tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57185929342982632712024-03-17T20:31:11.809-04:00Toronto Movie Guytorontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.comBlogger967125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-41191469558492862102024-03-13T05:16:00.000-04:002024-03-13T05:16:27.718-04:00The Girl on the Train (Andre Techine, 2009)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhm2VnAp69rq31Vd78UczTmDbrwfmgu-vskRKMZX6pAXaBdPWAZNTrGQTH0Z5PPf1QPY781w-nLY4nn_Bt6uy9KzdOzQS3lxLnHh0MWGMcJOaV0Zky_dWTFAv6MTSR4SJ9B6Z5ATI4cZX8v__Vr89RkfAHdx6kNCGgy5RrH96psXLhLhMmOy-y2DJgBbiA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="273" data-original-width="184" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhm2VnAp69rq31Vd78UczTmDbrwfmgu-vskRKMZX6pAXaBdPWAZNTrGQTH0Z5PPf1QPY781w-nLY4nn_Bt6uy9KzdOzQS3lxLnHh0MWGMcJOaV0Zky_dWTFAv6MTSR4SJ9B6Z5ATI4cZX8v__Vr89RkfAHdx6kNCGgy5RrH96psXLhLhMmOy-y2DJgBbiA" width="162" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Yet another underrated film by the almost brutally
undervalued Andre Techine, <i>La fille du RER</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-37794125821596529262024-03-05T22:23:00.000-05:002024-03-05T22:23:23.009-05:00The Territory (Raul Ruiz, 1981)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRsMx2qZeay624Dlv-oCD3CW4grr2vKGj7mIUU6dA9zvy2wy7N68ugXgPsK0qebvFwWseqYaW2iALaXGbtIiUgW88mmzArI-uPmJoZWI--R5fk43ROn4bafzNaceRaYIv3U8E3dnKiyYRfYaaiGZXuSgHW-2DJA_0wYNiNc0sNLI2FJ1MW_7mULgEPjCA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="247" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRsMx2qZeay624Dlv-oCD3CW4grr2vKGj7mIUU6dA9zvy2wy7N68ugXgPsK0qebvFwWseqYaW2iALaXGbtIiUgW88mmzArI-uPmJoZWI--R5fk43ROn4bafzNaceRaYIv3U8E3dnKiyYRfYaaiGZXuSgHW-2DJA_0wYNiNc0sNLI2FJ1MW_7mULgEPjCA" width="173" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="PT-BR" style="mso-ansi-language: PT-BR;">In Raul
Ruiz’s <i>The Territory</i>, 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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-17766050897956646702024-02-27T11:12:00.004-05:002024-02-27T11:12:59.995-05:00Curse of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards, 1983)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjMIYvvyrFWy5E_jR0-ibVYF-zGnrtRdRsydiWYExoQA9Nm8Bja8FrXSHSkolBRMjC-_F61FToh7KYbFfOJkMPpul_CKzy9hxVM7QuL4ZWAuJMly8EaYC5gaN4lHuo8c-yyY4piHzq6PSdVLwJT5Ob_ogjLwrE3JjUWvGTylil9Fu61eIiE6FRWqB8CFkg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="459" data-original-width="306" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjMIYvvyrFWy5E_jR0-ibVYF-zGnrtRdRsydiWYExoQA9Nm8Bja8FrXSHSkolBRMjC-_F61FToh7KYbFfOJkMPpul_CKzy9hxVM7QuL4ZWAuJMly8EaYC5gaN4lHuo8c-yyY4piHzq6PSdVLwJT5Ob_ogjLwrE3JjUWvGTylil9Fu61eIiE6FRWqB8CFkg" width="160" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>Curse of the Pink Panther</i> 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 <i>Return of</i>) and related characters while
relegating Graham Stark (who, among other things, was Clouseau’s assistant in <i>A
Shot in the Dark)</i> 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...<o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-90243401053156625182024-02-22T05:16:00.000-05:002024-02-22T05:16:05.944-05:00Broken Mirrors (Marleen Gorris, 1984)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhGHY-nXnQis9rH_VCv0sUKvY2Nj1iBBTPlFq8oov4VqZ2KItO-DsluFfFAcJn9jzGiKxTeaGGfYslX-d3O0dljXI3J3JOkvUKcMfAizPXVE7G1mliVFSX01Gk8yM-gQnmb3mlksqem8m-0U9kF2XcjyCi_mvExN-GFIdG2LQlXpjevXtSuyB8_Ppyc7og" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="218" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhGHY-nXnQis9rH_VCv0sUKvY2Nj1iBBTPlFq8oov4VqZ2KItO-DsluFfFAcJn9jzGiKxTeaGGfYslX-d3O0dljXI3J3JOkvUKcMfAizPXVE7G1mliVFSX01Gk8yM-gQnmb3mlksqem8m-0U9kF2XcjyCi_mvExN-GFIdG2LQlXpjevXtSuyB8_Ppyc7og" width="153" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Marleen Gorris’ follow-up to <i>A Question of
Silence</i> 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. <i>Broken Mirrors</i>
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 <i>A Question of Silence</i>, one leaves
the film with a sense of a female discourse from which men are excluded by
their very nature. <o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-48804327456456810182024-02-14T04:25:00.002-05:002024-02-14T04:25:48.341-05:00The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh8F-pHURHf5Gjus8-t1YvcF6wSa7IfF_tzXJ-4uUh5n_dFkPa3qBMjPgpvcpAsQy7bE1BF_xLAPS-_r0lGp3MJQkBCJjaEGXmlTtN1Q3kso7NXrf--eiiOEIgu0PUmwhX6LoLBffsC9M2ypbsnVJcSMXcK4_vNNebnWdCn-nkIHb1aOvYGwi91Aw6Mgg0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="457" data-original-width="297" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh8F-pHURHf5Gjus8-t1YvcF6wSa7IfF_tzXJ-4uUh5n_dFkPa3qBMjPgpvcpAsQy7bE1BF_xLAPS-_r0lGp3MJQkBCJjaEGXmlTtN1Q3kso7NXrf--eiiOEIgu0PUmwhX6LoLBffsC9M2ypbsnVJcSMXcK4_vNNebnWdCn-nkIHb1aOvYGwi91Aw6Mgg0" width="156" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Looked at now, it’s hard to decide whether the ending of
Billy Wilder’s <i>The Apartment</i> 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.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-70327003822070413432024-02-07T07:58:00.000-05:002024-02-07T07:58:44.254-05:00Police Python 357 (Alain Corneau, 1976)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgIEcg5RsDU5mipMWyQpi3ZxhpSbsNl_AUaYg605lxKQ3jqlnjbafAq41YobJ5EVYR67DrHK6Rhbd1rZrp9ZaUUAjLt5slCcLxqQgAG0doOzr4-h4fZGhj8BHrjgHJKCrNqj4UK44SYvi3WGYULY-URR20xTt6YhZSMkaxiHkF5qphJEF6MK1Jxp5-GFnQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="446" data-original-width="353" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgIEcg5RsDU5mipMWyQpi3ZxhpSbsNl_AUaYg605lxKQ3jqlnjbafAq41YobJ5EVYR67DrHK6Rhbd1rZrp9ZaUUAjLt5slCcLxqQgAG0doOzr4-h4fZGhj8BHrjgHJKCrNqj4UK44SYvi3WGYULY-URR20xTt6YhZSMkaxiHkF5qphJEF6MK1Jxp5-GFnQ" width="190" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">One might approach Alain Corneau’s <i>Police Python 357</i>
