L'ami de mon amie (Eric Rohmer, 1987)

In Eric Rohmer’s L’ami de mon amie, Blanche and Lea, both in their early twenties, become friends; Blanche is single but develops a crush on Alexandre, a man she meets through Lea, and who feels nothing for her; Lea lives with Fabien but the relationship is bumpy, and then while Lea is away, Blanche and Fabien connect and sleep together. The theme of intertwining couples and mismatched desires is worthy of classic romantic comedy, and Rohmer delivers a finale in that vein, in which each of the two women misunderstands which man the other is referring to, a confusion that’s ultimately happily resolved. The film is unusual in Rohmer’s oeuvre for its setting, the “new town” of Cergy-Pontoise, an easy commute from Paris but a universe away in terms of its modernity and artificiality and sometimes rather bizarre-seeming concept of space. Cergy is conceived as a place one might barely ever have to leave, with work and home and play all within precisely-curated walking distance: Fabien refers to an occasion on which he ran into the same person seven times while out and about, becoming increasingly frustrated about how to respond, an anecdote that nevertheless in a way confirms the location’s effectiveness in promoting connectivity. Even more than in some other Rohmer movies then, there’s a sense here of social experimentation, that Cergy-Pontoise ought to be productive territory for relationships, thus adding to the characters’ frustrations at their own failures (Blanche’s crush on Alexandre is presented as utterly absurd, and the moment when she finally realizes that he’s more naturally drawn to Lea is quietly penetrating). Rohmer doesn’t seem cynical about the setting though, his film marked by both fascination and optimism, by a sense that the possibilities of Cergy at that time might have been running ahead of the capacities of its occupants.

Searching for Mr. Rugoff (Ira Deutchman, 2019)

 

Ira Deutchman’s Searching for Mr. Rugoff is a modest but cherishable piece of cinema history, packed with juicy anecdote and memoir. The now seldom-mentioned Don Rugoff was an exhibitor and distributor, his holdings including a group of upper East Side Manhattan theaters that embodied the “arthouse” of the 60’s and 70’s (Rugoff was as responsible as anyone, for example, for Lina Wertmuller’s short-lived preeminence). An emblematically colourful and turbulent character, he habitually slept through screenings (which didn’t prevent him forming strong opinions on what he’d missed) and had lousy personal habits, possibly exacerbated by an untreatable tumor in his brain; still, for a while he made a lot of things happen, with a flair for imaginative publicity ideas (such as pumping up the prospects of Pumping Iron with bodybuilding demonstrations in the theaters). The documentary’s title references the somewhat extraneous Searching for Sugarman-type strand in which Deutchman tries to track down a small-town cinema club which Rugoff ran at the end of his life, the details of which have fallen into obscurity; while this material illustrates the depth of Rugoff’s fall from visibility, that part of the narrative would be amply clear regardless. Among the film’s notable omissions is any detailed account of Rugoff’s distribution business, and its impact on cinema culture outside New York, an absence that seemingly underlines the narrowness of Rugoff’s core achievement. Even growing up around that time on the other side of the Atlantic, I recall how largely that strand of Manhattan cinemagoing loomed in one’s perception of various films, of what it was to be a cineaste; as wondrous a moment in time as that was, it may seem in hindsight that a culture rooted in such a geographically and sociologically specific, and to most of us distant piece of the world, and bolstered by an unsustainable amount of spending on stunts and overhead, might not have been optimally built to last…

Gwaed ar y Ser (Wil Aaron, 1975)

 

