the film well.  It is told from the view point of a red balloon, and we are dropped into the story looking in on three very special figures.  Fang Song, the Chinese film student studying in Paris; her new employer, Suzanne, a free-spirited mom; and Simon, her son, the child Song is now nanny to.  I could describe the events overseen by the balloon but the film would seem insignificant.  This is a film that has to be seen.  It needs to act on our senses.  Only then we can appreciate the experience.

Suzanne is a performer.  Her grandfather was a puppeteer and she now does the narration and voice work for puppet shows.  She is a mess, a ball of energy with weird fashion and a wonderful personality.  She is always losing things or forgetting appointments—she has so much to do, and yet the people around her she never forgets.  She has an instant rapport with Fang Song.  Immediately she trusts her son with the girl, has her make a key to their apartment.  The film might exist in a hyper reality where things are far from perfect but they are still slightly untouchable.  This might be what I loved about the film more than anything.  It is liberating to sit back and have such a soothing, happy experience without guns, violence, cussing, and all the ugly things that most movies rely on for entertainment.  The Flight of the Red Balloon is as aimless as a free-wielding balloon.  Conventional screenwriting techniques would proclaim this structure a failure, and indeed if the screenplay read verbatim like the final cut of the film it would probably not be a good read.  But this is a movie.  It exists in sounds and images that create a great impression of life as I certainly would like to live it.  Director Hsiao-hsien Hou has the eye and temperament of a master.  He does not rely on typical, beautiful compositions or clean kept streets for beauty.  Life in Paris is beautiful, or can be, just as it can be anywhere, and any pretense of creating artificial beauty is not needed.  Life is beautiful as it is.

This is not a film about nothing, or a slice of life.  I think we have certain impressions of such phrases.  I would say The Flight of the Red Balloon is a film about living.  Think of how many people we pass each day, how many names we’ll never know.  We will hear snippets of conversation or create scenarios based on what we can see, but for all of it we are no better off than a shiny red balloon.

The great surprise in this film is the character of Simon.  It’s very tricky to create honest child characters.  I think so many of us are disillusioned with life that we cannot recall what existing as a child was like.  In American movies, young kids, ages 4-8, are blank-eyed, silent and morose things that are more creepy than enduring.  Simon Iteanu is everything I would hope a little boy could be in real life: bright, inquisitive, interested in creativity, in cinema, painting, puppets; he sleeps with a stuffed bear and exists enough in the modern world to use a digital camera and play Playstation video games.  He has answers to questions, insights and observations, like when Suzanne is arguing with a man on the phone who may or may not have been her lover or his father—we’re not privy to such information.  Suzanne screams, “I need a man beside me and there is no one beside me.”  Simon in the back seat says, “I am a man.”  The delivery is much more charming than the words, and the little Simon Iteanu is superb.  Juliette Binoche we expect a perfect performance from, Iteanu is a revelation.

One of the greatest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie is Suzanne’s final scene.  She has just argued heatedly with a neighbor, slammed the door in his face and now sits teary-eyed before her son, Fang Song, and a piano tuner.  The camera stays on Binoche’s face.  She calls her son over to her, asks what he did in school.  They hug and she smiles.  Simon goes off to play his Playstation.  Suzanne smiles serenely, still fighting back tears, shaken with anger as she asks the piano tuner if he’ll retune the piano okay.  Binoche does something magical.  Her expression, her attitude, her talent—I don’t know the right word, but this is a true moment of tranquility and it always makes the hairs on my arm stand.

I can only describe moments in the film.  There is not a thing wrong with it.  I could detail every scene but a masterpiece like this is better off discovered fresh.  I had such a profound reaction to this picture that I hope I am not overselling it.  Subtle movies affect everyone differently and it simply moved me like few films have.  I like to think the red balloon is watching all of Paris.  Only occasionally does it appear at the window.  Often it is floating in the sky.  Think of the stories that exist in the film that we do not see.  What does the red balloon know, and what other magic has it seen?

