Une femme douce (Robert Bresson, 1969)

 

Much of Robert Bresson’s Une femme douce is devoted to spectatorship, emphasizing the “gentle woman’s” passivity and lack of agency: the film includes an extended scene from Michel Deville’s Benjamin (when she and her husband go to the movies), another from Hamlet (a trip to the theatre), exhibits at a natural history museum and art gallery, shows watched on TV, even animals at the zoo. Further, the film begins by establishing her death, her body laid out on a bed as her husband narrates the story of their relationship, a story in which he all but harassed her into marrying him, and in which one senses that even his acts of generosity and openness are oppressive to her (for example, he praises an incident he observed in which another man tried to pick her up and she seemingly turned the man down, but it’s already been established that her actions were ambiguous, and the husband’s words serve to make him rather than her the owner of the narrative). The (pointedly unnamed) woman is far from a blank slate - she’s sufficiently educated to recall a passage that’s been omitted from the production of Hamlet, and on their wedding night she appears to be the sexual instigator – but when married to a less intuitive man, this may impede rather than facilitate happiness; as played by Dominique Sanda, the film has a recurring sense of sadly thwarted inquiry and possibility, and when she says near the end that she’ll be a faithful wife, it rings with defeat more than commitment. The film anticipates Bresson’s later L’argent in the recurring focus on money changing hands: after getting married she goes to work in her husband’s pawnshop business, one of her main attempts at rebellion embodied in paying needy people more than the items are worth (another action later appropriated by the husband when trying to prove himself to her).

New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)

 

Abel Ferrara’s singular (well, of course) New Rose Hotel is a fascinatingly displaced piece of work, a globe-spanning tale of conspiracy and manipulation and perhaps eventual catastrophe, built around a hundred million dollar transaction, that takes place almost entirely in hotel rooms, bars and the like, major events recounted to us third hand or else briefly glimpsed on blurry surveillance screens. Christopher Walken (dizzily idiosyncratic even by his standards) plays Fox, mastermind of a scheme to lure a brilliant sought-after Japanese scientist away from his corporate base, the plan consisting almost entirely of dangling a woman that the scientist won’t be able to resist (Asia Argento’s Sandy), complicated when Fox’s faithful lieutenant X (Willem Dafoe) also falls for Sandy, to the extent of the two talking about getting married. The plan works improbably well, and Fox collects his fee, but then things fall apart; Sandy vanishes, and the two men have to make a run for it. Ferrara’s astounding structural coup has the story essentially ending some twenty minutes before the end (and that’s with various momentous developments merely mentioned in passing), thereafter focusing on X as he goes to ground and mournfully runs through the events we’ve already seen, the film revisiting prior scenes with added details and shifted emphases that suggest the two men perhaps never fully grasped what they were involved in, Sandy increasingly taking on the contours of a classically unknowable noir-type woman. One is left with the sense of a movie that even if barely of this world in many of its particulars, taps a universal capacity for loss and regret (and, especially in the various songs we see performed, for fragile beauty); the ending constitutes no form of closure, provoking on the contrary a sense that Ferrara's film would as happily have circled back to continue picking obsessively at its own bones, and so on and so on indefinitely.

Spectateurs! (Arnaud Desplechin, 2024)

 

Arnaud Desplechin’s Spectateurs! would provide a most engaging introduction to the director’s oeuvre, despite (detractors might say because of) being a somewhat atypical project for him; it’s a largely academic observation though given that like all Desplechin’s recent work, it’s hardly been seen outside France. The film is a personal journey through cinema, including a few montages that wouldn’t be out of place in an Oscar broadcast (Die Hard!), but also spending extended time on memories of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and most unexpectedly, the late Misty Upham (with whom Desplechin worked on Jimmy P). Desplechin intersperses sweet-natured recreations of key moments in his cinematic growth, including being taken by his grandmother to see a sixties remake of Fantomas but then having to leave when his sister got scared, and screening Vera Chytilova’s Daisies for a school film club and in the process having a girl develop a heightened interest in him. Despite some moments of gravity, the film’s prevailing sense is of lightness and openness to possibility; one feels that on another day Desplechin might have gone in this or that different direction (the film includes a montage of diverse people talking about memorable cinematic experiences, including such quirky choices as a woman recalling that she went to see Train to Busan, and didn’t like it). The film’s final moments are suitably and delectably diverse, contrasting a chance glimpsing of Desplechin stalwart Mathieu Amalric at a screening of 400 Blows, an aspiring director talking in awestruck terms about his transcendent experience of that film, and Desplechin himself, alone in a room, sitting and typing, muttering a final maxim in a manner that lovingly (and is it more self-deprecatingly or self-regardingly?) evokes Godard, an impression immediately cemented by playing Tom Waits’ Ruby’s Eyes under the final credits (just as in Godard did in Prenom Carmen).