As in the joke about the piano-playing dog, one was probably never supposed to ask whether the 1975 Welsh-language Gwaed ar y Ser (Blood on the Stars) is any good, it being miracle enough that it exists at all. Lasting only about an hour, the premise is of a serial killer knocking off the line-up for an upcoming night’s entertainment at a village hall, the joke being that the victims were indeed at the time relative “stars” within the tiny confines of Welsh-language culture. The film places an uncertain foot in the folk-horror genre, the killer himself being less malign than the local kids’ choir that he notionally conducts, the threat from which will seemingly outlive his inevitable arrest. But any potential creepiness is swamped by a haphazard shooting style, scattershot jokiness and massive tonal uncertainty, devoting too much time to a way-over-the-top lead detective, and allowing minor characters to prattle on at pointless length. As a medium for the Welsh language, the film spans everything from ornate oracular eloquence to English-infused vernacular, and it dispatches with its celebrities in a varied bunch of ways, from a live-on-air DJ opening a package containing a deadly snake, to a folk singer whose dead body is found painted green (a sight the camera dwells on with particular relish), to a harpist electrocuted by her own instrument (after she leads a visitor through a gluttonous and mostly very starchy-looking cornucopia of local delicacies). Stuffed with in-jokes and references that probably barely resonated with its target audience (to the extent that one can imagine one) even at the time, the film was hardly designed to meet any kind of test of time; the bizarre fact of it popping up fifty years later on a Canadian streaming service seems then like a crazed vindication of sorts.

Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949)

 

Max Ophuls’ Caught follows the journey of Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes) and her relationship with two men placed at economic, social and emotional extremes from each other, the title seeming to refer primarily to the imprisoning gravity of money and the power it bestows. The film is driven by Leonora’s conflicted impulses and motivations: she enrolls in a “charm school” to increase her social effectiveness, takes a job as a department store model, and accepts an invitation to a party on a yacht belonging to the super-rich Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), but her ambivalence and reluctance are often evident, and although she’s frequently criticized during the film for being preoccupied with marrying well, it appears to be more of an imposed attitude than a deeply-felt one. Ohlrig does marry her, but with equal lack of conviction, perhaps primarily just to prove a therapist wrong, thereafter wearing her down with his disregard. The film doesn’t demonize Ohlrig, showing him to be in the grip of various kinds of malaise, but in the end he simply fades from relevance, a structural choice intriguingly balanced by how the other man in Leonora’s life, an idealistic doctor for whom she takes a low-paid receptionist job after attempting to break from her husband and who helps refine her values doesn’t appear until almost halfway into the movie (notwithstanding James Mason’s top billing). There’s something rather startling about the film’s ultimate deployment of death as a necessary ultimate step toward redemption, its twist on the familiar intertwining of biology and destiny, the impact into the material world rippling outward (the final image is of a once-prized fur coat being carried away). And if not one of Ophuls’ very greatest works, Caught is (of course) consistently visually eloquent and striking, whether exploring the alienatingly vast interiors of Ohlrig’s Long Island mansion or the drastically contrasting no-place-to-turn East Side spaces.

The Widow (Nam-ok Park, 1955)

 

Nam-ok Park’s 1955 film The Widow is highly worthwhile viewing, notable as the first Korean film to be directed by a woman, and marked by its sympathetic treatment of female perspectives. Shin is a single mother, widowed by the war, established in the early scenes as weighed down by money problems but also as independent-spirited, not inclined to settle; she’s financially assisted by an older acquaintance, but doesn’t sleep with him, contrary to his wife’s suspicions. Meanwhile the wife herself has a lover, Taek, who eventually in turn falls for Shin, their marriage plans imperiled by the return of Taek’s old love, whom he’d assumed to be also dead. The film’s examination of societal pressures on women evokes Ozu’s films of the period, but the comparison (not an entirely fair one of course) rather underlines The Widow’s lack of formal rigour and the relative softness of its approach (perhaps summed up by the recurring use of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Some Enchanted Evening). At the time of writing, the film can only be viewed in a truncated version in which the second-last reel is without a soundtrack, and the final reel is missing altogether, and although that’s obviously objectively not for the best, it does lend what’s left a rather singular vanishing quality. Just before the sound disappears, the film briefly detours for the first time into becoming a musical, and then a narrative that seemed geared toward a romantic coming together becomes one of separation, felt all the more deeply for the silence, underlined by a series of shots of her feet as she walks alone, and then later by a corresponding series of his feet, and a final shot of Taek alone in the night, staring in the direction of his lost love, the sudden imposition of the end seeming to define an absence and a longing that can never be filled or mitigated.