Flight of the Red Balloon (2007)

(a.k.a. Voyage du ballon rouge, Le)

Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou

Writers: Hsiao-hsien Hou and Francois Margolin

Stars: Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu and Fang Song

France

In French

Runtime: 115 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0826711/

Swimming Pool (2003)

François Ozon channels Alfred Hitchcock in his psychological thriller Swimming Pool.  Where Hitchcock only hinted Ozon marches fearlessly ahead in this surprisingly effective, sexually dynamic mystery that is more conventional then it ought to be.  Actors Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier as a would-be mother / daughter team break through the convention with fascinating performances, bringing out the rich nuance in Ozon’s macabre screenplay.

Rampling plays Sarah Morton, acclaimed author of the Inspector Dorwell series.  Sarah retreats to her publisher’s summer home in France to find inspiration for a new, watershed project.  When at first she begins writing the next in her Dorwell series, her tranquil visit is interrupted by Julie, her publisher / lover’s daughter.  Julie is a punk: brash, keeps odd hours, and is inconsiderate of the reserved English author’s peace of mind.  Julie brings different men home and has loud sexual trysts which agitate and seemingly arouse and fascinate Sarah.  The film doesn’t become a murder mystery until ¾ into it, and that section of the film is its weakest, but the set-up to the fatal accident gives us two very opposing rivals, one sexually liberated and one who, in Julie’s words, only writes about dirty things and never does them.  The dirtiest of things, the act which soils most, is done by the less likely of the women.

Ozon is unafraid to show Ludivine Sagnier’s beautiful body.  It’s hard to accept this is the same girl who played the impish Catherine in Ozon’s 8 Women.  I admit I didn’t want to see her naked having adored her in Love Songs.  I’ve associated a certain innocence with her.  Here her breasts are everywhere, and she touches herself more explicitly than a lot of actresses would on screen.  Some of her boy toys’ rear ends are seen, too, and these guys are not really the kind you might want to see naked.  This is something that bothered me about Julie.  She is so beautiful and sexy that you’d think she could attract hotter guys, at least guys her age.  And she probably could, but as we slowly learn this girl must be starving for attention, more so than we might thing even at the film’s climax.  The only nudity that embarrassed me was Rampling’s full frontal shots.  I felt that, while what the character was doing was interesting, it did not grow organically from the script and that Ozon was abusing his actress.  Then I realized that Rampling starred in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter in 1974, and then I understood that she is a fearless performer.

Her relationship with Sagnier’s Julie is really interesting.  Sarah, we sense, is an empty woman.  Her life is lived in her writing.  The only man at home is her invalid father; her lover—her publisher, Julie’s father—keeps big secrets from her, and she doesn’t have children.  I never sensed that Sarah wanted kids, but the twists she takes in her relationship with Julie really allow them to bond as mother and daughter.  I don’t want to give it away, but trust me, they do bond.  It could be that Sarah’s interest in Julie is solely as subject matter for a new book seemingly inspired by the writer’s experiences with the young girl.  In that case Sarah gets too intimately involved in the messes of her characters, but then again it is often said a writer’s characters become like their children.  Sarah’s efforts to protect Julie can be seen as motherly.

I can’t say, though, that I understood the ending.  To be honest, I guessed—and it will be fairly obvious to those familiar with the devices of thriller plots—the twist ending well before the finale, but the way the story unfolds is both unexpected and predictable.  So what does that ending do to Sarah and Julie’s relationship?  I honestly don’t know.  I can make assumptions, or at least explain it to myself, but my explanations alter or destroy the great material of the film, the relationship between Julie and Sarah.  But a twist ending in a thriller is often a letdown.  If the material is excellent, the bad ending can be overlooked, at least by me.  While the ending is not bad, it leaves a lot of questions at too late a point in the experience.  But I didn’t mind, just like I didn’t mind the some of the convention in the later part of the picture.  It is old-fashioned fun but with a sexually explicit twist to murder mysteries.

