★★ ½
Last Year at Marienbad* — (1962) — Resnais
After World War 2 the entire German population was expelled and the town renamed, so Marienbad is a lost city. The structure of the film is contained in the Nim card game which can be played as fast as four or as slow as 16 moves which mirrors the sequences in the film. But unlike the Nim game which always re-sets at the beginning, the game of remembering always takes up where you last imagined it. A classic example from cinema of subjective memory would be Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants. One of his friends from the same war-time boarding school relates that they were reminiscing about those days and Malle wasn’t even aware that it had happened, he had to be told the story, yet some 40 years later, he had became a central figure in the drama.
The key scene in the film is when the couple is arguing about the meaning of a two statues and the Doctor character explains that it is not a myth from antiquity, but a commemoration of king’s address before parliament: if everything in the film can stand in for something else, then this green lights any cockamamie interpretation of the film. My take? This is a classic tale of transference of a doctor falling in love with his patient. Early on, the woman drapes her left hand over her right collarbone and poses like a statue for the narrator, but when the doctor approaches, she places her right hand over her left collarbone and becoming a mirror image of the same pose, the two men are one in the same. As the one in charge of her dosage and prognosis (the game he never loses) she has to believe the doctor is sincere and has her best interests at heart. The narrator is simply the projection of his guilt.
The Game is Over — (1966) — Vadim
There is a nice opening that shows this wealthy Parisian family is a clearly little dysfunctional. The father is training his attack dogs in the spacious back yard and when he son approaches to watch him, they lock eyes . . . his father smiles . . . then sics his German shepherds on him. At first warm and compassionate, the husband is revealed to be a total slug, he simply stole the entire fortune of his heiress wife and socked it away in his business scams and he is now working on plan B to wed his son to a rich banker’s daughter to get his hands on that pile of loot. Alternating between the three different stories in the film, the movie suffers from a wandering point of view. It would have much stronger had it focussed on the wife’s tragedy, where she is fleeced out of everything then kicked to the sidewalk.
Jojo Rabbit — (2019) — Waititi
Making fun of the Nazis is serious business which requires mad skills to pull it off correctly, artistic chops the director clearly doesn’t have (notice there are not a lot of extermination camp comedies.) This children’s comedic fantasy of how delightful mass murder can be is marred by the two deep rips in the canvas revealing the deeper horror behind it. The first one is a kitchen scene, where the descent into barbarism so complete that if a mother did or said the wrong thing, her own child would denounce her as a subversive to the authorities. The second one is the city square, where the majority of people simply placidly stroll past a gibbet of their fellow citizens swaying in the breeze; agreeing tacitly that anyone who believes in human decency is a common criminal who deserves to have their neck stretched. Even those harbouring secret reservations about those magnificent men leading society have to walk past the gibbet with a vapid smile of approval pasted on their faces. I actually wanted to see those grim thrillers. One anachronism for the film, Hitler thought smoking was an utterly disgusting habit and wouldn’t have been caught dead offering anyone a cigarette.
Twenty-four Eyes — (1954) — Kino****a
Even though a recent graduate on her first teaching assignment transfers from the one room school house in a tiny village after one year to the bigger school down the road, she keeps in touch with her first classroom of children. There’s a little stunt casting; the first grade class was played by their own real-life siblings when they reunited for grade five at the big school (a 20 minute stroll) down the road. Even though she was pushed out of teaching during the war period for being unpatriotic, she has an unbreakable bond with each of her pupils over the next 20 plus years. This is kind of a Japanese To Sir with Love.
The Devil and Miss Jones — (1941) — Wood
A gruff old billionaire goes undercover at one of his big retail stores downtown to show his undercover agents how to bust a union and instead discovers how caring and wonderful everyone is; falling in love with one of his co-workers and even taking up the struggle on the side of the oppressed and exploited working class. Complete hokum, still, I enjoyed this puff of fantasy.
