Back with another diary
of Criterion Channel viewing, this one prompted by their offering a series of
films that I had been looking to re-see for a long time, Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, a major payoff on my charter subscription. The only filmmaker with whom I feel more
affinity than Rohmer is Truffaut. From
his Six Moral Tales through Comedies & Proverbs to this
series from the 1990s, his films could be characterized as romantic comedies,
each following attractive young people in erotic and philosophic roundelay. (Even historical or literary adaptations like
Perceval or The Marquise of O or The Lady and the Duke don’t
stray too far from that template, though they depart from his
documentary-inflected style.)
In A Tale of Springtime
(1990), a philosophy teacher has lent her Paris
A Tale of Winter (1992) was one I had not seen before, and ironically
starts with a sequence of a blissfully sensual seaside summer interlude. Before the man departs for a possible job
abroad, the woman gives him her address to stay in touch, but in the stress of
departure writes it wrong. Five years
later, the woman is living in Paris
In A Summer’s Tale
(1996), a mopey mathematician/musician is vacationing by the sea in Brittany
Autumn Tale (1998) lived
up to my memory as the best of the group, and one of Rohmer’s absolute
greats. Rather than his pervy old guy
preoccupation with the sex lives of young people, he reunites two of his
earlier young stars, Béatrice Romand and Marie Riviére, now approaching middle
age. The former is a winemaking widow,
who believes she has no time for romance.
Her friends come up with elaborate matchmaking schemes, which intersect
at a wedding where two potential suitors are present. Rohmeresque complications unravel to
delightful effect, in this golden-hued tribute to the lifelong potential for
love.
Criterion always includes an
exclusive selection of new films, most recently the Dardenne brothers’ latest,
Tori and Lokita (MC-79). NYT critic Manohla Dargis aptly characterizes
their films as “suspense thrillers about moral conscience,” and this one has a
real-world “Mission Africa try to
make their way through the underbelly of Belgian society. The 12-year-old boy has papers but the
17-year-old girl he claims as his sister does not (she saved him on the boat
crossing). As is typical with the Dardennes,
the nonprofessional actors are completely convincing. This pair works as a team for an illegal weed
dealer, in total subjugation, but they’re resourceful and committed to each
other, even if utterly powerless. One’s
fears for them are thoroughly grounded, and the despair fully earned – another
profoundly upsetting film from one of the world’s great filmmaking pairs.
Godland (MC-81) is an Icelandic film about a Danish Lutheran priest
trekking across the island to found a colonial church late in the 19th
century. The primary character is the
country’s wild landscape, from glaciers to volcanoes, from wide marshy wastes
to rock-strewn hillsides. Rather than widescreen
imagery, director Hlynur Palmason uses a narrow 4x3 frame for long slow pans
around spectacular 360-degree views. The clergyman is an unattractive
character, and makes an antagonist of his native guide, even as his church is
being built in a Danish outpost, where a village wedding forms the film’s
centerpiece. It calls up echoes of other great period
films, from The Emigrants to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as well as
god-haunted Nordic directors like Dreyer and Bergman.
The Innocent (MC-69) is a
pleasant enough French rom-com pretending to be a heist film. Louis Garrel writes, directs, and stars, with
an able assist from Noémie Merlant, but the result evaporates in the mind
afterward.
One film that epitomizes why
I’ll keep my Criterion subscription above all others is Turn Every Page:
The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (MC-81),
which I’d been searching to see from the minute I heard about it. Suddenly it turned up on CC and proved as
entertaining as I had imagined. Directed
by Gottlieb’s daughter Lizzie, it’s a touching and funny bromance between an
author and his editor, both of whom are at the very pinnacle of their
profession. The film fills in the
backstory of the author of monumental biographies of Robert Moses and LBJ, and
of the chief editor at Knopf and the New Yorker among many other
accomplishments, two literary NYC boys who met their match. Instead of a climactic gunfight, we peep
through the door to see the two octogenarians sitting next to each other with
pencils in hand and a tall stack of typescript in front of them. Thrilling!