I’m really starting to like François Ozon’s work.  I’ve seen 4 films, and the first, Under the Sand, was very boring.  It also starred Charlotte Rampling, but it’s the kind of arty flick where the subtly was so subtle that any subtext was altogether lacking.  The other three have been terrific.  Swimming Pool isn’t unique or original, but I was not bored.  There were a few moments where I was nervously inching towards the screen, and if a thriller can do that, it’s won.

Swimming Pool (2003)

Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Francois Ozon and Emmanuele Bernheim

Stars: Charlotte Rampling, Charles Dance and Ludivine Sagnier

France / UK

In English and French

Runtime: 102 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324133/

400 Blows, The (1959, Quatre cent coups, Les)

Watching The 400 Blows for the second time I remembered things from my adolescence that I had long forgotten. These were not dramatic, life altering episodes but rather personal moments that add up to create an impression of life. This is what cinema can aspire to. Art is reproduction, it is not life. All it can hope to do is create impressions, and François Truffaut’s first and probably best feature film creates a terrain of childhood that we have all traveled, even if we’ve experienced it differently than young Antoine Doinel. After all, we are on some level lost children on a beach, returning to the elements in search of our freedom and place in the world.

I did not have the wild adolescence of Antoine Doinel. I never stole money from my parents, never skipped school. I was raised to be docile, to observe, and was made (either by my insecurities or by instruction) to please others when asked, and I could still relate to and sympathize with the misunderstood and grossly underappreciated Antoine, never believed by his parents, abused through indifference by them, a scapegoat for teachers, and even betrayed by in his friends in moments when the blame for a class prank falls directly on the boy’s shoulders. It is no wonder Antoine cannot conform to society. He’s a bright kid who remains loyal, who never rats out his friends or his cheating mother and who always is under pressure of being caught. For what? His lying of course—Doinel is not a perfect kid—but society has set it up so that he is always the villain. His is punished for his precocious nature; that he wants to understand and finds it difficult, that face-value is meaningless to him, that he has seen too much arguing between his parents and knows so much that someone so young, in their developmental stages, shouldn’t know will curtail his innocence.

But for all the ugliness and cruelty Antoine experiences there is always Truffaut. I often forget just how great a filmmaker he was. I’ve seen all of his movies, many of them have left indelible impressions on me, but for some reason I always recall many others directors as favorites before remembering Truffaut. His films contain a magic called joy. There is always a zeal for life, a craving never satiated though always pursued, that gives his work a momentum and passion that can only be truly appreciated when actively watching his films. They are hypnotic. They are experiences offering glimpses of life as it should be, as it should feel, and these impressions are among the greatest works of art of the latter half of the 20^th Century. The 400 Blows may be his masterpiece, but Small Change (or Pocket Money, its UK title) is the other work of his that I truly think is just great. In both films one can see a motif that permeates much of the director’s work: his love of children, their unbiased look at a world that has fashioned itself on antiquation. The 400 Blows is a more tragic film, made at a time in Truffaut’s life when one can argue that as an artist and as a human being he was coming into his own. Small Change was made many years later, when the director had children of his own and we can guess having gained insight into his parents, his teachers, his world that were before too close to be obtained.

An aspect of the film I loved so and was grateful to have experienced vicariously was the close friendship Antoine shared with his schoolmate René. I did not have friends as a child, never learned how to make them being the younger brother and youngest of all my cousins. I was always with them as a baby, and when they entered school and made their own friends I was lost. Here I could experience a close, apparently life-long friendship (René is based on Truffaut’s best friend) that is as strong as any emotional bond ever described in a movie. These kids, so small and so cute, are there for each other. When Antoine repeatedly runs away from home René at first sneaks him into his uncle’s abandoned factory then into an obscure room in his spacious and beautiful apartment. He brings Antoine food and travels by bike to pay a visit when Antoine is sent to reform school. They skip school together and stand up for each other. When Antoine is expelled, René gets himself suspended to stick it to the teacher. There are beautiful moments like this throughout the picture and for me to describe them here is a waste. My words could never do justice to the atmosphere of Truffaut’s moving images.