Cluny Brown — (1946) — Lubtisch
When her plumber uncle is out on another job, Cluny takes the opportunity to field an emergency call. She shows up with her tool box and simply rolls up her sleeves and attacks a clogged sink to save the social event of the season. A Czech professor fleeing Nazi prosecution (the university students secretly think he a freedom fighter) is immediately smitten. Cluny Brown is a decidedly modern girl in a decidedly unmodern world. Nice girls don’t plumb. They end up in the same luxury mansion in the country; he as a house guest, and she as the new maid.
Joe Kidd — (1972) — Sturges
The film isn’t held in greater esteem for two reasons: Eastwood is playing a real character and not his usual stoic screen persona. He begins the film sleeping it off in jail and at his sentencing for drunk and disorderly; he prefers to take another ten days rather than pay the fine. He is a quiet man retired from the wars, no longer interested in violence. The power structures in this frontier town always in flux; a character’s momentary authority depends entirely on the setting and the people involved. The Sheriff and judge are ineffectual. The Mexican rebel leader turns out to be vain and has no problem sacrificing innocent people to his cause. When the great man shows up in town, at first he is a successful entrepreneur, then selfish robber-baron, then finally just a sociopath who enjoys killing anyone who gets in his way. The film also reveals the uncomfortable truth of the legal land theft; the Mexican and Indian land deeds tragically went up in smoke when a matchstick hit wooden filing cabinet in a state capital office, giving full ownership to the new immigrants. Suckers!
★★★
Arsenic and Old Lace* — (1944) — Capra
The horror comedy hybrid isn’t a new genre, here’s a film from the 40s with a nice blend of screwball comedy and horror (four serial killers [arguing who is most lethal one] with a combined body count of 24) it even takes place on Halloween. There was an in-joke I didn’t quite catch; the camera holds several times on the villain’s face, he either looks like Frankenstein with all the stitch scars, or a famous actor (Boris Karloff) of the period.
Lola*— (1962) — Demy
Demy’s first official real film was to be a glorious Technicolor affair with singing, dancing, and fabulous costumes. He found a producer who fell in love with the script and agree to fund it with a couple of minor tweaks; he had to get rid of the singing, the dancing, the costumes and it had to be shot in plain old black and white. Still this is a light and airy confection about first love; a nice tension is added with all the characters being a little sketchy and amoral. Lola’s Prince Charming is a vision in white; they are both unwavering in their faith they will reconnect with one another despite the passage of years. There are lots of echoes in the story; a recurring “Sailor” character; a nice score; and all the women seem to be younger or older versions of the same dancing Matryoshka doll.
The Young Girls of Rochefort* — (1967) — Demy
Musicals are inherently silly and this film revels in terpsichorean splendor, even the characters are color coordinated. Thematically, all the characters are out of sync, either a moment too early or a moment too late to connect with their one’s true heart. The musical motifs are stated once are then taken up again or suggested briefly in other scenes. There are some great props; the “aquarium” concession stand in the city plaza that allows one to watch the world stroll by; plus the two immediately identifiable American dance icons. The city even allowed the film crew to paint each window shutter with a pastel highlight and give a brilliant coat of white to all the background exteriors to be pictured in the film. When this was shot, Catherine Deneuve’s real life sister (they play twins in the movie) was considered one in the family with all the talent and the bigger star of the two. She died in a car crash a couple months after the film was released.
Motherless Brooklyn — (2019) — Norton
The main guy for a small detective agency gets whacked and the other gumshoes are more worried about rent and concentrate on the paying customers. Motherless Brooklyn (MB) is an orphan the big man took under wing and became a surrogate father for him; so he wastes no time poking around his murder and quickly finds corruption and evil at City Hall. There is one glaring mistake in the film: MB explains over and over again to everyone he meets in the story that he has a brain problem. Usually Tourette's syndrome is used as comedic relief by a bit player, but here they try to use it dramatically for the main character who always apologizes for his verbal twitches. Norton should have gone with the audience superior position, explain it one time expressly to and for the audience, then let him take his lumps for the rest of the film that actually would have built up more identification with MB. If this had been shot in black and white, the audience would have no trouble settling back for a juicy Film Noir; certain shots intriguingly suggest what some of those older films may have looked like: imagine Gene Tierney in a flame red satin dressing gown.