Mia Hansen-Love’s latest
film, One Fine Morning (MC-86), is
not yet available on Criterion (I got a DVD
on ILL), but the channel gave me the chance to see one of hers that I seem to
have missed, Things to Come (2016, MC-88), so I take this
opportunity to celebrate her Rohmer-esque oeuvre. I really liked Father of My Children,
Goodbye First Love, Eden Bergman
Island
One Fine Morning centers on the marvelous Léa Seydoux as a young widow
looking after a 7-year-old daughter, a father suffering from a
neurodegenerative disease, and an aged grandmother, while working as a public
translator. She has no time or attention
for romance until she meets an old friend (Melvil Poupaud) who sparks a flame,
and their affair adds another level of complication to her life. So the film is split between her efforts to
find an appropriate nursing home for her philosopher father, and stolen moments
with her married lover. Like real life,
the film has no settled resolution but many lovely (and some painful) moments.
I hate to say it, but Things
to Come may have been too subtle for me.
I couldn’t remember seeing it, I couldn’t find any review of it here,
and no memories were sparked by this viewing, until the very last scene, which
remained something of an open-ended enigma to me, though understandable in
retrospect. This is characteristic work
from Hansen-Love, with an outstanding performance by Isabelle Huppert, as a sixtyish
philosophy teacher whose settled life begins to unravel strand by strand. She’s confronted by a new generation of
students, abandoned by her husband and her publisher, plagued by her mother’s
aging, and ambivalently estranged from the protégé (Roman Kolinka) whom she
visits twice at his anarchist commune in the mountains. Nonetheless she is quietly piecing together a
new life, out of her disappointments.
While at it, I caught another
of Hansen-Love’s films, which came out in 2018 but just reached streaming. Maya (MC-62, AMZ) might be marked down for whiffs of colonialism
or pedophilia, but I didn’t consider it any sort of letdown for her, displaying
all her trademark virtues in a different context. A French war correspondent (Kolinka again),
just released from captivity by ISIS , seeks
recovery by returning to his abandoned childhood home in Goa ,
a coastal state in India
[Click on “Read more” for
brief remarks on a score of older films that I’ve recently watched on the
Criterion Channel.]
[In the following, the year
noted links to a Wikipedia page if more info is desired, but be forewarned that
there are always spoilers if you read down to the plot summary.]
In a CC collection of “James
Baldwin On-Screen” I was happy to be directed toward James Baldwin: The
Price of the Ticket, an excellent PBS “American Masters” documentary
from 1989, which
reminded me of how much his writing affected my thinking as a teenager.
There are always dozens and
dozens of classics worth seeing on Criterion, but after their collection of early
BBC films by the great Mike Leigh,
I was moved to revisit one of his best, Secrets and Lies (1996, MC-91), which certainly lived
up to my memory of it.
On my Sicilian viewing and
reading kick, I watched Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style (1961) starring
Marcello Mastroianni (a little broad for my taste, but with tasty local color)
for the first time, back in the day having seen only the follow-up with Sophia
Loren, Marriage Italian Style (Divorce having probably been proscribed
by the Legion of Decency). Meanwhile, my
latter-day re-viewing of Francesco Rosi’s neorealist Salvatore Giuliano (1962) made a
lot more sense after reading several histories of Sicily, which unpacked the
connections amongst the bandits, the Mafia, and the government.
I can sometimes enjoy
not-so-hot old movies simply for their period flavor, their sense of embodying
a cultural era, for better or worse. And
sometimes they’re pretty great in their own right.
Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) is a
pre-Code comedy from the most notable female director of the 1930s, Dorothy
Arzner. A rather daring cocktail of
alcoholism and infidelity starring Frederic March and Sylvia Sidney, it’s an
early entrant in one of that decade’s most popular genres, the “comedy of
re-marriage.”
Out of a collection of
“British Noir” I sampled It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), which
turned out to be much better than expected.
Directed by Robert Hamer (best known for Kind Hearts and Coronets),
it’s a portrait of postwar London’s East End, spun out in a single day, as an
escaped convict seeks refuge with his old girlfriend, now married with two
twenty-ish stepdaughters. It certainly
works as a suspense film, but scores on other levels, including the acting of
star Googie Winters and the rest.