But one more point on a similar subject. I loved the sense of childhood Truffaut created in the film. There’s one shot filled with humor and honesty and brilliance as a gym teacher takes Antoine’s classroom on a jog through Paris. Little by little patches of children run off, and thanks to one continuous overhead shot we follow the aloof teacher as his line of children gets smaller and smaller. Such an energizing image is indicative of the playfulness and inventiveness of The 400 Blows.

This is a very important film. Its greatness aside, historically cinema after 1959 might have been entirely different if Truffaut and his New Wave colleagues had not tried new things with the medium. A movie like this, of its reach, would not have been possible in a more structured filmmaking environment like France in the 50s, or Hollywood throughout the Golden and Silver Ages. The 400 Blows derives its power from it spontaneous and crude cinematic qualities, the honesty of its writer’s story and Truffaut’s love of being alive, indulging in his passion for freedom and the movies. The dichotomy is that without the past The 400 Blows could not have been made. We see that in Doinel’s love of Balzac and his stealing of a still of Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika. How great must it have been to be young and in love with cinema in the 1960s. The passions involved in making movies, arguments even revolutions being made in defense of one’s heroes and the conviction that movie goers wanted something more than cheap entertainment is something that we likely will never have again. We do have though the physical films still, and these are enough to inspire us still, but I’m afraid something has been lost.

I hope I’ve done the film right by my words. I have related as best I can my immediate reaction to this marvelous picture, but I know I have not given a clear statement about what the movie is about. This is in part intentional. The 400 Blows and indeed many of the more adventurous New Wave films were radically different from traditional filmmaking, their storytelling raw and style crudely cool. The story is told through a series of events, one building upon another in a chapter-like way. There are no big story twists; a melodramatic event like Antoine seeing his mother kissing another man is treated as just a troubling fact of life that is best kept secret, partly to keep peace and also for leverage if the need would arise. These are the insights Truffaut has, and it is what makes all of his films and especially The 400 Blows so painfully beautiful.

Above all though, the film allows us to recall our own childhoods, and what can be more beautiful or painful than that?

400 Blows, The (1959)

(a.k.a. Quatre cent coups, Les)

Director: Francois Truffaut

Writers: Francois Truffaut and Marcel Moussy

Stars: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Remy and Patrick Auffay

France

In French

Runtime: 99 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053198/

Nocturnal Uproar (1979, Tapage nocturne)

Nocturnal Uproar was Catherine Breillat’s second film, released in 1979, and is one of her rarest movies.  It has finally found an American home video release, a DVD from Pathfinder Home Entertainment which, despite being released only last week, is already difficult to locate.  The film is about a filmmaker, Solange, played by the beautiful Dominique Laffin, who intellectualizes sex, who has lots of sex, and who seldom makes movies.  Maybe she’s too busy in the bedroom for such distractions.

Solange is a young writer / director whose sexual conquests are vast and legendary.  She is married to a rich moneyman, someone who lets her indulge in her appetites.  First is her lead actor, a handsome American played by Warhol and Paul Morrissey regular Joe Dallesandro, but Solange states that ‘she loves him and is sick of him.’  Solange is always hungry, and when she meets a fellow director she becomes infatuated with him, wants him, and his initial resistance only makes her steadfast to the point where she develops an unhealthy obsession that has her questioning her thoughts on desire and sex.

Descriptions of the film state that Solange as a filmmaker does what her male counterparts do—sleep with lots of people, including her lead performer.  My problem is that whenever a film is about a filmmaker I find the material is often too fake, and the profession is treated as something intangible and sacred or taken for granted and the process of filmmaking is never done justice.  With Nocturnal Uproar it’s simply not used at all.  Solange functions as a filmmaker for only the first act and only slightly.  Sessions in the editing room are used complaining about her sexual partners, and then we never see or hear anything about her work.  The film changes focus before the half-way point, signs of an unfocused screenplay, and perhaps the film is less about a filmmaker and more about a woman.  But why have her be a director?  It doesn’t enhance the mise en scène nor give depth to the character; film director is such a pronounced profession that to have it go unused I found a distraction.