The Good Liar — (2019) — Condon
This little heist film becomes a playful cat and mouse game with just a few suggestions; the old con man is walking down the sunny side of the street and he spots the rich widow pacing in front of the restaurant and he immediately gets into character by limping painfully; it is a point of personal pride that he is never late for an appointment, yet the widow is always the one quietly sitting there (looking like the cat that swallowed the canary) waiting for him to catch up with her; her grand-son is hilariously writing his doctoral theses on whether or not Albert Speer was a good German (he didn’t notice everyone around him was a psychopath?)
Pain and Glory — (2019) — Almodovar
A film director emotionally blocked since the death of his mother, and incapacitated from a horribly botched back surgery spends the days tenderly puttering around his apartment before its time to knock himself out for the night with pain killers. A re-mastered print of one of his earlier films leads him try to end a 30 year old feud with the lead actor and have him come onstage with him at the gala screening. After a lot of pleading he gains entrance to his house and in the backyard, the actor offers him some nose candy. He gives it a snort. Nirvana! All his pain magically goes away, he can move without flinching, he can pick up pennies from the floor; and ideas and scenes for a new film start falling out of the sky. In the past, he had zero tolerance for degenerate drug addicts, but regularly chasing the dragon makes him a little more tolerant and forgiving about heroin addiction. The glorious melodramatic moments in the film are impossible to resist, where great chunks of the past return in a new light.
A Constant Forge — (2000) — Kiselyak
This is a great introductory primer to the work of John Cassavetes, As a filmmaker he was interested in challenging the audiences preconceptions about their own lives by having his actors craft original dramatic moments. He didn’t give a damn about commercial success; I think he actually says in the film people only interested in money are spiritually dead and are ghosts wasting what precious time they have left. There are some funny bits, the audience loved a preview screening of Opening Night, and he immediately thought he had stumbled somewhere and re-cut the film to make it less accessible. Gena Rowlands shares a story where she faked getting slapped by John during a rehearsal (clapping her hands and falling to the stage) then laid there on the floor giggling while the stage crew had to be restrained from attacking him. What comes off is in this documentary is what a Mensch Cassavetes was.
The Crossing of Paris — (1956) — Autaut-Lara
This comedy is a slightly unflattering portrait of Parisians during the occupation. A grocery store sells out minutes after opening; then the owner goes downstairs and butchers a fat pig for the black market. When his regular partner is pinched, an unemployed taxi driver taps a guy nursing a glass of wine in a tavern to take his place walking 200 pounds of contraband meat to its next destination. His new partner in crime turns out to be a wealthy painter who doesn’t need the money but takes the gig out of curiosity. He’s got an attitude and quite the mouth, when he finds out they are getting peanuts for the risky job, he destroys the basement supply room until the crooked grocer agrees to a pay bump. He is also not averse to telling all the low lives they meet on the way what embarrassing pathetic cowards they are. The film was shot in color but processed in black and white so it has a nice look to it. They are supposedly travelling across a blacked out city, yet there is always a random lamp post to light the scene dramatically.
A Slight Case of Murder — (1938) — Bacon
After prohibition is repealed, a crime boss decides his whole criminal organization and brewery is going legit. He doesn’t drink beer himself and no one in the gang has the guts to tell him, his prohibition beer tastes like horse piss. Years later, things are finally coming to head during a week-end retreat; they plan to meet their daughter’s fiancé who turns out to be copper; the bank is about to foreclosure on his brewery; and a stick-up crew from the race track heist chooses to hide out in what they thought was an abandoned house (allowing the boys to fondly relive the good old days of violin cases and cement loafers.) A lot of the gags are about gangsters with busted up noses trying to be honest citizens by speaking in refined manner. The only one who really pulls it off is his wife, but she runs hot and cold, depending on who she is talking to, she switches from gum smacking moll to a high society dame in a heartbeat.