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.<o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-54858410191051284162024-01-31T04:30:00.000-05:002024-01-31T04:30:29.126-05:00Flight to Berlin (Christopher Petit, 1984)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjA3-p1BHsKIJIkL0JPsjrIKL00edXpspykfgyKs30N4BLMLcCJ--MtgfWGfoNTmq6Ef3MObpXD5wDEw8Gd8knTxe_AjZMrqphO7hAvAhgWDRoZMyc2gV7ma8Mq4f2AMorztC3eBZexFUHWdGUXWuIhkKE-cCuaNCXkJYtBEV9z8npwt3dl_MK5HnWnjsU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="517" data-original-width="271" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjA3-p1BHsKIJIkL0JPsjrIKL00edXpspykfgyKs30N4BLMLcCJ--MtgfWGfoNTmq6Ef3MObpXD5wDEw8Gd8knTxe_AjZMrqphO7hAvAhgWDRoZMyc2gV7ma8Mq4f2AMorztC3eBZexFUHWdGUXWuIhkKE-cCuaNCXkJYtBEV9z8npwt3dl_MK5HnWnjsU" width="126" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Christopher Petit’s <i>Flight to Berlin</i>
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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-27628155530420300922024-01-24T15:17:00.000-05:002024-01-24T15:17:15.738-05:00Passe ton bac d’abord (Maurice Pialat, 1977)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEixNnFxWzZLHvlbbrJdi0aLBomyKdY3guwi4P9Ji3tkqHg2TJfxc8oQ9BFfp7ILcjLUPPuAmEEmEH_IM25Dlm5UDFQeLxHGssLwjyF2FVWFv0GBrmRBmUOINsnsX-WP9GQOIYfGP2GZRIKhwO0Y4a7Wfa-EVoeGVP4Akr7uA8bu2EGupr6VgP0AS-tDzf0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="764" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEixNnFxWzZLHvlbbrJdi0aLBomyKdY3guwi4P9Ji3tkqHg2TJfxc8oQ9BFfp7ILcjLUPPuAmEEmEH_IM25Dlm5UDFQeLxHGssLwjyF2FVWFv0GBrmRBmUOINsnsX-WP9GQOIYfGP2GZRIKhwO0Y4a7Wfa-EVoeGVP4Akr7uA8bu2EGupr6VgP0AS-tDzf0" width="183" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Maurice Pialat’s <i>Passe ton bac d’abord</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-21692664060754631292024-01-17T22:47:00.000-05:002024-01-17T22:47:09.506-05:00Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhSF1pHgv6MLHqppFs9Z_3bRU-TZTGj_0EkvNi2ZzTziWfUuZUVGNfvyTr4Zd8PFb7bvNPxsu2kGQAlX8gU3gosUR25WUcpj-e8NEgeDC0frYbHEgYEZkx_-9wKQjhlZX8TuK0OHcmiFEhfP-52msCUPoTUV5L4V6IWn4yrvPvp9_P94nleB9uPy5lza8g" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="297" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhSF1pHgv6MLHqppFs9Z_3bRU-TZTGj_0EkvNi2ZzTziWfUuZUVGNfvyTr4Zd8PFb7bvNPxsu2kGQAlX8gU3gosUR25WUcpj-e8NEgeDC0frYbHEgYEZkx_-9wKQjhlZX8TuK0OHcmiFEhfP-52msCUPoTUV5L4V6IWn4yrvPvp9_P94nleB9uPy5lza8g" width="156" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal">Hal Ashby’s <i>Being There</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-35139132991901935642024-01-12T04:57:00.000-05:002024-01-12T04:57:04.048-05:00In the Dust of the Stars (Gottfried Kolditz, 1976)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjgw3_X5QUTKp4RoPF8HeFL6FnPvX3gP-W0lnsvcPp12vIVYbJy0PSZB0KG6mMgGKuQyqHmLuU8gOgg-VWicHctvQrbgG1r3937Abr3VOQJlHxjz5u32lWQOwSujlEhcT9JDFbPXCl9SNhtu_sVQkJ2a3l0CydHmvkDIf-wa3Nk_PtxkE0lRcxbsCNvjPI" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="347" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjgw3_X5QUTKp4RoPF8HeFL6FnPvX3gP-W0lnsvcPp12vIVYbJy0PSZB0KG6mMgGKuQyqHmLuU8gOgg-VWicHctvQrbgG1r3937Abr3VOQJlHxjz5u32lWQOwSujlEhcT9JDFbPXCl9SNhtu_sVQkJ2a3l0CydHmvkDIf-wa3Nk_PtxkE0lRcxbsCNvjPI" width="167" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The plot of Gottfried Kolditz’s <i>In the
Dust of the Stars</i> 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). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-33089255232579554472024-01-05T01:05:00.000-05:002024-01-05T01:05:16.705-05:00The Disappearance (Stuart Cooper, 1977)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVvmKX6t6p5Hx5xAzxmoY-dG0JHvM7ouqA38NP4spWI-biC2lkfPnfXwqtmyYM2wSPt11i4HhaX4J3E5vaI997fAqrfVhGponUe112VXfnxC8WEZyjGfwPrYvGurBvOPHshWHc8ERGMQdCheSXRC42xNR4Eq-eMJo7d0sPfYZlrQhNmdR3i4nvkw423lo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="297" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVvmKX6t6p5Hx5xAzxmoY-dG0JHvM7ouqA38NP4spWI-biC2lkfPnfXwqtmyYM2wSPt11i4HhaX4J3E5vaI997fAqrfVhGponUe112VXfnxC8WEZyjGfwPrYvGurBvOPHshWHc8ERGMQdCheSXRC42xNR4Eq-eMJo7d0sPfYZlrQhNmdR3i4nvkw423lo" width="160" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">At the time of writing, there are two versions of Stuart
Cooper’s <i>The Disappearance</i> 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’ <i>The Immortal Story</i>, although he doesn’t
receive a single identifying close-up here, perhaps the saddest of all the film’s
erasures. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-18127548580338677462023-12-27T04:14:00.000-05:002023-12-27T04:14:17.965-05:00Love is a Funny Thing (Claude Lelouch, 1969)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjV1-g0EUHFZJJIeKD5FjF_M9daOweg-pZppnFR5qOO68LGaC54F5aRvgsBywUqcVchyk-xw9KoPXVXnBtARXo7Iely9wHHj4A8mPKXeWwBWxVUA2kuwFRONAeIozXVZJIDwnOLv37Lygfloj0CHRuijWeo7f2ObFQfpkyXxX708nyI2hvqhhJ9QCpti2Y" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="239" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjV1-g0EUHFZJJIeKD5FjF_M9daOweg-pZppnFR5qOO68LGaC54F5aRvgsBywUqcVchyk-xw9KoPXVXnBtARXo7Iely9wHHj4A8mPKXeWwBWxVUA2kuwFRONAeIozXVZJIDwnOLv37Lygfloj0CHRuijWeo7f2ObFQfpkyXxX708nyI2hvqhhJ9QCpti2Y" width="168" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Even at their sappiest, Claude Lelouch’s films are usually
more eccentrically ambitious and personal than his reputation often acknowledges; the 1969 <i>Love is a Funny Thing</i> is no exception. Henri (Jean-Paul
Belmondo) and Francoise (Annie Girardot) are both working on the same
American-shot movie, as composer and actress respectively; they hook up and take
off on an improvised road trip, with the film intriguingly eliding both the
details of the initial seduction and most of the key decision points
thereafter, concentrating instead on momentary experience and engagement. This
allows a quasi-pre-Herzogian cavalcade of American oddities, including a Western
shoot-out enactment (Lelouch thoughtfully lets the scene run long enough for