Good Morning, Miss Dove
(1955) is an
old-fashioned film, dressed up in CinemaScope for no good reason, about an old-fashioned
schoolmarm, a prim and severe spinster played by Jennifer Jones. Predictably, we find out the suppressed
passions of the seemingly virginal old maid, and witness generations of school
children testifying to the impact on their lives of “the terrible Miss Dove.” I did appreciate a certain Magnificent
Ambersons vibe about small town existence in the early 20th
century.
The Tarnished Angels (1957) is
characteristic Douglas Sirk if not among his best, but notable for the
uncharacteristic performance of a very young Rock Hudson, as a reporter in
Louisiana. Dorothy Malone surprises as
the wife of a daredevil barnstorming pilot, played woodenly by Robert
Stack. Based on Faulkner’s Pylon,
this is reputedly his favorite film adaptation from his novels.
Pillow Talk (1959), a favorite of my
youth, is cringeworthy in various ways today, but still has a fair bit of
energy and style. And the performances
of Rock Hudson and Doris Day take on an extra dimension now, knowing their
backstories. (The new HBO documentary, Rock
Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed (MC-71), is a
worthwhile look back at his emblematic career.)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959, MC-95) elicits
more than a bit of cringe in its portrayal of rape, but otherwise is a model
courtroom drama. Otto Preminger surprisingly
goes on location to the upper peninsula of Michigan, giving a documentary
flavor to this novel by a high court judge, based on a case early in his career. James Stewart has made his 1950s transition
from nice guy hero to suspect character, for his portrayal of a clever but
unscrupulous defense lawyer. Lee Remick
is the lascivious victim of rape, but Ben Gazzara is on trial for the murder of
her rapist. George C. Scott is on the
prosecutorial team.
Susan Seidelman’s Desperately
Seeking Susan (1985), a
comic caper about mistaken identity, works best as a period piece about downtown
NYC, much like Scorsese’s contemporaneous After Hours, and as an early
glimpse of many young performers on the cusp of fame, not just the stars
Rosanna Arquette and Madonna, but the likes of John Turturro and Laurie
Metcalf.
The Comfort of
Strangers (1990) was a
Paul Schrader film that I had missed, and with good reason, as it turned
out. I’d mixed it up with a different
film that I wanted to see again, but figured that a novel by Ian McEwan adapted
by Harold Pinter should be worth seeing.
And if you’re looking for a sex-haunted suspense film set in Venice, and
starring Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren, Rupert Everett, and Natasha
Richardson, then this might be for you.
But not for me.
I’m not a fan of thrillers
generally, but some stand out. Single
White Female (1992) stands
out for the presence of two white females, Jennifer Jason Lee and
Bridget Fonda. I had a favorable memory
of the film, and certainly enjoyed their byplay. Director Barbet Schroeder adds a taste of Persona
to a potboiler plot about a roommate (and doppelganger) from hell,
Speaking of thrillers, I’d
never seen Basic Instinct (1992), wisely as it turned
out. Verhoeven’s film is not a case of
so bad it’s good, but rather so bad it’s awful.
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) is
a highly stylized and frequently funny story about a teen girl with lesbian
leanings, who’s sent away to a conversion camp. For the always-striking Natasha
Lyonne, it’s a long and twisty road from here to Russian Doll and Poker
Face.
Some additional time capsules
from other channels:
Still exploring my
Italian-American background, I took another look at Saturday Night Fever (1977) and
found it as delightful as it was back then, with just a few qualms from the
perspective of our more enlightened age.
Disco (along with 1970s Brooklyn) looks and sounds better through a haze
of nostalgia, and surprisingly it didn’t seem ridiculous that John Travolta received
an Oscar nomination as Best Actor
Similarly, Jonathan Demme’s Married
to the Mob (1988) played around with ethnic
stereotypes in this screwball Mafia comedy starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Entertaining on second viewing, but revealing
no hidden dimensions.
As for Reality Bites
(1994),
I’m not sure if the sentiment of the title is true, but I would
certainly agree with the proposition that Ben Stiller’s movie bites, so
phony despite the presence of Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder. No wonder Gen-X has a bad rap.
No comments:
Post a Comment