Perhaps the film is more personal for Catherine Breillat.  Is it a record of her working methods during this period?  Her films have always dealt with sexuality and maybe the filmmaker was simply using the medium to express her own thoughts and experiences.  I love that; a great deal of why I love the cinema is the auteur theory which states the director is the author of a film; that links in an artist’s work can be found from work to work.  Breillat surely qualifies, and I can see how this film influenced her later work.  For example, it seems to be a precursor or even a veiled prequel to Sex Is Comedy, an infinitely more insightful look at the filmmaking process and sexual manipulation, and there’s a series of shots showing 2 characters descending a spiral staircase that she would repeat 30 years later in Bluebeard.  The problem with Nocturnal Uproar is that it isn’t insightful about the cinema, it isn’t insightful about relationships, and it isn’t even honest about sex.  I don’t want to sound perverted but the sex scenes in this film almost all look fake, though it is obvious that actress Laffin is being touched between her legs.  The film develops into a woman’s sexual obsession for a man who toys with her, someone who may or may not have alternate intentions with his amours.  This is a great subject for a film but it is arrived at a little too late.

Considering gender and sex; can a woman be as sexually free as a man?  Sure she can prey after the men who attract her like some men do for women or even other men, but because women have been brought up to be and perhaps instinctually are more in tuned with their emotions can they have indiscriminate sex and not, on some level, feel tied to the men they have?  Is the act of being penetrated, of having someone inside of you, too intimate a feeling to simply toss off sexual intercourse as a fling?  On some level I believe this.  The intimacy created by inviting someone inside physically is a more intense sensation, one that requires more trust and strength than being the more dominant sexual partner, and perhaps Breillat is arguing that women cannot be free sexually and perhaps more generally they lack freedom in Christian-dominated societies.

The film works better as an intellectual exercise than it does a movie because frankly it isn’t visually interesting.  It’s all dialogue, and while the majority of Breillat’s work relies on dialogue here her characters have very little of interest to say.  They seem more to be parodying what a Breillat film will become rather than offering genuine insight into sexual or human relationships.  Catherine Breillat again gets a gutsy and rather brilliant performance from her lead, Dominique Laffin, whose innocent looks and beauty reminded me of Irene Jacob.  Laffin is nude a lot, mostly from the waist down, an interesting decision by the director, and she performs the part great as written.  I only wish it were written better.  She is however an actress I loved looking at, and I was shocked to read that she died at 33 of a heart attack.  Life is sometimes a bad joke.  Joe Dallesandro was a surprise to see.  He’s not a great actor but he has been great on screen, particularly in Flesh, the Warhol Factor’s best feature.  Here he is playing someone like himself, a handsome young actor who’s photographed more for his looks than talent.  It’s sad that while still young, the effects of drug use seemed already to be working against him in 1979.  The character of Bruno, Solange’s filmmaker lover, isn’t that impressive.  He has his games with Solange but I never believed that she would become so obsessed by this man.  Yes she is flirtatious but the parts are not well developed and we never see their intensity build.

Catherine Breillat may be a crude or uneven filmmaker—some of her movies are masterpieces, others insufferably slow and thoughtless—but that is the nature of her art.  She uses the cinema not to entertain or even to enlighten but to rummage through her own demons.  This explains the existence of Nocturnal Uproar.  It is an impulsive film, indecisive; maybe this is the film she should make now, with some 30 years distance, to truly make her intentions felt.  Maybe now after a life lived, a stoke which must be life changing, she can grasp at a more clear understanding of her younger self and write about a sexually desiring filmmaker who uses men until she tires of them.