each participant to be acknowledged and to take a bow), the ability to walk
into a gun store and make a purchase using travelers cheques, and the all-round
kookiness of Las Vegas (where the food may be lousy, but at least there’s a
trapeze act to distract you from it, or failing that, Pat Boone with special
guests Sonny and Cher). The two return to Europe and to their spouses with the
idea of meeting up again later, but their connection was all too obviously dependent
on a particular set of circumstances, and the film ends in absence and separation
(the original title, <i>Un homme qui me plait,</i> better reflects that the story
belongs more to her than to him). It’s a shame that a viewer is most likely to
encounter the film in a dubbed English version which flattens the sense of
language and broader cultural differences (although the person who dubs
Girardot does so with some delicacy, reflecting the actress’s reticent presence),
but it’s still worthwhile viewing, with the bonus of a very young Farrah
Fawcett, cast in the early scenes in a miserable have-I-got-a-girl-for-you
role, at the mercy of Belmondo at his most offputtingly leering and predatory.<o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-29993775209189114762023-12-20T07:57:00.003-05:002023-12-20T07:57:39.730-05:00Q Planes (Tim Whelan, 1939)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgjjVQ_cY8OQdeRGl_xsZP_FrRi-X8lZD0GW3khcvU8Ia2D5Bl2kE6rEfTcffQRaHm0GtXHaVXHUv3ymxUC_yFMLoz5UW0KJ4n3teOdjy1KUl8ZOftN9EIf9OOCZwPn6s-BtB8S0XmHz9_tN_K9wVvo8v0rvYMjnCPrEJvLDNsTIVnMUzCK0teUKcw8QTc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="190" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgjjVQ_cY8OQdeRGl_xsZP_FrRi-X8lZD0GW3khcvU8Ia2D5Bl2kE6rEfTcffQRaHm0GtXHaVXHUv3ymxUC_yFMLoz5UW0KJ4n3teOdjy1KUl8ZOftN9EIf9OOCZwPn6s-BtB8S0XmHz9_tN_K9wVvo8v0rvYMjnCPrEJvLDNsTIVnMUzCK0teUKcw8QTc" width="165" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Tim Whelan’s <i>Q Planes</i> makes for fun
viewing, especially perhaps for the retrospective hints of a Bond-like franchise
in formation, with Ralph Richardson’s secret service agent Hammond quipping his
way through fraught situations, battling a foreign power equipped with
cutting-edge technology in the service of malign dreams of dominance. Pursuing
a theory about a series of recent supposedly unconnected accidents, Hammond embeds
himself inside a airplane manufacturer, </span>soon crossing paths with test pilot McVane (Laurence Olivier, a mostly workmanlike presence here) who shares his suspicions; the next test flight promptly
goes missing, and we see it brought down by a device located on a nondescript-looking
industrial ship, which scoops up the plane and imprisons the crew. The scheming foreign power isn’t specifically
identified, but audiences of the time would obviously have had little problem
filling in the blank; the film focuses just as much on treachery from within
though, suggesting an environment of multi-faceted, destabilizing threat. The
country’s best safeguard against this, it implicitly posits, is to put one’s trust
in the grand old establishment: the film is fairly drenched in class-based
privilege, with Hammond and his journalist sister (Valerie Hobson), who also
sneaks her way into the plant in pursuit of a story (and of course soon has a
thing going with McVane) scything their way through the world with an innate
moneyed confidence, exhibiting the unwavering good humour of those for whom
things always work out (Olivier’s McVane by comparison often seethes with resentment,
feeling himself hard done by, exhibiting few of the same social skills). A
running gag has Hammond continually phoning a woman to postpone his latest date
with her, often when she’s virtually out the door already, never letting her
get a word in; like other aspects of the film, it would fall flat if not for
Richardson’s superb force-of-nature timing.</p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-61959121616873065742023-12-13T16:05:00.000-05:002023-12-13T16:05:37.845-05:00Crime of Love (Luigi Comencini, 1974)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVRzHjv5tpJGRQXqM45vls6k7fvKBLg6ReGasjCHnFfbdLEplu8bh947yWwMGbX4A09DxYzpNrd_N3w0WfJzpS8w6qjju1eKsdsGendMuGJl21St_gqHzeH7vPjV_tqZhJzTMWwu8QcNi_d7dOE6IKC5tfh-n1neMRhKo80lVPaJgtpJwhoEX_kbAd6AQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="395" data-original-width="281" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVRzHjv5tpJGRQXqM45vls6k7fvKBLg6ReGasjCHnFfbdLEplu8bh947yWwMGbX4A09DxYzpNrd_N3w0WfJzpS8w6qjju1eKsdsGendMuGJl21St_gqHzeH7vPjV_tqZhJzTMWwu8QcNi_d7dOE6IKC5tfh-n1neMRhKo80lVPaJgtpJwhoEX_kbAd6AQ" width="171" /></a></div><br />Luigi Comencini’s unhelpfully titled <i>Crime
of Love</i> is single-minded to a fault, but makes a walloping cumulative
impact, rooted in fine personal and social detail. Nullo and Carmela (Giuliano
Gemma and Stefania Sandrelli) both work at an emblematically awful Milanese factory,
its employees mired in mind-numbingly repetitive tasks while often enveloped in
toxic fumes; the mutual attraction is plain, but held back by Carmela’s
mercurial nature, based in a mixture of strategy and instinct and in the
inherent impossibility of her situation. She’s from Sicily, living with the
rest of her family in a single room seemingly filled mainly with beds; Nullo’s home
in a more modern building, although also shared with parents and siblings,
appears luxurious by comparison (plastic covering still on the couch; a fish
tank); he’s an anarchist who rejects the idea of a church wedding whereas she
can’t imagine anything else. And yet, she frequently demonstrates the inclination
and capacity to be freer and more self-defined: she swings from not wanting him
to enter her house because she’s there alone to being the one who shortly afterwards
initiates sex (and mentions that she’s been on the pill ever since they met);
she sets the tone and direction of things far more than he does, to his
perpetual bemusement it seems. The film sometimes evokes Antonioni, depicting a
