MUBI dipping

Through inadvertence I wound up with an additional month of the subscription channel MUBI, a distant third behind Criterion and Kanopy as a place to find offbeat, classic, and international fare.  MUBI doesn’t have the monthly churn of curated collections that Criterion has, but they are currently offering an Almodovar retrospective, for example.  I started my survey here, but I don’t expect MUBI to be a regular in my rotation of channels.
 
They did have one new offering that I’d been seeking for years, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004, MC-86).  Thom Andersen’s long documentary essay on the portrayal of the city in Hollywood movies is intelligent, provocative, and entertaining.  From well-known films like Chinatown, Double Indemnity, and Blade Runner to oddities like Kiss Me Deadly or a Laurel & Hardy short, he uses clips to illustrate the history of the city and its architecture, and the attendant mythmaking.  With a strong if not altogether convincing point of view, it’s a highly illuminating anthology about urban development.
 
Mubi also had a recent French film that I was happy to discover, Other People’s Children (MC-80).  Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski has clearly been to school on the films of Rohmer and Truffaut, so she’s swell in my book.  Virginie Efira is a striking actress, previously unknown to me but apparently a major star in France, and I can certainly see why, luminous and radiant being words that come to mind.  She’s a 40ish middle school teacher, veteran of several relationships but looking for another, hearing her biological clock tick.  (Her gynecologist is played by Frederick Wiseman in an eponymous cameo, hilarious if you recognize him.)  Meeting a likely candidate at guitar class, she soon encounters his 4-year-old daughter and after a rocky start develops a close relationship with the child.  Meanwhile she advocates for a troubled favorite student, and follows her younger sister through an unexpected pregnancy.  This film is full of life as it is lived, given a special glow by subtle and big-hearted creativity.
 
In search of more Virginie Efira, I watched Sybil (2019, MC-59), though both the title character and Justine Triet’s film are a bit of a mess, and less than the sum of their parts.  She’s a therapist who wants to suspend her practice and return to the writing career she abandoned after publishing one book.  She reluctantly takes on one desperate new client, an actress played by Adele Exarchopoulos, who’s making her first film while pregnant from her leading man, who happens to be married to the director.  Her story becomes grist for the therapist’s book, and they become so enmeshed that the shrink has to accompany the actress on location, to the volcanic island of Stromboli.  A bunch of other stuff is going on, comic or melodramatic, but not much of it makes sense.
 
I found several other Efira films over on Kanopy, including In Bed with Victoria (2016, MC-58), also directed by Justine Triet, and also rather muddled, but not entirely lacking in interest.  Here she’s a single lawyer with two young daughters, and a trainwreck in both her professional and romantic lives.  Her travails are neither comic nor dramatic enough to hold the film together, and her character is similarly mixed.  But Efira remains a pleasure to watch.
 
On the upside, in An Impossible Love (2018, IMDB), adapted by Catherine Corsini from Christine Angot’s autobiographical novel of the same name, Efira credibly ages over forty years, from ingenue to grandmother.  The story is narrated by her grown daughter, and tells of their relationship over the years, from the romance that produced her through each of their tangled relationships with the mostly-absent father in question.  It’s an absorbing and provocative story, impeccably handled all round.
 
Best of all was The Sense of Wonder (2015, IMDB), which seems to be a Kanopy exclusive, but well worth seeking out.  Eric Besnard was not a filmmaker I’d even heard of before, but he certainly charmed me at first look, with Virginie Efira at her most delectable and a lovely setting on an organic pear farm in a beautiful region.  She’s a young widow with two growing children, and the bank threatening her home and livelihood.  She has a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger, who is something of an autistic savant (Benjamin Lavernhe rather more believable than Dustin Hoffman was in Rain Man).  We know where this is going, but we have a beautiful time getting there, full of wondrous imagery.  (Kanopy may well be free with your local library card.)
 
Back to recent Mubi offerings, Pacifiction (MC-75) attracted my attention with a slew of French film awards.  Directed by Albert Serra, it’s set in picturesque widescreen Tahiti and centered on the French colonial administrator played by Benoit Magimel, in a parable of paradise under imperial control.  The film is languorously paced, enigmatically dramatized, and overlong at 164 minutes, but intrigue and setting kept me watching all the way.
 
Everybody Loves Jeanne (Mubi), except maybe herself, as she sinks into depression in this pleasant enough French rom-com.  Jeanne (Blanche Gardin) has just lost her mother to suicide and her innovative do-good business to mishap and bankruptcy.  She is bedeviled by an inner voice of anxiety and self-reproach, crudely but amusingly animated by writer-director Celine Devaux.  In Lisbon to sell her mother’s flat to stave off financial ruin, Jeanne’s immobilized except for a couple of flirtations that may lead her up from the depths.
 
Passages (MC-79) is a new Mubi production from director Ira Sachs, about an unconventional love triangle.  In what seems like a scathing self-portrait, Franz Rogowski plays an arrogant, self-obsessed film director – married to Ben Whishaw – who falls into a relationship with a woman (Adele Exarchopoulos), heedlessly doing damage all round.  The sex is graphic but the motivations are mystifying, as everyone suffers from the director’s whims and confusion.  Hard to see the appeal, of the main character or of the film.  Not altogether bad, but not good either.
 
On Mubi there are numerous films well worth seeing that I have already seen, so my round-up is skewed.  The service is worth dipping into from time to time, but not retaining on a continuous basis.