Peau d'ane (Jacques Demy, 1970)

 

Jacques Demy’s Peau d’ane might appear to be among the most purest-hearted of films, if one focused only on the tangible pleasure of its inventions – a donkey that excretes gold and jewels, an old woman who coughs up frogs, dresses that look like the weather and the moon and the sun, fairy godmothers, a talking rose; underlying all of this though is a sense of adult mores and anxieties, evidenced in particular by how the plot turns on a father’s incestuous wish to marry his daughter (the film acknowledges that all little girls may at some point express such a wish regarding their fathers, but the sensibility here is plainly pitched beyond such innocent naivete). Like so many mythic narratives, the film would seem arbitrary in its twistedness – why did the route to save the princess from her father’s desire and to deliver her into the arms of her true love have to follow such a highly specific course? – if not for Demy’s unwavering specificity and deliberation, for the sense that the obstacle- and oddity-strewn world here reflects the complexities of our own more earthly strivings (even that fairy godmother is highly fallible, her decisions coloured by some hinted-at romantic grievance against the king). One feels that Demy would have rejected digital trickery even if it had been available to him: such is the tangible sense of delight in, for example, painting the faces and horses and prevailing décor of one kingdom in blue and of another in red, or in the physically very varied casting; he refers to technologies that don’t yet exist in the world of the film (and ultimately even has a helicopter touch down) and has the princess take a puff on a pipe (which duly makes her cough), all of this held in mysteriously perfect balance by the director’s immensely infectious, even if vaguely melancholic, belief.

A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)

 

First-time viewers of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, drawn by its ever-growing reputation, may be surprised to discover that it begins with scenes of blue-collar men at work, allotting the top-billing not to Gena Rowlands but to Peter Falk: it’s an early indication of how the film is as much, if not more, about the “influence” as about the woman. Rowlands’ Mabel has no job, no close friends that we’re shown (albeit that her husband Nick is easily capable of filling up the house for an impromptu party), no apparent interests; after working all night on what was supposed to be a date night, he brings his crew back to the house for an early morning group meal, which of course she’s expected to spring into action to prepare. This all flows into the film’s abiding core mystery, how much of Mabel’s unusual or outright “crazy” behaviour is the “fault” of society, and of her husband in particular, a necessary release valve of sorts in a life which would otherwise be intolerably dull and repetitive; one wonders whether she might be demonstrating, in some sense at least, the most fully-inhabited, boundary-testing consciousness in the whole movie. Rowlands is as remarkable as everyone says, at once laceratingly present and comprehensively unknowable, funny and intimate and loving and scarily possessed. The film’s home stretch, after Mabel returns from some six months in an institution (of which, again, we see nothing), at first seeming weary and subdued, then gradually reclaiming some version of her old self, sums up all its worrying mysteries: is Nick helping her back toward something true, or bullying her into being the unusual but essentially submissive woman to which he’s accustomed? The final images of routine domesticity reasserting itself suggest a recovered equilibrium, but few will read it as an entirely happy ending.

Masculin feminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)

 

Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Feminin is typically characterized by citing its line about the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” which in tandem with one of its main characters being a budding pop star (number six in Japan!) would likely lead one to expect this to be one of the director’s more colourful films. In fact though, the movie (shot in black and white) is one of Godard’s more melancholy works of the period, with little exuberance or display of pleasure, not least regarding the central relationship between the singer Madeline (Chantal Goya) and the bouncing-around-jobs Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud), which is more talked about, often in unenthused terms, than depicted. It contains several acts of sudden and inexplicable violence, reflecting global conflicts in the background, but these acts fail to move those who observe them, embodying a pervasive sense of denial and willed ignorance, feeding into a worryingly drained human fabric (even going to the cinema is unsatisfying, both because of the unpersuasive narratives, and the technical flaws of the projection). This culminates in a sense of erasure: the film’s final stretch spends extended time on another couple, with Paul last seen and heard expressing his dissatisfaction with his work, before a last scene in which he’s gone altogether, and Madeline is alone with a horrible choice to make, almost frozen in indecision (a state likely reflected in the viewer, given the withholding of much relevant information). But at the same time, of course, the film teems with possibility: that one could indeed be such a pop star, or take advantage of the era’s gadgety innovations, or fool the military into sending round a chauffeured limousine, or spot Brigitte Bardot at a nearby table, or (in one deadpan moment) step into the shoes of someone else to see, as per the adage, if that yields any great revelation (it doesn’t).

The Sleepy Time Gal (Christopher Munch, 2001)

 

The many alluring wonders of Christopher Munch’s The Sleepy Time Gal start with that title, seeming to promise a bedtime-worthy child’s tale, but instead concerning itself with deep-rooted matters of separation and absence, of lives still structured and shadowed by the events of decades earlier. Its main character, Frances (one of Jacqueline Bisset’s best-ever roles, her unexplained accent aiding the mysterious undercurrent) was once a late-night radio broadcaster under the titular title, although that doesn’t seem particularly important in how she assesses her own life; of the many details and bits of personal history that tumble through the movie, the most hauntingly recurring is the memory of the daughter she gave up for adoption, Rebecca, played in adulthood by Martha Plimpton. Rebecca’s life as a New York corporate lawyer bears little obvious relationship to that of the money-strapped Frances, but Munch weaves in multiple correspondences, even suggesting the two women may have slept with the same man, decades apart. The film has a recurring lightness, an openness to possibility, yielding structurally unimportant but pointedly lovely scenes such as Frances’ encounter with a French tourist who’s out foraging for mushrooms, or a glimpse of her photographer son instructing a subject to get naked, or many little bits of history and commemoration (spanning George Washington to the dawn of a Black-oriented radio station); all of this partially offset though by darker intimations (the other son is in Britain, barely in contact, the movie suggesting he may be in dire straits). Munch’s finely calibrated work ultimately denies the form of closure we might have hoped for and expected (the two lead actresses never even share the same scene), while beguilingly asserting a form of reconciliation and understanding that transcend death and distance, intertwined with the power of art to forge connections that would otherwise be beyond one’s imagination or grasp.