La rosiere de Pessac 79 (Jean Eustache, 1979)

 

Jean Eustache’s 1968 La rosiere de Pessac chronicled the annual selection and celebration of a “nubile” and virtuous young woman intended to embody the town’s better nature and aspirations; it coincided that year with France’s chronic social upheaval, against which Eustache’s film stood in an intriguing, resonant tension. Returning to the same subject matter eleven years later, Eustache moves from black and white to colour, a choice which underlines how the annual event is gradually becoming less embedded in tradition and community, and more of a ceremonial abstraction serving as a basis for commerce and a generalized good time. The second film allows a fuller sense of Pessac, of the contrast between the “old town” in which the activities are concentrated and the apartment blocks and impersonal streets which presumably constitute the bulk of its growth; the film ends on an event not seen in the 1968 version, an open-air celebration which seems to become increasingly drunken and rowdy, the chosen rosiere (a highly reticent woman whom I don’t think is ever heard uttering a complete sentence) being pulled unenthusiastically from one table to the next, kissing a grueling volume of cheeks. There’s an undercurrent of desperation to the festivities though, linked to the film’s frequent evocation of economic hard times: the rosiere herself has to live elsewhere during the week for the sake of finding work, returning to Pessac only at weekends. On a more basic level, it’s intriguing to note how a selection process which was efficient and collegial in 1968 has become more halting and messy (the voting procedure has changed for unspecified reasons, with some uncertainty over how it now works, and there’s much more talk of neighbourhood associations and accompanying petty bureaucracy). And whereas in the original it seemed at least plausible that the process might yield an actual and not merely symbolic virgin, the update is laced with gossip about the secret pregnancies of former rosieres. Oh well, nothing stays the same…

The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941)

 

Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture may lack the hypnotic unity of his earlier great work with Marlene Dietrich, but it lingers no less fully (if probably more bizarrely) in one’s mind. Apart from a few presumably stock snippets of Shanghai exteriors (which one imagines Sternberg might have included only with reluctance), the film is an utter artificiality, the central meeting point of “Mother Gin Sling’s” multi-tiered casino teeming with excited extras: they receive a rare mention in the opening credits as a group “who without expecting credit or mention stand ready day and night to do their best,” as if encouraging us to peer more deeply than usual into the movie’s folds and crevices, an exertion which would certainly be repaid. Those opening captions establish Shanghai as the ultimate melting pot, “neither Chinese, European, British nor American,” specifying that “its destiny at present is in the lap of the gods (but) our story has nothing to do with the present.” And implicitly then, nothing to do with the gods either, but rather with human machinations at their most slippery and uncategorizable, including lead characters that all use (or have used) names other than their own, and an absurd notion of Chinese-ness (supplemented by Victor Mature’s self-described “mongrel,” “Dr. Omar”). The movie’s notional plot driver is the attempt to evict Gin Sling and appropriate the casino site for redevelopment, but events carry an escalating sense of implosion: disparate characters including Gene Tierney (absolutely smoldering) Poppy/Victoria, Walter Huston’s “Sir Guy Charteris” and Ona Munson’s indelibly styled Gin Sling ultimately revealed as sharing closely (well, absurdly) intertwined pasts, the feeling of terminal claustrophobia resonating oddly against images of young women being hoisted up in cages to be auctioned off to the crowd of men below (supposedly an event that’s being staged as part of a New Year celebration, although a character observes that the mob looks real enough).

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

 

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman may cause a viewer to reflect on the intertwined wonders and banalities of existence: on how the smallest and most repetitive elements of our life can be recurring sources of structure and stability and even of contentment and joy, while also imprisoning and belittling us. As laid out by Akerman in the film’s opening section, Jeanne’s life is geographically small and economically constrained, but not devoid of activity or stimulation; one detects that the predictability and patterning is soothing, even fascinating, but that this depends on maintaining a precise perspective which is all too easily disrupted or shattered, opening the door to profound existential crisis. But the film is dotted with sudden outbursts which speak to a desire for greater intimacy or self-revelation, such as a neighbour erupting into a monologue about her family’s eating habits, or Jeanne’s mostly wordless son oddly choosing to end the day by musing out loud on sexuality (sex is, as in many things, the source of greatest strain - fundamental, economically significant, vital and mundane and worse). These moments contribute to a slippage containing elements of both liberation and terror (perhaps I’m not the only one who thinks of HAL in 2001, given the film’s now transcendent status in the cinematic rankings). The film’s ending is of course wondrously debatable, its long closing observance of Jeanne carrying elements of despair and doom and hopelessness, both personally and as a broader representation of the toll of patriarchal society, but also of transcendence and possibility (how significant is it that we watch the terrible climactic event reflected in a mirror?). Delphine Seyrig is one of the great screen presences, unselfconsciously ordinary and submerged, but subtly enabling us to tap into the performative resonances of Jeanne’s life, elevating this smallest of films to stand among the largest.

Sweet Substitute (Larry Kent, 1964)

 

Much about Larry Kent’s 1964 Sweet Substitute now seems plain or cursory, but it remains memorable if only for its breathtakingly cold-hearted closing moments, giving the bland-sounding title a startling spin (the alternative title Caressed is far less apposite). To summarize, student Tom finds out that his closest female friend Kathy is pregnant (as far as we know they only had sex once, entirely impulsively, although the film is coy on such matters) and reacts despairingly: his male friends gang together to protect him, cruelly dispatching her from the movie, then in the last shot he’s with his regular date Elaine, a new engagement date prominent on her finger. It’s been well-established though that Elaine’s view of their relationship is entirely calculating, that she’s strategically withholding sex until the marriage she’s been manipulating him into, that she dumped (if indeed she fully did) her preferred mechanic boyfriend only because Tom has better financial prospects (he plans to be a high school teacher!) and she won’t need to work; the conversations between them are trivial and desultory, where those between Tom and the much more independent-minded Kathy are vibrant and multi-faceted. The film roots Tom’s astounding wrong turn in an amusingly bored depiction of car-less life in Vancouver  (at one point he and a friend rhapsodize about the cross-country trip they could take, if only), providing enjoyable time capsule glimpses of downtown (movie theaters showing A Hard Day’s Night, that kind of thing) and the beach; Tom’s academic struggles, it seems from what’s presented, are based partly in sexual frustration, and otherwise in his push to finish reading From Here to Eternity. The film seems incurious at best in its approach to some of the other female characters, and is shaky in various other respects, but this generally adds to the historical interest, with Tom’s chronic lack of constructive introspection seeming to tap a broader societal, if not national precariousness.