world from which one could only possibly feel alienated (when she talks about
wanting to go somewhere sunny, Nullo takes her to a swimming spot of his youth,
now a polluted cesspit surrounded by garbage and dead birds), but Comencini’s intentions
are more straightforward, with Carmela ultimately a victim of just about everything
there is to be a victim of (when her brother beats her up for coming home late
and gives her a black eye, she tells people that Nullo did it, because that
seems more respectable, and indeed earns him praise from some co-workers). The
film ends on a startling act of protest, but one that barely registers, compared
to the persuasively draining chronicle that precedes it.<p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-35725531908567014662023-12-06T08:14:00.000-05:002023-12-06T08:14:07.485-05:00One Mile from Heaven (Allan Dwan, 1937)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYUskfCPrLGIcX56jsa3qsAJ2pWRiXcUlk76HRwX8PZNM0jD57Oanjo4yhTNmuH33umUK2KzSb6mGt-tvqwOZ3y7_8wtAtnIXPFgDSZV1QVfevg_Qs1RKh0HlmVDdts8jo7AmMiBv1814wVq9E08XgrzsLrhsY0b-SL7KBjfiOSgqp_wxaxGGLNcl_gzc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="183" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYUskfCPrLGIcX56jsa3qsAJ2pWRiXcUlk76HRwX8PZNM0jD57Oanjo4yhTNmuH33umUK2KzSb6mGt-tvqwOZ3y7_8wtAtnIXPFgDSZV1QVfevg_Qs1RKh0HlmVDdts8jo7AmMiBv1814wVq9E08XgrzsLrhsY0b-SL7KBjfiOSgqp_wxaxGGLNcl_gzc" width="160" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times",serif;">About as eventfully varied
as any 67-minute movie you’ll ever see, Allan Dwan’s <i>One Mile from Heaven </i>has
Claire Trevor as Tex, a reporter who takes an unplanned trip to Harlem and then
starts fixating on Sunny, the Shirley Temple-lookalike daughter of Flora, a
Black mother (Fredi Washington). Tex instigates a juvenile court proceeding to
investigate Sunny’s parentage, and the newspaper coverage of the case triggers
a long-dormant history involving a convict father and a now well-connected
mother who believed her child to be dead. The film is a fascinating melange of the
progressive and patronizing: to take just a couple of examples, the Black community
exhibits a distinct lack of rancour toward Tex’s meddling, accepting her
actions mainly as the natural excesses of a newspaper woman and downplaying the obvious
element of race-based prurience; the narrative ultimately works its way to a
sort of proposed co-parenting arrangement, but one in which Flora will plainly
only be marginalized over time, given the vast disparity in economic power and
social connection. The film generally views Black culture in terms of prettified
otherness: the depiction of Harlem, with its teeming streets and hoards of kids
running outside to watch the dancing neighbourhood policeman (Bill Robinson), seems
to place it as close to toytown as to heaven (Washington’s inherent dignity and
gravity make her a general exception to such trivialization). Still, Dwan
avoids the worst potential pitfalls, and at times appears to be grasping for
something genuinely and idealistically radical; Robinson’s dance numbers are
valuable on their own terms, and if it’s hard to see his persona as that of a
beat cop, it's notable that he’s not merely a comic relief, but is treated as a
credible and considerate moderating presence. On top of all that, the film
includes strands of screwball comedy (mainly involving Tex continually getting
the best of rival reporters) and of gangster melodrama, all melded together
with no-nonsense efficiency and know-how.<o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-29155881781239623762023-11-29T15:13:00.000-05:002023-11-29T15:13:18.354-05:00A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhL_yzZbx1ZYR-c8z1_GJ6ZXhoXzSeMJH7W7LkckhFAkN-K4JS8-iX-6krxtHKgdxvJ3wKfjQlG7hu-DudnnSqJYssNnlZN5rSm1eLZp-gnV8MXjO6gRwpltK1VK1CjsvlyvMZMtqId17AOSwXYxyjoU-o2mu4YJyVBqiPF4wRLxzJ8o5yyfXkMCV_fFbk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="353" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhL_yzZbx1ZYR-c8z1_GJ6ZXhoXzSeMJH7W7LkckhFAkN-K4JS8-iX-6krxtHKgdxvJ3wKfjQlG7hu-DudnnSqJYssNnlZN5rSm1eLZp-gnV8MXjO6gRwpltK1VK1CjsvlyvMZMtqId17AOSwXYxyjoU-o2mu4YJyVBqiPF4wRLxzJ8o5yyfXkMCV_fFbk" width="154" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Marleen Gorris’ <i>A Question of Silence</i>
remains a classic of political feminist cinema, endlessly stimulating and
debatable for all its inevitably dated trappings: three women, strangers to
each other and with little in common, spontaneously join together in brutally
killing the male owner of a clothing store; another woman, a psychiatrist, is
assigned to prepare a report for the court, and is unable to provide the
expected conclusion, that the women were insane (at least by some measure). This
isn’t a vigilante movie based in a whipped-up sense of righteous revenge (the
women aren’t violently abused by their partners for instance); the injustices
and imbalances underlying their actions are more subtle and systemic, rooted in
the basic structures and assumptions of work and family, sometimes seeming to
verge on the supernatural, particularly in the depiction of four other women
who witness the murder, and thereafter seem to be joined in some silent form of
communion (the sense of other-worldly possession bolstered by the highly
of-the-moment synthesizer score). Such devices may seem a bit overly emphatic
at times, but they’re a vital element of the prevailing sense of otherness, of
a text which can’t be contained by prevailing patriarchal norms and
expectations. It follows that the question of motive is never resolved (and
indeed is rendered almost comically inadequate, an attempt to impose an easy
narrative on an action which inherently resists that); a suggestion by the
prosecutor that the crime should be assessed no differently from, say, a murder
of a female shop assistant by three men strikes the women as so clueless that only
laughter can follow, rendering the proceedings morally void, if not legally so.