Animal Love — (1995) — Siedl
There is a nice range from simple snapshots of proud owners posing with their little ball of fur to vignettes and complete sequences in this Austrian documentary about pets. The pet owners turn away from human contact when their pets become intimate extensions of themselves. A homeless man buys a rabbit merely as a prop to better beg. A soap actress reads all her adoring fan mail but prefers cuddle with her husky. At times, the reality is sometimes so astonishing; one can only believe certain scenes must have been faked. In addition to simple companionship, pets can also become sexual substitutes—judging from the number of participants that had no problem frolicking on camera on their beds with their dogs. Unlike Herzog’s mockumentaries, there is always a line that is crossed in Siedl’s films, there is always something vaguely unsettling and unflinching in his gaze.
★★★ ½
Fences — (2016) — Washington
Troy, the garbage man, is full of bluster at home. He has worn down his first son from years and years of argument and now begins to chip away at his second son who may be an (athletic) chip off the old block. Certain conversations have an immediate lived-in quality; these are almost like serial confrontations. There is great depth to the writing and each scene crackles with tension. You are never quite sure if Bono (Troy’s best friend) is a sitting spectator or there to pull apart the combatants when the arguments become too rough. Washington as a director has always been a deliberate craftsman and this is his first effort with a little spit and shine. He is helped enormously that all the original actors from the stage production reprised their roles for the film. You are here for the drama.
Antigone — (2019) — Deraspe
This is a nice re-make of a Greek play thousands of years old focusing on the perversion of justice. In her innocence, Antigone (a high school girl) believes justice will prevail because it is the simple truth; little does she know the laws have been carefully crafted for the exclusive benefit of the powerful and the rich. The courtroom appears at first to be sympathetic to her plight, however the flimsy legal protections afforded her will be useless against the vicious assault (in the name of the law) about to befall her family. I did like that certain agents within the system were shown to be decent, but their hands are manacled by legal restrictions and job descriptions, and their goodness has only a nominal reach. There is a nice bit where a (dis)approving social media stands in for as a vibrant Greek chorus.
La Chinoise — (1967) — Godard
The film begins dramatically with the founding of the revolutionary Maoist Aden Arabia cell in Paris. They suffer almost immediate set-backs; they lose one member to a tragic house painting accident and another member is expelled for failing to raise his hand for a unanimous vote. There is marvelous gibberish: they borrow a huge dollop from anarchism’s direct action. The daughter of a wealthy banker believes she is proletarian because she once worked in an orchard one summer vacation; she takes the most glamourous elements (like Molotov cocktails) and runs with them. On one hand, they are passionate and earnest; there is a great tumult of ideas with the excitement of young people discovering the world of ideas and books. On the other hand, with no sense of history or political experience they doomed for some serious lumps. The revolution peters out right about the same time her parents return home from summer vacation to reclaim their apartment (now ruined with red, yellow, and blue highlights) and the next semester at University begins. The film quickly becomes an intellectual screwball comedy where political platforms are banana peels to be stepped on and philosophy is a custard pie to be faced.
The Earrings of Madame de — (1953) — Ophüls
This (almost unstated) tragic love story is revealed exclusively through visual echoes and character/camera movement. For instance, the jeweller’s great excitement about returning the “stolen” earrings to the general is revealed entirely by the way he orders around his shop assistant (like a chicken without a head) upstairs, while he waits placidly at the front entrance to the shop. When she first sells her earrings she sits down imperially as if a queen on a throne; whereas near the end when she tries to buy her earrings back, the same chair (removing the cushion riser) appears to swallow her up. At the outset she uses her fainting spells to manipulate the men around her, yet these spells have an arc that gets progressively worse during the film. It could be suggested that she is the earrings of her husband; her great beauty and flirtations are a way to publically lionize his reputation. There is some ironic humor; her husband goes ballistic not because the diplomat may have slept with his wife, but that he may have seduced his mistress.
* = rewatch
**** = it's something like a brown frankfurter