 

Looping the Loop (Arthur Robison, 1928)

 

Arthur Robison’s 1928 silent film Looping the Loop is never less than sturdy, and often captivating, rooted in a well-lived-in sense of circus life (it’s a sometimes disquietingly good source of footage of now-taboo sights such as performing bears and elephants). The film is capped by its protagonist Botto the clown, his white face and bald head and baggy clothes making an indelible visual impact, at once hilarious and poignant and somewhat unnerving, especially as his act involves a dummy that’s his exact double, and that in the film’s most nightmarish sequences appears to be the more alive of the two. Botto is consumed with the idea that a woman could never fall for a man she knew to be a clown, and therefore tells his younger love Blanche that he’s an engineer who has to work at night; despite all his efforts, she falls for a colleague of his, the acrobat Andre (Warwick Ward), enthusiastically depicted as one of the most single-minded and shameless horndogs in the history of film. The title refers to an ambitious set-piece into which Andre pulls the untrained Blanche as an assistant – one of the film’s most striking reveries (which would seem like a deliberate echo of King Kong if this movie hadn’t been there first) has a giant Botto towering over the apparatus, his fist clenching around the tiny Andre, before dropping him to the ground and crushing him underfoot. The film flags at times, but has a good feel for the limited choices available to women - Blanche’s parents all but push her into the arms of the blandly well-to-do engineer, her ultimate return to him appearing as much a fatigued strategic retreat as a heartfelt realization of where her heart lies - and a very enthusiastic performing dog, who unsurprisingly lands the closing shot.

Parking (Jacques Demy, 1985)

 

Jacques Demy’s poorly-received Parking, his modern-day musical version of Orpheus (decades before the wonderful and obviously much better known Hadestown), barely rates a mention in many accounts of the director, as if pushed into its own underworld. Indeed, much about the film is dated (man oh man, those hairstyles) or jarring, and on its own terms it often seems shakily plotted and superficial; Michel Legrand’s music is too often thudding and grating in comparison to his other work for Demy (which actually might speak to the composer's skill in channeling coarser cultural norms). The film works best if taken as a more despairing and desperate expression of Demy's bittersweet, often ambiguous romanticism: despite Orpheus’ great love for his wife Eurydice, it’s suggested that he’s bisexual, and another character (albeit not one of the human ones) refers to having married her uncle (not the only instance of incest in Demy’s work); there are also references to pimping and drug use and intimations of kinky sex. The film takes an intriguingly tangible, low-tech approach to evoking the beyond, as an environment of greys and whites and splashes of red, its administrative structure evocative of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death but with a more industrially grungy vibe – the title refers to an unprepossessing parking garage that contains an entry portal (a particular spot on the wall becoming visceous and permeable, allowing the intermediary’s black Porsche to travel through). That’s just one respect in which Demy's take on the myth evokes Cocteau’s; another is the casting of Jean Marais as Hades, but for every instance in which such references are meticulous and pleasing, there’s another in which they’re rushed and cursory. Still, the film certainly channels Demy’s wondrously singular sensibility, and is utterly cherishable for all its weaknesses and peculiarities.

The Ugly American (George Englund, 1963)

 

George Englund’s The Ugly American might have turned out to be a memorable instance of an inexperienced director biting off more than he could reasonably hope to have chewed: a complex political-charged South East Asian narrative with major logistical demands, built around Marlon Brando in one of his most waywardly uncooperative periods. Given the challenges, the result remains at least respectable, albeit limited by any amount of over-compression and simplification. Brando is MacWhite, the newly-appointed ambassador to “Sarkan” (largely shot in Thailand), his qualifications based in part on a long friendship with anti-government activist Deong: at his confirmation hearing he defends Deong against charges of being a Communist (and in turn of leading a potential military uprising) but later changes his mind and accordingly adjusts his policy positions in a pro-Government direction, before dramatic events and realizations change his perspective yet again. Brando is laconic and amused at times, steely and resolute at others; he’s inherently fascinating at every turn, while failing to make MacWhite particularly credible or comprehensible as a human being, let alone one who might plausibly be nominated as an ambassador. The character goes through whiplash-inducing changes of perspective, making up major US policy seemingly on the fly, which does of course succeed in conveying the arbitrary nature of international realpolitik, the malleability of the concepts of allies and adversaries; MacWhite’s final address pointedly underlines that the US’s choices in this regard don’t consistently reflect its founding values (and the movie’s final shot succinctly indicates that plenty of people just don’t care). The film handles the chaotic spectacle ably enough, and if nothing else is an intriguing historical reference point: for instance, MacWhite’s proposal to reroute a so-called Freedom Road through the largely unspoiled north of the country and open up “economic development” doesn’t arouse an iota of environmentally-minded objection.  

Madame Freedom (Hyeong-mo Han, 1956)

 

Hyeong-mo Han’s ironically-titled 1956 film Madame Freedom isn’t as potently accomplished as some of the similarly-themed Japanese films of its period, but it’s an absorbing portrait of thwarted material and sexual ambition. The unfulfilled Madame Oh, married to a self-absorbed academic, mostly stuck at home with her young son, takes a job in a store selling high-end imported goods, rapidly getting drawn then into liaisons with other men and involvement in shady financial schemes, such that she’s almost never home; the husband meanwhile has his own, much more restrained quasi-flirtation with a young woman who attends a nighttime grammar class he teaches for a group of typists. The film focuses mainly on a narrow, relatively privileged echelon of Korean society, defined in part by the perceived superiority of Western products and culture (standards like Someone to Watch Over Me and Autumn Leaves dominate the soundtrack) and material striving, a reference point which allows its female characters a new-found confidence and sense of achievement, but at significant personal risk. The film gains much from the withholding quality of lead actress Jeong-rim Kim, her almost mask-like appearance contributing to a productive ambiguity: even as she blatantly flirts with and makes arrangements to meet with other men, it’s unclear how far her desire truly stretches (some of the quietly saddest moments involve the little boy, perpetually sitting alone at his little desk). The ending however leaves no doubt that if her husband, now aware of her conduct, allows her to remain in the home, it will only be as a properly dutiful and compliant mother and wife, in this context a fate at least preferable to that of some of her business associates. The film slows down along the way for several musical numbers, often again Hollywood-influenced, including a charming if drastically out of place “mambo” number.

Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)

 

Kubrick’s filming of Nabokov’s Lolita is perhaps his first great filmic maze, subsuming eroticism (or even any real engagement with transgressive sexuality) to a recurring sense of entrapment, of obstacles and traps and distances needing to be traversed: in retrospect it may feel like much of the movie consists of watching cars in motion. James Mason’s Humbert Humbert says early on that every game has its rules, referring to his initial calculation of marrying a woman he detests, Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), in order to be close to her teenage daughter Lolia (Sue Lyon); they are rules though that he perpetually fails to navigate adequately, learning only near the end of the movie that the object of his obsession was always more focused on another, playwright Clare Quilty. After Charlotte’s death, Humbert sets out to establish a new life with Lolita, behind the cover of being a respectably urbane professor and single father, but his strategy, while arousing the suspicion of neighbours and observers, pales in effectiveness against Quilty’s wild iconoclasm and bizarreness, brilliantly embodied by Peter Sellers as a man operating almost outside normal time and space (the film’s opening and closing scenes, sealing the intertwined fates of Humbert and Quilty, might almost accordingly be taking place in a different dimension, as if jumping two Kubrick movies ahead). Kubrick’s sly casting underlines the ridiculousness of Humbert’s desire, Mason’s full and searching presence often hilariously contrasted with Lyon’s deadpan superficiality (as in the scene where he tries to impress her by reading from “the divine Edgar”), the effect aided by the film’s frequent sense of dislocation (arising in part from filming such a deeply American story in the UK); his ridiculousness sealed by the deliberately strenuous ordinariness of Lolita’s ultimate arrival point, pregnant and married to a decent man of only modest prospects, Mason’s Humbert crumbling like one who’s truly reached several kinds of end.

I...for Icarus (Henri Verneuil, 1979)

 

The opening moments of Henri Verneuil’s I…for Icarus could hardly be more explicit about the film’s desire to tap into the facts and myths of the JFK assassination: would-be assassin Daslow (check out that anagram!) raises his rifle to take aim at the presidential motorcade below, finding that his gun cartridge is empty; the president is shot dead by an unseen other and then so is Daslow, in what’s staged as a suicide. A year or so later an investigative commission names him as the sole killer, over the dissent of a single member, Yves Montand’s Attorney General Volney, who then launches his own much more energetic inquiry. The film undermines itself with leaden writing and plotting: characters speak at rather than to each other (even the great Montand, to most viewers likely the only recognizable person in the cast, seldom surpasses the strictly functional) and the Volney inquiry proceeds so easily and quickly that it’s impossible to imagine how the original commission filled its time (even allowing that it was a put-up job), often progressing through hokey devices such as a key witness revealed as a liar because a photograph indicates he wasn’t wearing his glasses and so couldn’t have seen what he claimed to see, or a tape which for some unfathomable reason contains a helpful montage of commands issued in connection with the assassination and other misdeeds. The would-be shock ending is telegraphed so far in advance that one merely grows impatient at the film’s failure to pull the trigger (uh, so to speak) and get it done. For all of that, it’s never dull of course, well in line with latter-day conspiratorial attitudes, suggesting a “deep state” of almost limitless reach and awareness, and taking an extended detour into a psychological experiment about submission to authority which almost constitutes a self-contained film within the film.

Circle of Two (Jules Dassin, 1981)

 

No one emerges with credit from Jules Dassin’s last film Circle of Two, a thoroughly artificial and disengaged concoction that almost makes one wish the director had found a way to work in his wife, the reliably unwatchable but at least lively Melina Mercouri. Fifteen-year-old Sarah (Tatum O’Neal) sneaks into a porno theatre, where artist Ashley St. Clair (Richard Burton) is asleep in the row in front of her: they briefly register each other when the film ends, and then meet again in a café, but it’s typical of the film’s superficiality that his seemingly out-of-character presence in such a location is never even casually probed. She visits him at his studio, and then again, and they rapidly gravitate to being physically affectionate while out and about together; he never makes a sexual move on her though, and indeed explodes in anger when she takes off her clothes for him (although that’s to offer herself as a subject for a painting, not a conquest). Even so, the relationship becomes all-consuming (a reedited version of the film was released under the title Obsession), with Sarah refusing to eat when her parents prevent her from seeing Ashley; it’s all psychologically and behaviourally incoherent though, with Burton at his most offputtingly stiff throughout, and O’Neal generally seeming to be reciting lines she barely comprehends. The film hints at unhealthy family dynamics (Sarah recoils from her mother trying to dress like her, and is justly surprised one morning to find that the overly controlling boyfriend she dumped has been invited over for breakfast) but even these frail points of interest come to nothing, and things ultimately end as abruptly and incomprehensibly as they began. The script’s poverty of imagination includes a dopey fixation on Gone with the Wind, cited twice as a reference point for Ashley’s name, and elsewhere in speculating on the length of the porn flick.