Inevitably, Gorris doesn’t arrive at a tidy conclusion, her film’s ending
suggesting further new alliances ahead, an ongoing need for breakage and
disruption. <o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-81646354208653114592023-11-22T15:52:00.002-05:002023-11-22T15:52:47.592-05:00Joe Hill (Bo Widerberg, 1971)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhKCPcm1cAPPty9sM9xjsxFeq-7foXYdo19nBJWWfurrhomTVju6l3SYX98P6tClrvWfiswjT5Bxo6tT_ImzOVK9b-KupumJLV_rQPEUKJ8ANQUP6F8rkKUf0eKA6oYiRGKzZmOvaOV_kW2yY5J6JRqXJ6PBl3XBN6TLCzXcngFo_LDKy01gxZSxsNZVlU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="353" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhKCPcm1cAPPty9sM9xjsxFeq-7foXYdo19nBJWWfurrhomTVju6l3SYX98P6tClrvWfiswjT5Bxo6tT_ImzOVK9b-KupumJLV_rQPEUKJ8ANQUP6F8rkKUf0eKA6oYiRGKzZmOvaOV_kW2yY5J6JRqXJ6PBl3XBN6TLCzXcngFo_LDKy01gxZSxsNZVlU" width="160" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Bo Widerberg’s <i>Joe Hill</i> follows the
history of the real-life early 20<sup>th</sup>-century activist from his
arrival in America as a Swedish immigrant, through early struggles in New York,
through years of itinerant labour and increasing involvement in the workers’
rights movement, to his shocking death by firing squad after a murder conviction.
The film has some wonderful, light-footed passages, at its strongest when
channeling formative, unstructured experiences and realizations, such as his
stumbling into song as a way of getting his message across (Hill is apparently
reliably credited as the source of the phrase “pie in the sky’). It skimps
though on setting out the arc and substance of his political journey, allowing
a few isolated sequences to represent a complex whole, and spending relatively disproportionate
time on the trial and its aftermath (although the contrast between the state’s
painstaking management of execution protocols and its indifference to matters
of infinitely greater social importance is well-made). Like Widerberg’s <i>Adalen
31</i>, the film feels less radical than its subject might demand; potential
anger and righteousness somewhat defused by a sensitivity to the unpredictable
nature of experience and influence, to the unreliability of memory and
history in prioritizing events. <i>Joe Hill</i> acknowledges the possibility
that a martyred Hill might be worth more to the movement than a live one, but
doesn’t attempt to provide any broader perspective on the validity of that
judgment; the final scenes show the organization making strategic use of his
ashes, but also hints at how quickly hearts and minds move on. Widerberg’s curiosity
and openness are among his most appealing qualities, even if they might suggest
a lack of rigour and focus; in this case, at the very least, his approach
results in a very personal engagement with history and myth, leaving ample space
for competing versions of Hill’s story and significance (an implied invitation
not yet taken up by other filmmakers though). <o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-14937491273777941792023-11-14T15:10:00.001-05:002023-11-14T15:10:47.915-05:00The Last Tycoon (Elia Kazan, 1976)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgbvFgeCLFhW2Yxp3xtpQ-Va8B7KlKwbMMvEywO5FPvtUWVHTcq-CUOD4Op8BOpRyiPH_rc9WtgQpWUyJ5nB5mgRZRfF71q3dmQgOqb8DbAIgInRivcqXjRXa_tUpQL8UiGQD-HNrz16NULRarOWGiBcqfy8efhsv_3tIuT3mseA9ki5_UcSoxRSLANURA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="353" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgbvFgeCLFhW2Yxp3xtpQ-Va8B7KlKwbMMvEywO5FPvtUWVHTcq-CUOD4Op8BOpRyiPH_rc9WtgQpWUyJ5nB5mgRZRfF71q3dmQgOqb8DbAIgInRivcqXjRXa_tUpQL8UiGQD-HNrz16NULRarOWGiBcqfy8efhsv_3tIuT3mseA9ki5_UcSoxRSLANURA" width="157" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">The closing moments of Elia Kazan’s <i>The
Last Tycoon</i> suggest that the film was intended all along as a romantic valorization of the "dream factory" aspect of Hollywood lore: its
doomed 30’s studio head protagonist Monroe Stahr seeming on the verge of being
eased out, for the first time addressing the camera directly to reprise a story he improvised
earlier in the movie as inspiration for a bogged-down writer, except that now we understand
it as an expression of lost love, followed by a final walk into the literal and
figurative darkness. It’s an ending that extends the film’s two main strands –
Stahr’s bullheaded approach to running things, perpetually making expensive
creative decisions which no one else in the more money-minded executive suite sees the need for,
and his longing for a woman who can ultimately never be his – but it carries far too little charge, given the strangely still and displaced quality of much
that precedes it, the sense of a film joylessly located outside both history
and myth. In theory at least, Kazan must have been better placed than most to probingly
recreate the studio system’s uniquely epoch-defining mixture of glory and
corruption, but his work here is dutiful and passionless, neither pleasurably
nostalgic nor gleefully eviscerating. Similarly, Robert De Niro is at his most quietly
withholding as Stahr – as with Kazan’s direction, it’s often hard to determine
what he had in mind – but the film at least provides a good source of trivia
questions and degrees-of-Bacon type connections: yes, it’s true, De Niro did indeed
once act with Dana Andrews and Ray Milland. Jack Nicholson shows up late in the
film as a union organizer, but he’s yet another oddly ineffectual presence, a theoretically
crackerjack meeting of two of the decade’s defining actors coming across as a
chore that they both just had to plod through.<o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-23330683072033803582023-11-08T12:17:00.002-05:002023-11-08T12:17:22.541-05:00Perceval le Gallois (Eric Rohmer, 1978)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgsAW3M48nRxeckGbnjjGvdrEEHr2ZxVsFCX_4yg36MyjBmtX0QrKX4ccZpQefJuzWcHLJAGgXeAGmh3CED1BKA_i00k6RZrpqrwBcCfp7lXltTyv0GYiSqRcwunq0c18hl4Du0c6qDUkVfpve0nw1ejgzYVzqBUo1qZ_dpiI7Xo1o59_DZ3rhrRazxwYM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="250" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgsAW3M48nRxeckGbnjjGvdrEEHr2ZxVsFCX_4yg36MyjBmtX0QrKX4ccZpQefJuzWcHLJAGgXeAGmh3CED1BKA_i00k6RZrpqrwBcCfp7lXltTyv0GYiSqRcwunq0c18hl4Du0c6qDUkVfpve0nw1ejgzYVzqBUo1qZ_dpiI7Xo1o59_DZ3rhrRazxwYM" width="175" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In itself, it would be mainly of academic interest that the
