Trois places pour le 26 (Jacques Demy, 1988)

 

Jacques Demy’s last and mostly overlooked film is a perfect ending to his career, as beautiful and joyous and yet quietly transgressive as all his best work. Yves Montand (himself only two films from the end, as it turned out) plays (some version of) himself, returning to his childhood home town of Marseille for a stage show based on his own life (Demy visualizes the show with just the right amount of warmly cheesy intricacy), while also hoping to find his old love (Francoise Fabian); she’s living in genteel poverty after her once-rich husband got sent to jail, with a headstrong daughter (Mathilda May) who adores Montand and gets a part in the show, falling for him and then sleeping with him, after which she rapidly learns that she just committed incest with her biological father. Needless to say, few musicals have taken the inwardly winding nature of genre plotting to such a point, although the speed and equanimity with which those involved shake it off and move on is equally notable. The film has great fun with the Montand persona, acknowledging the cornerstones of his biography, including his legendary love affairs (Piaf, Signoret, Monroe) and apparently ongoing virility, while suggesting suppressed shadows and secrets; it’s as flexible with the musical form itself, at first giving us a world where characters break into song and dance in classic style; then in its latter stages confining the performance to the stage. And just as it channels Montand, there’s the sense of a shadow portrait of Demy himself – another kind of return, heavy with allusions to and parallels with earlier works, and with something always beyond reach, summed up in the film’s final, almost offhand moments, reminiscent of how The Young Girls of Rochefort placed the long-awaited meeting of its star-crossed lovers just beyond the final scene.

That's Life (Blake Edwards, 1986)

 

Given the considerably underexamined scenic affluence of its environment, it’s not clear that Blake Edwards’ That’s Life is appropriately titled in any very generally applicable sense – the label of “first world problems” hardly starts to describe it, and between that and the over-indulgence of Jack Lemmon’s familiar mannerisms, I’ve always considered the film a disappointment. On a recent reviewing, those reservations still seem generally applicable, but maybe with age I’ve become more attuned to the genuine anxiety that drives it all, to the expression of a raw insecurity that material comforts can’t suppress and may in some ways (such as by reducing the capacity for genuine spontaneity) even exacerbate. Lemmon plays Harvey Fairchild, a successful architect (but, as he makes clear, no Frank Lloyd Wright) approaching his 60^th birthday, weighed down by hypochondria, blind to the fact that his wife Gillian (Julie Andrews) is quietly dealing with a much more urgent health problem; their adult children and partners arrive, all with their own issues; an old friend of Harvey’s reappears, now a Catholic priest (displaying an intriguing mixture of hard-line doctrine and pragmatic personal behaviour); casual sexual possibilities drift by. The casting of actual family members doesn’t add as much nuanced realism as it might, given the regimented nature of things, and a form of happy equilibrium is ultimately restored all too easily. But there’s much that may linger uncomfortably in the mind – notwithstanding the comment above, Lemmon sometimes (as in a scene where he may actually be trying to induce a heart attack on an exercise cycle) seems agonizingly possessed, and the final professing of need and devotion doesn’t sweep away Harvey’s easy recourse to adultery on two occasions within as many days (albeit that he fails to perform the first time, and that the second time is just plain weird).

The Nude Princess (Cesare Canavari, 1976)

 

The title character in Cesare Canavari’s The Nude Princess, Miriam, is a lawyer and former nude model (a duality which well sums up the film’s dominant mindset) who comes to Milan to negotiate construction contracts on behalf of her emerging African nation, and Canavari does affect some critical interest in the condescending and exploitative mindset of former colonial powers, portrayed here as certain they can negotiate rings around her (to the extent their thoughts are anything other than lewd ones). For all her impact on those around her, Miriam regards herself as “dead inside,” which she attributes mainly to a sexually traumatic past incident negotiated by the nation’s dictator, who regards her as his slave. Over the course of the film, various forces intervene to push her toward reawakening, which we can take in some general way to stand in for the broader evolution of African consciousness. However, such concerns sit strangely in a film of such lascivious instincts, one which seems primarily occupied by ensuring a regular supply of female nudity, a project executed with varying degrees of finesse: the film feels almost afraid of its own privileging of a powerful black woman (one played by a transsexual yet) and constantly drawn to self-sabotage, by insisting that she’s just another prisoner of quivering biology, her problems ultimately nothing that couldn’t be cured by the right man. Likewise, the appropriation of African culture oscillates between seeming admiring and engaged and just being reductively offensive. Despite everything though, it’s hard not to have some affection toward a film which thinks to cast the alluring and very European Tina Aumont as an American industrial espionage expert called “Gladys Fogget,” or in which we’re led to understand that wild, mind-altering tribal dances around a fire can apparently take place on an upper floor of a downtown Milanese building.

They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich, 1981)

 

Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed makes for strange viewing, often feeling as if taking place on the sidelines of a more substantive movie that’s screening somewhere else – an inordinate amount of the viewing time consists of people getting in and out of cabs or buildings, or following other people on the street, or signaling to others who they should follow, with the human stories at the centre of all this busy intrigue ultimately revealed as being so slight that they hardly register at all. Aspects of Bogdanovich’s vision are rather sweet – his people make immediate connections, whether as friends or more than that, spontaneously applying nicknames and developing lines of patter with others they just met; the flip side though is a feeling of utter arbitrariness and disposability, in which it’s hard to take any expression of real feeling or emotion seriously, or to know whether that’s even intended. The notional plot has Ben Gazzara, John Ritter (whose relentless tripping and bumping and general klutziness is the main source of physical comedy) and Blaine Novak as three detective agency employees working on two surveillance cases on behalf of suspicious husbands; Audrey Hepburn and Dorothy Stratten are the targets. Stratten is merely blank, regardless of what tragic resonance her presence might in theory have carried, and Hepburn is strangely and frustratingly underused, barely conceived as a character, and seemingly held by Bogdanovich at arm’s length. The film isn’t without a certain panache, but it barely contains, much less evokes, even isolated and scattered laughter, let alone the sustained collective enthusiasm of the title. Talking of which, the fact that the title song is among several Frank Sinatra songs heard just fleetingly in the background (seemingly in evocation of bygone classiness), in contrast to the foregrounded prominence of some grindingly undistinguished country numbers, is just another peculiarity.