Love's Confusion (Slatan Dudow, 1959)

 

The basic plot of Love’s Confusion, the last film completed by Slatan Dudow, sounds as frothy as that of any Hollywood romcom: art student Sonja is dating medical student Dieter, who gets distracted by the less complex Siegi, whose boxer boyfriend Edy then sets his sights on Sonja, the two reconfigured couples eventually heading toward marriage despite the obvious intellectual and temperamental incompatibilities. Dudow oversees these events with a sustained lack of sentimentality or romantic exuberance; Sonja is particularly self-contained and enigmatic, seeming to regard her boyfriend’s interest in another woman as something of a social experiment (even as she acknowledges that the distraction is eroding the quality of her art). For an East German film of its period, there’s little ideological or moral content (only a few brief scenes of industrial production!): the characters seem largely self-defined (and not overly subject to economic constraints), and the film has a rather startling vein of titillation including a few bare backsides and, in an extended “carnival” sequence, intimations of widespread sexually liberated goings-on. That sequence is a modest tour de force, with Dieter wandering through areas labeled for purgatory and hell and love and so forth, among hundreds of thronging costumed extras, and a sense of burgeoning possibility which recurs throughout the movie – even in the recurring scenes of Dieter’s class attendance, the lecturers often seem less to be imparting hard knowledge than to be drifting into philosophy. This culminates in a finale when matters correct themselves on the way to the altar, not an unfamiliar genre device, but one again executed here in remarkably low-key, matter-of-fact manner. Overall, the film is hardly as radical and memorable as Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe, but then not many are; on its own terms it’s often quietly surprising, with a palpable sense of pushing against imposed standards and boundaries.

In God We Trust (Marty Feldman, 1980)

 

Marty Feldman’s In God We Trust has no shortage of ideas, albeit that the commercialized, grotesquely monetized brand of modern religion makes them easy to come across: unfortunately, Feldman isn’t much of a stylist, and struggles to wrestle the material into any kind of shape. He’s a rather diffident leading man also, playing Brother Ambrose, venturing into an unfamiliar and mostly sleazy world in search of money to save the remote monastery in which he grew up: the film’s humour runs from Ambrose heading for refuge to a place advertising “All Night Mass” and having to go running when realizing that the signage’s last three letters had been temporarily covered up, to his constant resort to cold showers to dampen carnal urges toward the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold who takes him in, to a temporary job nailing plastic Jesus figurines onto miniature crosses. The film lacks any sense of real engagement or relish, but it does luck its way into seeming mildly prophetic via Andy Kaufman’s televangelist character Armageddon T. Thunderbird, who preaches self-righteously absurd sermons (God is in the E.R. and you’re the ones that put him there) to an adoring and pliable crowd, easily whipped up into giving something eerily close to a Nazi salute, working every angle for his own financial advantage and planning to unveil a third political party which will carry him to supreme power – more than a few pre-echoes there of our own false prophet, including the hair (although from the neck down the styling is more evocative of Liberace). With more subtlety, Feldman’s film might also have seemed to carry a warning about submission to technology, given that the closest thing to an active God in the film is a sentient but misinformed supercomputer (bearing the likeness of Richard Pryor), all too easily here reprogrammed onto the path of righteousness.

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

 

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle is one of Jean-Luc Godard’s unquenchable glories, a film of electrically vivid presences, suffused with a sense of absence and longing. Filmed in 1966, it finds the world bewildering, all but submerged in consumerism and its attendant messages and forced choices; between the surfeit of surrounding signs and meanings and a hellish global outlook (most prominently represented by Vietnam, frequently referenced here), it’s barely possible just to live in and experience the world, as one compulsively questions the most basic elements of identity, language and experience. And yet, compared to our own mostly drab world of blacks and greys, the environment is gloriously colourful and stimulating; even a mundane shot of a gas station ravishes the eye with the perfection of the composition, the reinforcing blocks and splashes of red linking the flowers in the foreground to a car standing at a pump to the trims on the fixtures. Similarly, as Godard’s voice over muses over the acceleration of science and progress, commenting how the future may now be more present than the present, the vivid observance of something as mundane as coffee swirling in a cup tells us otherwise, that the present for all its travails remains inexhaustibly fascinating and seductive. The film’s most identifiable plotline has its housewife protagonist (Marina Vlady) working as a prostitute, another expression of economic pressure, but on this occasion played mostly for absurdity, including an episode in which an American war correspondent (for the Arkansas Daily!), taking a Parisian break from Vietnam, has Vlady’s character and a colleague parade around with airline bags over their heads, the image both gleefully absurd and yet rather poignantly sad (not least because both the airlines in question, Pan Am and TWA, are now long gone, like much else of the film’s vivid consumerist reference points).

The Possession of Joel Delaney (Waris Hussein, 1972)

 

The basic premise of Waris Hussein’s The Possession of Joel Delaney – a sadistic killer’s spirit occupying another man’s body – seems pretty old-hat now, but the film is unexpectedly distinctive in a variety of ways. Well-to-do Manhattan divorcee Norah Benson (Shirley MacLaine in an intriguingly uncharacteristic role) struggles to deal with her younger brother Joel Delaney’s erratic behaviour, from randomly attacking a man in his building and subsequently remembering nothing of it, to weird outbursts of childlike exuberance; she discovers that Joel’s now-dead closest friend was a serial killer, the dead man’s mother claiming that her son's malign spirit now occupies Joel’s body (the theme of unstable psychic boundaries extends to initially teasing us to read Norah and Joel as lovers rather than siblings, with several subsequent intimations of excessive closeness). The film’s depiction of an attempted exorcism is quite unnerving in its sheer assault on the senses, although that’s in part at the questionable cost of depicting New York’s Puerto Rican community as entirely and scarily other, an impression bolstered by subsequent scenes in which Norah finds the unfamiliar streets of Spanish Harlem too much to bear, all but throwing money at an off-duty cab driver to get her out of there. On the other hand, the initial portrayal of her entitled life (for example, lounging in bed as she deluges her put-upon housekeeper with instructions and demands) suggests an under-examined decadence complacently making itself vulnerable to malign infiltration. The film’s ending – while showing some signs of truncation, with Michael Hordern’s prominently billed analyst character amounting to nothing, and a few key events taking place off-screen – is again more raw and transgressive and palpably threatening than one might have anticipated; the final twist isn’t so shocking in genre terms, but certainly gains something from, well, from being built around Shirley MacLaine.