apparent peculiarities of Eric Rohmer’s <i>Perceval le Gallois</i> can be
explained by his emphasis on fidelity to the tone and content of Chretien de
Troyes’ 12<sup>th</sup>-century source material, but Rohmer’s choices here also
resonate fascinatingly against the main body of his work. For example, the
film’s second half contains a startling narrative switch, abruptly putting
aside the story we’ve followed to that point (the young Perceval leaves his
home to become a knight, gradually accumulating in knowledge and understanding)
to follow that of another knight, Gawain, who’s been only a secondary character
to that point; later on, at what might seem to be just as arbitrary a point, it
switches back. In this context, the device promotes a heightened reflection on
the artificial and conditioned nature of all narrative coherence; when the film
then culminates with an enactment of Christ’s crucifixion, there’s a feeling of
all narrative, of all creation, deriving from Western civilization’s core
origin story, underlining the sense of humility and fidelity that marks the
entire enterprise. The film is in part a heightened version of the behavioral
and ethical puzzles that mark Rohmer’s contemporary work: Perceval is initially
a near-blank slate, who at the start of the film sees a knight for the first
time and peppers him with basic questions; later on when a wise man advises him
not to talk too much, he takes the advice too far, missing out on
opportunities, and even unknowingly committing grave sins. Rohmer’s chosen
style beautifully supports the project, emphasizing artifice and immediacy, the
act of storytelling (with the characters, for example, often describing their
own actions) as prominent as the story being told. And it’s delightful how his reversion
to an ancient text carries the sense of a personal rebirth, with the cast containing
several young performers (Pascale Ogier, Arielle Dombasle, Marie Riviere) who he
would use more prominently in later, modern-day works.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-20487455887697840862023-11-01T04:48:00.000-04:002023-11-01T04:48:24.423-04:00El cochecito (Marco Ferreri, 1960)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDTxp6GqzoOLxPdk4_Z4MeDWIiRoDfWOSl1a0tXA6MhCvoi3zFhiSROhd4tLGoLsK2hEAfsmoO3raAcVeMGoJcchSov5E6161yNcWBhY3GOPPqIQBEXvIzJoMNB4wCaL8ADL4PQ4NUXmbWFPuTIsekq98Q6j2fP-_g2E6cU-vSzZDXmD1LAAK_s5M8ThY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="497" data-original-width="353" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDTxp6GqzoOLxPdk4_Z4MeDWIiRoDfWOSl1a0tXA6MhCvoi3zFhiSROhd4tLGoLsK2hEAfsmoO3raAcVeMGoJcchSov5E6161yNcWBhY3GOPPqIQBEXvIzJoMNB4wCaL8ADL4PQ4NUXmbWFPuTIsekq98Q6j2fP-_g2E6cU-vSzZDXmD1LAAK_s5M8ThY" width="170" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Marco Ferreri’s <i>El cochecito</i> lives
up to its reputation, its perspective on the community of the differently-abled
still seeming radically matter-of-fact and quasi-aspirational. A retired
bureaucrat, Don Anselmo, visits an old friend who now gets around in a
motorized wheelchair, and who gives him a ride on it when Anselmo can’t find a
taxi; it leads to other get-togethers and contacts and diversions (presented in
enjoyably garrulous, lived-in manner) and to Anselmo desiring such an
item for himself, regardless that it’s beyond his means, and that
he doesn’t actually need it. The desire becomes a near-fixation, and yet
appears more rational than his family’s strident opposition to it (this aspect
of the film aligns well with modern Uber-aligned notions of choice and autonomy),
in particular as he actually wants to get out and experience people and places, an
ambition seemingly beyond the scope of his relatives’ closeted thinking. Threatened with
being committed to an asylum, Anselmo takes a desperate step to get what he
wants, his awareness of his transgression made clear in a startling, long-held
close-up, in which Ferreri temporarily seems to yield to the evocative powers
of his lead actor, Jose Isbert. The final scene (in the full original version
that is; the film was reportedly available for years only in bowdlerized form) allows
him a final taste of freedom, and although it’s clear that a severe reckoning
lies ahead, Anselmo’s final remark has a resigned lightness to it, suggesting
that from his hemmed-in point of view, his liberation, however brief, was worth
it at almost any logistical and moral price. The film allows occasional
glimpses of the later more expansive Ferreri (for example, Anselmo enjoys an
indulgent lunch that presages <i>La Grande Bouffe</i>), but on the whole
occupies its own stylistic and tonal space within his oeuvre, no less enjoyably
for that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-33781941434594156652023-10-25T05:10:00.001-04:002023-10-25T05:10:56.077-04:00Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRaQPLGg62CHxx4qNMQJAPaTauZ1OK62ZGjHZyH5q8pKtGDAqrOgdDakBJvd8QZIhVSul7IOjeVCUtj9sDyyLEnSe40TG8Hldx9Q1hr5DEzekq8TSFu2Ceb_XVM-FMh6utReZJ1WvbyY4flR6eXehevwUExyLgBcu1dodGWG6qvzcNK3aiWEJTiwZ0pyM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="353" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRaQPLGg62CHxx4qNMQJAPaTauZ1OK62ZGjHZyH5q8pKtGDAqrOgdDakBJvd8QZIhVSul7IOjeVCUtj9sDyyLEnSe40TG8Hldx9Q1hr5DEzekq8TSFu2Ceb_XVM-FMh6utReZJ1WvbyY4flR6eXehevwUExyLgBcu1dodGWG6qvzcNK3aiWEJTiwZ0pyM" width="160" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="PT-BR" style="mso-ansi-language: PT-BR;">Paul
Verhoeven’s <i>Starship Troopers</i> is an exemplary action-fantasy, frame
after frame overflowing with compositional exactitude and beyond-the-call-of-duty
detail; there’s never a moment of apparent corner-cutting, of Verhoeven’s
immense focus and willpower even momentarily faltering. If it’s generally
viewed (despite major defenders) as lying outside the top drawer of modern
genre classics, that’s partly because of the relative blandness of the
foreground, relying on somewhat blandly attractive leads put through
conventional narrative arcs of self-discovery. But that’s also the source of
some of the film’s most mind-boggling resonances: the sense of young and
