La vie revee (Mireille Dansereau, 1972)

 

Early on in Mireille Dansereau’s pioneering La vie revee, two young artistically-inclined women, Isabelle and Virginie, meet in a workplace washroom, exchange a few remarks about make-up and jewelry, and within moments of screen time become all but inseparable friends, summing up the film’s still-striking confidence and lightness of touch. They start to talk about bringing up a child together, and Isabelle has a father in mind, an older married man with whom she says she’s in love; eventually she and he get together and it’s a big letdown, but the friends rapidly realize that the release from their mythic three-corner structure (evoked in some of the film’s many brief fantasy sequences) opens up new possibilities, ending the film on a celebratory note. Among much else, the movie energetically serves as a fascinating Montreal time capsule, from recognizable landmarks to an economically quite wide-ranging survey of residential streets and neighbourhoods (there’s only one English-speaking character in the film, and pointedly he’s the man who fires Isabelle); there are multiple references to and visual hints of past family traumas, and almost every issue of the day (Quebec separation, abortion, woman’s equality) gets a passing mention. One rather regrets the ending, both because it doesn’t seem necessary for the film to be over yet (it’s actually too short!) and because the closing sense of liberation manifests itself in tearing down all the self-generated artwork decorating the apartment, as if it had been all along a manifestation of entrapment and limitation rather than meaningful expression (not an invalid idea, but one seeming to warrant more exploration, if that’s the intention). But on the other hand, the film retains a beguiling degree of mystery, contrasting an easygoing approach to female nudity with a refusal to explicitly define the parameters and potential limits of Isabelle and Virginie’s relationship.

The Man who Loved Women (Blake Edwards, 1983)

 

It’s easy enough to take shots at Blake Edwards’ The Man who Loved Women, starting with that not-quite-fitting title, for which possible replacements range from The Man who Had Sex on the Brain to (more intriguingly) The Man who Wasn’t that Comfortable Around Other Men. Certainly the stated premise that women obtained something rare and cherishable from their interactions with the recently deceased sculptor David Fowler (Burt Reynolds) doesn’t seem borne out by anything in the flashback-structured film, although that leads to one of its many points of low-key interest - David’s soft-spoken recessiveness, how he’s the least wolfish of compulsive predators. As the narrative begins he's stifled by indecision and uncertainty, a state visualized in his staring impotently at a block of granite, unable to get to work; Fowler’s home is almost stiflingly opulent, as are many of the movie’s settings, suggesting a stultifying cocoon of privilege and separation. And Edwards’ recurring interest in psychoanalysis runs wild here: his own analyst Milton Wexler is one of the credited scriptwriters; the film is narrated (adding a further layer of distance) by Fowler’s analyst, played by Julie Andrews, with many scenes taking place in her office, and the breakthrough that allows him to get back to work arriving when he suddenly starts to think of her in sexual terms. As always though, Andrews’ vibe is far more motherly than seductive, another aspect of the film’s recurring sense of displacement (whatever woman this man loves, it never quite seems to be the one he’s with): the most extended sequence has him relentlessly pursued by a reckless woman he barely seems even to like (Kim Basinger), her machinations causing him to tangle disastrously with a tube of Krazy Glue, ending up with one hand stuck to his lips and the other to her little dog, strangified to the point of barely being viable as a functioning human, let alone a lover.

The Hunters (Theo Angelopoulos, 1977)

 

At times, Theo Angelopoulos’ The Hunters weirdly evokes Luis Bunuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, as a central group of characters submits to a surreal series of events and time shifts, near the end even being lined up and shot, before the film revives them and resets to an earlier point. If nothing else, the comparison underlines Angelopoulos’ relative withholding of cinematic pleasure (although the movie does have its moments of deadpan farce): his mastery of long, complexly orchestrated takes is second to none, but seldom deployed here for the sake of conventional pictorial beauty (a few scenes of red-sailed boats stand out as almost the sole exception) – even the film’s various musical sequences feel dour and joyless. That’s appropriate though for a film that grapples with Greece’s post-war history of violence and turbulence, sometimes conveyed relatively straightforwardly (such as its depiction of the influx of American Marshall Plan aid and the ensuing economic optimism), at other times barely explained and thus largely impenetrable (at least to an outsider, at least at first viewing). Angelopoulos intensifies the sense of witnessing and spectatorship through his austere approach to performance, his characters moving in a kind of formation, with little sense of spontaneity (at its most extreme making them seem as little more than programmed zombies, which would however carry its own statement about the toll on the individual) The notional plot has the titular hunters finding a dead body in the snow and bringing it back to town for investigation, the corpse lying in the open through scene after scene as individuals provide their testimony (typically in the form of a theatrical performance or other non-naturalistic set-piece), people regularly remarking on how fresh the blood appears, another recurring reminder of the cost of political and social instability and the consequent disruptions and traumas.     

Les photos d'Alix (Jean Eustache, 1982)

 

In Jean Eustache’s captivating Les photos d’Alix, the real-life photographer Alix Clio-Roubard calmly talks the director’s son Boris through a series of her photographs, in some cases emphasizing technical matters, in others the nature of the underlying memory or personal connection, the film allowing both us and Boris time to absorb her explanation before moving on to the next; it gradually dawns on you that what she’s saying no longer bears any relationship to the picture she’s addressing, that she’s pointing out people and objects and effects that plainly aren’t there. The film is in a certain sense an extended joke, and as such works best first-time round: the viewer starts to register the difficulty of relating her words to the image before us, but in the absence of any signal to the contrary likely attributes the shortfall to his or her own deficiencies, perhaps a lack of concentration or an insufficiently refined aesthetic sensibility. Even as the film’s scheme becomes clear, it’s tempting to search for a rational explanation, that sound and image have somehow become decoupled: Alix’s explanations remain so calmly persuasive that one may see the photos she’s describing as clearly as the ones before our eyes, if not more so. The concept wouldn’t work so well if Alix’s photos weren’t indeed so beguiling, so worthy of being contemplated and curated (even if not in the actual way that she does it); Boris’s regular-guy-in-an-ugly-sweater vibe providing an ideally unprepossessing counterpart. But the film feels retrospectively seeped in tragedy: the director committed suicide not long after its completion (and before its 1982 Cesar win for best short film), and Clio-Roubaud died of a pulmonary embolism in 1983, at the age of just 31, a fact that makes the film seem even more ephemeral and elusive and seeped in transient illusion.