L'amour a mort (Alain Resnais, 1984)

 

Alain Resnais’ L’amour a mort is a uniquely unsettling film, stark and stripped down and unerringly focused, seeming by its nature to demand a deeply personal response but forging a rigorous cinematic space that precludes any easy identification or sentimentality. The film starts in the midst of trauma as Simon (Pierre Arditi) suffers an attack and is pronounced dead by the doctor; he comes back to life though, the whole event initially seeming like an amusing embarrassment, and one sparking a sense of liberation as Simon feels free to cut ties with people he doesn’t like and to plan trips around the world. But he becomes increasingly preoccupied with the idea that he did actually die, studying the Bible and talking about how he glimpsed the afterlife, and then he’s gone, with his partner Elisabeth (Sabine Azema) immediately becoming obsessed by thoughts of joining him. The couple’s best friends are married clerics, allowing a certain amount of theological debate, and the film’s closing words assert a belief in resurrection, but the prevailing sense is of a love and accompanying rationalization that lacks any ready explanation or reference points. Resnais closes off all easy points of explication: Simon and Elisabeth have been together for only a few weeks, undercutting any sense of a long-established love; one of the married friends reveals to Elisabeth that she and Simon had an affair years earlier and even entered into an unsuccessful suicide pact (the film daringly suggests that suicide might not be antithetical to religious belief, but rather central to it); despite the film’s preoccupation with endings, Elisabeth works as a biologist developing new plant species and Simon is an archaeologist, both in their different way focusing on origins (which, however, are also inherently forms of closure). Resnais punctuates the film’s mysteries with shots of swirling snow against a black background, or similar evocations of an unknown elsewhere, as if the film itself were aspiring to transcend conventional form and existence, to merge with the unknown.

The Passion of Remembrance (Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, 1986)

 

Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance is a film of sharp contrasts: between documentary and fiction, celebration and criticism, hope and despair, traditionalism and progressivism, heteronormativity and queerness, between submitting to chance and fatalism and aspiring to control, all fascinatingly, often thrillingly interwoven.  The film’s title speaks to the commemoration of the struggle for social and racial justice, and it’s particularly concerned with how the telling of that history, however passionate, has been a predominantly male function, dominated by easily assimilated “iconic” images such as the American athletes giving the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics (a clip included here). It’s particularly biting on under-examined male attitudes toward homosexuality, with the mother and sister defending a gay friend against complacent barbs, and (in one of its most straightforward dramatizations) depicting a couple of policemen going easy on a group of violence-minded youths. At the same time, the film takes time to assert the joyfulness of family and friendship, even in such minor rituals as collectively watching and squabbling over a TV gameshow; it has extended sequences of stirring music and uninhibited dancing (there’s an occasional music-video-like playfulness in its approach to the documentary montages also). And further, Blackwood and Julien’s framing device, with a man and woman conversing and arguing in a desolate landscape (seemingly a representation of a parched history which undervalues the contributions of women to activism and discourse), has the quality of myth, of post-apocalyptic science fiction in which, after all else has been stripped away, the core issues of social and gender equity may be all that remain. The film can feel somewhat stilted and overly formal at times, but the lack of polish feeds the broader sense of direct engagement and authenticity, of a film urgently concerned with immediate needs and crises.

Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973)

 

Claude Faraldo’s Themroc is likely to strike you more as a connected series of assorted provocations than as a meaningfully sustained vision, with an occasional sense of throwing stuff out to see how much sticks: happily, it works better than might have been expected. Broadly summarized, the film follows a blue-collar painter (Michel Piccoli) who one day snaps and starts trashing his apartment, inspiring a few others in adjacent buildings to follow suit, with the authorities largely powerless to intervene; he also has sex with his sister, among others, perhaps engages in cannibalism, and in general arrives at, at least for the short term, an alternative, seemingly satisfying mode of living. The film is set in a version of then present-day France, providing ample footage of drab-looking, bottled-up people stuck in dull and repetitive lives, much that could be either documentary or a Candid Camera-style bending of it, but strangified by the absence of any intelligible dialogue: on the few occasions that people speak at all, they do so in grunts or shrieks or streams of gobbledygook. The casting of Piccoli with his impeccable art-film resonance certainly adds to the intrigue of the film’s implied puzzle, especially when supplemented with that of Beatrice Romand (from Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee!) as the almost perpetually half-naked sister: the two ensure that there’s a strange delicacy at the heart of the chaos. It finds its final flourish in the film’s sweetest sequence, in which they gently seduce a bricklayer (Patrick Dewaere) who’s working on repairing a wall, luring him into joining them in kicking down his own handiwork and in the subsequent sexual ecstasy. Ultimately, the film doesn’t have too much to offer as analysis or diagnosis or social prescription, but the weirdly deliberate specificity of the whole thing easily keeps boredom at bay.

Shy People (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1987)

 

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Shy People is a lumpy concoction, not really satisfying in any respect at all, but generally strange or eventful enough to maintain one’s interest. Diana (a not very effective Jill Clayburgh), a New York-based writer for Cosmopolitan, travels to the Louisiana bayous to seek out some distant relatives, thinking she can get an article of it, with her teenage daughter Grace (Martha Plimpton) tagging along. The family lives up-river, way away from it all (at times evoking a scuzzier version of the French plantation in the extended version of Apocalypse Now) under the stiflingly tight control of matriarch Ruth (Barbara Hershey), who for example keeps one of her kids locked up like an animal; Diana’s arrival coincides with an increase in tensions between the family and local poachers, with events at times approaching Deliverance-level feral, at others edge-of-horror grotesquerie. For all that, it often seems that the movie’s main point is simply to wallow in the contrast between the two women, big hair and clunky jewelry versus never-seen-a-comb and rotting teeth, but the closing stretch seems to be hinting at a form of spiritual exchange or transmigration, with Diana drawing her errant child closer even as Ruth loosens her grasp over her brood; adding to the sense of the quasi-supernatural, Ruth’s husband, who she treats as merely missing even while all the evidence suggests he's long-dead, makes an at least symbolic return, in mysteriously transplanted form. But the co-crediting of the screenplay to Roman Polanski’s frequent collaborator Gerard Brach perhaps leads one to detect something more darkly twisted than Konchalovsky actually delivers, and the closing citation of Revelations (because you are lukewarm – neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth) is more likely to prompt eye-rolling than sage nodding. The film’s more striking moments include the sight of a group of locals sitting at the dock gathered around a battery-operated TV, mesmerized by, of all people, Liberace.