inexperienced recruits thrown into situations for which they’re barely prepared
(and which, in some cases, they have little rational chance of surviving)
suggests that the war of the future, however technologically advanced, will demonstrate little moral or ethical advance on our brutal past (modern-day debates about
the propriety of drone warfare are beyond the movie’s scope). Even more
remarkable is the evocation of Fascism, most explicitly in the scientist
character played by Neil Patrick Harris (!), strutting around in black leather and
justifying any amount of human loss for the sake of strategic advancement, focused
specifically on sinister scientific experiments, all of this ultimately
presented as positive and virtuous, and intertwining with a bracing notion of
“citizenship” as something that’s no longer a matter of birthright, but that
has to be earned through various forms of service, most prominently the
military kind. The film concludes on a note of interim rather than total
success, which seems here less like laying the ground for sequels (although of
course it does that too) than leaving the viewer somewhat off-balance, with
every indication that the splashy celebration of military triumph will be paid
for in part with wrongs and atrocities elsewhere, daring us not to succumb to
the momentary sense of triumph.<o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-34076191101630610692023-10-18T08:10:00.001-04:002023-10-18T08:10:49.628-04:00Love Unto Waste (Stanley Kwan, 1986)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj_MR5z87vMsjN5dmTYzAMclSB8G3IzLuNyNodfVgpTJrF6uKhCp-2VZh0BImo0BW4mqxkyTZYY-jXr8bW1V0BA2tnTQH8OpPuDK8Kik6K2KlGPA8DuaE2G936JWcQt2oWuTZOhtESq8gE14pqcXfktOhX-ZYo3ChIEa317Ts441r5POnfBCn-DyiAQ-xY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="323" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj_MR5z87vMsjN5dmTYzAMclSB8G3IzLuNyNodfVgpTJrF6uKhCp-2VZh0BImo0BW4mqxkyTZYY-jXr8bW1V0BA2tnTQH8OpPuDK8Kik6K2KlGPA8DuaE2G936JWcQt2oWuTZOhtESq8gE14pqcXfktOhX-ZYo3ChIEa317Ts441r5POnfBCn-DyiAQ-xY" width="193" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The 1986<i> Love unto Waste</i>, the second film by Hong
Kong’s great and mostly underappreciated Stanley Kwan, sounds conventional in
its outline, but becomes steadily more evasive and unreadable as it goes on, the
implications of its title only fully coming into focus at the very end. Tony
Cheung (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is first seen getting flamboyantly drunk at his
birthday party, vomiting over young model Billie (Irene Wan), whom he
nevertheless rapidly ends up dating, and through her becoming part of a quartet
which also includes the actress Liu (Elaine Jin) and singer Chiu (Tsai Chin).
When Chiu is brutally murdered in her apartment, detective Lan (Chow Yun Fat)
enters the orbit of the remaining trio, his methods flamboyantly eccentric and
unfocused (he cites Columbo as an inspiration), but rapidly seeming more
interested in hanging out with them than in solving the case. The film continually
muses on matters of cultural identity and self-definition, with the characters
debating the meaning of a particular word, or how best to express a certain
thought (it’s likely that even more subtlety than usual is lost in the subtitling
here), all of which intertwines with the work in progress of their personal and
professional identities; when the trio takes Chiu’s ashes to her family in Taiwan,
and into a milieu where two of them don’t speak the language, the existential investigation
almost entirely displaces the criminal one. The film ends far from where it
began, both narratively and tonally, with the group having dispersed, and a key
character visiting another who’s now dying from cancer, the two summing up their
achievements and finding them wanting, marked by too much wasted time and
possibility. It’s an ending that puts the film’s moments of joy – karaoke and drinking
and laughing and smoking and flirting and cooking (a chicken inside a pig’s
stomach!) – in poignant, haunting perspective. <o:p></o:p></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-72422138446309387092023-10-11T04:58:00.000-04:002023-10-11T04:58:12.983-04:00Tale of Cinema (Hong Sang-soo, 2005)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhtzFp14VAStZ9WO1TiQo_8l3XXYgo0JUlkYf97V7IJY1A0JdwsD8onL4QBTLtW4rENmlj6tnbAjA9cMLkbyu_VBDCLcnk_dVLPKCreo3-Xo9mxGEF94KHwwNunNZpf5ArL5rlnHXdssXpxkVZGkpwrBcsCKCxPGaJrT7RU9rKEYEDXszoJEOnE-L2V488" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="376" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhtzFp14VAStZ9WO1TiQo_8l3XXYgo0JUlkYf97V7IJY1A0JdwsD8onL4QBTLtW4rENmlj6tnbAjA9cMLkbyu_VBDCLcnk_dVLPKCreo3-Xo9mxGEF94KHwwNunNZpf5ArL5rlnHXdssXpxkVZGkpwrBcsCKCxPGaJrT7RU9rKEYEDXszoJEOnE-L2V488" width="243" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Entirely by coincidence, I watched Hong
Sang-soo’s <i>Tale of Cinema</i> the day after the “Joan is Afraid” episode of <i>Black
Mirror</i>, a juxtaposition which made Hong’s film seem, if not prophetic, then
at least beautifully attuned to art/life paradoxes which take on a new edge in
an era of CGI, AI, quantum computers, 24-hour connectivity, and whatever else you
want to blame. Of course, Hong’s film contains nothing which obviously
constitutes “special effects” (the English title at least evokes Eric Rohmer,
which doesn’t seem too out of place tonally speaking), but halfway through it
provides a purely cinematic thrill, when one realizes that everything we’ve
watched up to that point represents a film that has just been viewed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>by Dongsoo, the protagonist of the film’s
second half, and which he later claims was largely based on his own
experiences. He spots the actress from the film in the street, and follows her
as she revisits one of the locations; later on they go drinking together, and things
develop somewhat as they did in the movie in which she starred, although
eventually art and life inevitably diverge. It’s beautifully ambiguous whether
Dongsoo’s claim about the past is entirely or partially true, and in turn
whether he’s trying to ape what he saw in the film, or reliving a past
experience, or finding something unlocked in himself, or some combination of
