Kiss Me Goodbye (Robert Mulligan, 1982)

Robert Mulligan’s Kiss Me Goodbye is a strangely slack and disinterested film, one of those works in which no one and nothing seems to connect with anyone or anything else. Three years after the death of her choreographer husband Jolly (James Caan), Kay (Sally Field) returns to the house they shared together, intending now to occupy it with her fiancée Rupert (Jeff Bridges). She soon encounters Jolly’s ghost, visible and audible only to her, and adjusts to his presence with remarkable ease; Rupert of course thinks she’s nuts, but sort of plays along, to the extent of taking the ghost on a road trip and ordering for him in a restaurant. The concept of the ghost is thin indeed – Jolly is clearly tuned into some greater force in that he’s able to dredge up undisclosed facts about Rupert’s past, but nothing more is made of that power, and Kay doesn’t evidence a shred of curiosity in how he experiences their interactions, or in where he goes when he’s absent, or in much of anything (none of the actors are anywhere near their best). For a while she toys with the idea of maintaining two husbands, opening up some raunchily twisted possibility, but a scene where she tries to make love to Rupert while Jolly’s in the room plays as unsexily as anything you’ll ever see. The movie limps along through some slumbering set-ups (an attempted exorcism; a wrong notion that Jolly’s spirit may have gone to hide inside Kay's dog) and then ends in as offhanded a way as it started, with the vaguest of explanations for Jolly’s intervention. The movie is of almost no specific interest, but stands as one of many examples of a recurring Hollywod mystery, of how so many presumably somewhat discerning and skillful individuals can devote their energies to such a coldly meaningless, complacent undertaking.

Spoiled Children (Bertrand Tavernier, 1977)

A largely forgotten early work by Bertrand Tavernier, Spoiled Children remains as interesting as any of his films for its artful collisions of themes and tones. The opening credits promise a boisterous culture clash, counterpointing a rollickingly performed song about the glories of old Paris with various scenes of the drab contemporary reality, but this is an immediate misdirection, evoking a zest that the modern world hardly accommodates. The focal point is a movie director, Bernard Rougerie (Michel Piccoli) who rents a second apartment away from his family, to work on his script in peace (the self-referentiality of this notion is underlined by references to Rougerie’s last film Deathwatch, which in reality would be the title of Tavernier’s next one), a notion rapidly challenged as he gets involved with the building’s tenant defense committee, formed to counter excessive rent increases imposed by the landlord (the film is very informative about relevant laws and practices), and in particular with one attractive young neighbor, Anne Torrini (Christine Pascal). Rougerie’s wife works with silent children, coaxing them into talking – this and the title underline the theme of personal and societal immaturity, of stumbling toward a coherent voice and identity: even as Rougerie’s movie starts to take shape, he finds himself critiqued by Anne for a lack of personal commitment, to their relationship, to anything. In summary this might sound a bit schematic, but Tavernier deftly navigates through contrasts and counterpoints, suggesting an ironic auto-critique even as his film amply justifies his chosen course.The final maxim – “If I die one day I want to meet death as I have met love” – may seem better suited to a more classically romantic film, especially when pasted over children playing in a grim-looking urban playground, but as such provides a final assertion of ambiguity and cross-pollination, of a directed voice that may still be heard over all our capitalistic injustices and challenges.

Lady Oscar (Jacques Demy, 1979)

Lady Oscar is certainly one of Jacques Demy’s less prominent films, with a persistently displaced feeling about it: set in France during the decade or so leading up to the Revolution, but made in English with mostly Japanese money. It may sound in summary like a gender-bending swashbuckler - Oscar is born a woman but raised as a boy to satisfy her father’s desire for a male heir, becoming a personal guard to Marie Antoinette -  but doesn’t feel particularly queered: except for one scene in which she dances with and kisses another woman (entirely to demonstrate her resistance to an unwanted suitor), there’s no suggestion that Oscar is anything other than a slow-to-awaken heterosexual woman, whose awakening as a woman coincides with that as a socially aware citizen, coinciding further with the radicalization of the populace as a whole. Compared to the striking grubbiness of Demy’s Pied Piper, the film often feels overly antiseptic, consisting largely of stiff exchanges in fancy rooms, with a central character that’s as much observer as meaningful participant. At times, certainly, the distancing can be rather stimulating - to that point I couldn’t quite decide on the merits of Catriona MacColl’s well-spoken but largely blank lead performance – and Demy often seems as interested in secondary narratives of female deception and adaptation, including the Queen’s self-serving materialism and infidelity, and another character who lies her way from poverty into money, each instance adding fuel to the popular anger that sparks the Revolution. It’s certainly interesting how Oscar’s ultimate arrival at a sense of self is immediately followed by a kind of obliteration, as she suffers her greatest personal loss, while submerged in the jubilant crowd: as such Lady Oscar looks ahead to Demy’s often quietly tortured-seeming, much underrated late run of work, in which a musical number might be as likely to accompany suicide or incest as to articulate more conventional sentiments.

Law of the Border (Lutfi Akad, 1966)

The restored print of Lutfi Akad’s The Law of the Border starts by emphasizing the remaining flaws and shortcomings, noting that “the poor state of preservation of the only source available for restoration has irreversibly hindered the quality of the final outcome.” While no one should argue this benefits the film, the ragged quality of the viewing experience does rather accord with the scrappy nature of the underlying narrative, adding to a sense of authentic sociological engagement channeled through energetically genre-hugging set-ups (as has been pointed out, one might choose to engage with it as a displaced western, although that could be more limiting than helpful). The movie’s basic opposition is between a group of poor villagers who make their living by smuggling across the Syrian border, and the firm but sympathetic law enforcer who tries to shut them down without putting them in jail, brokering a deal for them to become sharecroppers (the term used in the subtitles) on a rich man’s land, and helping to persuade them to accommodate a school. Further conflicts erupt between outlaws, the details of which weren’t always entirely clear to me at least, but this generally functions as daring, almost poetic fragmentation (the movie has enough raw narrative material to fuel something of epic length, but dispenses with it all in barely more than 75 minutes). Much of what’s depicted seems almost divorced from any recognizable time and place, but the very clearly contemporary affect of the teacher in particular emphasizes that this isn’t some kind of romantic primitivism, but rather a simple function of poverty and deprivation: seen today, the film’s social charge is heavily retrospectively enhanced by the subsequent extraordinary life history of its star Yilmaz Guney. Overall, the film can’t be classed as a masterpiece, but it elicits a deep sense of respect.