The Girl on the Train (Andre Techine, 2009)

 

Yet another underrated film by the almost brutally undervalued Andre Techine, La fille du RER has been typically summed up in sensationalistic terms: a young woman, Jeanne, falsely claims she was attacked on a train by an anti-Semitic gang, causing a brief national sensation. The opening titles with their marching-to-battle vibe seem to lay the groundwork for something correspondingly confrontational, but from then on, Techine in typical fashion confounds expectations, sowing much mystery as to the film’s basic nature and purpose. Among other things, the incident in question doesn’t even arise until the film’s second half, and hardly seems rooted in what came before it; almost or literally no one who knows Jeanne believes her story and it fairly rapidly falls apart; and Jeanne isn’t even Jewish. Her ex-boyfriend brands her as a compulsive liar, but really only has one example to support that; he blames her for his taking a shady job that lands him in jail, but the film shows how he aggressively pursues her into being with him, her role in the relationship a relatively passive one, almost a blank canvas on which men might project their desires; at the end of the film she’s become a fantasy love object for a much younger boy, a teenager. Despite the title, the defining recurring image isn’t of Jeanne on the train but rather on roller blades, defined by pure movement, shimmering with undefined possibility; it resonates against Techine’s fascination with the mysteries of relationships, ranging here from unrealized hints of a romance between Jeanne’s mother (Catherine Deneuve) and an old beau who’s now a prominent lawyer, to the lawyer’s son and his estranged wife, veering within seconds from hostility to passionate reconciliation. The film carries an additional charge in the wake of the 2023 Hamas attacks and the subsequent spike in protest and debate, particularly in its implied caution against under-analyzed position-taking and tribalism.

The Territory (Raul Ruiz, 1981)

 

In Raul Ruiz’s The Territory, four adults and two kids set off on a guided hiking trip, soon starting to argue with their guide about the apparent lack of progress, parting from him and subsequently finding him dead, their plight worsening so that they ultimately turn to cannibalism, their numbers nevertheless continuing to dwindle. Such a summary may make the film sound like a relatively straightforward narrative, and therefore of course in no way represents the gorgeously strange, disorienting experience of actually watching it. In Ruiz’s singular hands, even the basic details of who these people are, where they are, why things happen the way they do, are elusive; for every moment of apparent clarity, there’s another in which the film takes a startling lurch, introducing new characters out of nowhere, or providing odd tidbits of information which may or may not be seen as “clues” of a kind. Without claiming that these ever yield a corresponding solution, an emphasis on literature in the closing scenes suggests that the territory is in a sense a space of pure creative capacity, eventually devouring the artistically repressed, capable of being traversed only through submission to endeavour and extremity, causing permanent ripples in the afterlives of any who emerge from it. But at various points the film could also be taken as an ecological parable, or (noting the use of such artifacts as maps and masks) as sly genre parody, among almost limitless other possibilities I’m sure. At every point, Ruiz blurs the distinction between objective weakness and sly ambiguity: by conventional standards, for example, the actors’ delivery often feels stilted and uneasy, but this rather supports the sense of a commitment to experimentation that blurs the difference between life and art (even the objective errors within the credits, such as crediting John Paul Getty III as “paul Guetty jnr,” seem playfully strategic).

Curse of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards, 1983)

 

I wrote in the past that Blake Edwards’ fascination with the Pink Panther universe carries the air of a stubborn, doomed quest toward revelation, and the late failure Curse of the Pink Panther fits right in with that assessment. Things kick off with yet another heisting of the titular diamond, but this time executed so cursorily that it seems like mere referential nodding; Clouseau apprehends the perpetrators and abruptly disappears, with a bereft France summoning the world’s best remaining detective to track him down, except that the computer making the selection is secretly reprogrammed by Inspector Dreyfus to instead identify the world’s worst, Chicago officer Clifton Sleigh. As played by Ted Wass, Sleigh is indeed sufficiently inept and bumbling that several characters wonder whether he and Clouseau are related, but he’s otherwise an affectless blank, sheer dead air, which however somewhat fits the obsession with absence; the ending has the world convinced that Clouseau is indeed dead, whereas he’s actually undergone plastic surgery and is now played by Roger Moore (apparently embodying a weird simulacrum of himself, given that Sleigh recognizes him as a famous star). Edwards churns out the set pieces (miraculously-avoided assassination attempts; the mandatory car chase; any amount of falling into swimming pools and the like) with barely a hint of his formal strengths, suggesting a broader displacement and dilution of spirit. And yet, the film’s selective navigation of the Panther universe is weirdly intriguing: it reaches back to the first film to resurrect David Niven’s Charles Litton (erasing the fact that Litton was subsequently played by Christopher Plummer in Return of) and related characters while relegating Graham Stark (who, among other things, was Clouseau’s assistant in A Shot in the Dark) to the role of a waiter, in a scene in which Sleigh’s extended ineptness has the people at one adjacent table hysterically laughing as if watching the movie Edwards wanted this to be, while those at the next table are utterly oblivious, presumably more securely lodged in the fictive universe. All very strange...