all three; as such the film elegantly expresses the complexity of our
interaction with movies. It wouldn’t have been a great surprise if Hong had
rebooted a second time; the final note though warns against the allure of such
rabbit holes, emphasizing the importance of thinking, of rationality, of
applied intent. And indeed, it’s the kind of film that in its unpreachily
graceful but detailed way makes you want to reexamine yourself and your
coordinates, and to change them for the better.<o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-65509176979045052662023-10-05T04:59:00.000-04:002023-10-05T04:59:52.372-04:00The Conversation (Francis Coppola, 1974)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhic2x7vUGH69ZT6sCLRYw78W7gpxITIaTMw7T4PPRZj8FZDVhMaJqs6vyPm9123P-fMn-mL7qs3Pb3cUZ7-IwGcBHRj8gsvSpbJW0EmiJANiiSBA2lByAomjN-zkAOvjsg7n53eOjzUideRZMQACkbmrLOUUlVtjUI_pBUzPXbd2T_YdGLtdhad9Tb_RM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="353" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhic2x7vUGH69ZT6sCLRYw78W7gpxITIaTMw7T4PPRZj8FZDVhMaJqs6vyPm9123P-fMn-mL7qs3Pb3cUZ7-IwGcBHRj8gsvSpbJW0EmiJANiiSBA2lByAomjN-zkAOvjsg7n53eOjzUideRZMQACkbmrLOUUlVtjUI_pBUzPXbd2T_YdGLtdhad9Tb_RM" width="160" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times",serif;">The details of Francis
Coppola’s 1974 film <i>The Conversation</i> may be superficially dated (even at the time, a competitor throws barbs at Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul for using outmoded
equipment), but the themes of lost control and corroded sense of self remain
enormously resonant in an age of online identity theft and accelerated AI. Caul
is a professional surveillance expert, engaged by a corporate director to record
an open-air conversation between the director’s wife and another man,
achieved by synthesizing the recordings from several different microphones;
as he works on polishing the tape, he becomes ambivalent about completing the
assignment, partly because of past occasions when his work triggered unforeseen
and violent outcomes. The film feels overly schematic in some ways, such as the
strenuous artificiality surrounding its conception of “the director” and his
sinister assistant, but this must be offset against the sensationally detailed
and layered conception of Caul, a marvelous amalgamation of paranoia, Catholic guilt,
ego, fear, and underserved desires. If the film stands as one of the key works
of the 70’s, it’s partly because it feels to be in, indeed, a conversation with
the surrounding culture: an extended scene of late night shenanigans evokes
Cassavetes, some of its more baroque moments evoke De Palma, the presence of
Harrison Ford as the assistant seems like a harbinger of new populist waves to
come, and so on. Not unusually for its period, the film’s perspective on women
is limited, viewing them primarily as appendages to a world of male intrigue,
defined largely by sexual availability; even here though, Coppola strikes some productively
mysterious notes, suggesting that Harry doesn’t entirely grasp their agenda, or
the full extent of what they know about him. Indeed, the narrative ultimately
turns on the fundamental likelihood of the self-assured biter, even the most
powerful biter (even entire societies of them) eventually becoming the
painfully bitten… <o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5718592934298263271.post-69548544968729667802023-09-26T22:24:00.001-04:002023-09-26T22:24:08.847-04:00Don't Cheat, Darling! (Joachim Hasler, 1973)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhPLk1wmQddtgexEy2OJqV0GTnY3ZcJYRSCACaPWmSvAVneODh_QuN44-gO6WcKXNqLiIkcyLoB1rNYYqq4dM-d9Sx11KL76Pr6-hTx51syu8Kp0ITGeb72c-MLlLR66vDRQQvOfH57Tj-Dv_VZxQDe3tasH3wwkF3zEP38ggVa2kDCjnhoxkKi4fT3" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="243" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhPLk1wmQddtgexEy2OJqV0GTnY3ZcJYRSCACaPWmSvAVneODh_QuN44-gO6WcKXNqLiIkcyLoB1rNYYqq4dM-d9Sx11KL76Pr6-hTx51syu8Kp0ITGeb72c-MLlLR66vDRQQvOfH57Tj-Dv_VZxQDe3tasH3wwkF3zEP38ggVa2kDCjnhoxkKi4fT3" width="171" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I don’t know how many musicals came out of 1970’s
East Germany, but Joachim Hasler’s <i>Don’t Cheat, Darling!</i> confirms that
the total is more than zero. There are even fleeting moments, as
dozens of brightly-dressed performers sing and dance in the picturesque,
cobbled-street town of “Sonnenthal,” in which Jacques Demy’s sublime <i>The
Young Girls of Rochefort</i> comes to mind, although Hasler can’t approach the
choreographic finesse and cinematic grace of Demy’s film, and the songs (lots
of strenuous odes to collective happiness) mostly evoke Eurovision (or on
occasion perhaps, <i>Man of La Mancha)</i> more than Michel Legrand. <i>Don't Cheat, Darling!</i> is
hardly a biting critique of the governing regime, but the narrative is
explicitly premised on an infrastructure of extensive central planning and intervention
and constant resource constraints, albeit that the film’s characters treat this
mainly with good-natured exasperation, or as a challenge to be creatively overcome.
The main medium of that is soccer; the accomplished Dr. Barbara Schwalbe
arrives to take up a new administrative post, finding that the bus she arrived
on and the apartment that should have accompanied the job are both being commandeered
for the benefit of the local team. By the end of the film, just about every special
interest group in town claims to have formed its own competing and equally
entitled squad, and things end on a general note of renewal and optimism,
although some of the narrative’s cumbersomely-articulated details escaped me.
In common with the more drably crowd-pleasing British cinema of the period, the
film suggests that just about every character has sex more or less constantly on
their minds, given the lack of anything else to think about (excepting the
character preoccupied with his pet rabbits, which might just be a variation on
the same thing). although matters remain highly decorous - a late suggestion
that two characters actually spent the night together comes as a mild shock! <o:p></o:p></span></p>torontomovieguyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17546481940057905714noreply@blogger.com0