Nocturnal Uproar (1979)

(a.k.a. Tapage nocturne)

* the DVD goes by the title "Night After Night" *

Director: Catherine Breillat

Writer: Catherine Breillat

Stars: Dominique Laffin, Bertrand Bonvoisin and Joe Dallesandro

France

In French

Runtime: 97 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134993/

A great resource for Breillat on DVD:
http://breillat.blogspot.com/

I have been in touch with Pathfinder Home Entertainment via email and they confirmed that Dirty Like An Angel, currently Breillat's only unreleased film in the US, will be released this fall.

Certified Copy (2010, Copie conforme)

2 people explore the treasures of Tuscany on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  They are at first strangers, but the things they say to each other leave us questioning the nature of their relationship.  I didn’t have to make up my mind as to Juliette Binoche and William Shimell’s relationship.  It is obvious to me what is happening in Certified Copy, but whether or not we believe Binoche and Shimell are married is not the focus of the film. The film works as a puzzle.   It remains mysterious and objective, asking us to consider where the true worth of human experience exists: in a happy past or a less romantic present.

Shimell, an English opera singer, plays James Miller, an art expert who has written a book called Certified Copy, about the worth and unique authenticity of art forgeries.  He argues that a reproduction is just as valuable as the original, partly because the original is itself a copy of a real event.  Binoche plays an unnamed woman, a fan with a teenage son who waits impatiently while James is giving a lecture.  Her son teases her, insinuating his mom has a crush on the author.  And, she seems to.  Binoche leaves her number with his Italian translator and she and James meet on a Sunday.  He signs multiple copies of his book for her, one made out to her sister, Marie, who with her simple love for her husband is in sympathy with James’ philosophy of art forgeries: it is not the work itself that has value; it is our appreciation of it that gives it its value.

Their dialogue is imprecise and mawkish when James first meets her.  Binoche is self-conscious and excited to be in the author’s presence.  They take a drive.  “I can’t believe you’re sitting in my car.”  This shot is amazing.  For several minutes, Binoche and Shimell are in a two-shot, photographed from outside the car, and the reflection of the buildings on both sides of the street obscure, in flashes, both actors.  Their dialogue is innocuous but the scene is riveting.  We’re really seeing two images; a visual clue to the idea of the film.  There are overlaid images in many moments in Certified Copy.  Director Abbas Kiarostami’s directorial approach at first seems breezy and loose, but in Shimell’s and Binoche’s first scene together as they wander about her shop, precise choreography between the two leaves Shimell alone among many art forgeries, and Binoche reflected in a small mirror in the background.  They face each other even when they are separated in the filmed frame.  A similar image happens later, when Shimell stands alone near a motorbike and in the side mirror Binoche is reflected off screen.  I can’t say I’m familiar with Kiarostami’s work; I don’t know if his double images are unique to this film or important in his overall body of work but they support the material, which is not so much about doubles but the multiple interpretations of what two people say.

We are like the tourists on Binoche and Shimell’s vacation.  We hear what they say and yet lack the greater context of their lives to truly understand.  The advantage we as an audience have is that unlike these tourists who exist as extras in the film, we get to follow these two people and hear the whole of what they say.  It is still not a fault of the picture that we are not given a blunt truth.  The film is a puzzle which cannot be solved, and when I saw the film for the first time I was so overjoyed to be actively participating in the story.  Depending on how I viewed the material, the story would change and satisfy me.  It also is very mysterious and good at dropping clues through dialogue and facial expression.  The flipside is that when we solve this puzzle, the second time around Certified Copy isn’t as absorbing.  We can view the early scenes and notice the subtle clues that support our theories.  I, for example, found great meaning in a quick line of dialogue by Binoche’s son which suggests much of the complicated dynamic between these three people.  To be honest the line is so quickly delivered and I don’t speak French and I missed it the first time.  But if films are meant to be viewed more than once then the lasting impact of Certified Copy will not live up to its reputation.  If I had written this right after I saw the film once, I would have talked only positively about it.  I didn’t know what to say then other than, ‘see it and interpret it for yourselves,’ and I hoped that I could elaborate on my own opinions about the movie itself with a second viewing.  Truth is I found it difficult to get into it in the same way.  Like a mystery film I kept examining the film for evidence and found the situation betrays itself.