Broken Mirrors (Marleen Gorris, 1984)

 

Marleen Gorris’ follow-up to A Question of Silence is very much its companion piece, foregrounding some of the same actors, extending the earlier film’s questioning of the basic structures and assumptions of work and family, carrying a similar sense of a text that can’t be contained by prevailing patriarchal norms and expectations. Broken Mirrors is the more structurally ambitious film, with two intertwining narrative tracks, one located primarily within a brothel, the other tracking a serial kidnapper and killer of women: the juxtaposition of two such cinematically loaded milieus can seem strained at times, the point about contrasting forms of female powerlessness all too obvious even before one of the characters voices it explicitly near the end, but never to the point of negating the film’s overall strengths. It’s at its strongest when observing workplace activity, the women putting up with a wide spectrum of male behaviour (the “nice” clients as tediously transparent as the aggressors), the two strongest characters gradually forming an axis which ultimately allows them to stand up to a transgressing client and then to walk out (it’s telling that the image of a woman holding a gun and firing into one of the titular mirrors made it onto the film’s poster, given how wildly unrepresentative it is of the overall substance). But it’s also plain that their stand, no matter how momentarily brave, leaves the broader picture essentially unaltered (as soon as they leave, the remaining women return to their usual time-killing activities), and while one of the two says she won’t ever be back, the other can go no further than “not if it’s up to me.” The law, in the form of police or otherwise, is entirely absent: as in A Question of Silence, one leaves the film with a sense of a female discourse from which men are excluded by their very nature.

The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)

 

Looked at now, it’s hard to decide whether the ending of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is really even a remotely happy one, as opposed to a sad capitulation. Certainly the two principals (Jack Lemmon’s C. C. Baxter and Shirley MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik) regard each other with genuine-seeming delight in the final shot, and the film pulls off the conceit of the two never even using each other’s first names, let alone kissing or more; the formality and caution makes them an oasis of mutual decency and regard in a mostly crass world. But on the other hand, it’s the kind of device that obscures as much as it reveals character (likewise the snappy Wilder dialogue – “that’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise’), and the film provides precious little evidence that they’re well-matched in any substantive regard (one wonders if Kubelik looks happy mostly because she knows she’ll never flip for the trying-too-hard Baxter as she has in the past for various unsuitable guys, finally giving her a protective upper hand). On the whole, one probably chooses to feel uplifted, if only because the rest of the film is so seeped in the disheartening sexual go-rounds that surround them in the workplace: the sense of a relentlessly predatory culture, of a genuinely callous attitude toward women, certainly holds up, such that the takeaway might merely be that if you find something that’s just half a step above squalidity, you shut up and deal. On the other hand, the portrayal of the office itself, with its dystopia-worthy rows of desks and its stifling hierarchies, is less productive, and at times the movie just seems grumpily dated, as in the scene of Baxter flipping through old movies and sponsor announcements in search of something to watch with his TV dinner, eventually giving up in exasperation. Whether or not one rates Wilder’s film as a masterpiece, it retains its mordant singularity, even if there’s something rather depressing about that too.

Police Python 357 (Alain Corneau, 1976)

 

One might approach Alain Corneau’s Police Python 357 with some trepidation given that seemingly gun-stroking title, an impression bolstered by the fetishistic opening titles, and by the knowledge that while the film casts Yves Montand (an irresistible presence throughout) as Inspector Marc Ferrot, the proud owner of the titular weapon (he even makes his own bullets), it saddles his real-life wife Simone Signoret with the far less dynamic role of a largely bed-ridden old schemer whose husband (Francois Perier, playing Ferrot’s boss Ganay) openly maintains a much younger mistress. Early on, the film may also seem overly reliant on coincidence, as the young woman, Silvia (Stefania Sandrelli) starts seeing Ferrot as well, each man becoming aware that he’s not the only one, but unaware of the other’s identity; when Ganay murders Silvia, the prime suspect is the unidentified man that neighbours and others most recently saw her with, entailing that Ferrot is effectively assigned to track down himself. But Corneau keeps things unpredictable, and slyly subverts expectations throughout, intercutting Sylvia’s murder with a goofy scene of a drunk Ferrot opening the back of a parked truck to release its cargo of pigs, and later having Ferrot (for whom the affair seems to have been a radical deviation from a buttoned-down existence) go to extremes to avoid being in the same room with witnesses whom he knows will recognize him, first by barging into a heated group of strikers and getting himself beaten up, and later by throwing acid onto his own face and permanently disfiguring himself. The finale showcases Ferrot’s personal courage and marksmanship, but any sense of triumph is by then heavily offset by the character’s diminished physical, professional and psychic state; likewise, Montand and Signoret only really have one scene together, an extremely bleak one that subverts any likely expectation for such a star pairing.

Flight to Berlin (Christopher Petit, 1984)

 

Christopher Petit’s Flight to Berlin sustains the brittle surface of a modern-day Euro-noir, starting with a visitor to the city, Susannah, taken from her hotel for police interrogation, the questions apparently based in suspicion of illicit smuggling and connections with murky local figures, then going back in classic style to review the events that lead her there. That’s almost as much as one can say with any certainty about Petit’s film, all that follows being almost endlessly slippery, ambiguous, mutable and playful, drawing (but not too strenuously) on Berlin’s then-unique status as a divided, liminal space. To note just a few points: Susannah, we find out, is indeed fleeing a crime scene, but not the one she’s questioned about; she frequently calls herself by a different name, Marianne (and although English, is played by the Swedish Tusse Silberg); she has a German sister, Julie, with whom she’s seldom ever spent time, and she rapidly sleeps with a man who’s also slept with Julie, and who works for a shady character who turns out to be Julie’s husband (a Frenchman who claims he only married her for a German passport, seeming more interested in being with Susannah). The film at various times evokes almost every major European director of its time in one way or another (the casting alone provides connections with Rivette, Fassbinder, Wenders, Godard and onwards), as well as the looming shadow of classic Hollywood, with Eddie Constantine showing up as himself, oozing presence and charisma and opining along the way that by going into politics Ronald Reagan ruined a perfectly good career in B-Westerns. Ultimately, the film offers no resolution, perhaps ending where it might have begun, indeed defined largely by a sense of flight, of storytelling and reinvention, both of its protagonist and of the unstable city around her.