I still admire it a great deal.  The digital photography is sublime, and Binoche is terrific.  I think many years down the line historians will make her out to be the greatest performer to ever appear in front of the camera.  It may sound like hyperbole but I really believe it.  The things this woman can do with her face are amazing.  She would have been fabulous in silent movies.  She’s also great at delivering lines, and without giving away my interpretation of the film the great material is the quarrels that this couple shares.   This is a terrific script.  It balances three different languages—English, French, and Italian—which Binoche can speak perfectly.  There is a great exchange between Binoche and the proprietress of a small café.  The proprietress assumes James is her husband, and the woman gives Binoche a reasonable speech about what husbands, even bad ones, give their wives.

I feel I must say a bit about how I saw the picture.  I sensed a great deal of hostility in Binoche’s voice early on towards James.  This is when I began to suspect things aren’t as they appear.  At first I was made uncomfortable by her forward, angry speech.  It is not at all how people behave to strangers and I felt embarrassed for her.  But James seems a willing listener.  Neither backs down on their beliefs and yet they never once put an end to their union.  I think something more is going on, something more complex than are they strangers or are they married, but a saving grace of the picture is its ambiguity.  It also makes it more of a puzzle, and it distracts somewhat from the generally brilliant experience it is to watch Binoche’s and Shimell’s performances.

Certified Copy (2010)

(a.k.a. Copie conforme)

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Writer: Abbas Kiarostami

Stars: Juliette Binoche and William Shimell

France

In French, English and Italian

Runtime: 106 minutes

Certified Copy is currently available On Demand from Comcast and other service providers.  It should be released on DVD by IFC in the near future.

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020773/

Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The (1964, Parapluies de Cherbourg, Les)

I have been watching a lot of musicals in recent weeks, a lot which star Catherine Deneuve.  I always saw the genre as being artificial, sappy, and always happy, but I’m discovering many musicals are quite sad.  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is sad in a sappy way that is uniquely cinematic.  Descriptions of the film tell of its beautiful qualities and these same qualities from its leading lady, but Deneuve is seldom happy in Cherbourg.

Deneuve plays Geneviève.  Her widowed mother runs a poor umbrella shop, but Geneviève is too happy with her handsome beau, Guy.  They cannot wait to marry but Geneviève’s mom sees no future for the young couple.  Guy is drafted and he and Geneviève make love, and naturally she is with child while he is off fighting the French war against Algeria.  Geneviève is melancholic with Guy’s departure and her loving but selfish mother doesn’t make her ordeal easier by encouraging Geneviève’s relationship with a handsome young jewelry salesman named Roland Cassard.  Though the child is not his he wishes still to marry Geneviève.  With the passing time and the infrequent letters from her true love, Geneviève decides to marry the rich Roland lest all chances of her happiness vanish.

I must admit my recent viewing of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was my first.  I had not seen it before seeing Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs.  I was completely unaware of how much Honoré was influenced by Cherbourg, so much so that I can only deduce that the film was a major film for the New Wave in 1964.  Jacques Demy, the film’s gifted director, was a breed of New Wave filmmaker unrelated to Cahiers du cinéma, the movie review magazine that is remembered as the birthplace of the popular New Wave directors.  Demey, with wife Agnès Varda and the great Alain Resnais, was part of a revolutionary contingency of New Wave filmmakers known as The Left Bank.  Their films were more radical than The Right Bank, or Cahiers crowd, and often less successful.  Possibly because of Cherbourg’s popular success the film has been separated from the memory of the Nouvelle vague.  It’s a trivial concern because the film is so wonderful, but it is still interesting.