Passe ton bac d’abord (Maurice Pialat, 1977)

 

Maurice Pialat’s Passe ton bac d’abord looks at a loosely-constituted group of young people in the dead-end French town of Lens, adults in some ways (they drink and smoke and are sexually active) but not yet in others (some are still in school, few if any are economically self-sufficient). The film starts and ends in philosophy class, the teacher instructing the students on the necessity to free one’s mind from preconceptions, an admonition hopelessly at odds with a reality defined by lack of economic and cultural opportunity, by deadening repetition, by a peer group that makes major life decisions such as marriage or pregnancy on the basis of entirely short-term calculations. Of course, many films have covered such territory, but as always, Pialat’s powers of vision and empathy give his work an almost unnerving connective power. The film certainly feels naturalistic and drawn from life, but is also muscularly shaped and balanced, the mundane central realities offset with a sense of possibilities around the edges. The most striking of these is perhaps the late arrival of a Rolls-Royce, its passage through the streets given quite a build-up, turning out to contain two model agency representatives who want to offer one of the girls a contract; whether or not the opportunity is worth pursuing, the broader point is that the parents dismiss the two out of hand without even a minimum amount of due diligence regarding what’s being offered and where it might lead. As a different kind of example of the film’s acuity: during a trip to the coast, one of the group meets a girl from Paris who in her unforced way embodies the greater inner and outer resources that they lack; he has sex with her (at her initiation) and later shows off to the others the exotic undergarment that he took from her, but the scene is more poignant than triumphant, an embodiment of distances that can only momentarily be traversed.

Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)

 

Hal Ashby’s Being There remains famous for its central conceit, that a developmentally-challenged middle-aged gardener who knows almost nothing of the real world might fall into the orbit of rich and powerful people who take his simplicity as a sign of serene analytical intelligence, such that he may even be destined for the Oval Office. The notion no doubt carries a certain dreamy appeal, but even allowing for the inevitable concisions and conventions of movie narrative, the film can only work at all by engaging in rampant fakery, for example by boiling down conversations and events which would spread over hours into a minute or two, or by having Chance start off in one improbably rarified high-end environment and then, once he’s expelled from there, luck out within a day into one that’s even more so. The film has its prophetic aspects in that a rampant idiot did indeed ascend to the Presidency in recent years, except that the angry, bitter, wrecking-ball reality of what we’re still living through makes Ashby’s benign conception seem even more irrelevant than it did at the time. Even Chance’s accidental wisdom, his supposed message of sticking it out through economic fall and winter in anticipation of the inevitable upturn of spring and summer, amounts to no more than counseled complacency (no doubt the burden of the fallow seasons wouldn’t fall too heavily on the plush lives depicted here). The film sustains a thin veneer of tastefulness, and Peter Sellers does as well with the unplayable character as can be imagined, but any assessment of this as an important or meaningful film must be rooted in Chance-level misapprehension. The film’s losers include Shirley MacLaine’s character Eve, defined as having almost no attributes other than that of being a rich man’s younger wife, distastefully falling for and offering herself to Chance within a few days of meeting him.

In the Dust of the Stars (Gottfried Kolditz, 1976)

 

The plot of Gottfried Kolditz’s In the Dust of the Stars could have been plucked straight from episodic television: a spaceship of six crew members (four of them women, including the commander) touches down on an unknown planet in response to a distress call, only for their hosts to claim it was sent by accident; the crew laps up the local hospitality while preparing to depart, but then discovers that the call came from the planet’s native inhabitants, now oppressed and forced underground to mine a rare mineral. Viewed in the present day, the film’s allegorical aspects benefit hugely from the clear physical resemblance of the oppressors’ leader to Vladimir Putin (although they have less in common behaviorally); that aside, it’s rather hard to gauge how seriously to take the film. It often lacks even basic plausibility (for example, the crew members put themselves immediately in the hands of the planet-dwellers, including ingesting whatever’s offered to them, without taking even minimal precautions) but the prevailing earnestness doesn’t suggest (despite various mostly labored comedic touches) a parody or jape, and the overall thrust of the narrative is fairly politicized. But then it provides an array of peculiar visual flourishes, including the penchant of the local women for dancing in skimpily diaphanous outings (the movie seems well-resourced in some respects, but some of the special effects and other trappings are distinctly rickety), and the Putin character’s mixing-board-like toy at which he sits and makes music (again with accompanying dancers always on call) while his giant pet snake slithers around. The film’s ideological footprint is somewhat confused, broadly aligning itself with the resistance to the colonial occupiers, but seeming far more intrigued by the latter; it crafts its villains far more colourfully than its heroes, with the six cosmonauts having largely interchangeably non-descript personalities (one of them standing out only by virtue of an extended shower scene).  

The Disappearance (Stuart Cooper, 1977)

 

At the time of writing, there are two versions of Stuart Cooper’s The Disappearance easily available online, one of them a shorter, linear cut with almost unwatchably dark image quality, the other longer and more impressionistic, but with opening and closing credits missing; I only watched a few minutes of the former for comparison, enough to reveal intriguing small differences such as an assassination victim who cries out “Don’t do it” before he’s killed, but is silent in the second version. The multiplicity of versions and details enhances the evasively prickly nature of Cooper’s film, one built around basically familiar narrative ingredients, but with most points of certainty removed: although the title seems to refer specifically to the sudden disappearance of the protagonist’s wife, the film is full of sudden absences and strangely brief appearances (the movie has a starry sounding cast including John Hurt and Christopher Plummer, but most only show up for one or two scenes). Donald Sutherland’s Montreal-based assassin Jay Mallory is a perfect focal point, unreadably spiky and short-tempered at times, completely charming when the situation demands it: he takes a job in Britain that he doesn’t want, apparently because it allows an opportunity to follow a lead on his wife’s location, and it’s no surprise of course when he finds a link between the disappearance he’s investigating and the one he’s being paid to effect. If that’s all broadly predictable, the treatment is consistently intriguing and expansive, always suggesting greater mysteries and ambiguities, all the way to the final seconds which introduce yet another unexplained disappearance of sorts. A peculiar sequence has Sutherland and Hurt encountering a couple of roadside bandits, seemingly unrelated to anything else in the film; one of the two criminals is apparently played by Norman Eshley, the sailor in Welles’ The Immortal Story, although he doesn’t receive a single identifying close-up here, perhaps the saddest of all the film’s erasures.