Like Love Songs (or I should say Love Songs taking inspiration from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) the film is divided into three acts, each act a unique section in its characters’ lives.  The first part, The Departure, shows us how much Guy and Geneviève are in love, and how time is always against those in love, not just in the face of upcoming events but in its concept to quantify the minutes, hours, seconds that go by and are gone forever.  Love can never be enough, and in one way Cherbourg is a film for young people.  The film screams of youth and beauty and promise, of children becoming adults in the face of difficulty.  In another way, the film is for such adults, those who know that the promise of young love is irrational and misleading.  Geneviève’s mom knows that if her daughter marries Guy their future will be difficult.  Geneviève knows they would live modestly but if they love they will be happy.  Young lovers never consider bills.  Love doesn’t pay in reality.  The film’s second part, The Absence, focuses solely on Geneviève as she deals with her pregnancy, hopeful when receiving Guy’s letters, panicked when not.  Roland is a handsome guy, nice too and infatuated with Geneviève.  I would go so far as call him a pushover.  Geneviève makes some serious decisions in the face of the facts.

One at first thinks of her actions as cold and of betraying her and Guy’s love, but the French have always had such keen insight into human behavior and ritual.  At least their films have, and if The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was a real 50s Hollywood musical, Geneviève would have defied her mother and ignored Roland, but an unwed young girl expecting with the father countries away has few options for the future.

The final part, Guy’s return, is the saddest section in the film, perhaps because it hits a nerve in modern times.  After serving his country, Guy comes home to find his love gone, married to another man raising his own child.  There is no place for him in an ever changing Cherbourg, and he wallows in drinking and cheep women, his vital time passing him by.  With our country at war for the last 10 years, it is painful to watch a veteran so short-changed in very honest ways.  Nino Castelunuovo, the actor who plays Guy, is just terrific.  Handsome, Italian, sensitive and charismatic, he really makes the last act of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg work.  I expected to be wooed by Catherine Deneuve, but Castelunuovo was a pleasant surprise.  That he clings to his invalid aunt’s young nurse in the face of his own loneliness is the ultimate tragedy.  Though the film’s final shot suggests true happiness in his new life, I got the sense that Madeleine, the nurse and his new wife, will never be loved the way she loves Guy.  She is his consolation prize, pretty as she is, but Guy will always be inevitably comparing her to Geneviève.  Their relationship can stand for many.  I feel sorry for their son, who when he grows up might learn the truth, that his parents’ love isn’t what society says marriage should be.  I understand it’s only a movie but good movies make you forget.

I wasn’t impressed by the music.  Though composer Michel Legrand’s music is beautiful, I didn’t care that every line of dialogue is sung.  It feels too much like operetta.  I wasn’t bothered or turned off by it but I will say that for the first 10 minutes I did consciously notice it.  There also isn’t a “great” song to be remembered afterwards like in a traditional musical structure.  There is one bittersweet melody that becomes Guy’s and Geneviève’s love tune that is worth humming, but the continuous song, separated mostly by the act breaks, seldom with the changing scene, isn’t what I’m used to with musicals.  But don’t let that dissuade you.

All the beautiful comments made throughout the years regarding The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are warranted, but I wish its memory recalled the bittersweet quality this film has.  A musical’s ability to capture the trials of life, sad and true, is an event to behold.

Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The (1964)

(a.k.a. Parapluies de Cherbourg, Les)

Director: Jacques Demy

Writer: Jacques Demy

Music: Michel Legrand

Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo and Anne Vernon

France

In French

Runtime: 91 minutes

The best DVD edition of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the UK 2-disc set, which features a feature-length documentary by Demy's wife, Agnes Varda.  Purchase at Amazon (UK):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Umbrellas-Cherbourg-Special-DVD/dp/B000AMSSCK/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1304558757&sr=1-1

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058450/

Various Amazon links, including multiple DVDs, a VHS, the documentary The World of Jacques Demy, and Legrand's soundtrack:

      

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: